Inside out: art's new terrain.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, a group of American artists went into the remote landscape to push beyond the conventional boundaries of both the art world and the artwork. They sought a territorial tabula rasa for their practices, a sublime expanse whose real contours would accommodate an "expanded field" of sculptural practices that might fall outside the traditional circulatory infrastructure linking studio, gallery, museum--and even magazine. More than thirty years later, the lure of the "remote" remains seductive, but at the same time one wonders: Is such physical and conceptual terrain even available to artists today? With the remarkable expansion of the international art world and the proliferation of biennial exhibitions to points all over the globe, Smithson's idea of an "indoor-outdoor dialectic," for example, can seem anachronistic if not quaint. Now that the art world lacks a fixed center and portable communications devices have altered our most basic experience of distance, and of space, the very notion of a geographic remote can seem tenuous.

Nevertheless, the growing number of far-flung projects indicates that artists--even if for disparate reasons--are still answering the siren song of the great beyond. With this development in mind, Artforum's special section "Inside Out" considers a range of contemporary artists who are moving into the landscape in a manner that draws on the precedents of the '60s and '70s but to very different ends. If historic Earthworks call to mind the solitary figure in the desert or salt flat, for some today, as Rirkrit Tiravanija contends in our online roundtable conversation, "the exterior is about the social." This is certainly the case for his experiment in community building in northern Thailand (chronicled here by Daniel Birnbaum) and also for Andrea Zittel's High Desert Test Sites, which draws in equal measure on the collaborative spirit of frontier survivalism and an impulse to create "the most literal manifestation of the object and process possible" by developing and maintaining long-term, site-specific works. For Tacita Dean and Pierre Huyghe (who, along with Zittel, appear in this issue), the remote site is one "not overcrowded with meaning, rules, culture, even longitude and latitude," as Huyghe puts it. Such terrain invites the projection of new scenarios--and the time and movement required to reach the site itself is an equal part of its allure.

In all cases, the act of translation and the problem of mediation loom large, just as they did for Smithson, who famously distinguished between Spiral Jetty the Earthwork, the film, and the magazine piece. Today, the relationships among these iterations have grown even more intricate--turned inside out, as it were--with the representations of some projects strangely seeming to precede their physical manifestations in the world. As one potential "site" in this continuum, Artforum invited several artists to contribute directly to the magazine, joining scholars Anne M. Wagner, who explores the implicit politics of place, from the Great Salt Lake to the jungles of Brazil; and David Joselit, who identifies a "navigational" paradigm in recent art. The territory has indeed expanded, and the following collection of essays and projects is our attempt to plot its ever-shifting coordinates.--THE EDITORS

BEING THERE

ART AND THE POLITICS OF PLACE

Three artists are interviewed by Avalanche magazine. The sessions are conducted on various occasions in December 1968 and January 1969, the results published the following year. What do they talk about? Earthworks. And because the artists are those exemplary practitioners Dennis Oppenheim, Michael Heizer, and Robert Smithson, their exchange seems to conform to now-predictable lines. Each man seems to be "in character," which is to say that by the late '60s each was pretty well prepared to lay down the tenets that guided his practice in the out-of-doors. By this time, Oppenheim had already made a cut in a California hillside and lines through deep Maine snow. Smithson and Heizer, by contrast, were still searching for their ideal locales.

The artists do not agree. Their dispute concerns the Earthwork's site and its relationship to the gallery or, in the shorthand of the conversation, the "indoor-outdoor dialectic," Smithson's term, of course.

   [AVALANCHE:] Would you agree with Smithson that you, Dennis, and Mike
   are involved in a dialectic between the outdoors and the gallery?
   OPPENHEIM: I think that the outdoor/indoor relationship in my work is
   more subtle. I don't really carry a gallery disturbance concept
   around with me; I leave that behind in the gallery. Occasionally I
   consider the gallery site as though it were some kind of hunting
   ground.
   Then for you the two activities are quite separate?
   OPPENHEIM: Yes, on the whole. There are areas where they begin to
   fuse, but generally when I'm outside I'm completely outside.
   SMITHSON: I've thought this way too, Dennis. I've designed works for
   the outdoors only. But what I want to emphasize is that if you want
   to concentrate exclusively on the exterior, that's fine, but you're
   probably always going to come back to the interior in some
   manner. (1)

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To read this exchange today is to encounter an idiom in the making: Take Oppenheim's awkward "gallery disturbance concept" as an example of but one embryonic phrase. The idea of "coming back to the interior" is another, a bit of Smithson-speak that names the inevitable necessity of acknowledging the artwork as a real and ponderous object and likewise recognizing the commodity status of such a specialized thing. Yet although the phrase seems a trifle labored, it will not quite do to substitute another more polished (and nearly synonymous) Smithsonian concept, the "non-site," without first noticing that this term, too, implicates the gallery as the locus of an inevitable return. So inevitable, in fact, that Smithson even suggests that landscape and gallery are coextensive. He may have been an inveterate traveler and self-conscious chronicler of every chapter in the journeys he took ("The bus turned off Highway 3, down Orient Way in Rutherford"; "The road went through butterfly swarms"; "Driving west on Highway 83 late in the afternoon, we passed through Corinne, then went on to Promontory" (2)), but he was also a realist. For even if he considered these journeys the "primary phase" of a work's production, sooner or later the artist, plus an accumulation of maps, surveys, drawings, photographs, movie footage, and geological samples, turned around and headed for home. No matter where or how far you travel, the gallery cannot (and should not) be left behind.

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If Heizer did not agree with this necessity, one reason (though not the only one) was his belief that "the work [of art] is not put in a place, it is that place." The statement cries out for emphasis: "The work of art is not put in a place, it is that place." Yet even with italics provided, it's still hard to decide whether the idea is hopelessly utopian or merely practical, something like a committed statement of the truth. What does it mean for a work of art to be a place? What then happens to the work of art? Erasure or expansion? Or both? And what about the place? On what map does the new hybrid appear? Where might we track it down?

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One of the best reflections on site and artwork was provided in 1977 by Nancy Holt. It took the form of an Artforum article that laid out what went into the making of Sun Tunnels, 1973-76, the four massive concrete culverts she carefully positioned in a Utah valley on a forty-acre plot of land. (3) (Together they form a cumbersome camera, an enormous viewing device to record nothing less than the passage of celestial time.) Holt's essay details the two-year production process, soup to nuts. Pretty much everything gets straightforwardly described, including how and by whom the work was made. You can tell she never dreamed that so many people would be involved. Here is her list: "2 engineers, 1 astrophysicist, 1 astronomer, 1 surveyor and his assistant, 1 road grader, 2 dump truck operators, 1 carpenter, 3 ditch diggers, 1 concrete mixing truck operator, 1 concrete foreman, 10 concrete pipe company workers, 2 core-drillers, 4 truck drivers, 1 crane operator, 1 rigger, 2 cameramen, 2 soundmen, 1 helicopter pilot, and 4 photography lab workers." The total number, including Holt, is forty-two, which in the Utah of 1977 was more than four times the total population of Lucin, the nearest town (no one at all lives there today). No wonder Holt concludes her summary by declaring, "In making the arrangements and contracting out the work, I became more extended into the world than I've ever been before."

Such self-extension concerns not an artist's body traveling through space ("we passed through Corinne"), nor an artist's work becoming a place (though anyone who has visited Sun Tunnels would certainly see it that way), but rather the artist's work directing, even becoming, the labor of others through a process of production that could only be contracted out. Such work had economic implications; it required time sheets and balance sheets, and its participants kept tabs on any profit or loss.

Who can say why it fell to Holt, as opposed to Smithson or Heizer, to sum up an Earthwork in just these terms? The reason does not lie in her special alertness toward those economic relationships that have always positioned the artwork but instead, presumably, in the special and unfamiliar sense of self-extension her words record. The artist senses her collaborators as quasi prostheses, expanding her presence in and maybe even her grasp on the surrounding world. Mind and place and body: All are somehow aligned. And for Holt, they still are. She still owns both tunnels and site and periodically pays them a visit, camping out to see the sunrise and inspecting the wear and tear: Lucin is remote, but marksmen and skateboarders still manage to leave traces that fall to her to tidy up. Of course, this modest maintenance scheme is dwarfed by current curatorial efforts on behalf of other Earthworks. Discussion of potentially raising the level of Smithson's Spiral Jetty, 1970, is only one case in point. But even this might pale beside the effort and money expended so Heizer can realize his City, 1970-, or so Christo could bedeck Central Park with The Gates, 1979-2005. Instead of the spectacle of sunrise, there are mastabas and ripstop nylon, plus a whole new understanding of what makes for spectacle as well as when, where, and for whom.

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One reason to turn back to Holt and Heizer, Oppenheim and Smithson is because their testimony registers the emergence of a set of problems and issues that have not gone away. They speak to the complex new spatialization of art since the '60s and to the resultant complications of where and what the artwork is. Spatialization is not the same as globalization, though the two notions have clearly been connected in recent years--perhaps misleadingly. Again, it helps to have recourse to Smithson to explain the former term. To sum up the difference between the art of "an Anthony Caro" and that of his cronies, Smithson employs a simple formula: "Anthony Caro never thought about the ground his work stands on." Ground here means soil or surface or floor or pavement, certainly. But it also means reason, basis, or assumption. Here is where Caro falls short. For to attend to spatialization is to reground the work on both physical and conceptual terrain. It is to think locally and economically, as Holt did; to grasp the new dialectic between place and artwork, following Heizer; and, in light of Smithson, to acknowledge that gallery and landscape and even the artist's travels are ultimately coextensive, even if only while the artist is alive.

Let's imagine a roundtable like the one launched by Avalanche taking place today. A few artists gather around a table, no doubt some curators, too. For me, the central issue where art and site are concerned is a new economy of scale. Now there are traveling artists aplenty: a whole class of "itinerants" or "nomads" (as described by Miwon Kwon), whose wanderings make Smithson look like a shut-in. (4) The new badge of belonging is the airline ticket (hopefully business class), so it's no wonder that Gabriel Orozco found in such talismanic remainders the perfect materials for tongue-in-cheek collage. Jac Leirner, for her part, has paired boarding passes with airplane ashtrays (those obsolete objects), both against a Bubble Wrap background. It is as if the artwork were quite prepared to pack itself.

But if the new nomads need tickets they also need destinations, as well as far-flung collections and collectors ready and waiting to support their work. At least some borders have opened: As Brazilian magnate and collector Bernardo Paz recently put it, "I can't understand a world divided into foreign and Brazilian artists. Humanity prevails over cultural differences, especially today in our globalised world." (5) His Centro de Arte Contemporanea Inhotim (CACI) will officially open to the public in October 2006, just outside the quiet town of Brumadinho and thirty-seven miles from Belo Horizonte, the capital of the northeastern state of Minas Gerais. (Not on most maps, Inhotim is a cluster of dwellings, many of them housing CACI's hundred-person staff.) CACI comprises seventy-five acres of tropical gardens, with the potential for expansion into thousands more. There, Paz envisions "the possibility of creating specific conditions for the exhibition of works of art" so as to "participate in, and in some way to contribute to, the creative process of the artists, in particular challenging them with a unique context for their works." (6)

I think it is worth weighing Paz's statements. Something about them sounds somehow different, if not precisely new. The distinction does not lie in a now all-too-familiar allegiance to the global over the national, though no doubt these words resonate rather differently in Sao Paolo than in London or New York. Instead, it is to be found in the newly described "nature" of the site: No longer an isolated salt flat or mesa, the terrain is a garden that dozens of keepers tend with care. It's to this quite particular environment that artists will be invited--challenged--to adapt their ideas and works. The plan is to create a high-end development complete with artworks, possibly including a designer golf course, spa, and condominiums.

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In February of this year I traveled to CACI, where I met its curators and owner and toured its collection and grounds. As of my visit, no works had been made specifically for the garden; instead, existing objects, along with their designers, had been imported, their sites sometimes (though not always) chosen with their makers' help. By the lake, a 2002 Dan Graham pavilion reflects the clouds and palms and grasses. In a dark dell sits (improbably) a snow-white igloo made of fiberglass; within the pitch-black interior rises a single jet of water, each drop and plash arrested into visibility by a pulsing strobe. This 1996 work by Olafur Eliasson bears the only partly ironic title By Means of a Sudden Intuitive Realization, Show Me Your Perception of Presence. Indeed. Only in retrospect did it occur to me how well both the work and its title fit with the vision of a tropical idyll that Paz has brought to be. How appropriate that to "really" see the play of these drops of water we need a pump, a fiberglass igloo, plastic sheeting, electricity, and a tirelessly flashing strobe. Isn't there something in Eliasson's artifice that summons CACI itself? Here is a confrontation with "nature" that is, in fact, all culture, all planning, all technology. No wonder that for the water to be visible, its surroundings must be closed out.

As I was leaving CACI, Paz urged me to talk about the place, the collection, and my visit once I had made my way back home. At the time, I had no idea what I might say or to whom. Now, reading back through Holt, Heizer, and the others, I've discovered what I think should be registered in response: A place like CACI (assuming there are others like it) opens again the spatial issues that artists in the '70s tried to think about, remarkably enough, through their Earthworks. (Remarkably, for surely mounds, cuts, and jetties are not the only forms that could have done the job.) These issues concern how art intersects with its surroundings when those surroundings both literalize and metaphorize the problem of art's place in the world. They address center and periphery and raise the question of how an artwork might rearrange or suspend that shopworn binary by the mere fact of its physical being: When you start thinking globally, being on axis is less difficult than one might think. They realize, and thus make visible, the limits on the artist's body as well as the parameters of her expertise. They admit to economic relationships. All this is in some way a function of simply being there. What Paz's experiment demonstrates, however, is that there both involves a concrete reality and summons a point of view. What is most striking about his pronouncements is how urgently they insist that there's a there there: The "specific conditions and unique context" he offers are both a promise and a threat. Could we have ever imagined otherwise? Can we mistake the urgent assertiveness of Paz's point of view? His is not an imaginary elsewhere, to which artists simply bring personal visions or long-held dreams. Which is to say that CACI is hardly Lucin, let alone Rozel Point. What it has in common with those earlier artistic destinations, however, is simple. The demands of any site always translate into a politics steeped in the realities of place.

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NOTES

1. Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp, "Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson," Avalanche 1 (Fall 1970), as reprinted in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Jack Flam, ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 242-43. Further quotations of these artists are taken from this interview, unless otherwise noted.

2. Robert Smithson, "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey," in The Collected Writings, 69. Smithson, "Incidents of Mirror Travel in the Yucatan [1969]," in The Collected Writings, 122. Smithson, "The Spiral Jetty [1972]," in The Collected Writings, 145.

3. Nancy Holt, "Sun Tunnels," Artforum, April 1977, 32-37.

4. Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).

5. Mare Spiegler, "Focus on Nations: Latin America. Dealers bone up on their Spanish as market develops," The Art Newspaper, Dec. 3, 2004. Accessed online at www.marcspiegler.com/Articles/Artnewspaper/ABMB_2004_12_03_Latin_Collectors.pdf.

6. Brochure published by CACI, December 2004.

ANNE M. WAGNER

Anne M. Wagner is professor of modem art at the University of California, Berkeley. (See Contributors.)

THE LAY OF THE LAND

AN EXPERIMENT IN ART AND COMMUNITY IN THAILAND

It's already evening when I arrive by car at the Land, an artists' community in northern Thailand initiated by Kamin Lertchaiprasert and Rirkrit Tiravanija in 1998. Dusk is falling, and the fire that keeps the water buffalo warm at night will soon be lit. The buffalo themselves are already on their way to a familiar spot next to a small pond; slowly and majestically they approach across the vast rice fields. Behind them, in the distance, are the mountains that surround these agricultural flatlands. This is the village of Sanpatong, some twenty minutes outside the northern provincial capital, Chiang Mai, a rapidly growing city of some two hundred thousand people. Hot rain is falling from the skies--in fact, it's pouring--and we find shelter in one of the pavilions huddled around the pond. I entered this structure once before, in its previous life as a work of art in a European institution. Designed by German artist Tobias Rehberger, it was displayed at Stockholm's Moderna Museet in 2000, before being dismantled and shipped across the globe to this rural and, needless to say, less visible site. It now serves as temporary home to one of the inhabitants of the Land. It may still be a sculptural work, but now it has been put to use. A few belongings (a backpack, sneakers, a few books) make clear that someone is, in fact, living in this basic but elegant three-story wooden structure on stilts, which overlooks the pond. Spread out in the landscape are a number of other modest structures designed by Lertchaiprasert and Tiravanija themselves and by artist friends from around the world.

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Rehberger, the very first artist from outside Thailand to be involved in the project, emphasizes its open and somewhat vague quality. "It wasn't at all clear to me when Rirkrit approached me eight years ago what this was going to be," Rehberger told me. "And now, after many visits to the Land, I still don't know exactly what it's all about. It may sound strange, but this hazy quality is precisely what attracts me. Nobody knows what the Land is--and even less what it's going to develop into." In fact, the Land isn't a commune in the normal sense, because the artists realizing projects there have done so primarily for the benefit of others. The inhabitants--perhaps "users" is a better term--are a mix of local artists, a few farmers, and a small group of students.

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"The Land [is] to be cultivated as an open space, though with certain intentions toward community, toward discussion, and toward experimentation in [various] fields of thought," according to an official--and no doubt deliberately vague--statement of intent that makes clear that other fields besides art are part of the experiment. So, what is the Land? A sculpture garden? A huge artist-run space emphasizing interdisciplinary and collaborative practices? A commune in search of new forms of being in the world? Or is it, if not a collaborative artwork by Tiravanija and his colleagues, then at least an extension of his practice beyond the institution? Probably all of these things, but not quite in the way we tend to understand them in Europe and the United States, where the very idea of a commune simultaneously gives rise to a murky nostalgia and to skepticism, even to a sense of revulsion--conjuring thoughts of monstrous gurus, psychological terror, and sexual oppression. The truth, however, couldn't be less dark.

The Land's land--no one seems to know the precise acreage, but you can walk the length of it in three or four minutes--was acquired seven years ago for a modest sum (roughly ten thousand US dollars) by the two founders, but each is eager to point out the irrelevance of the notion of property to their endeavor. Lertchaiprasert, who is showing me around, is critical of the art world's rush to label the collective effort an art project, thus defining it according to standards set elsewhere. "It's more about finding new ways of being together," he says. "That's how it started, and that is the real significance of what's going on here. A group of artists has come together to find out if there are other ways of working together and producing things. Not just art but, more important, things to eat, like fruit, herbs, greens, and other vegetables." Lertchaiprasert emphasizes that the projects on the Land all have a practical function. "They actually do work," he emphasizes, "and that's important. It's about learning by doing."

The projects at the Land are not primarily meant to be contemplated aesthetically but rather to be used. So what does the praxis consist in? On the one hand, farmers and local artists work the fields together. With the support of a student group from Chiang Mai University, rice is harvested not seasonally but year-round. Some three thousand pounds are consumed by the community at the Land and by a number of AIDS patients in the local village. There is also a one-year program of around ten students, mostly from Thailand, who stay in Chiang Mai for a year to develop their own art in dialogue with Tiravanija, Lertchaiprasert, and a number of other artists and academics. This pedagogical endeavor is a recent development but is already gaining attention internationally and could develop into a new kind of art college. Some of these students live at the Land itself, others in the city. It seemed to me, during the few days I spent at the site, that these young people were the ones who brought the place to life. Their curriculum, formulated by the Land Foundation, involves a wide spectrum of activites, from farming and meditation to art and philosophy.

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The pragmatic aspect of the Land and the nondogmatic attitude of its organizers recur in Lertchaiprasert's presentation of the various projects. We walk from site to site--there are more than a dozen structures so far--and talk about the pond, Rehberger's Swabian architecture (which looks rather Asian to me), and the size of mangos. The agricultural practices used at the Land adhere to the basic philosophy and methods of a Thai farmer named Chaloui Kaewkong, who, besides teaching a general skepticism toward chemicals and industrial farming, has developed ideas about the harmonious composition of the human body. Following his teachings, the terrain of the Land--three-quarters water, one-quarter terra firma--was landscaped to mirror the makeup of our own bodies. Many of the inhabitants, the local artists as well as the participants in the one-year program, practice a kind of meditation based on Hindu techniques, but there is no dogma: Rules and regulations don't govern life on the Land. Everything is figured out by trial and error. It's never about illustrating or implementing some grand doctrine. On the contrary, the individual ingenuity and imagination of each denizen and guest is the focus--which becomes abundantly clear when one considers the heterogeneity of the group of artists who have realized things here or are planning to do so.

To actually accomplish anything at the Land has turned out to be more difficult than many of the participating artists originally thought, as the goodly number of delayed projects proves. Rehberger's building, transported from Sweden, is now in rather bad shape, as he knew it would be after a few years. Little by little the wood must be replaced, so that in the end the whole house will consist of local Thai materials. The Danish collective Superflex developed and installed at the Land a system for the production and storage of biogas using nothing but buffalo manure, which is stored in large, lurid orange balloons that float on the water. Since there is no electricity on the Land, their contribution is essential for everyday life: The methane gas thus produced is used to fuel the stoves in the communal kitchen sited in one of the centrally located houses. The entire system is to be overhauled this fall. For a project in Africa, Superflex had already developed a simple, portable biogas unit that can produce sufficient methane for the cooking and lighting needs of a large family. In part as a comment on the Thai culture of cheap copies, Superflex also designed a biogas version of Danish designer Poul Henningsen's famous PH5 light fixture and had it manufactured inexpensively in Bangkok, to be used by people living in areas without access to electricity. Both of those devices were ideally suited for the Land. Projects by other Land practitioners that have already been realized or are in advanced stages of planning include a compost-toilet system by the Dutch collective Atelier van Lieshout; a library in the middle of a pond, designed by Prachaya a Phintong but as yet unfunded; houses by Spanish artist Alicia Framis, Swedish spoken-wordsmith Karl Holmqvist, and the Stockholm-based design collective Uglycute; a bus stop by Swiss duo Peter Fischi and David Weiss inspired by Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia; and a solar-energy plant (still years away) by American artist Arthur Meyer. Tiravanija himself has designed a group house based on what he calls the three spheres of human need. On the ground floor one finds a communal space with a fireplace; it's a place for meals, gatherings, and the sharing of ideas. The second floor is for reading and meditation; here one can reflect on the exchanges that took place downstairs. The top floor is for sleeping.

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The most ambitious project and perhaps the most visionary to date is artist Philippe Parreno and architect Francois Roche's collaborative Battery House, a hall for large gatherings that is to feature an animal-powered generator and storage system, which will solve the electricity problem at the Land and provide a central venue for various activities, including the use of computers. Built and financed as a film set for Parreno's Boy from Mars, 2003, this strange-looking building (somehow plant, animal, and machine at once), was about to undergo extensive reconstruction when I arrived and has yet to be completed. Originally, the Battery House was supposed to be powered by the elephants that live in the area, but the collaborators had to settle for buffalo. This is a building that "breathes and perspires--something between Clement Adler's early bat-winged airplane and a Spielberg pterodactyl," according to Roche. In a short, rather literary essay from 2003, "Hybrid Muscle," he spells out the inner workings of the Battery House and the intimate cooperation between man and animal that's involved:

   In front of [the elephant and his trainer] is a structure made of
   still-inert plastic leaves holding a 20-tonne concrete counterweight,
   hanging vertically like clothes in a European miners' locker room.
   Their job: to lift [the "leaves"] patiently, one by one, using a
   system of cables and pulleys, moving with animal slowness. Thus
   muscular energy (2,000 [watt-hours]) is transferred, stored and
   released, transformed, by means of a dynamo, into electrical energy.
   This endless cycle from elephant to structure to gravity and then to
   energy compresses or frees interior space, in rhythm with the
   occupation of the Land and the movement of the counterweight
   platform.

Since Lertchaiprasert is highly suspicious of projects that don't perform a practical task, he says that Parreno's structure will be turned into a greenhouse if it doesn't produce electricity as originally planned. But a young engineer working on the project assures me that this biotechnological vision is no fantasy--the generator will soon be up and running and three buffalo put to work on a daily basis. The interior space, defined by the massive artificial leaves reminiscent of elephant hide, will function as the natural venue for larger gatherings and the place to recharge your laptop and cell phone. The energy produced will also make possible the electronic-music events planned by Swedish sound artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff, whose own house was finished in February. This curious, star-shaped wooden building is an homage to occult scientist Friedrich Jurgenson (who claimed to communicate with the dead via radio) and also a materialization of the antihierarchical symbolism developed by von Hausswolff as part of his fictive nation Elgaland-Vargaland, a collaboration with various artists and the composer Leif Elggren. Now that his house is finished, von Hausswolff is ready to begin programming ambitious concerts with colleagues from the electronic-music world. The buffalo had better get to work.

Part of the budget for von Hausswolff's architectural project comes from the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe, Germany, an institution to which the artist recently donated a major installation that includes Jurgenson's archive of occult recordings (which his widow had given to the artist). This is typical of how the productions at the Land are made possible. There is no real support locally--from the city of Chiang Mai, say--nor is there any financial help to be expected from the founders. The artists who have realized projects on the Land have brought their own funding with them and have put together unusual coproductions (as the Rehberger, Parreno, and von Hausswolff cases make clear). These projects have come to fruition because of a strong desire among artists to contribute to the Land. It has nothing to do with normal art-world careerism, with media visibility, fame, or fortune.

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So what is the motivation? "If this would have been in Europe, I wouldn't have been so attracted," says von Hausswolff. "The whole art-commune thing has no interesting future there," he adds. "But in the Asian context, things seem to crystallize in totally new and unexpected ways. Nobody knows what's going to happen here." This clearly echoes what Tiravanija himself has to say about the future of the whole endeavor. In response to my question concerning the relationship of the Land to the notion of utopia and to the "Utopia Station" exhibition project he cocuratated (with Molly Nesbit and Hans-Ulrich Obrist) for the 2003 Venice Biennale, he replies with a laugh that no one can say for sure where the Land will be in three weeks' time: "Utopia? It's all really quite uncertain since we have no money of our own. People suggest projects, and some can be realized, others not." "Utopia Station," which has already added several chapters to its history after the original Venice installment, is more defined in temporal terms than the contributions to the Land. "People come for short periods to realize works," Tiravanija observes. "Often they're just here for a few days. Then they have to leave, and return only two years later to attend to what they've built. It's all very different from an exhibition--more unpredictable, more open." And yet Tiravanija does recognize that his position at the Land is not so different from his role in the art world. "In both contexts," he notes, "I play the host." The Land is proof more of the extension of today's art world to places far from the centers of commerce rather than of Tiravanija's ambition to break out of the traditional art circuit. Even if many aspects of the Land don't fit the typical art-world categories, what is happening there is--whatever else it may be--also unavoidably art.

Like most of Tiravanija's projects and interventions, the Land is also about integrating and reacting to the local. In Sanpatong, he is something of an ambassador who travels the world and brings back interesting people and ideas, whereas Lertchaiprasert is more closely involved with the local community and has strong ties in Chiang Mai as well. The international presence of artists, writers, and curators at the Land can be quite intense, even overwhelming to some of the more long-term inhabitants, and Lertchaiprasert, who on occasion complains about "art tourism," sometimes gets bored with giving people like myself guided tours. Since most of the art stars whose projects have made the Land famous in art circles are seen here only on rare occasions, the arrival of a small but steady stream of critics and curators can only be disturbing to Lertchaiprasert and the other artists and students who work here day in, day out.

Perhaps what unites the diverse practices of the international cast of artists brought together at the Land is a long-standing effort to engage the objects and actions of everyday life, and Sanpatong has provided them a unique opportunity to extend that effort, without limitations. In this way, the Land may be seen as a physical manifestation of how far artistic production today has come to exceed the boundaries of the autonomous object and the institutions that support it. And given the motivation of artists all over the world to realize projects here, one gathers that there is something specially attractive about this site exterior to the world of institutions and commerce. Is the allure simply the possibility of working outside the system--or of working within an altogether novel system of one's own devising?

Not long ago, a German newspaper asked Tiravanija about the intentions behind his work, and he replied simply, "To destroy capitalism. To destroy imperialism." And yet he is no political activist in any antagonistic or belligerent sense but rather someone who, in a helpful and generous way, suggests models for being together, for communicating, and for exchanging things in a manner that resists reducing everything to an image or an object. When Tiravanija turns a German kunsthalle into a functioning apartment where people can live, work, and sleep, or when he turns an entire art academy into an inn with hundreds of guests, as he did in Frankfurt, he doesn't really expect to change these institutions for good but merely to suggest the possibility of another model--the possibility of new forms of exchange, and perhaps, ultimately, other forms of human life, another societal order: one less obsessed with things. In this light, his art could be seen as a kind of therapy for curing us of today's pathological acquisitiveness. The Land, Tiravanija insists, is not a property.

When I leave Sanpatong by car, it's pitch black and the buffalo are asleep. The fires are glowing in the dark. In my mind I keep turning over something Tiravanija once said. Asked if his nomadic way of life should be seen as an attempt to create many centers, he replied that, on the contrary, he's much more interested in the multiplication of peripheries. "Because then you will understand," the artist offered gnomically, "that the center lies on the outside."

DANIEL BIRNBAUM

Daniel Birnbaum is director of the Stadelschule art academy in Frankfurt, cofounder of its new institute for art criticism, and head of its Portikus gallery.

TRISTAN DA CUNHA

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I sit in urban safety imagining my journey to Tristan da Cunha. I have known about this island for many years, since studying the trade routes in the Southern Atlantic and the rough and fearsome seas of the roaring forties. They call it the remotest island on earth, because it is nearly two thousand miles off the nearest coast and only one boat goes there a year, out of the Cape of Good Hope. It is a volcano risen out of the ocean, where fewer than three hundred people still live, all descendents of the sea's itinerants--the shipwrecked and the runaways and the naval loners restless at home. They come from the stock of old seafaring nations, like the English and the Dutch, the American and the Italian, and they still have only seven family names between them.

For a long time, I have wanted to go there: to arrive on that boat, the RMS Saint Helena, and to leave on it again a year later. I see it as my big project--my observation post in the roughest seas on the planet, where the weather is cruel and the skies are filled with albatross instead of herring gulls. I began to have dreams about Tristan da Cunha. I dreamed about waiting for the post to arrive. Once, when letters were being distributed into piles on tables, it occurred to me, quite suddenly and as if in panic, even in my dream, that the boat that had brought the letters had to be the boat: the boat that meant my year was over and I could go home. My concentration on all those letters I could not send, as well as those I could not receive, made me begin to imagine a year in the plod of time and in the minutiae of all that news I could not get.

But this fantasy belongs to the analog world: the world where you could still get lost. It belongs to a time before we began endlessly and futilely communicating with each other, when people expected to wait a year for a letter. I read now that a satellite public phone has been installed in the only village on Tristan da Cunha and that the local administrator has e-mail and that from time to time cruise ships on their way to Antarctica stop by when the weather lets them anchor. Maybe getting lost, or rather disappearing out of sight, has become an anachronism in our communication-crazed world. Is this why being hostage to such remoteness is so attractive to me when, truth be told, I am a coward to such loneliness?

I recollect a story from childhood, where the hero, in order to remedy something I can no longer recall, had to walk on land where no man had ever trod. I remember being troubled by this. Where might such land be? Was it under the sea or in the desert or on top of a mountain? How would we know if man had ever walked there? Did the riddle perhaps mean new land: land that had come up from the center of the Earth, land made of lava? Or was it land fallen from the sky, like ice land? Was it on the moon, or, now that that has been vanquished, Mars? I don't remember the end of the story. What I am remembering, though, as I struggle to understand the part of me that craves the distant elsewhere, is that the riddle of the untrodden land might have planted a seed.

And like one of those gifts of synchronicity that answers you out of nowhere, I decide, just after having written the above paragraph, to look at Antoine de Saint-Exupery's 1939 book Wind, Sand and Stars for some inspiration on where to go with this text. I open the book at random and read straight away about his forced landing on an isolated plateau in the Sahara: "Without question, I was the first human being ever to wander over this ... this iceberg.... I was thrilled by the virginity of a soil which no step of man or beast had sullied. I lingered there, startled by this silence that never had been broken. The first star began to shine, and I said to myself that this pure surface had lain here thousands of years in sight only of the stars."

So I realize, suddenly, what is at the heart of this draw to the Earth's edges--to the desert and to the sea or to the ice at the bottom of the world or the volcano risen out of the ocean. In these places, we are not bound by the rules of human time; we can be free of a history that cannot mark a surface in constant flux, like that of the sea or the shifting dunes of the desert or a surface brutalized by weather or extremity. In these places, we can imagine millennia; we can imagine prehistory and can see the future.

As Saint-Exupery walks his untrodden desert plateau, he finds in the sand a black stone, like lava stone, which has fallen from the sky, and the more he wanders the more of them he finds. "And here is where my adventure became magical, for in a striking foreshortening of time that embraced thousands of years, I had become the witness of this miserly rain from the stars. The marvel of marvels was that there on the rounded back of the planet, between this magnetic sheet and those stars, a human consciousness was present in which as in a mirror that rain could be reflected."

TACITA DEAN

Tacita Dean is a Berlin-based artist. (See Contributors.)

NAVIGATING THE NEW TERRITORY

ART, AVATARS, AND THE CONTEMPORARY MEDIASCAPE

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It's the electric whisper bleeding from earphones in subway cars, and it's the disarming experience of believing for a minute that the well-dressed guy talking to himself on the street is crazy--until you see his headset. Or it's the zombie dance, visible through the glass enclosure of a video arcade, of two adolescent boys whose virtual adventure is being conducted through their actual movements on a platform in front of a screen. These are the symptoms of a new spatial order: a space in which the virtual and the physical are absolutely coextensive, allowing a person to travel in one direction through sound or image while proceeding elsewhere physically. Imaginative projection is as old as the histories of art, theater, and literature--in other words, as old as humanity itself--but virtuality suggests the sensation of inhabiting such projections bodily. What makes our present moment distinctive is the degree to which devices such as the iPod, the cell phone, and the personal computer allow our bodies to occupy two places at once while, conversely, our physical environments function more and more as mediascapes composed not only of surfaces of print and electronic signage but also of the inhabitable three-dimensional signs of architectural branding.

This experience of straddling two or more locations simultaneously has caused the negotiation of both physical and virtual worlds to become increasingly disembodied, and, as with any cultural shift, this transformation has produced new opportunities for art. "Navigation" now describes how we move, and the term, given its dual associations with sea voyages and Internet surfing, perfectly captures the elision of physicality and virtuality. Beyond generating novel aesthetic responses, the experience of navigable space has led to a reconsideration, among both artists and art historians, of more literally territorial ecologies, particularly those of Land art. What is distinctive in "navigational" art, which encompasses not only Internet art but also much recent painting and sculpture, is not simply the association of virtuality with presence--which is implicit in any site-specific practice--but their confusion.

Land art was encountered by the urban art world as a series of media dispatches (photographic and/or cinematic) from exotically remote locations, often in the deserts of the American West. Efforts to experience such works physically were--and remain--difficult: One still hears amusing stories of art pilgrims trying, and frequently failing, to locate Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, 1970, or Michael Heizer's Double Negative, 1969-70. In Land art the desert, as a pure presence existing beyond the gridded precincts of urban or suburban settlement, marked the limit of media representation. It is symptomatic that in certain of his projects, Smithson called his "documentation" non-sites, since the assumption underlying Land art was that the earth functions as a non-sign, or the not-media. Undeveloped desert land is the sublime referent that will never be captured by contemporary spectacle. In other words, the limit of virtuality in Earth art was the presentness of territory.

James Meyer, Miwon Kwon, and Hal Foster have developed a compelling reading of those site-specific art practices of the 1980s and '90s that many have understood as a return of Land art's concerns in the context of identity politics. While their positions differ in important ways, these scholars are alert to how artists such as Renee Green, Fred Wilson, and Mark Dion, to name just three, understand site as discourse. Such sites need not be distinct places but may consist of institutional structures like the museum or even heterogeneous cultural formations like AIDS. In such work, it is the artist's activity that brings a discursive landscape into visibility. Kwon has argued that the itinerant or nomadic artist-ethnographer (this latter term is more Foster's than hers) operates as a presence within the virtual site of discourse. In her pathbreaking article "One Place After Another," published in October in 1997, three years before her book of the same title, Kwon writes:

   The presence of the artist has become an absolute prerequisite for
   the execution/presentation of site-oriented projects. It is now the
   performative aspect of an artist's characteristic mode of operation
   (even when collaborative) that is repeated and circulated as a new
   art commodity, with the artist functioning as the primary vehicle for
   its verification, repetition, and circulation.

In other words, it is the artist's physical actions or manipulations--such as rearranging the collection of the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore to demonstrate its unconscious racial biases, as Wilson has done (Mining the Museum, 1992)--that constitute discursive site specificity: It is literally a kind of performance art.

Land art and subsequent site-specific work therefore share a deep structure. Belonging to a period of unprecedented media expansion (the television era), both sets of practices center on the mutual delimitation of virtuality and presence. In Land art presence is associated with remote territories, while virtuality inheres in mechanically reproduced documentation. In site-specific art, it is the artist as diagnostician or itinerant consultant who signifies presence in materializing a hitherto-virtual discursive site, as when Christian Philipp Muller actualizes an unmarked international border by crossing it on foot (Green Border, 1993) or Andrea Fraser ventriloquizes the entire dramatis personae of the art world while undressing (Official Welcome, 2001). In one set of practices it is the land, and in the other, the body, that serves as the material limit of representation.

In navigational art, whose technological or media analogue is cyberspace as opposed to television, the line between representation and actuality (as marked by a territory or a body) is rendered indiscernible. Here, the opposition between virtuality and presence is restaged as a conjunction of virtuality and presence, as in works like Janet Cardiff's "Walks," where a viewer is immersed in an auditory world that contradicts or phantasmatically augments her physical perambulations. In spatial terms, such an elision results in mediascapes, where territories and signs are knitted together in a single fabric. In his important 1996 book Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai identified several "-scapes"--ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes--as the virtual-real "ecosystems" whose proliferation and superimposition constitute the ground of globalization. It is on such new terrain that aesthetic practices emerging from Earth and later site-specific art are being transformed into strategies that confuse document with fiction. Navigational art emerges when the two guarantors of presence found in Land and site-specific art cease to convince. Landscape becomes a mediascape whose contours and topography (as any Web surfer knows) are as unpredictable--even sublime--as an unmapped canyon in Utah; the body becomes an avatar, a presence beyond or beneath the threshold of identity that, like a sentient cursor, projects agency and mobility into a virtual world.

MEDIASCAPE

If mediascapes are characterized by the simultaneous occupation of virtual and physical space, Cardiff's sound works are their locus classicus: Her aural sculptures project a simulated world onto an actual place and invite viewers to move about in this contradictory terrain. In Forty-Part Motet, 2001, for instance, in which Thomas Tallis's "Spem in Alium" is presented as a "chorus" of forty voices, each emitted from one of forty speakers arranged in a huge oval, the chorus is rendered as a collection of individual voices that the viewer may walk through--and thereby "arrange." Not only is the voice elided with the speaker, but the aural composition becomes a spatial object. As in her "Walks," wherein one navigates a site while listening to a contradictory sound track, Cardiff's Forty-Part Motet spatializes an immaterial work, a piece of music. Like much navigational art (and unlike most Land and site-specific art), Cardiff's "journeys" may take place in a gallery, for the portals to virtuality are by definition anywhere. And indeed, the laboratory space of the museum, where the contradiction between the virtual and the physical may be isolated and contemplated, is paradoxically central to the art I'm describing. This is the case in Rirkrit Tiravanija's recent installation at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Untitled 2005 (the air between the chain-link fence and the broken bicycle wheel), which established a guerrilla television transmission within the gallery it occupied. Untitled 2005 includes two adjacent pavilions pressed against one another but slightly out of register. One pavilion was slick, built of glass and chrome to house a homemade transmitter connected by cables to monitors in a far corner of the gallery; the other was built from plywood and recalled the architecture of refugee camps. There was no access to the room-size vitrine that housed the transmitter, but the plywood "theater" was open to museumgoers: Sitting on benches, they could view the transmission of Punishment Park (1971), Peter Watkins's "speculative documentary" on the backlash against leftist activism and Vietnam War protest in the US--its signal weak and interrupted by the kind of electronic noise that cable has all but rendered obsolete. In making this architectural collage, Tiravanija forced broadcast television's invisible network conducted across the highly valuable but equally invisible airwaves to emerge as two noncommunicating chambers (one devoted to transmission and the other to reception). In other words, the decidedly undemocratic virtual space of television's closed circuit, where the privilege of broadcasting is vested in a few highly capitalized corporations, was here rendered as a physical space of uneven access.

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Just as his two pavilions realized television's virtual closed circuit as an actual spatial configuration (where the viewer felt herself a "prisoner"), his wallpapering of the gallery walls with various documents pertaining to broadcasting, pirate transmission, and his own installation produced a spatial model of the search engine's nearly random juxtapositions. I doubt that many visitors had the patience or stamina to absorb the surfeit of information lining these walls (which would have involved a good deal of circumnavigation and neck craning while reading in public). Like his noncommunicating pavilions, Tiravanija's info-wallpaper offered only the look of democratic access while undermining it physically. His spatialization of television was thus encased within a spatialization of the Internet like a box within a box, and this complex layering produced an architectural allegory of passive media consumption.

If in Tiravanija's installation physical space crystallizes out of a virtual network like the precipitate in a chemical reaction, in Tacita Dean's film (and accompanying book) Teignmouth Electron, 2000, a single object, the ruined boat of that name, generates its own cinematic, photographic, and textual events. The antenna installed above Tiravanija's plywood viewing pavilion in Untitled 2005 was a beat-up replica of Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel of 1913. By allowing the first readymade to function as a television antenna, Tiravanija suggests a structural relationship between the Duchampian readymade and the medium of television. This juxtaposition is initially mystifying but ultimately quite logical. If, historically, the readymade was invented to recode commodites by shifting their context (physically or through inscription), commercial television is a medium whose purpose is to derive a profit from such recoding--by making a brand of soap stand for beauty, say, or a cleaning product for liberation. Dean analogously links the readymade to media by doubly inscribing a single object (the boat) within two distinct informational fields: her nonnarrative film, wherein the Teignmouth Electron serves as the central "character" palpated by the camera, and her book, in which the complex and multilayered narratives circling around the vessel's journey are engaged episodically. In its simultaneous exploration of physical and virtual space, the story of the Teignmouth Electron itself embodies the double nature of navigational art as I have been at pains to define it. The yacht was owned by English industrialist Donald Crowhurst, who disappeared in 1969 while racing it solo around the world. But his ill-fated journey, though real, was nonetheless discursive: It was self-consciously promoted by Teignmouth, the town from which he embarked, as a publicity stunt; Crowhurst himself brought log books, a tape recorder, and a 16 mm film camera on board to ensure the documentation of his exploits firsthand; and, finally, the tragic story of his disappearance (perhaps by suicide due to a kind of disorientation at sea known as "time-madness") resulted in a media sensation netting, according to Dean, "at least one book, one novel, two feature films with another in production, two television documentaries, several radio programmes and endless newspaper articles."

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Dean's film and book, which I regard as two dimensions of the same project, thus navigate a mediascape composed of actual and virtual events. As she puts it with regard to a scripted sound work based on her own trip to find the Spiral Jetty in an interview published in the catalogue to her solo show at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona in 2001, "It's half fake and half real, which I always like ... because it reminds me of Crowhurst, when my false journey meets my real journey." For Tiravanija the encounter of the false journey and real journey is rendered as the crystallization of a media network's undemocratic asymmetry, but for Dean it lies in the dilation of a thing, such as the Teignmouth Electron, into an event. The film is largely composed of a succession of shots--some stationary, others not, some close-up and others wide--of the grounded boat. The climax occurs with the takeoff of a light plane within view of the Electron, and it is followed by a shift in point of view to a window inside that plane, from which the viewer sees the yacht below disappear. An object that was lost at sea is lost once again in the blank stare of the Dean's receding camera. But unlike the sealed vitrine that houses Tiravanija's pirate transmitter, the blank time of Dean's cinema offers a space in which anything (or nothing) may unfold.

AVATAR

In cyberspace an avatar is a movable icon representing a person, a virtual-presence capable of navigating mediascapes. More the index of a location than a traditional form of subjectivity, an avatar does not possess an identity but rather exercises one (or many) provisionally in order to chart a particular path: As a fictional character controlled by an actual body, it is defined by where it goes rather than what it is. In the context of art, the emergence of avatars has been a salutary response to the balkanized pieties of identity politics, but it has also brought the risk of mere cuteness that so much recent figurative painting, ranging from Ellen Gallagher's catalogues of hairstyles to Amy Cutler's revenge-bent scenarios, has fallen into--a parodic miniaturization of the crucial struggles around gender, race, and sexuality that characterized much of the best art of the '80s and '90s. Despite its dangers, the potential of the avatar is considerable: By injecting a powerful ingredient of fantasy into the delineation of identity, the avatar makes possible an imaginary/real mobility that the artist's physical presence in site-specific art could hardly allow. It is as avatars that I understand the quasi-mythical characters that populate Matthew Barney's most recent work.

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In his Cremaster cycle, 1994-2002, Barney's cast of fictional characters traveled simultaneously in exotic physical locations, phantasmic mythological terrains, and microscopic biological worlds beneath the threshold of human perception. It is perhaps only in his latest work, in which similar characters occupy documentary and fictional worlds at once, that they qualify as avatars. In De Lama Lamina (From Mud, a Blade), 2004, for instance, a film that centers on a float Barney designed for the Carnival de Salvador in Bahia, Brazil, the worlds of virtuality and actuality are literally confused. As a fictional vehicle, the float serves both as an agent of forward motion and as a performance platform for three diverse "characters": musician Arto Lindsay (playing himself); the Greenman, a creature with bulbs and roots growing out of his mouth and anus; and environmental activist Julia Butterfly Hill (played by an actor). Documentary sequences of the float's progress in the carnival parade amid police and reveling dancers are intercut with shots of the strange activities of the Greenman, who engaged in a fertility rite under the float's huge tractor which included an autoerotic embrace of the vehicle's monkey-feces-lubricated driveshaft, and of Hill's climb to the top of a candelabra-like tree suspended in front of the float. These sequences, in contrast to footage of the parade and of Lindsay performing, are characterized by the hallucinatory, almost myopic concentration on indecipherable tasks that Barney's films are known for.

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The juxtaposition of these contradictory cinematic idioms enables what the artist has referred to as the positioning of one mythology within another, or the refashioning of a place through its mythological transformation. In a text included at the beginning of De Lama Lamina, Barney clearly states the reigning metaphor organizing his aesthetic vision: "According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the world will eventually die, decay, fall into drift, come to a hopeless end, burn out, slide into disorder. According to Ilya Prigogine, Nobel chemist, under certain circumstances and within certain localities the Second Law fails. Energy increases. An organism is able to reorganize itself into a higher level of order, to transcend itself." The avatar is an organism that reorganizes or transcends itself in order to pursue navigational lines inaccessible to a being burdened with physical presence. The mutability of an icon in cyberspace is here actualized through its simultaneous occupation of the communicating worlds of myth and cinema verite. Barney's method for evoking such figures tends toward the fictional, but this is not the only way of building an avatar.

In her installation an inadequate history of conceptual art, 1998-99, Silvia Kolbowski offers a second, "nonfiction" model. Kolbowski's work consists of two parts: audio interviews with a group of artists asked to "briefly describe a conceptual art work, not your own, of the period between 1965 and 1975, which you personally witnessed/experienced at the time" and a video projection in a separate room showing close-up the hand gestures of the interviewed artists. Not only were the audio and visual components of the work presented separately in adjacent spaces, but the person speaking and the person gesturing did not remain in sync. In other words, the mnemonic journey of the audio script is explicitly severed from the body's agency, marked in vestigial form by the video images where out-of-context hand gestures suggest a puppeteer who has lost his grip on the strings. If Barney articulates the freedom of the avatar, Kolbowski dwells on the consequences of that freedom. The loss of the body she represents is further registered as a purposeful evasion of naming: Interviewees were asked not to identify themselves or the author and title of the work they described, leaving the vertiginous impression of identities unhinged.

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Since the elision of document and fiction is a prominent characteristic of navigational art, and since the document is typically aligned with politics while fiction connotes quietism or escape, the confusion of these terms leads one to question whether a politics of the mediascape and the avatar is even possible. My own answer is affirmative. First, as in recent theories of the posthuman, such a politics could build coalitions across balkanized identities: It would construct new avatars for particular purposes, drawing its limbs from as far afield as the Greenman and Julia Butterfly Hill. And second, it would be truly navigational, committed to opening new paths inside existing closed circuits like broadcast television. It would focus less on diagnosis and more on action. To an accusation that such a program is utopian, I can only plead guilty. But why, especially in the virtual realm of art, should we cede our power in advance?

DAVID JOSELIT

David Joselit is a professor of art history at Yale University. (See Contributors.)

A TEXT ABOUT HIGH DESERT TEST SITES

GETTING LOST

The best and worst part of High Desert Test Sites is getting lost in the desert. We make a map, but it's usually inaccurate. The desert is big, a magnitude larger than the city, and we can never fit its immensity on a sheet of paper without the details getting too tiny. So in addition to being inaccurate, the maps are also completely out of proportion, which makes some visitors tense. Seeing the sites isn't like gallery hopping in Los Angeles. LA is notoriously spread out, but it's nothing compared to the desert. Driving these huge distances, you're really forced to connect with the landscape and become immersed in the place. Sometimes this immersion is literal--getting stuck in the sand is a common occurrence. Then someone else will drive by and help dig you out with their hands. Or a local with a truck and a chain will take pity on the poor urbanite. Everyone's sweating and sunburned and wearing ridiculous hats. Then they start talking about the art they've been looking at. Because the situation is so foreign, people feel comfortable striking up conversations with strangers. Getting lost makes it possible to really explore.

HAVING AN EXPERIENCE

I completely agree that one of the most redeeming things about the events is that everyone gets lost. A direct drive from the first site to the last one takes about seventy-five minutes, which is absolute hell when it comes to organizing the events. But the distance is also the thing that opens all these spaces so that odd adventures start to happen. Part of me thinks that having an "experience," especially an unpredictable one, is another secret artwork that we sneak into the program.

The directions to Hal's piece, which was on the dry lakebed, read something like, "Go down Broadway until it ends and continue in the direction of three o'clock." There are no roads on the lakebed, just a bunch of tracks from ATVs and dirt bikes. During HDTS, there are a lot of Volvos lost on the dry lakebed, not going too fast.

To continue this thought, in a world that tends to package art as an import/export commodity, I often find myself wondering if there are still ways to experience an artwork in a single place and moment in time. What if, rather than trying to campaign for more and more funding and lure out larger audiences and travel our exhibitions, we develop works that cost less, that are dependent on no one for their creation, and provide an experience for an intimate audience? When we first started doing HDTS it was one of those situations where everything and nothing seemed possible at the same time.

THE EXPERIMENT

It would have been easy enough to move to the desert, drink my perfected recipe for homemade margaritas, and make art between regular trips to New York, LA, London, Berlin, and Stockholm. But somehow (as usual) I quickly became overinvolved. I wanted to find out if contemporary art could play a role outside a major art-world center. I wanted to be able to talk to the guys behind the counter of Barr Lumber about that bitchin' cockroach performance by Pentti Monkkonen the same way that I heard them talking about dirt biking or the playoffs--only HDTS would be their home team and our event would be their playoffs. The HDTS home turf includes Yucca Valley, Pioneertown, Joshua Tree, 29 Palms, Wonder Valley, and a scattering of small towns strung along the thin stretch of 29 Palm Highway, which heads out into the deep desert toward Arizona and the Colorado River.

Life here often feels a bit like a dry, sandy version of Northern Exposure--an intimate community of diverse (often humorous and sometimes maddening) personalities. Most people who live here are transplants, though everyone seems to come for a different reason. In 29 Palms, swarms of marines live on the largest Marine Corps base in the nation. Joshua Tree has the rock climbers (think landlocked surfers), New Agers (the Institute of Mentalphysics), and lots of shacks--notoriously suspected to be meth labs. Then to the west is Yucca Valley, with a few old-time ranches as well as the beginnings of stucco spillover from the growing sprawl out of Palm Springs and the lower desert.

Some great rumors circulate in the local community about what we're up to. A friend once said that his neighbors told him I was buying plots of land, installing sculptures on them, and then selling them to museums for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Well, it isn't quite like that, though I admit that in a perfect world HDTS could set a precedent for another kind of institution that would acquire and archive long-term, site-specific, experimental works and maintain them in the context for which they were created. Dia, of course, set the obvious precedent but only for a handful of artists in a very fleeting moment in history. It seems timely that once again an institution would start to consider long-term commitments to art that doesn't require deep storage or ongoing shipping costs.

MORE ABOUT THE LOCATION

This corner of the high desert is probably best known for its proximity to Joshua Tree National Park. It's about two or two and a half hours southeast of Los Angeles (three and a half if you stop at the Barneys and Prada outlets) and two hours south of Las Vegas. So we're just a short drive from the epicenter of West Coast culture, but when you are here, you feel like you're a million miles away from it all. My grandparents ranched in the low expanse of the Imperial Valley just south of Joshua Tree, and I've found myself in the rocky high desert for one reason or another throughout much of my life.

When I was nineteen I thought I was going to be a photographer, and I went on long trips with my teacher, desert photographer Walter Cotton. Walt knows this area like the back of his hand. We drove it in his '60s Volkswagen convertible, slept on Bureau of Land Management property, and cooked quesadillas on a Coleman stove. He did a series of works in the desert that were among the original inspirations for HDTS--large, mysterious, setlike constructions that seemed both militaristic and sci-fi, which he (along with his friend and collaborator Steve Depinto) built and photographed in the middle of dry lakes and near abandoned military installations.

About ten years later, Allan McCollum and I drove through the same area and fantasized about building side-by-side, personal roadside museums where we could store and exhibit our own work. We would charge admission, which would cover the cost of storage, and build a joint cafeteria so we wouldn't have to worry about cooking. There's just something about the desert that opens up enough thinking space to reimagine all sorts of new parallel art worlds.

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In 2000, I finally made the move and bought a small cabin and five acres, which I now use for my own work. The initial setup cost about forty thousand dollars, which still left a budget for art materials and periodic flights to New York. The affordable cost of living also took some of the pressure off worrying about sales and the commercial demands of an art career. (This still seems like a good model for being an artist.) In the last five years I have continued to purchase land (usually at tax sales), which I then turn over to the larger HDTS endeavor.

My grandparents moved to Palm Springs when I was a kid and we visited them there. I dreaded those trips. I remember my grandmother talking about all the "fairies" in Cathedral City and how they were good cooks. But the food was horrible, and my grandfather always sent back his order. Those were my first visits to the desert. I don't know exactly the first time I went to Joshua Tree. There was one point when it seemed that every fighting couple around me would go to the 29 Palms Inn to reconcile. I began to associate the desert with bad relationships. When Andrea moved out there, I gave the area a second chance.

Do you remember when you came out and we tried to teach ourselves how to two-step with that book that you brought?

Yeah, that didn't work out. I thought I could learn to two-step and that would be the magic skill that would tune me in to the desert people. But one thing I realized about the desert is that there isn't really such a thing as a desert person. It seems that a lot of people are here because they don't really fit in anywhere else. But how they don't fit in differs drastically. There's a subset of angry youth who dress all punk rock, cut themselves, flirt with white supremacy, and sometimes vacation in jail. There are retirees, Satanists, Jesus freaks, climbers, speed freaks, New Agers, homosexuals, and marines. Sometimes in combination: Satanist climbers, Jesus-freak homosexuals, New Age speed freaks. And then there are a lot of old people, too. They come for the "health benefits," which I guess means the dry air. I think it's pretty inhospitable in the desert, but the old people are always cheerful when you run into them at the thrift shop or wherever.

THE CLIMATE

There was already a legacy of artistic endeavors in the high desert--by both educated sophisticates like Noah Purifoy and George Van Tassel (The Integraton) and innocents such as Leonard Knight (Salvation Mountain) and Jacob Samuelson (Samuelson's Rocks). Often the desert is seen as a blank slate for human projections, but the really incredible thing about all of these projects (and the reason that the desert isn't already filled up with private roadside museums and installation-style artworks) is its insanely harsh climate and its practical limitations, which on most days dwarf one's ability to perform even the most basic tasks. The temperatures here range from 110 in the summer to snowy and freezing in the winter. (Sometimes it even feels like the temperatures swing that much in a single twenty-four-hour period.) Clear calm mornings can evolve into violent sandstorms by three in the afternoon, with enough velocity to sandblast the paint off your Escalade. But apart from the three hundred brutal days, there are about sixty-five days a year when the weather is perfect, and by using our clairvoyant abilities we always manage to hold the HDTS events on one of those perfect days (not!). Weather plays a big role in what is actually possible--it demolishes the ambitious projects and favors the fluid ones. And sometimes it makes me believe that Allan Kaprow is the smartest artist alive.

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The first HDTS was in October, and we set up an outdoor screening room in Pioneertown. I don't think anyone could have predicted how freezing it would be that night. Those of us from the big city think "desert" means hot. As Mungo Thomson's Roadrunner-free desert landscapes played on the big screen, I slowly lost all feeling in my feet.

THE ORGANIZERS

Before I start talking about the events I should describe the organizers. We are a small, loosely knit group of five (plus some volunteers). John Connelly and Andy Stillpass were the first to get involved. They came to visit in May of 2002, and for three hot, dusty days we drove the valley from end to end in my black Toyota pickup truck. Andy was possibly going to loan us some money to buy land for potential art projects, and I was trying to convince him that we should purchase a forty-acre parcel at the end of nowhere. (Turn left on a dirt road about twenty-three miles past the sign that reads: "Last services for 100 miles.")

I had also shown Andy some property sixty miles west in the "good neighbor-hood" (Pioneertown). Andy fell in love with it, a stunning hundred-acre parcel with ancient Joshua Trees surrounded by giant boulders. But I had my heart set on the flat, sparse land at the other end of the valley. So in the end, Andy bought the parcel that he wanted, and I bought my land, and we determined that we would jointly turn them into an experimental area for artists to use for projects. At that point John started to fantasize that he would move to the desert part-time and run the project, which had yet to be named.

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Over the next few days (and quite a few homemade drinks) we continued to plot and came up with the name High Desert Test Sites, which makes reference to the nearby Nevada nuclear-test sites. From the start, there was an awareness that art has both a positive and a somewhat corrupting effect on the landscape. I liked this name because it is mysterious and compelling yet slightly sinister at the same time. (Incidentally, the name created some havoc in the community, as our signs from time to time have led people to believe that the marine base in 29 Palms had expanded to include parcels throughout the rest of the valley.)

I wanted to make a postcard of the woodpile on the marine base, and Skylar Haskard was looking for material for his HDT[S.sub.4] project. The woodpile is open to the public, and you can get all the free wood you can carry. But you can't take photos because they store bombs behind the woodpile. I pulled out a camera and all of a sudden there was a situation. An MP arrived and asked all sorts of questions. Now I have a record at the marine base. They even took down the design and location of my tattoos.

By the time we were up and running, Shaun Caley Regen had come on board. Shaun has actually become the invisible armature for the projects and events, providing a network base in Los Angeles. And finally we recruited Lisa Anne--artist, writer, photographer, and soon-to-be master knitter. Lisa Anne is famed for her zines like The Casual Observer (the darkroom log of the Griffith Observatory) and American Homebody. Initially she started out by making the HDTS publications (zine style), but she quickly became more involved with each event. Shaun and Lisa are the core of the decision-making branch, as they are strong women with weighty opinions who aren't afraid to say no.

The publication actually began as my contribution to the event. It was really my take on things, not an official document at all. I had this idea that being out in the desert was just as important as the art, so I included all sorts of things like restaurant reviews and information about the area. I asked all of the artists involved (at the time it was a manageable list) for information about their work, which I mostly rewrote or reinterpreted. So it was really all about me and not them! But then the publication outlives the event ... and what was originally my project became the only record of all of the other projects. And because I had interfaced with all of the artists gathering the information, I had unintentionally become a bit of a point person.

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Greg Gilday met Andrea in the desert when he was working as an art shipper. I think he had a little crush on her, so he wanted to get involved with HDTS. Turned out he had an offset press in his Long Beach garage, so Andrea handed him over to me. We worked together on all three of the HDTS publications. The first one was stapled together at 7 AM the day of the event.

Greg had a crush on me? I doubt it! Why didn't you say something?

I like the fact that there aren't any real formalities in terms of who runs what. The creation of the "committee" has been quite organic, and each person has simply joined by identifying a function that they were willing to take on. Veronica Fernandez, a Texas transplant who now works in a gallery in the lower desert, is starting to help us deal with press. Giovanni Jance and Jennifer Nocon became organizers just because they were always involved and always "on call." Our resident crisis manager is Till Lux, a longtime high-desert resident (who won't let us forget that he was born in Canada by flashing the maple leaf tattooed inside his lower lip). Other hardworking volunteers include Tom Bloor, who came from the United Kingdom to pick up trash in the hot sun; Jay Lizo, who ran the headquarters last year; Bill Kelley Jr.; Guy Green; the wonderful Leah Curry and Ramie Camarena (who took care of Rainer Ganahl); and Pat Flanagon, who has become our resident ecological adviser.

THE EVENTS

If the events could be described in two words, "chaos" would be both of them. Artists fly in from remote destinations on red-eye flights, rent cars, and wind up lost in the desert at 3 AM. On any given morning before an event I'll wake up to discover at least one or two new bodies sleeping on my front patio or in cars parked on the road. The arriving bodies sleep on the front patio; the established ones get spots with air mattresses on the back patio. We've counted up to fourteen people sleeping there at once. My water is delivered by a truck, so I'm really stingy about letting people flush the toilet and take showers, and everyone really stinks.

For those who can't afford hotels and aren't lucky enough to claim spots on the back patio there is the wash behind my house. The secret is that the wash is nicer than the patio, unless you don't like snakes. The only other problem with the wash is that everyone gets stuck in the sand, and it's such a common event that it's hard to motivate anyone to help dig you out if you've been dumb enough to get stuck.

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If there's no room at A-Z West, the parcel in Wonder Valley is available to the hardy. It's even farther from civilization than the Palms, and the views of the stars are incredible. Andrea says that from time to time you can see bombs go off at the marine base. It really feels like the middle of absolutely nowhere, but one time when our car got stuck the gas man came by and got us out. I really don't know what he was doing out there.

We're lucky to have a fully equipped shop for the HDTS artists to use (only it's my shop, and it is always completely trashed afterward) and a preparator who works for free (that would be me). However, lately more people have been hopping on board to help the artists, which has been a total lifesaver. Possibly the best of these moments was when Leah and Ramie did an illegal guerrilla intervention on a billboard on the highway in broad daylight for Rainer Ganahl because he had a bad back and couldn't get up there himself.

Saturday and Sunday are the days of the main event. Everyone who drives out and hasn't done a project stays in a hotel and has lots of energy and runs around trying to catch all of the sites, while the artists (who are exhausted by now) drink beer and fashion clothes from the shredded remains of what they brought with them. I keep meaning to write something on the map to explain that no one can possibly see all of the sites and to tell people not to bother rushing around so as just to have a good time. But even if I did spell it out for them, they would probably try to do it all anyway.

There's a schedule that's handed out, and in a perfect world it would allow visitors to see everything. But the perfect world doesn't account for getting lost, meeting someone new, or having an unexpected adventure--so what kind of perfect world is that?

Saturday night is the dinner, which is held at a family-run joint called the Palms, fifteen miles east of 29 Palms.

It's fifteen LONG miles. You pass the town, then you just keep going on this completely empty road lined with old homestead cabins and desert scrub. You check the map, but of course it's wrong, since there's no way we could fit twenty-four miles of nothing onto the map. So everyone is driving and driving and wondering if they've passed the place, calling each other on cell phones (if they can even get reception). Then finally, after you're sure your odometer's wrong and your map's wrong and you're on the wrong road, there's this shack of a place with a buffalo on the sign and you're there! On a non-HDTS night, there are always people hanging out and playing pool. It's also my favorite desert bookstore. Their section of used books has it all: military handbooks, religious texts, and guides to breast-feeding. If you're lucky, you'll also find a pair of used cowboy boots in your size. Look just to the left of the door as you come in.

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The first time we had dinner at the Palms, they were a bit overwhelmed by the crowd. We told them to expect a large group, but they were barely prepared for the numbers that showed up. Everyone was hungry, and there just wasn't a system in place for feeding so many. At one point I looked into the kitchen and there was Andrea flipping burgers!

Jennifer Nocon once tried to show her video on the TVs at the bar during the World Series. The handful of regulars could put up with hundreds of HDTS people, but when it came to the TV they put their foot down.

Everyone stays up way too late, which is why the traditional artists' brunch at 29 Palms (hosted by Shaun Regen) is such a lifesaver for the hungry and hungover (except that we were almost blacklisted the year after Greg Martin stripped down and jumped in the hotel pool naked except for his black cowboy hat). For the rest of Sunday everyone does the art stuff while Shaun, Giovanni, David, and I, along with a few other event refugees, hide out at a local pool in a state of HDTS over-load. By this point I have usually decided that the event can just run itself from here on out. (That is, until I start feeling guilty that jay Lizo is still working at the headquarters tent and probably hasn't seen any of the projects himself.)

In the beginning there was a lot of talk about whether to have events or whether HDTS should just be a full-time project that people could access by down-loading a driving map from the Web. After the second event, Andy suggested that we shouldn't have any more, and at this point I agree with him. But the problem is that everyone really loves the events. So for the time being the compromise is that we have them when the organizers have the time and energy to pull them off, and in the meantime we're trying to focus on supporting individual projects and the longer-term ones (by providing descriptions and directions to them on the website).

Everyone really loves the events, because it gives them an excuse to actually get off their asses and get out there! If the projects came and went without fanfare, I don't think people would really take the time to see them. People also welcome the opportunity to socialize in a different setting and to have a dialogue with people they might not otherwise see. The desert puts everyone on equal ground, in a way. We're all concerned about whether our SPF is high enough and if we should hit Site Five before Site Seven and what time the sun goes down. The normal awkwardness just disappears.

Yes, but the reason the events have been so cool is that there haven't been masses of people. The more events we do, the bigger the audience and the more complicated and less intimate the whole thing will become. In my opinion people should motivate to get out there even when the rest of the world isn't with them.

That's tough to do! But having smaller events has also been great and without the complications of wearing down roads. The costumed hike we had a few weeks ago brought a lot of HDTS participants, plus some new faces for a smaller-scale adventure. Everyone dressed up and no one had to leave to get to another event forty miles down the road. One way to keep it from getting too big is by having a series of smaller events instead of big blockbusters.

THE ARTISTS

Describing the organizers also calls for a description of the artists and what they bring to HDTS as a whole. Most of the artists (both emerging and established) do almost everything themselves. As a big promoter of a healthy DIY attitude, I'm still always amazed at how self-sufficient and totally competent people become in these situations. A good example of this is Roman Vasseur, who came out in early April 2005 to realize the second phase of a project that began with an airplane drop of "black propaganda" on a piece of desert owned by Jeremy Deller in Trona, which is several hours north of our own land. Roman wanted to screen a film of the drop on the local television station. He flew in from London while I was away for teaching gigs, so he made the trek out to the desert alone and managed to meet more people in town than I had in my first year there. By the end of his first week he had discovered a local filmmaker, Bob Stephenson, who had shot two films in the area, called Magnum Farce and Filthy Harry (no, they're not porn!), and he had found a cable network that agreed to screen his film once a week for a year at no cost. (Roman's project is currently featured on our webpage, www.highdeserttestsites.com.)

Marie Lorenz is another incredible HDTS veteran who befriended Garth. He lives in a concrete tepee with no power or phone, and one of Marie's three HDTS projects was a moat that went around one of the rock formations in Garth's garden. (He also happens to be our prime suspect for altering projects probably not to his liking. For example, we think he smashed into Giovanni's big orange arrow with a truck and, when he couldn't break it, painted it matte brown to make it more harmonious with the landscape.)

We met Garth for the first time at HDT[S.sub.1], when he graciously lent us a fire pit for Joel Otterson's pig roast after voicing concern that we might burn down the desert if we tried it on one of our own sites--he has a small magnetic "lake" of iron filings found in the desert and an outdoor kitchen. He's welcomed all of us to explore his grottoes and meet his birds.

OUR MISSION STATEMENT

Just for fun we made a mission statement. Well, actually I made a mission statement and put it on the website, so now it's "our" mission statement. Some of the points work out really well and others are still open for revision.

I think the mission statement is something to aspire to, but in actuality it's difficult to stay true to the goals. There are always complications and unforeseen events and compromises to be made. And some projects don't always live up to their proposals. Since we are totally DIY, there's no way an artist would get "pulled" at the last minute for not coming through. But I do worry about the integrity of the event. I think at the back of our minds we ask ourselves, "How is this NOT Burning Man?" There are a lot of reasons it's completely different, but sometimes I feel that it's treading a bit too close. When I tell people who have nothing to do with the art world about HDTS, they inevitably ask, "Like Burning Man?" I frown and angrily tell them "No way," but then later, when I think about it, there are all these Burning Man-esque factors. The idea of encouraging long-range projects is central to the mission statement, but stuff is often made elsewhere and then shipped to the site the night before the event. I'd like to be a bit more hard-ass about sticking to the mission statement, since we've got one.

1. To challenge traditional conventions of ownership, property, and patronage. Most projects will ultimately belong to no one, and they are intended to melt back into the landscape as new ones emerge.

I love the idea of making art that belongs to no one, but I keep meaning to rephrase the second part of this item, as it alarms many of the locals who fear that we will literally leave our work like crumpled McDonald's wrappers to litter the land. On one hand art litter could be kind of interesting, but it also brings up one of the first problems about installing art in nature. Ultimately you have to respect nature over artistic complexity, and the problem is, great art is always a little bit "good" and a little bit "bad." This is when it sometimes starts to feel more "liberating" to make art in a gallery or an urban environment that is already corrupted and ready for more abuse.

Allen Compton's piece was incredibly successful at this. He brought out a series of blue solar-powered lights, which were installed alongside the hill above A-Z West and became a landmark after dark. Allen thought the solar cells would last a year, but it's been nearly three and some of them are still there. Some have disappeared, and it's hard to say whether vandalism or coyotes or the weather contributed to their demise. This art-work was environmentally low impact but had a huge presence. It went very quickly from being Allen's work to becoming "those blue lights on the hill."

A one-hour call-in radio program on [Z.sub.107] FM was dedicated to trying to explain the blue lights that ran along the darkened silhouettes of the mountains just north of the park. People speculated that they were everything from missile-test markers to alien sightings!

2. To "insert" art directly into a life, a landscape, or a community, where it will sink or swim based on a different set of criteria than those of art-world institutions and galleries.

In 2003, redneck dirt bikers systematically and repeatedly destroyed Hal McFeely's painted billboard picturing President Bush with text that said LOOT THE ART BUT THE OIL IS MINE. It wasn't a surprise, given that he'd installed it in a place people go to shoot guns and ride dirt bikes. My mechanic's friend found Chris Kasper's I'M SORRY sign in the wash and was asking about it all over town because he was so perplexed by why someone would put it there.

3. To encourage art that remains in the context for which it was created--similar to the intentions of early site-specific art, before "site specific" became something that could be retailored for any location. Works that will be born, live, and die in the same spot.

A great idea, but once the event got so big, it felt like the sites were becoming overwhelmed with stuff that was supposed to "die" in the spot but ended up just trashing up the landscape. One of the real draws to the desert is the open space, and some of the sites feel a bit like sculpture gardens now. It's tough to be strict when we go through proposals. We can't advocate this very open experiment and then nix everyone's ideas.

4. To initiate an organism in its own right--one that's bigger, richer, and less organized than the vision of any single artist, curator, or architect.

This has really worked. In addition to the "official" sites, we encourage others to make their own sites. Some have turned their homes into Test Sites for the event, and this is great, because it really makes the edges fuzzy.

5. To create a "center" outside of any preexisting centers. Inspired by groups like the Modern Institute in Glasgow and Forcefield in Providence, Rhode Island, which aren't based on the cachet of living in an existing cultural capital so much as on their ability to make a center around themselves, wherever they happen to be.

I've always said that HDTS was really started because Andrea wanted people to come visit her in the desert! And it worked. In some ways, HDTS is a grandiose sequel to her Thursday-night cocktails at the original A-Z in Williamsburg.

6. To find common ground between contemporary art and localized art issues.

Perhaps because my own work bridges art and "life," I have always felt that it was possible to make smart contemporary art that still speaks to a larger, more "generalized" public. And I still believe that to some extent this is true. In the high desert we have found a sympathetic and often responsive audience (sometimes even collaborators) from all fields. Sometimes it feels like the whole town is willing to pitch in to pull off an event.

Ray, the muffler guy who had a place next door to my old studio (across from the Ideal Mall), was really supportive. He took us up in his Cessna when Chris James wanted to shoot aerial footage for his video. Till Lux, who owns a sign shop in Yucca Valley, made all of our signs, designed our logo and T-shirts, and did doughnuts in his monster truck for David Dodge's piece Dust Farming in 2004. Dave, the owner/bartender at Stars Way Out (home of the Ugly Man Contest), brought out a group of local kids to help clean up the beer cans from the Tiger Pit and then took them into town so they could redeem the cans for cash.

We've been less successful bridging the gap between ourselves and the established local art scene. When we first started having events, we didn't make our plans known, and this was seen as an insult. But really we just didn't realize we were supposed to talk to anyone before doing something new. I guess we weren't clued in yet to the nuances of desert etiquette. There was some nasty press at the beginning from the local art mag, but now our relationship with the local arts is healthier, and lately there have been proposals for creating some sort of alliance between the local cultural-arts association and HDTS.

It seems that people involved with more traditional, less conceptual practices are more resistant to HDTS than those who have no real connection to art. In the international art world, Andrea is hot shit. But in the desert, she's just another kooky lady making stuff. It's really great to see her introduce people to her world. They just have no idea.

7. To run on a zero budget. The High Desert Test Sites receives no funding--nor does it seek any. The organizers and artists themselves pay for all expenses. As a result of the zero-budget policy there is a necessity to find new ways to convey meaning and create experiences through the most economical means. The most successful works are often casual, experimental, and somewhat offhand.

The zero budget--really just the fact that we lose money on each event--is one of my favorite parts. I'm not sure why except that it means that we have to really love this project in order to keep doing it--and that we don't owe anything to anyone.

8. To contribute to a community in which art can truly make a difference. HDTS exists in a series of communities that edge one of the largest suburban sprawls in the nation. Most of the artists who settle in this area are from larger cities but want to live in a place where they can control and shape the development of their own community. For the time being, there is still a feeling in the air that if we join together, we can hold back the salmon stucco housing tracts and big-box retail centers. Well, maybe.

The verdict is still out on this one. There has recently been tremendous growth in the area, which some attribute to its discovery by artists. But I personally feel that those artists are the same people who are going to save it from tract-house sprawl. The question is whether, after it becomes yet another artists' community, it will really be the kind of community that a project like HDTS is meant for.

Racing across the desert at dusk in pickups trying to catch the runaway horse that Jacob Dyrenforth was supposed to "ride off into the sunset" for his performance titled The End.

LISA ANNE AUERBACH* & ANDREA ZITTEL

TEXT BOXES CONTAIN HDTS "MOMENTS"

* Text by Lisa Anne Auerbach in italics.

TRUE BEAUTY

JEFFREY KASTNER TALKS WITH MATTHEW COOLIDGE ABOUT THE CENTER FOR LAND USE INTERPRETATION

Sewer systems and traffic patterns; abandoned air-force bases and simulated Main Streets built to train law-enforcement officers; dead shopping malls and towns swallowed by the rising waters of technologically diverted rivers. This is the American landscape as seen through the eyes of Los Angeles's Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI): a complex national topography that's emphatically physical yet also has a certain uncanny lyricism, one rich in the cadences of what CLUI's director, Matthew Coolidge, calls "anthropogeomorphology"--the landscape as altered by humans.

Founded in 1994 by Coolidge with a small group of colleagues and run today out of a modest Venice Boulevard storefront in Culver City, CLUI has emerged as the most astute of many creative groups around the United States currently engaging contemporary issues related to land and its uses, both functional and aesthetic. Though increasingly known for its exhibitions--including this spring's "Terminal Island," a show focusing the organization's celebrated research on that man-made landform in the Long Beach area of Los Angeles, the largest container port in the United States--CLUI actually presents a wide range of programming, from books and lectures to multimedia bus tours. These tours put people in direct experiential contact not only with the various sites they visit but also with local experts and spokespeople who bring firsthand, sometimes divergent perspectives to the discussion. Perhaps CLUI's biggest enterprise is its least public, the Land Use Database, a collection of photographic and analytical information on thousands of "unusual and exemplary" locations around the country--"from industrial sites to military sites to Land art to prisons to housing developments to tennis courts," says Coolidge--that the organization has spent years processing for use as source material in its various projects.

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In addition to its West Coast headquarters, CLUI has an office in upstate New York and is currently branching out around the country through its American Land Museum project, a network of far-flung "landscape exhibition sites" designed to serve as bases for an ongoing interpretive project on the distinctiveness of regional land-use patterns, from the Pacific Northwest to the Great Plains breadbasket. For now, CLUI administers the museum's first outpost, with its own residency program, in Wendover, Utah. One could hardly imagine a more CLUI-esque location. Just off Interstate 80 in the shadow of the Silver Island Mountains, the Wendover complex occupies a series of buildings on the site of an abandoned airfield where the crew of the Enola Gay was trained. Within a few hours' drive of both one of the world's largest open-pit mines and Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, 1970, the complex lies adjacent to two tantalizing and telling artifacts of our recent sociocultural past--like its own mission, somewhere between art and science, between myth and matter.--JK

JEFFREY KASTNER: How was the Center for Land Use Interpretation created?

MATTHEW COOLIDGE: A few other people and I were already doing individually what we now do together as an organization. Most of us had some background in the arts. I studied geomorphology in school, as well as art history and film. In 1994, we filed papers to become an official institution and established a methodology that we've been following ever since: We collect information on places across the United States, storing and then using that raw material to organize regional or thematic exhibits.

JK: What was your practice as an independent artist at the time?

MC: I took pictures, I did videos, I made things. I was interested in point of view, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle--what happens when you look at things, how medium and mediation change the view of the object.

JK: So what were your first CLUI projects like?

MC: We began to establish the database, as we call it: a systematic analysis of land use across America. It's really about figuring out how the nation's lands are used, who owns them, how things are connected. We're interested in manifesting the things that exemplify interconnectedness--the gas line coming into your building is connected to another line, which goes to a trunk line under Venice Boulevard, and that goes out to the 405 Freeway and underground a thirty-six-inch main that goes under the interstate up to the gas fields of Alberta, and so on. To accomplish this, we select subjects based on what we call the "unusual and exemplary criteria," which means that a place can be selected from the continuum of space because it either stands out as singular, unique, or extraordinary, or is "exemplary"--meaning that it exemplifies a more typical or common type of space.

JK: Tell me how a CLUI-style analysis of a site might begin.

MC: It depends on the site. Let's say it's a gravel pit. There are gravel pits all over the place. Someone sends us an e-mail saying, "Have you seen this big gravel pit outside of Chicago?" Using the "unusual and exemplary" criteria, we would then look at what information we have about the relative size of gravel pits in the area, trying to determine if there's something about that particular gravel pit that makes it stand out. We prefer ground truth whenever possible--to have somebody from the organization go to the site and do a site analysis, describing it from firsthand experience.

JK: But your exhibitions also extend beyond physical characteristics to how the site is run as a business, the relationships it has to other institutions, or its history. Do you want the presentations that you make to contend with conventionally accepted portraits of the places they depict?

MC: At times. Let me give you an example. Recently, we did a tour to parts of the Great Salt Lake and looked at the Bingham Pit, an open-pit copper mine they call "the biggest hole on earth." Two people can stand next to each other in front of this massive creation, and one will say, "This is a horror! Look what we've done, we're doomed!" And then the other person will say, "If you're engaged in society, you're using copper; you depend on it for your communications, your electricity. This site symbolizes the industriousness and ingenuity that built this country." Those are two ends of one conventional political polarity. But we try to introduce the rest of the spectrum, where you can understand the site as both of these things. It's stirring, it's moving, it's horrible and beautiful--in a kind of Keatsian sense where beauty becomes truth. A sense of connection with a place is a form of truth; a visual truth, a ground truth. It can embody conflicting judgments all at once. Through us trying not to tell people what to think about the site--by getting in touch with this truth of the ground--maybe you come away with more of an emotive or a psychological truth, a more complex and complete sense of the place.

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JK: And what is the role of the research you present in this context?

MC: Maybe one that allows you to become less sure, to realize that things aren't quite as certain as you thought. We try to suggest with the database and exhibits that the landscape is fairly rich as it is, and in a way, you don't need to do too much to it other than change your perspective. Familiar objects, often unseen because they're so familiar, become more interesting and become something else if you change the context in which they're presented. It's in that state of uncertainty that your mind is most active. That's the space of change, and anything can happen in that space. And if we can get people untethered, even briefly, then things change slightly, individually, and perhaps even collectively down the road.

JK: Do you view your process of information gathering and sorting as an activity that produces a "factual" account of things? You've spoken previously about the questions of mediation, of fact and fiction. How does this dialectic operate in CLUI's work?

MC: Well, we feel like fact is often just a more widely believed form of fiction--or can be, at least. And that's where we want to operate. What is a fact? Is it just consensus? It's a collective conviction, I suppose, but we often wonder where the truth really lies and whether it can even be found. The X-Files people say, "The truth is out there." I don't know. Perhaps it's in our heads more than anywhere else.

JK: Presumably these questions around information and presentation are important in deciding how to put together your exhibition formats--their mixing of visual documentation, textual description, related cultural materials, and tours.

MC: Absolutely. We very much want it to appear that we're dealing with "truths," but also we want to indicate that those truths are often tenuous.

JK: I'm interested in CLUI's modes of representing place. It seems like this is the kind of conceptual terrain--the representation of large-scale, land-based phenomenological activities through visual and textual artifacts in exhibition or publication contexts--where your project dovetails with the legacy of Land art.

MC: Land art is an odd category. People put Smithson and Michael Heizer next to each other, but they're very, very different. Heizer's a post-Minimalist sculptor who has to work outdoors: He works on a large scale and deals with monumentality and therefore needs access to the inexpensive bulk materials of the ground. Smithson is much more of a Conceptualist. Spiral Jetty, even though it's made of rocks bulldozed out into the water, is more the illustration of an idea, one that's coupled--or tripled, I guess you could say--with the essay and film about the Jetty. And all those things together form the work.

Our relationship to that art has to do with our surroundings. We all live in a combination of indoors and outdoors; in most of the country, a lot of our time is spent negotiating the landscape. In a place like the Mojave Desert, to cite one extreme, experience is nearly entirely exterior; and that's probably where most Land art has been produced. The other extreme is Manhattan, where most experience is indoors--even the streets feel like hallways. This kind of environment encourages the production of interior-based art and structures to contain it, like museums. So when Land art appears in New York, it is usually in the form of images and other secondary representations. As a result, Gianfranco Gorgoni's imagery of Spiral Jetty is what people have in their heads--but that doesn't exist anymore.

JK: I've always thought this was the most interesting conceptual question related to Land art, and it's one that really seems to be at the heart of what CLUI does. Negotiating those dialectics--indoor/outdoor, process/artifact, site/non-site--is central to your whole approach.

MC: Yes. And there's also something that Smithson could not have perhaps anticipated. It's not a dialectic, it's more a trialectic--site, non-site, website--where you have this fluid electronic version of space that is a form of a non-site but is also something else. And increasingly, a lot of our efforts are being directed in mapping these sites into cartographic networks on the Web so that all this information--this multilayered portrait of America through its different land uses--can be explored in a scalable system where you can look for new relationships, juxtapositions, and contexts based on where and how you're looking. And that truly is a new way of experiencing "place" that is perhaps different enough from mere representation of a place, what Smithson called the non-site, and is in fact a new version of space--"infospace," or whatever you want to call it. It's like a triangle where each element affects the experience of place and there's a fluid back-and-forth between these three nodes of experience we work with and people work with in their own lives, as well. There's definitely a lot left to learn about being there and not being there.

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Jeffrey Kastner is a New York-based critic.

REMOTE POSSIBILITIES

A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION ON LAND ART'S CHANGING TERRAIN

TIM GRIFFIN A number of artists have recently executed high-profile projects in remote places--"remote," at least, from traditional art-world centers. In fact, we can count three individuals participating today among them: Pierre and his recent voyage to Antarctica, Rirkrit and the Land in Thailand, and Andrea with her High Desert Test Sites near Joshua Tree. Realizing, of course, that there are significant differences among these projects--and I hope we'll shed good light on a few of these--working in a "remote" location seems to be a broader trend (think also of projects by Carsten Holler, Tacita Dean, and Matthew Barney, among others). This development demands some comparison to work made by previous generations, such as the Land art of Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, on the one hand, and the travels of artists like Bas Jan Ader or Hamish Fulton on the other. Is there any way that we can begin to characterize this way of working today, if only very broadly, while bearing these historical precedents in mind?

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CLAIRE BISHOP To generalize perhaps too wildly, I think that a main difference between Land artists of the late '60s and '70s and artists today can be characterized in terms of the medium with which they're engaged. If the precursors can be framed within an expanded field of sculpture, today's artists are working within an expanded cross-disciplinary field more likely to involve research as a geographer, social worker, anthropologist, activist, or experimental architect. That said, there is a clear continuity in some of the projects you mention in terms of the lure of the remote. But I think we may still need to differentiate between artists for whom the aesthetics of the remote landscape remains important (such as Matthew Barney and possibly Pierre) and those artists who engage critically with the social and political discourses that mark that landscape. The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) is a good example of the latter.

PAMELA M. LEE My sense is that some of the artists discussed in these terms--CLUI, to follow Claire's lead, would be the prototype--might be "reading" the earlier generation in a way that is closer to the Land artists' original thinking than the primary criticism was. With over thirty years of historical hindsight, it has become abundantly clear that the impulse to work in remote locations was less about a "return to the land" as such--a kind of aesthetic nativism--than a critical engagement with the terms of artistic mediation, whether organized around institutions or forms of media.

CLAIRE BISHOP I agree, Pamela. But there's no denying the gorgeousness of the landscape backdrops in those earlier works and the way in which the individual is set in relation to epic expanses. I'm thinking in particular of those photographs of Walter De Maria lying on the ground beside his Mile Long Drawing [1968], or the tiny person standing among Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels [1973-76].

The question about mediation, however, makes me recall that the emergence of Land and installation art go hand in hand through the '60s. Both are grounded in the authenticity of one's firsthand experience of a site. So I wonder if we should also differentiate between contemporary and historical Land art on the basis of that famous "indoor-outdoor" dialectic articulated by Smithson--and consider whether the "indoor" itself has changed in recent decades with the rise of installation art. For example, Olafur Eliasson is one artist who deals with the paradoxical way in which such firsthand experiences (especially that of nature) are always already mediated (by ideas of the sublime or the "uncontaminated"). You don't need to travel to a remote location to experience his exquisite fake sunsets or waterfalls. But it is telling that while Eliasson is at pains to reveal the mechanisms behind it, his work is nevertheless criticized for being too attractive or oversize.

PAMELA M. LEE I think it's worth pursuing the lingering appeal to "aesthetics" in this art, given that forms of artistic mediation are central topoi around which this work is organized, in both contemporary and historical iterations. In fact, the residual sublimity for which Eliasson's work is often criticized is continuous with many of the debates played out around Land art in the '60s; the technology has doubtless undergone radical change, but the rhetoric hangs on. Then, as now, the mechanisms supporting the production of the work were much in evidence, too. Smithson's non-site, however unequivalent with his Land art, necessarily revealed both social and historical influences swirling around the actuality of his "objects." Perhaps one of the historical legacies of this work has to do with our (not so) latent attachment to the aesthetic; that the "remote" might stand as code for the "aesthetic." In which case, maybe we haven't traveled so far after all.

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LYNNE COOKE Could the criticism of those works by Eliasson that are monumental in scale or budget have to do with their lack of the kind of irony or self-conscious wryness one finds in, say, Tacita Dean's deadpan audio piece Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty [1997]? Do the lack of self-reflection and absence of an ironizing modesty of means in work currently presented in the institution, which nevertheless draws directly on these '60s precedents, indicate an indifference to the site/non-site dialectic, Smithson's most crucial gambit, rather than a substantive reworking of it?

PIERRE HUYGHE In my case, the issue of the "remote" place is not exactly the point. The movement that brings you to the outside is as important as the outside itself. It's a question of displacement. What's interesting is how you create this conceptual displacement, the journey that brings you to this elsewhere, not the destination itself. I'm less concerned about place than the production of situations and complex, heterogeneous territories.

Our journey to Antarctica had nothing to do with going far away per se. A boat is a temporary habitat moving toward the unpredictable, a collective movement, a social time. Then it becomes about how you translate that experience. The displacement is in the constant renegotiations that take place between the people engaged in the journey. You can think of Foucault's idea of the heterotopia as a kind of counterplace, the place that's outside all other places but also includes them. And that could be found anywhere--in the middle of the city, at the hospital, in a museum. Going somewhere like Antarctica is an at