Reconstruction 10.3 (2010)

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Desert Interventions / Roderick Coover, Hikmet Loe, Larry McCaffery and Lance Newman

[1 ] In December, 2009, Roderick Coover invited literary scholars Lance Newman and Larry McCaffery and art historian Hikmet Loe to explore the question of how desert ecologies are shaped through creative expression and actions. Oriented around the works of writer Edward Abbey and Roderick Coover's Canyonlands project, the conversation concerns how experiences in and of the desert are conveyed through expressive forms. Making comparisons with artist Robert Smithson among others, they consider how Edward Abbey engaged questions of ecology and intervention through creative expression. This is a segment of that conversation.

NEWMAN: There's a great moment in Abbey's essay “The Great American Desert” where he's circumambulating Navajo Mountain on the north shore of Lake Powell. He's having one of those long walks that's interminably the same. He then makes a short climb, and, in the middle of nowhere, in a space where he thought there had never been another human being, he comes across an arrow sign that's made out of rocks in the dust that's been there for centuries. It's packed in sedimented dust. This conflicts with the conventional way of thinking about these deserts as inhuman spaces, as spaces empty of human inhabitants -- the ultimate wildernesses in the way that wilderness is defined by the Wilderness Act of 1964. Really, that's an illusion. One of the things that you learn after years of walking in deserts is how to see the record of human inhabitation of those spaces. This segment in Abbey's work also expresses the idea that walking in the desert is a form of improvisation.

MCCAFFERY: Yes, it's become almost a cliché that when you're out hiking in the desert you need to open yourself to improvisation rather than to have a specific destination. This approach is essential because the desert has a way of mocking just about any goal-oriented behavior. You see a hill in the distance that looks like an inviting destination for lunch, but by lunch time the hill mysteriously seems farther away than when you began; meanwhile, you’ve been struggling to get across all these washes and slot canyons that weren’t visible when you started out, and so on. Now this can be pretty frustrating if you’re a goal-oriented person, like I used to be, but it can also be very liberating. So at a certain point, you realize that you should forget about the hill and check out one of the washes. Thoreau used the term “sauntering” to describe something similar to this in his essay “Walking”; it also reminds me of the process of urban meandering that Baudeliare used the term “flâneur” to describe—wandering around the city becomes a way to experience it from a fresh perspective. Of course, there needs to be some balance here—it’s also easy to get lost if you’re meandering in the desert. So you need to be aware of where you are, so you're not going to lose your car or you can find your way back. But at the same time, you have allow yourself to let the landscape dictate the path for you.

COOVER: In our conversations with him for Canyonlands, Abbey's friend Jack Loeffler noted more than once that Abbey would talk about this experience in terms of the difference between awareness and intelligence. In navigating in the desert, you need a bit of both. Walking in the desert constantly offers a set of choices and one needs to be aware of the signs in the moment, and paths usually aren't really visible. This makes his experience quite different from hiking along marked trails and wooded mountain tops. Walking becomes a creative experience and, in a way, it becomes a readerly process, too.

MCCAFFERY: Absolutely. And, I think this notion that the desert experience involves a readerly or aesthetic component comes forward throughout the Unknown Territories project too. One of the things I most enjoy about hiking in the desert is to leave myself open to that sense of the desert’s deceptiveness that almost everybody talks about. One of my great joys out here is to find an area that doesn't initially look very interesting and then go off into it precisely because I’m almost certain this area is going to surprise me. It’s understandable that many people find this deceptiveness to be scary or intimidating, but to me it’s one of the desert’s most fascinating features—because it results in constant experiences you can’t anticipate.

COOVER: Yes, nature offers surprises and so do humans. Deserts, which seem so devoid of life contain all sorts of traces of other human activities. There are some very destructive marks and blisters on the landscape, but isn't there also a quite remarkable legacy of humans in the desert where they've made very conscious interventions in very innovative ways?

LOE: Artists have created a legacy of art and interventions in the desert and on the land, especially the artists who were involved in the earthwork movement here in the United States in the end of the '60s and beginning of the '70s, such as Nancy Holt who I mentioned earlier, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, and certainly Robert Smithson, who were very interested in the desert's vastness. For them, it was a sublime surface, a blank canvas that they could literally write on. Many of them developed processes of writing on the desert floor to leave their sign. If an artist used a device such as motorcycle, as Heizer did in 1970 to “draw” on a dry lakebed in Nevada, the mark or signal was lesser and would go away; but sometimes it would be something more permanent, such as the Spiral Jetty that Robert Smithson created in 1970 along the north shore of Great Salt Lake.

COOVER: How do those kinds of works relate back to the existing signs of the desert?

LOE: Land artists working out west didn’t create art to plop into the landscape – there was a lot of research and forethought that went into determining the place’s history and meaning and how it would be reflected in their art. In the case of Robert Smithson, we have an artist who was very interested in geology, archeology, geography, and Native American history. He'd done a lot of research on Utah before he'd come here, and he knew of the different signs and different pictographs that Native Americans had created throughout Utah. He didn't have a prescribed idea for the shape of his works until he got there. That certainly was what happened with the Spiral Jetty. He wanted to have the particular landscape dictate what the particular work would be, then the idea of spirals and Native Americans and the roundness of the whole space and the roundness of the lake and the mirror of the lake--all of that then fit in together. And, the spiral goes back to Native American marks that had been here already. It's interesting that he had spent some time here in Utah, created the Spiral Jetty, and then, after that, continued spending a lot more time in Utah, investigating parcels of land out on the West Desert, spending time down in Moab, working on a unrealized bid to turn Bingham Copper Pit into a large-scale work of art as he began to focus on land reclamation projects. So, he probably would have continued working out here, in some way, if hadn't died so suddenly, particularly as his focus turned towards the ecological and the idea of the artist and geologist/ecologist working together.

MCCAFFERY: There's always something very poignant about this need people have to make their marks in the desert—to leave behind some indication that you’ve been there amidst all this inhuman immensity. And that’s true whether or not you’re talking about someone carving their initials on a rock or these large-scale installations like Spiral Getty and the geoglphys that Native Americans left behind near Blythe or in Imperial’s Yuha Desert. I feel the same way when I’m out walking in the desert and come across markings that aren’t strictly “artistic”—old Indian trails, bits of clothing, rusty nails, or an old board that’s all that’s left from an abandoned house. These are also marks, traces that speak to us about the lives of people who once were here, speaking to us in a kind of secret language. Of course, these traces accumulate in a city as well, but maybe because they’re so less common they seem more mysterious somehow when you encounter them in the desert. They signify the presence of human beings but also the impermance of everything, the hopelessness of ever leaving behind anything that is truly permanent.... Here, you see physical, human interventions whereas in a lot of other kinds of places, such interventions maybe grown over with trees or grass or get paved over within a year or two.

COOVER: This is a good example of the sense of time in the desert: the stuff of humans stays around. At the same time people pass through; in fact, they usually can't stay. I suppose this includes the experience of migrants.

NEWMAN: Yes. Chuck Bowden has been doing some incredible work about the border for the last decade or so. He has a great book called Exodus/Exodo made in collaboration with a Mexican photographer, Julian Cardona, that presents images of the border region and people moving across the border. It's incredibly moving work. I spent some time in the Valley of the Moon and walked south into Mexico on a migrant trail, crossing the border at a place where it was really just a few strands of barbed wire. On the other side of the wire was a migrant camp where people would wait until nightfall in order to make their dash to the north. Underneath the greasewood and shrubs were these drifts, almost like snow drifts, of water bottles, one-liter to one-gallon water bottles, all with labels from Mexican bottling plants. There were also just lots and lots of incredibly moving pieces of personal flotsam and jetsam, like a little kid’s backpack with an image of Donald Duck on roller skates on the back of it. At some point, that kid had likely decided this was too much to carry. I remember walking north from there along the Pacific Crest trail and finding, at one point, tucked under the bushes, but folded very, very neatly, a pair of Tommy Hilfiger jeans with a big American flag logo on the back pocket that somebody had decided they just couldn't carry anymore. This was somebody's best pair of pants that they were carrying so they could change into them when they reached their destination, and at some point they decided they had to just set them down, but they folded them neatly before they did. So, the land is marked with an entirely different set of objects that have completely different meanings, because of the kind of experience of walking through the desert that these people are having.

Seeing objects like these challenges the traditional green, desert-walker, desert-rat or environmentalist mindset that we find comfortable, or even invisible. Because from the perspective of the desert-rat or environmentalist, the temptation is to look at those drifts of water bottles, call them trash, and get angry. All too often the next step is a metaphorical leap from that plastic trash to the idea of human trash. Within the southwestern environmental movement, there's often a hostility and conservatism on immigration issues that's wrapped up with the kind of misanthropy that we talked about earlier. It grows from the sense of needing to protect the desert from being overrun. But that set of conventions can really put some pretty hard limits on our ability to think clearly about political issues like immigration and the practical situation that people face when they try to walk north in search of work...

COOVER: On the other side, there are many who hold admiration or awe for how migrants and others who pass beneath the radar of conventional life as they move through the desert. It’s the same kind of awe many hold for those who ran the old stagecoach routes that crossed the deserts or occupied outposts. I once biked across the deserts from San Diego to Sante Fe, and I was stunned by the number of solo and homeless bikers and walkers, just making their way across the land. Some rode little children's bicycles or pulled carts, hundreds of miles from any possible destination and miles even from any water source. All these differing kinds of travelers over time, trying to make it through in a landscape that's not really easy for humans to survive in...

MCCAFFERY: Right. I wonder how aware Abbey was of the paradox that even in his very politically-charged writings, he was also drawing attention to the deserts; and inevitably this was going to lead to more people coming.

NEWMAN: I think that issue of the landscape being overrun is one that Abbey didn't really think through and become aware of until the mid to late '70s really. In the 1960s, in the area of Southern Utah around Moab and all the way to Kanab, there were very few, if any, paved roads. So, there was very light traffic. At the time, Abbey and others like him believed that the threats to the land were not coming from tourism; they were coming from mining, ranching, and logging. It was a time when, in the United States, on the left, anarchists, socialists, and other Marxist ideas were much more widely accepted and the concept of intervention had a very specific kind of edge to it and a very specific kind of meaning. To intervene was to interrupt the flow of political history and redirect it in a specific way. For example, Abbey worked as an activist around the Black Mesa defense fund, which was trying to prevent the Peabody Coal Company from destroying lots of land quite near the Hopi mesas. That activism bled over into the writing of The Monkey Wrench Gang, which I think was, in a sense, Abbey attempting to use the form of the novel as a political tool, dissolving the lines between art and his activism. At the same time, he wrote these exciting descriptions of monkeywrenching, which he also called “night work.” His descriptions of ecosabotage inspired the organization of activist groups such as EarthFirst! The novel may still shape some of the art organizations today that combine aspects of activism, intervention and art, such as the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI).

LOE: What you just said about the 1960s, reflects, I think, that people felt a lot freer and took a lot of forms, particularly art forms, into places they had never taken them before. I think part of the allure of the West was that it was big. It was uncharted. You could get permits. Or, you didn’t need permits. We have a very different concept these days of what is allowed, what is acceptable practice and behavior in the wilderness. More recently, CLUI has presented a new model of land art, per se, they are the new generation. Their interest in the land is paramount, except that they are interested in documentation, exploration, exhibition of land use, rather than intervention. They’re not the ones going out there, such as the artists from the ‘60s and the ‘70s and marking up the land or tearing it down or building it up. CLUI began in L.A. and still has an exhibition center there, but they’re bi-coastal and document land use and intervention all around the country. Photographing, creating a database and turning documentation into an exhibit ends up being their artwork....They don't say anything political about what they record, but, maybe, by not saying it, they’re saying it a lot louder.

NEWMAN: That’s really interesting. There’s a big debate in nature-writing, in environmental literature, about this issue of documentation versus polemics. When Rod and I interviewed Ken Sleight for Canyonlands, what Sleight said was, “What bothers me is that a lot of the nature writers today don’t get political. They write about nature. They take their classes in nature, but they don’t write about how to go out and defend the wilderness. And that’s a shame that they won’t go out and put their body on the line or even express themselves.” That was all Ken Sleight, who is one of Abbey’s mentors out there in the Moab area and the model for Seldom Seen Smith in Abbey's novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. So, there are two contrary theories that essentially come down to this: what’s the most effective way to intervene, right? Are you effective if you directly address the political issues and engage in polemics with your audience? That’s another kind of ‘60s phrase, right? Polemics. Or are you going to be more effective if you simply show people either the beauty of pristine wildernesses or the incredible ugliness of ruined land?

COOVER: In Abbey’s case, there was actually a very direct correlation between performing differing kinds of direct action and writing about what was going on. I don’t think we see that in the same obvious way. There seem to be two very separate camps today. Am I right about that?

NEWMAN: Well, Abbey was there in the 1980s when EarthFirst! unrolled a banner on the face of Glen Canyon Dam, and the banner was a giant crack. That was one example of a long tradition of acts by environmental groups such as EarthFirst! and Greenpeace that may be simultaneously artistic and political; acts that are very much about performance as intervention.

MCCAFFERY: This seems like another example of that fundamental paradox we’ve been talking about that’s involved with the artists who want to protect areas they love and what are the best ways to do this. The act of documenting this area that you love and want to protect it also runs the risk of drawing attention to it. And then, unfortunately, the hordes will not be far behind...

COOVER: And I think a similar thing happens to Abbey when he realizes that his polemics against tourism in books such as Desert Solitaire only seem to add to interest in the area, and that interest leads to new roads, parking lots and hotels. As his rage increases, his thinking evolves. At first, he seems to welcome the army of lug-soled hikers as a solution to save the wilderness from more industrial forms of development. But, he soon realizes the dangers that come with increased tourism...

NEWMAN: When we interviewed Abbey's friend, Kim Crumbo, he said: "Yeah, you know, we imagined taking a Wonderbread truck and stuffing all the loaves full of C4 explosive and making a delivery to Glen Canyon Dam and driving it down into the dam. Then we’d tell everybody, 'Hey, there’s free drinks outside. Head out.' And then blow up the dam." In The Monkey Wrench Gang, Abbey imagined loading a houseboat with dynamite, driving it up to the face of the dam and blowing it up. But, Kim Crumbo made it very clear they never meant to really do it. As he explained, it was always just something to talk about, an imaginary performance, but they were never serious. It was just a way to think and a way to talk. But, one of the things one has to recognize is that many people were taking it very seriously, right? The Monkey Wrench Gang inspired Dave Foreman to found EarthFirst! which was an early version of what would later become ELF-- the Earth Liberation Front. What Abbey called "night-work" is now called "ecoterrorism" by the Department of Homeland Security, and there have been numerous incidents involving the burning of houses, the burning of ski resorts, the planting of bombs at Hummer dealerships, and other things like that.

COOVER: I think we need to distinguish some of that from what was in Abbey’s writing. There is a big division within the environmental movement about this and there are some important distinctions made between ecosabotage and ecoterrorism. Most importantly for Abbey, an essential difference between acts of sabotage and those of terrorism was that sabotage was employed to stop violence through peaceful means-- and this includes stopping violence enacted on the land by corporations and the government. A fundamental rule was first and foremost to never hurt another person. The goal was to disrupt the machines that caused harm. I think the notion of monkey-wrenching as a peaceful act of protest gets swallowed in the rhetoric of the post 9/11 fear of terrorism. Is that correct?

NEWMAN: I think that’s absolutely right. Sabotage is a fine American tradition, right? It goes back to the coal miners and the railroad workers in the 1870s and to the people on Ford production lines and so forth, right? Throwing a monkey wrench into the works of the machine that’s both destroying nature and oppressing workers, that’s a fine American tradition. ...

COOVER: Filling a bulldozer’s gas tank with non-petroleum substances will stop that one bulldozer. It probably won’t stop the highway being built. In Abbey's case, a solution comes through spectacle and imagination -- through writing and art that transcends its location but also refers back to it. That’s true for the artists we were talking about as well.

LOE: Robert Smithson is an interesting parallel here. He built the Spiral Jetty in 1970, and then he died in a freak plane accident in 1973. The two years before he died his artwork and his intent turned very serious because, not only was he interested of course in earthworks as aesthetic objects, but he turned more and more towards the idea that artists had to start becoming ecologists, they had to start working with scientists, and they had to start working with people who had done mining, strip mining, coal mining. So, he spent the last couple years of his life writing to many different companies, including the Bingham Copper Mine to turn disused areas-- these areas that had been marked by humans and then marked as waste-- into artworks. He saw that as one way that he could make a real serious impact. By writing to everybody and then advertising the fact that he was writing to them, he started to cause a movement in that direction.

NEWMAN: Well, this is total speculation, but it sounds like Smithson and some of the other artists in his cohort, were attracted to the desert mainly because they perceived it as being an empty space. I think you mentioned that they described it as a blank canvas, Hikmet. I wonder if the process of working on that landscape and getting to know that landscape transformed Smithson’s way of thinking about it -- if, in a sense, the desert turned Smithson into an ecologist. In this sense, we can almost see that there’s a kind of collaboration between the artist and the site in which the artist can be changed by the conversation... That’s what happened with Abbey too, right? I think that Abbey came to the deserts looking for the West of the western movie tradition and found something completely different. He found something that he admired a great deal more than what he thought he was coming out here to see. I think he came out here for a kind of imaginary freedom and, in a sense, he ended up being conscripted by the desert to serve as one of its defenders.

Notes

1 This conversation occurred in November 2009. Special thanks to Alanna Miller, a Temple University doctoral candidate, who assisted in the transcription and editorial process.

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