CLUI's Crown Victoria

(This was written in 1997)...    I was driving through Nevada a few weeks ago, returning from a wedding in Las Vegas to Wendover, Utah, where I was staying for a month-long artist in residency program.  I was driving an unregistered car that I had borrowed, which, ironically, looked like a white, unmarked police car.  Somehow, the adoption of the appearances of "officialdom" while operating outside the law, coupled with the interruption of my usual routine and change in environment had put me in a particularly interrogative mood.  I was looking at the Styrofoam coffee cup in the blue plastic drink holder that clipped into the window slot.  The cup and the holder came with the car.  They formed part of the aesthetic of the whole vehicle and the landscape and I didn't want to interrupt.  The Styrofoam cup was emblazoned with a decorative -in the loosest sense of the word- landscape that wrapped around its middle.  It was printed in dull, primary red.  The landscape was composed of several layers, each layer having a simple pattern that one might interpret as either texture or color, depending on how many layers of abstraction one infers into the cups creation.  The sky was polka dots in a diamond pattern, the clouds were left white, but outlined.  The next layer was distant mountains, small zigzag along the top, completely red.  Then the nearer mountains, larger zigzag, regularly interrupting the above layer, filled with diagonal lines, closely packed.  The next layer down is the plain, filled with plus signs, by far the most interesting pattern.  Next comes the shoulder of the road, small, dense, diagonal cross-hatching filling in the narrow space between the upper, zigzag and lower, straight line.  Next comes the road, a solid red band.  Then the nearer shoulder of the road, similar to the first but slightly larger and less dense.  Another band of waving plus signs at the bottom lets us know we're standing in the fruited plain.

                  Why on earth did anyone bother to decorate this cup, particularly with this bland, RED, monochromatic landscape that just couldn't appeal to anyone?  The cup itself was not for sale, it's the kind of cup you get a large coffee in at the only gas station for 200 miles.  Even if it was attractive which it was not, the peculiar design is not a selling point.  It doesn't advertise anything either, so that can't explain the added cost of manufacture.  I was starting to wonder whether this cup, and therefor a whole army of banal objects, was part of an insidious arsenal aimed at nothing less than the destruction of visual sensitivity.  

                  The landscape of Nevada and Utah is vast.  At 85mph the white cruiser drifted slowly across the Great Basin.  Changes happen very slowly, which generally allows you to continue mental discourses without distraction for a long time.  But suddenly, something did change, the road turned red.  I have seen other roads of various colors, usually shades of purple and brown, which are the color of the local rock.  But this red was bright for a road. For a few seconds I considered the possibility that it was an art piece.  I was in the land of earthworks -Spiral Jetty, Sun Tunnels, Rodin Crater, etc.- so maybe someone had painted the road red in this desolate and otherwise unchanging place.  No, it was red asphalt, it looked beautiful with the sun setting behind me.  I pulled over to take a picture, though pictures never quite capture strangely colored landscapes.  I pushed the door of the car open with my foot and pointed the camera out the door. Strange composition,  Above the gravel of the shoulder, the road was a perfectly horizontal red band with the  perfectly horizontal gray band of the opposite shoulder sitting on top of it.  Above that was the mottled green/yellow of the plain leading up to the mountains.  On the right hand edge of the viewfinder was the Styrofoam cup.  The red of the road and the red of the cup were identical.  The horizontal landscape was undeniable.  The metaphor of endless scenery circling the cup was unmistakable.

                  All of this is really an elaborate explanation of what I found myself experiencing which was a very specific type of doubt.  I had accepted the cup as being utterly false, an abstraction of an abstraction.  I had looked at it as a complete failure at the trivial task of decoration.  But what do you call it when you begin to doubt something's' falseness.  I had imagined that nothing on the cup could be true, a red landscape?  What's red in a landscape.  But, plainly, before my eyes, was one element of the cup that COULD BE TRUE, where I had thought it all to be clearly false.  A shadow of truth.

How to Lose a Cadillac and your mind...

74 Eldorado Convertible on the Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah.

"Hey, I've got an idea. What if I buy Peter's caddy for my brother, and then we give it a test drive up to Wendover Utah?" Igor asked, but I could see that as convoluted as it might seem, the plan would move forward with or without me.  Peter needed to get rid of his Cadillac, Igor wanted to help scout for potential artist residency sites with Matt Coolidge who was running the Center for Land Use Interpretation but he needed a more reliable vehicle than any of us had at that moment to make the drive. He didn't need, and couldn't justify, buying another vehicle but maybe his brother needed this classic car.  I had gotten to know Igor a little this year, he was somewhat infamous for his art intervention project The Barby Liberation Organization.  The "BLO" bought dozens of G.I. Joe and Barby dolls and switched their voice boxes, then "Shop-Gave" (the opposite of Shop-Lifting) them to toy stores before Christmas.  There's something about Barby yelling "Shoot 'em Up!" and G.I. Joe saying "Math's hard, let's go shopping" that removes the illusion and lets us acknowledge what they're really saying. I only knew of Matt, vaguely, but any plan that involved riding in convertibles, and looking for real-estate on some sort of post-governmental military sites seemed like a good adventure. Having just formulated this idea, Igor was hoping to leave around 3:00 pm, before the traffic got bad.  Somehow, he managed to make the transaction, transfer the title and throw some stuff together to pick me up at the appointed time, the plan was afoot. But, as we headed north out of San Diego to pick up Matt in Los Angeles, the accelerator started sticking. A bad sign so early in a road-trip, especially in a car you have never driven. But both Igor and I are handy and optimistic; we pull over and find that one or two strands of the throttle cable have frayed, and are getting snagged.  We massage the strands together, cut the bits that stick out, and off we go.  We only had to stop once or twice before picking up Matt to adjust our repair. With all three of us comfortably sitting in the front (this car is w i d e and there is no transmission hump because it is front-wheel drive!) we set off on the 11 or 12 hour drive to Wendover.  Luckily, there's not much moving the gas pedal once you're on the long road there, so we spend much of the trip talking about the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI). It's too long to explain CLUI if you don't know it, so just follow this link if you're curious..  Matt was the central and founding figure at CLUI, and he could -and did- talk at length about every area we passed through on the drive.  CLUI presents the myriad ways that humans interact with the land with sublime dryness, from government/industrial projects that are "too big to see" to systems that have infiltrated our daily life so much that they ARE the forest. Presentations are deadpan, apolitical, and highly informative.  His approach was to give people access to information, a lot of it and of the widest variety, and let them formulate their own conclusions.  He had already done an exhibition in Wendover, a town that straddled two states and two states of mind.  Wendover Nevada is a casino town, serving the needs of Utah with services that are illegal in Utah.  Wendover Utah was once the largest military base in the world. Now mostly abandoned, the leftover assets served those who needed cheap storage or lots of space to do dangerous things like test bombs, have races, or shoot films that might involve bombs or races.

We found the non-descript barracks in which Matt had mounted his last exhibition.  It was documentation of all the "notable" industrial, governmental or military sites within 50 miles of Wendover, presented as large photos accompanied with text, delivered in CLUI's "just the facts" terrifying objectivity.  We stayed in a little partitioned-off room in the barracks and the next day went about exploring the otherworldly landscapes and attractions that Wendover had to offer.

Later in the afternoon, we headed over to the Bonneville Salt Flats.  The whole area is the lake bed of the ancient Lake Bonneville, but there are only certain parts where the salt is thick enough that you can drive on them.  All around the Salt Flats, apparently, are salty mud flats. You can see evidence of this from almost anywhere along Rt 80 in the entire state of Utah; perhaps because the scenery doesn't change for so long, people just go crazy and drive off the highway onto the mudflats to do donuts or stomp out a pleasing message to other motorists or a former lover.  Anyway, we got to the Salt Flats and Matt guided us through the very specific entrance you need to follow to stay on the hard surface. I had never been there or anywhere like it before; it's SALT! Yeah, I know, but until you lick it, somehow it doesn't become real.  Just btw, don't lick it! There's all kind of industry and toxic incinerators out there, not to mention that there's all kinds of salt we DON'T EAT and even the one we do eat isn't good for you. Still, it was so weird to lick the ground and have it be SALT.

So, it's the golden hour and we're on the Salt Flats all by ourselves, and we have an Eldorado convertible with the largest engine ever put in a production car -500 cubic inches! What do you think we're going to do?  We arbitrarily pick a direction and floor it, and discover that this boat of a car can do about 108 miles per hour which isn't bad, but on the salt flats, with absolutely no points of reference passing by us, it seems rather tame. You don't need to stay in a lane or go straight or avoid anything, in fact, it's a lot like being on a boat (in addition to the fact that we're driving the boatiest of all cars). The next run, we're sitting on the trunk and the hood, because "why not?", steering only needs to be done occasionally. We stopped to enjoy the deepening pink-purple-golden light, getting a few beers out of the trunk as the sun sank lower. Then we hop back in and drive straight out toward "Floating Mountain" which -in real life- looks even more like its name than in this photo.  At a distance, the flatness of the salt, combined with heat, causes a mirror effect that lowers the horizon causing this illusion. It REALLY looks like it floating!

  And it's FAR.  We drove quite a bit before swerving to go around it a bit.  It was right about then that the throttle cable snapped,.. but before we could even drop below 60 mph, Igor had pulled out his leatherman pocket tool, turned himself upside down and slid under the dashboard.  He grabbed the broken throttle cable with the pliers and pulled...  Viola! we were accelerating again.  So now, with Igor operating the throttle, I could sit on the door and steer, I think Matt was sitting on the other door or the trunk.  In fact, since there was no real reason to steer, I think Matt and I traded positions wandering around the car a bit, "Engine Room! A little more power!" "Aye aye..."  We careened around a bit and then realized it was getting dark faster than we expected.  But now there was a trick, we had driven out in a big straight line and turned left some amount and driven for some amount of time.  There was no way to know if the surface directly between us and the lights of Wendover (the city) was hard, so we tried to retrace our steps.  We're gliding along with the speedometer reading 75 or so, but we're not getting closer to the entrance point as fast as we should be and now it was fully dark. The Caddy was very quiet, so gliding over the non-descript white Salt Flats under the moon was much like driving through the snow -very serene.  It was then that I noticed that the Caddy's temperature gauge was climbing, which seemed odd given the cooler night air.  "Igor, give me a little more speed, we're only doing 60.." "aye, aye" We're making a big arc toward the lights of Wendover, but we're just not getting there despite the fact that we're cruising right along... well, the speedometer says we're cruising right along, except we're down to 60 again, "Igor, can you give me some more throttle?" "I can't pull it any further!" "Really? Now we're only going 55! And the temperature is really high!"  Matt had turned on his big cop flashlight and was shining it around the hood, we could see steam coming around the edges of the hood.  Just then, Matt's light caught an object in the otherwise perfectly white surface of the Salt Flats.  It was a stick, stuck in the ground, which made us panic for two reasons. 1) It was stuck in the ground, which means the ground could have something stuck into it which was impossible without a hammer-drill on the hard surfaces on the salt flats, 2) It went by the car at walking speed, despite the speedometer reading 55 mph. "Oh SHIT!" Igor let go of the throttle and the Caddy sank, bellying to the playdough-like terrain.  We got out, suddenly realizing that we had been churning our way through the Soft Salt Flats. Behind the Caddy were deeply squished tire-tracks reaching back into the night.  With no visual points of reference, and no feedback from the throttle, we felt as though we were sailing along, when in reality (if there is such a thing), we were probably moving at walking speed, though the speedometer was reporting the front wheel's speed of 55.  The only psychological feeling that I can equate with this is if you've ever been skiing in a whiteout. I was, once, the wind was whipping my face and I couldn't discern anything, it was all the same grey in all directions.  I couldn't tell how fast I was going until I fell down and realized -by the way I impacted the ground- that I had been standing still, probably for 10 minutes. Same weird disorientation, except in this case you think you can see.

Digging it out was hopeless, this was a 10 ton car on soft mud.  We grabbed a few beers, put the top up, and started walking trying to note the car's position in relation to Floating Mountain, the Promontory Mountain Range which surrounds the Salt Flats, and the lights of Wendover.  The walk back took a few hours, but there were no obstacles.  

In the morning, we started calling around to get a tow truck.  By and large, no one was really interested in going out on the Salt Flats, but we finally found a guy...  "I'm a junkyard dawg" he said as we climbed in the crewcab of his hybrid monster truck/tow truck.  He wanted to let us know what a favor he was doing us, "this time of year, you can lose your whole truck out there.  It just starts sinking and it keeps going."  Okay, okay, we get it.  So, we're back on the Salt Flats and it's glaringly bright.  It's "high noon" bright.  Floating Island is coming closer and we're starting to get to where we think the car is.  Like the day before, there are very few other people on the Salt Flats near the entrance and we pass by them early on, but out in the distance, just at the edge of the Promontory Mountains, I see a dark van driving along what is probably an access road carved into the mountains just above the flats.  "We veered left here," I say, and junk yard dawg veers left. No car in sight, nothing. Maybe it was further than we thought.  "You lose 'em in the heat ripple," junk yard dawg says.  He keeps driving.  I see the van along the mountain range road heading the same direction as us, and I start to worry that we've broken some law or wandered onto private property.  Or the van is heading out to scavenge from the stranded Caddy...  Matt thinks we've gone too far east, so dawg turns the truck north then a little westward -according to the compass on the windshield.  Still no caddy, but I'm surprised to see that the dark van has turned around and is driving along the mountain road in the same direction as us, again!  "What do you think that van wants?" I ask.  "Probably just sight seeing from the safer road" says dawg, "don't worry, no one messes with me."  Great.  We still don't see the Caddy, but as we turn North and then East again for a further sweep, I see the dark van reverse direction again to keep going the same direction as us.  Then it hits me, "Dawg, drive straight at that van!" he turns straight toward it and the van stops. We drive toward the van and the bottom of the mountain range recedes until the salt flats surround the van.  Now we can see that the van is really not as tall as a van, but it is a car and its reflection.  The van transforms to the Caddy. The mountains back away.

But the dawg won't stop near the car, "It's too dangerous" he says.  He lets us out with a big long rope.  He won't stop driving in big circles around us, "I don't want to stop and sink in!" he yells out the window.  We have to tunnel through salt mud to get the rope around the frame of the Caddy, then drag the rope out to firmer ground where the dawg lets us attach it to his truck.  We start up the Caddy, and put it in Drive.  The monster jumps and bucks and churns and yanks us right out, and then pulls us another half mile, just to be on firmer ground.  

But are you ever on firmer ground, or is it just that there's nothing that's not sinking as fast as you?  Over time, I would work with Matt and Igor to help establish this residency program you see below and was even the first of many artists in residence. The Center for Land Use Interpretation still operates today, with researchers and centers around the country. I believe Matt's ultimate goal is to become so institutional that CLUI is accidentally assumed into the government and funded like NOAH and other acronyms.  Igor went on to form the YesMen, a group that exploits the media primarily by impersonating spokesmen for corporations and governments, which they call Identity Correction.  They (the Yesmen) pose as the evil-doers at some event or on TV and announce that they are going to "do the right thing" which necessitates their targets announcing that they have no intention of doing the right thing, which will hopefully be so embarrassing that they will do the right thing. I owe much to these two for lessons (intentional or not) in perception, illusion, and adventure. Resident 1's log, Reflection Date 2020-04-04