Lords of muddled earth - On Site

ArtForum, Jan, 2004 by Daniel Herman

YOU WON'T FIND the Los Angeles suburb of Irwindale on any star map, but on a September Saturday last year, fifty of us are on a tour bus heading for that very town. There, scattered among the standard landmarks of contemporary suburbia--a strip mall, gas stations, an office park--are the peculiar and sublime sites we've come to see: a gravel quarry, some piles of sand, a speedway, a dam, an asphalt factory, a brewery.

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The guide for this unusual excursion is the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI). CLUI was started in 1994 as a nonprofit institution devoted to understanding the "utilization of terrestrial and geographic resources." Early on, the group, having done several site-specific installations, such as placing a sound-emitting device ("gently lapping water") in a dry lake bed in central California, moved beyond art making per se to organizing fact-finding missions, publishing the results in handy quarterly pamphlets, and setting up an infrastructure (headquarters, website, generic United Nations-esque logo) that more closely resembled a research institution. Since then, CLUI has hosted numerous exhibits of photographs and maps in its LA-area gallery. For example, "Ground-Up: Photographs of the Ground in the Margins of Los Angeles," at the gallery last fall and to which our trip is keyed, looked at the condition of the land at the edge of a metropolis. Viewers first saw several textbooklike diagrams detailing trenching and shoring methodologies, and, as is typical of such exhibitions at CLUI, these documents were presented as found material with little graphic intervention other than enlargement. Rounding out this small, focused show were large color photographs of parcels of land with highly idiosyncratic uses, including one photo of flat farmland where a layer of grass is just beginning to form--a sod farm. Other pictures depict an off-road-vehicle recreation park and, seemingly in a nod to Robert Smithson's 1969 photograph Asphalt Rundown, a hill where excess concrete is regularly dumped. The bus trips, such as the one last September, are extensions of these gallery shows. Past tours have visited nuclear power plants in Washington State, shipyards in and around the San Francisco Bay, and, naturally, Area 51. CLUI considers such forays critical to their goals. As the group's mission statement declares, "There is no substitute for being there, especially in these increasingly virtual times."

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In spite of such Ruskinian pronouncements, CLUI is not always so "hands-on." The group can be rather mysterious--indeed, even virtual. The center, such as it is, is not easy to find. It's housed in a windowless storefront on a busy commercial boulevard in a nondescript part of Culver City. (It is so unassuming as to be easily missed even by those who visit the better-known but equally inscrutable Museum of Jurassic Technology, which is located next door. That these two organizations should be neighbors is a happy congruence: Both agitate the middle ground between art and science, adopting a studied detachment that allows humor to seep in through the cracks.) Furthermore, the group's most accomplished work to date is virtual, in the most literal sense: Their website's Land Use Database (www.clui.org/clui_4_1/ludb) is an archive of marginal land uses nationwide, from nuclear-waste sites and artillery ranges to mining museums and Earthworks.

CLUI has succeeded in identifying compelling episodes in the otherwise workaday story of land use, and that's why we're spending our Saturday in Irwindale. Our trip recalls another September Saturday thirty-six years earlier, when Smithson rode the number 30 bus from New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal out to Passaic, New Jersey, for an adventure into the wilds of suburban New York. Among the more typical sights and sounds--a high school football game, a used-car lot--he found some equally generic yet for him more evocative scenes: concrete abutments, an oil derrick on pontoons, a cluster of pipes spouting water, a sandbox. Smithson's account of this odyssey, published in these pages ("The Monuments of Passaic"), elevates ordinary episodes in the modernization of suburban infrastructure into epic struggles between progress and entropy:

That CLUI's tour was inflected by Smithson's sensibility was evident before the bus left for Irwindale. Smithson's 1967 essay and its Land-art legacy had long since helped aestheticize the kinds of landscapes seen in the gallery show.

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As we head out on the eastbound 10 freeway, CLUI cofounder Matthew Coolidge delivers some opening remarks over the bus's PA system. "You'll see banal and dramatic landscapes. By the end of the day, you won't know which is which." For the veterans of previous CLUI bus tours, Coolidge offers this proviso: "Our tours have had to get more boring to get more interesting." In Irwindale, the regional center for aggregate mining, boring turns out to be a way of life. The town's nine and a half square miles are, according to Coolidge, "more pits than surface."