The Center For Land Use Interpretation

An interview with Matthew Coolidge

The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) is a nonprofit research organization based in Los Angeles that encourages new ways of seeing and thinking about the perception and manipulation of terrestrial resources Đ land use. The CLUI is the lead agency in the establishment of the American Land Museum (ALM), a network of landscape exhibition sites being developed across the United States. The purpose of the ALM is to create an informative, instructive, and compelling contemporary portrait of the nation. The ALM is, in a sense, a network of »evolutionäre zellen«, each node possessing the mission to challenge conventional views of the landscape. Neither didactic, nor ideological, the Centers methodology emphasizes objectivity in its research. Sites already developed for this purpose by the CLUI include the Great Basin Interpretive Region location in Wendover, Utah, and the Desert Research Station (DRS), two hours from Los Angeles, in the heart of the Mojave Desert. The DRS is owned and operated by the Center for Land Use Interpretation, and was initially funded by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, in 2OO1. Inside the Desert Research Station information and displays about contemporary land uses in the desert are available for viewing by the public during programming periods. The participants in the SiteGeist program will help to orient visitors who come to the location, and will be able to show their exhibited material directly to the public. Thus the experience of a »non-trip to a site from a nonsite« is possible as well.

The program takes the ordinary, everyday landscape of the Mojave Desert, and provides the tools for repeated and multiple recontextualizations of this space. It brings a »foreign« or »alien« perspective to the region, and offers a venue for the public to come and consume these new portrayals of the landscape. It provides a research resource for participants in the program, both informational and residential, acting as a literal »cell« for the generation of new ways of perceiving and understanding this place, a place that is shared by the world as a romantic land of extremes, halfway between the mythified metropolis of Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

(excerpts from interview taken from the book »Greater Los Angeles«, by Florian Haas and Martin Schmidl, Verlag Jürgen Häuser, 1997)

»When did you start »The Center for Land Use Interpretation«?

Coolidge: Well, we incorporated as a non-profit organisation in March of '94. Before that, it was really just the disparate activities of a number of people, not really consolidated under an official title. Personally, I worked in an organisation called »FIASCo«, which was a for-profit corporation, doing some of the things similar to the site extrapolation projects of »The Center«, but that was more of a design and conceptual company. And that is still going on to some degree. Though I don't really participate much with it right now.

And where do they get the profit from?

They didn't really get much of a profit, but they weren't afraid to try. (laughing)

And what is their work about?

Well it's a company that explores what it's like to be a company, to be a sort of a major multinational organisation, to diversify into service industries as well as the manufacturing and distribution of products. It explores what it is like to be a contemporary large company, explores the issues of corporeity and corporeality, what it means to be a body in some way, the substanceless body of a collective.

And who were the other founders of »The Center«?

There were two other original founders, one is an organic farmer, and one is a bike courier. And then there are other people who have since gotten involved, who all have other professional careers, but they help out in any way they can. Right now there are probably about ten active volunteers contributing on a regular basis. (...)

You said, that the people contributing to CLUI have different backgrounds. That one works in the petroleum industry, and another as a bicycle messenger, and another one studied art.

Yes, a number of artists, a number of photographers.

And yourself?

Myself, I studied environmental sciences, with a degree from Boston University. I specialized in geomorphology, and contemporary art and film. In some ways »The Center« is a reconciliation of geography and art. We utilize many of the styles of the geographic disciplines, approaching matters from the »land use« point of view. Geography is becoming a popular and even fashionable way to approach the arts, theory, criticism and literature. It has to do with the increasing globalization of thought, the instant linkage of worldwide communications Đ the »electronosphere«, and a sense of possibility, of new ways of seeing through geographic technologies such as GIS (geographic information systems) and GPS (global positioning systems). Though I think that at the same time as we transform, and effectively eliminate, space and place through electronic systems, virtual reality, whatever, we become less aware of where we are, physically, and that we will continue to want to travel in these »real« spaces. But that we will do so as tourists only, no longer as explorers. The physical spaces beyond the cities in America, and to a large degree within the cities themselves too, are becoming corridors of the tourist industry. The landscape itself, like everything else, is now percieved mostly as a recreational and entertainment medium. We are dedicated to examining this development, and other phenomena like it that is related to the landscape. (...)

You collect a lot of information, and you have a lot of access to information about things like the nuclear industrial complex, for example. Did you ever have a desire to judge these things, to say it's bad or good? Is there a kind of idea behind this collecting of information, not to do this just to collect and to publish?

Perhaps itÔs up to other people to assess a value or lack of value to the sites that we're highlighting. But, for example, the »Nevada Test Site« book we put together has been appreciated and praised by both the Department of Energy and anti-nuclear activists. Both of them read it, and I think thatÔs amazing. And the success of the document has really been quite pleasing. It's accessable to both, and read by both, and they both come together perhaps, and use this meeting ground, this common ground of information. It's like a watering hole. That's where they meet. I'm really quite pleased about that, it's very much the objective of »The Center«, to try and show the common ground in these places, to bring disparate factions together to think about things in a similar and shared way, and not to alienate people by telling them what we think is bad or good.

You said that people in America are not aware of how much land, and how much industry, and how many people work in the defense business. Are you trying to make this less so by trying to change public opinion?

I think that if more people knew about the excesses of the defense establishment, then there will be an inclination to move away from such a dependence on it. People don't have all the facts, because how you get those facts is very much under the control of a limited number of people. But the more information you have, the better decisions you can make. And I think that once people have a little more information about the degree of the military sites out there and they realise the extent of it, then maybe their decisions will change, or their thoughts on these issues will be more informed, and they can make better decisions. What »The Center« is doing is about information. That's the commodity of this age, now. And information is the material with which power is executed. And so, in some ways we are trying to address the issue of the amount of information we are given, and the imbalance and control of information. (...)

But what are the main motives for the decisions of which kind of sites or areas you include in your program?

Certain sites have characteristics that are somehow interesting or complex, or tell a story in some way. And the way »The Center« approaches these sites is to help them tell their story. The sites, for instance, are usually composed of the inert material of the land, and obviously there are many ways you can look at them, in terms of land use and landscape, and it is very subjective perhaps, but we try to help the land say something that is important, or to say something about us that is interesting and to enable us to better understand our relationship to terrestrial resources. We try to get information, and our thoughts about land, to the public arena, where it can be considered. Military sites, for example. I think there is a sort of imbalance in public cognition, or awareness, of these spaces. Considering how much of it there is, and how much of our whole economy and our culture is founded in defense. And it's represented in landscape through military installations, researching, development, whatever. And we hope to be able to correct some of the imbalance by bringing attention to the fact that there is more of it visible than most people think, out there, and that the military is much more of an important component to the culture than is generally recognized. So these sites will help educate people, one hopes, to that. Our major infrastructures are military first and civilian second. The major projects of America, from the super highways of the 1960's, to the information superhighway of today, were founded by the military. The land is a sort of a medium where some of these issues are worked out. We are really just working with the medium of landscape to explore social, societal, and philosophical issues.

Can you explain the museum in Utah?

It's on an old airbase, and our exhibit space is in one of the original buildings, an old barracks structure. But the reason why we selected this place was not because it was an airbase necessarily but because the environment surrounding the area of Wendover is so various, and so isolated. The land use out there is really quite dramatic. There are for example some of the major waste facilities in the country around there. It's a very remote place. You have nuclear waste, you have chemical weapons, ammunition storage, you have industries like you never seen, working with materials they extracted from the salt because it is right next to the Great Salt Lake. The military is out there. And in the landscape as well, there are incredible sorts of abstract forms, the salt environment, which is so interesting, when you think about salt itself as a kind of endproduct of everything. If you melt a mountain then you will end up with salt. It's stuff that won't go away, it's what kills agriculture, the living end of things. And when you continue to irrigate produce in an agricultural area gradually salt builts up, until the agriculture dies. Salt is like the product of entropy, it's the stuff of some ways, of death, uselessness, and disorder. And so this is the environment that Wendover is perched on, and it's part of what makes that area so interesting.

The interaction of the structures of society, of the industries that supply the cities, meeting with this sort of chaotic force and this degrading and destructive kind of element. But, you know, people have been drawn to the Great Salt Lake for a long time, so we are not the first to be attracted to that. But we are hoping to consolidate a lot of these other people's works in the museum. So, the first show that is going on out there is a photo show, mostly. There are some maps and diagrams and explanatory text, but also a description of some of the places out there. To do all of them would take a lifetime. And we hope to have interns come to work out there. And then represent their work in the exhibit space, the work they create after spending some time there. (...)«

Outlook

»The Center for Land Use Interpretation« will create a living space at the Desert Research Station, located in the California Desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. This living space will be made available at no cost to selected visitors who have asked to stay there having heard about the place through the website, word of mouth, or through interactive kiosks that will be placed in one or more museums or other appropriate places in Europe. Visitors may be artists, scholars, writers, photographers, curators, musicians, philosophers, explorers, or researchers, from any level of experience, who have an interesting, creative, and innovative project in mind for the site. A website/ kiosk will describe the application process, which will be simple: submit a letter saying what you intend to do there for one week to three months, along with background information on who you are and what you have done in the past. A peer review panel will meet periodically to select individuals from the pool of applicants. If selected, they will be invited to spend time at the site to execute their project. The living space will be equipped with an internet connection and web cameras, enabling communication of ideas and images of those at the site with the world wide web, and with one or more interactive kiosks to be placed in museums, galleries, or other public spaces in Europe. The electronic kiosk, serving as the »nonsite« through the website, will allow a museum or other institution to »possess«, in an abstract manner, the actual physical desert location. Web cameras viewing on-site exhibits and work posted by residents will make it possible to »curate« the nonsite representing the site, in real time. The grant will be used to build up the infrastructure for the program, including the web cams and modifications to the physical plant at the DRS. The living accommodations will consist of a commercial office trailer, which the C.L.U.I. already owns. The trailer needs to be moved from its current location in the town of Boron, 30 miles to the west to the Desert Research Station in Hinkley, California. The trailer will be renovated to make it appropriate for residential use, using economical furnishings. In addition, a second, smaller unit will house the web broadcasting area, which will be the primary exhibit space for the program.