SY, Death Valley 69: video by Richard Kern

Herzog, Fata Morgana

The Four Corners: A National Sacrifice Area?

Peter Galison: Memorializing Nuclear Waste

Test Site

Test Site - trailer from Solarisfilm on Vimeo.

New documentary. Strapline: LOVE, SURVIVAL, MYTH, RITUAL, MUSIC, SPEED AND DEATH IN THE NORTH AMERICAN DESERT
Website

MOUT

Sophie Ristelhueber

Sophie Ristelhueber from Laure Vermeersch on Vimeo.

Bombay Beach (2012)

Trevor Paglen: Blank Spots

Some snippets from Dirty Wars:

Planning the rescue of a kidnapped friend who has been squirreled away in a disused government installation, two men in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990) study maps of the area: “They peered at the maps, each with that enigmatic blank in the middle, like the outline of a state in a geography test, belonging to something called ‘the U.S.,’ but not the one they knew”  (250).

The unmarked space on the map has become a common trope in writing about the American West in recent years, a double motif that speaks on the one hand of the shroud of secrecy covering military-industrial activity and on the other the resistant spaces beyond the inventory of the U.S. standing-reserve.

In Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge (1991), “A blank spot on the map translates into empty space, space devoid of people, a wasteland perfect for nerve gas, weteye bombs, and toxic waste” (241). Similarly, in DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), the white places on the map “include the air base, the army base, the missile range, the vast stretch to the northwest called the Jornada del Muerto and the interdunal flats as well.”  The flats themselves are perversely “map-white, on the page and in living fact,” so that their absence on the map does in fact represent their physical condition. In an uncanny twist, the blank space on this map tells the truth even as it continues to lie, since the few low buildings and propane tanks that are visible “service the underground operation in the Pocket, where weapons were conceived and designed” (404).

The blank space on the map is a visible marker of the state of exception that, as Giorgio Agamben explains in State of Exception (2005), “represents the inclusion and capture of a space that is neither outside nor inside (the space that corresponds to the annulled and suspended norm).”  The “topological structure” of the state of exception, claims Agamben, is “defined by the oxymoron ecstasy-belonging” (35); that is, being-outside yet also belonging.  This seems to me to be precisely the condition of the map’s blank spaces, which simultaneously refuse the function of the map’s signifying purpose while confirming this function: the blank space is where the hidden is emplotted, where the suspended norm gives shape to the normative representation of the world that surrounds it. The blank space is neither inside nor outside the nation state of the United States; it ruptures the continuous spatial indexing that produces the narrative sense of the map as a record of all there is while also indisputably being in that space.

The House in the Middle (1954)

'In the house on the right all the earmarks of untidy housekeeping...'

Producer: National Paint, Varnish and Lacquer Association
Sponsor: National Clean Up-Paint Up-Fix Up Bureau. Produced with the cooperation of the Federal Civil Defense Administration.

Steve Rowell, Playas, NM

Steve Rowell's Flickr Photostream, including shots taken during Steve's visiting fellowship at Newcastle University in June 2010.

Department of Homeland Security helicopters and student troops assault

empty homes during the inaugural simulation event in December 2004.

CLUI photo by Steve Rowell

Steve Rowell's Playas, NM work can be seen here.

Andrew Freeman

(Manzanar) Architectural Double.

The buildings at the Japanese American WWII internment camp at Manzanar were relocated and reused after the war, effectively dismantling the material evidence of the camp's existence. Between 2001 and 2004 Andrew Freeman tracked the buildings down and photographed them.

#11.4.01 - Mount Whitney Rifle Club, Lone Pine, California.

N 36°36.156’, W118°03.749’

Working the Line

Good information and images on this project and related things here:

• The 98th Parallel at a456.
• Working the Line at BLDGBLOG
• GeoCaching the Mexican Border Obelisk Monuments at Groundspeak Forums
• David Taylor's Working the Line at Fraction Magazine

Walter De Maria, Mile Long Drawing (1968)

A Boy And His Dog (1975)

Post-apocalyptic Don Johnson. Is there any other kind? The whole film is on Youtube. Here is the first 10 minutes.

 

Mark Klett

Mark Klett studied geology before working as a photographer with the U.S. Geological Survey. In the late 1970s, along with Ellen Manchester, JoAnn Verburg, Gordon Bushaw and Rick Dingus, he undertook the re-documentation of many places in the Western United States that had been photographed in the 19th century by territorial survey photographers such as Timothy O'Sullivan, William Henry Jackson and John Hillers. The Rephotographic Survey Project (RSP), as it was called, repeated over 120 19th century photographs between 1977 and 1979. In 1997 Klett and a new group undertook a new project, called Third View, which returned to many of the sites to make a set of third images. There is a great Third View website -- link is on the right.

I'm not sure of the provenance of the video below. This has only been up on Youtube since May 2010. The clips are accompanied by this text:

Mark Klett, a Regents Professor of Art at Arizona State University, and fellow photographer Byron Wolfe have spent three summers locating the sites of historic photographs and artworks of the Grand Canyon and making new photographs at the same locations.

These new photographs explore the relationship of the original images to the spaces they depict. The approach is intentionally experimental and playful, but the results are meant to explore the early art of the canyon and how the Grand Canyon landscape became one of American arts icons.

Electra Glide in Blue

Arcosanti

Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti: A Desert Oasis (Sony DSC-RX10) from Dan Carter on Vimeo.

Spiral Exhalations

From Edgar Allan Poe, "MS. Found in a Bottle" (1833):

We got under way with a mere breath of wind, and for many days stood along the eastern coast of Java, without any other incident to beguile the monotony of our course than the occasional meeting with some of the small grabs of the Archipelago to which we were bound. One evening, leaning over the taffrail, I observed a very singular, isolated cloud, to the N. W. It was remarkable, as well for its color, as from its being the first we had seen since our departure from Batavia. I watched it attentively until sunset, when it spread all at once to the eastward and westward, girting in the horizon with a narrow strip of vapor, and looking like a long line of low beach. My notice was soon afterwards attracted by the duskyred appearance of the moon, and the peculiar character of the sea. The latter was undergoing a rapid change, and the water seemed more than usually transparent. Although I could distinctly see the bottom, yet, heaving the lead, I found the ship in fifteen fathoms. The air now became intolerably hot, and was loaded with spiral exhalations similar to those arising from heated iron. As night came on, every breath of wind died away, and a more entire calm it is impossible to conceive. The flame of a candle burned upon the poop without the least perceptible motion, and a long hair, held between the finger and thumb, hung without the possibility of detecting a vibration. However, as the captain said he could perceive no indication of danger, and as we were drifting in bodily to shore, he ordered the sails to be furled, and the anchor let go. No watch was set, and the crew, consisting principally of Malays, stretched themselves deliberately upon deck. I went below — not without a full presentiment of evil. Indeed every appearance warranted me in apprehending a Simoom. I told the captain my fears — but he paid no attention to what I said, and left me without deigning to give a reply. My uneasiness, however, prevented me from sleeping, and about midnight I went upon deck. As I placed my foot upon the upper step of the companion-ladder, I was startled with a loud, humming noise, like that occasioned by the rapid revolution of a mill-wheel, and before I could ascertain its meaning, I found the ship quivering to its centre. In the next instant, a wilderness of foam hurled us upon our beam-ends, and, rushing over us fore and aft, swept the entire decks from stem to stern.

Planet of the Apes

'Nature will surely come to her own again. Nothing human is of long duration. Men and their deeds are obliterated, the race itself fades; but Nature goes calmly on with her projects' -- John C. Van Dyke, The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1901), p. 62.

'Enfranchisement was an historical event' -- Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso.1988), p. 112.