(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.
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