Return

We've returned to Milwaukee, and soon the reflecting, assessing, sorting, and processing will begin. Deciding what worked and what didn't requires a lapse of time to get some distance between you and what you tried to do, so we may leave things alone for a while to let our brains rest and our experience settle a bit before returning to the work. Upcoming deadlines for a studio open house and an exhibition will make sure we don't shelve it for too long, however. 

This week, we'll try to regain control of our regular lives: recombobulating our household, saying hello to the cat, doing paperwork, paying bills...all the things that we got to forget about for the past several weeks, which is what is so gratifying about being awarded a residency. It's a chance to see how productive you can be when most of your responsibilities are removed, and you are transported to a new and inspiring place. We highly recommend it.

Desert Snow

One would think that by attending a residency in the hottest place in North America, one could avoid the kind of weather that our friends are experiencing back home. But alas, our outpost in Beatty is 3500 feet above Death Valley and this morning we woke up to falling snow. I've been thinking of this place as a sort of polar opposite to the Midwest, but today it doesn't seem quite so different. We are packing up to leave this morning, looking forward to a scenic drive back to LA (this time not in the dark). Perhaps this bit of snow will help ease the shock of returning to a Wisconsin that is deep into winter.

Earth

Never have we been more aware of the Earth itself - it's surfaces and textures, tectonics, and overall vastness. Death Valley is a place of many worlds, most of them seemingly primeval or martian. It is easy to imagine that a rivulet of salt-flat water, slick with brown algae, is the ylem that will soon produce the first single-celled organism; the precursor to life as we know it.

Today we sought out these places as environments for our characters to wander through and attempt to understand.

On another note, I've been thinking about the term "landscape," a word I have been using perhaps too freely. The term implies taking in a scenic vista, representing a scene in a painting, or perhaps even sculpting your lawn so that it is more aesthetically pleasing. The intention of a landscape seems to be to keep the real place at a comfortable distance. Since our goal here is to learn about the place by actually being inside of it, and to ask ourselves how people from the past (without the luxury of cars, plastic bottles of water, and helpful park rangers) would have dealt with Death Valley, I think I need to find a new term. I doubt, however, that one term will suffice, nor be as mindlessly convenient as landscape is (or was).

The Pace of Light

Light here is an elusive thing. We start each day fully intending to use the greater part of it shooting in the sunlight, but morning preparations usually mean we are on location by noon at the earliest, setting up, hoping the high sun will start to set a little, lengthening shadows in a prettier way. Then, we are left with three good hours, maybe four, to get done what we can. When the sun slips behind the mountain, it is like someone has just flipped a light- and heat-switch.

Yesterday as we were shooting in a blackened, ancient volcanic site, I could feel the sun begin to set before my eyes sensed it...an incremental cooling of the light made me look to the hills where the sun was neatly cradled between two mountaintops. Then we watched the shadows quickly lengthening while we snapped the last few pictures.

I'm told one feature of James Turrell's almost-complete Roden Crater project will be a special seat facing a special window that will frame the sky and the sun in such a way that, as the earth rotates, one will be able to physically feel the incremental revolution.

If Roden Crater never gets finished, or if the waiting list to see it is a lifetime long, I know another place you can feel the earth this way - a sense that we are actually standing on a slowly spinning ball, hovering in space, at intervals facing the light and warmth of the sun.

My Toy Desert

When I was a child and I imagined Death Valley, I thought of lifeless dunes as far as the eye could see, nothing on the horizon but more hills of blowing sand. I thought of being lost in the middle of this endless expanse, sunburnt and thirsty, becoming delirious and counting the hours until my final breath as I ration the last drops of water in my canteen. This image is not just a product of my overactive imagination, but a delusion I share with anyone who has ever seen a movie. The Mesquite Flat Dunes are, after all, in close proximity to Hollywood, and this site has shaped our archetypal image of the desert. From Spaghetti Westerns to Star Wars, and endless series of fictions filmed here have imprinted this landscape in our minds. Usually the dunes are shot form a low angle in an attempt to eliminate the imposing mountains that surround it, for these mountains do not fit with the idea of the endless desert. In reality the dunes are only about a mile and a half across, easily walkable, even without a canteen of water. The name Death Valley is something of a misnomer in itself, as there are few recorded deaths in its history. 

The mountains surrounding Death Valley tend to miniaturize the dunes. It seems almost like toy desert - a little sandbox plopped down in the middle of this valley for our enjoyment and recreation. And indeed there are people playing all over it. There's a parking lot full of tourists who have stopped to run aroundthe dunes and climb the hills of sand. There are sandboarders bombing the highest peaks, riding in t-shirts and enjoying the always-fresh powder. Overhead there are two fighter jets doing loop-de-loops and filling the valley with continuous thunder. Its a far cry from the image of the lone, desperate soul, dying of thirst with no oasis in sight. 

Rocks and Sand

Today we set out to begin understanding the lay of the land and the resources, conceptual and physical, it has to offer.

Gold mining drew homesteaders to this area, but all that remains are the sad hovels of those who sought the elusive prize. Getting up into the hills, away from the enormous man-made mountains of mine tailings, the landscape is fresher, a little greener, and happily being left alone by large mining operations.

It's interesting to speculate about the lives of those who live here. As a Midwesterner, it's hard to understand being drawn to such an exposed, barren landscape. But those are car thoughts - questions I have while racing down the highway in an SUV. To get closer to the true nature of this place, I have to get out of the car, brace myself against the wind, kneel down to bend a twig, discover a split stone, listen to the birdless silence, observe the low layers of cloud cover, hear the crunch of my boots on the gravel-like ground, find snow in north-facing crevices, wonder what I would do if the car, and instantaneous warmth and comfort, weren't 20 yards away...

Christmas Eve

After a much-needed Christmas Eve grocery expedition to a nearby town called Pahrump (Beatty only has a few convenience stores), we again found ourselves driving in the dark. We took a different route this time, along the higher-altitude Amargosa Valley, skirting the edge of Death Valley. Unexpectedly, we found ourselves in Death Valley Junction, a town whose only structure is the famous Amargosa Hotel and Opera House. The theatre was ready for a show - the fire was lit, the stage lights were on, but no one was there. It was easy to imagine the pageant that should have been taking place on Christmas Eve, but alas, Marta Becket, the visionary behind this unlikely place had stopped performing earlier this year at the age of 88.

At home, we fashioned a Christmas tumbleweed and decorated it with a strand of tinsel and some lights we picked up in Pahrump. Brent found some flowery boas to add some festive color. We roasted a chicken and drank some Prosecco, quietly acknowledging the holiday. Tomorrow we'll dive into our research, starting with an exploratory drive, this time in the daylight.

Night Driving in Death Valley

Our GPS had a hard time locating Beatty, NV, so for most of the trip, we thought we had several more hours to drive than we did. Lost in time, and early darkness (the sun slipped behind the mountains around 4:00PM, and it was pitch dark by 4:30), we barreled into the void.

An almost-full moon cast thin silvery light on the landscape. At intervals, we could sense hulking masses - incomprehensible land forms - either near to us or far away, but we have no sense, as of yet, for the shape of the place itself. Thus, our experience of Death Valley for now remains a mystery, one to sleuth out in the near future, after setting up headquarters in Beatty.

Joshua Tree Melancholy

Joshua Tree is a tiny town between Yucca Valley and Twentynine Palms, on a dusty strip of highway about two hours outside of Los Angeles. The gateway to the Mojave Desert. Our lodgings for the night was the Harmony Motel, famous for housing the band U2 when they recorded their album, Joshua Tree. Strangely, the motel wasn't using this fact as a promotional scheme, except a blurb or two on their website. We found the place to be shabby but friendly. A pleasant night's sleep.

The tone of our trip changed dramatically the next morning. For some reason, I developed an intense headache, nausea, and a general sick feeling that I later decided may have been a touch of altitude sickness - we had spent the day rising and falling on our trip through the hills.

We met briefly with Andrea Zittel at her High Desert Test Sites headquarters in Joshua Tree, where we were debriefed about the Mojave area, our forthcoming journey to Death Valley, and the vandalism that plagues the projects installed for the annual HDTS event. Apparently doors, windows, and building materials of all kinds are in high demand. This new information is shifting our thinking about our proposal...our new train of thought involves a project in which pilfering and plundering is expected, indeed required, to complete the piece in some way...

LA Recap

Perhaps these pictures will speak for themselves…LA was a sunny experience, in a multitude of ways. We spent our time there networking with artists and arts organizations, meeting with long lost friends from Milwaukee, eating great tacos and exploring the landscape of man-sized cactus and other scratchy plants.

Tomorrow we leave for the desert, with a detour through Joshua Tree to visit Andrea Zittel and her project High Desert Test Sites.

(By the way, to the left, that's Michael Heizer's "Levitated Mass," built for LACMA recently. Beautiful in many ways, but with a few problematic details...)

Foreign/Familiar

Acclimating to Los Angeles for the second time in two years, I find myself caught up in an oxymoron - I'm noticing the same differences I noticed last time. The plant life: rubbery, spiky, green in December. Palm leaves that could kill you if they fell when you weren't looking. The traffic in its endless but unhurried flow. Low-lying architecture with desert colors and textures. Buildings that can settle into the heat of an intense summer. And a general feeling of having been transported to another world, one that without an iPhone map, I'd be lost in forever.

Moments of real familiarity have appeared, however. Brent was excited to point out a gigantic donut he remembered from his childhood in LA, big enough to be seen from the airplane window. Once today we thought we were in a neighborhood we might have been in a year or so ago. Today, out walking, Brent became nostalgic for skateboarding when we came upon a neighborhood skatepark boiling with teenagers.

I'm not sure how all of this will play into the art ideas we are each internally mulling. For now, we are happily riding the see-saw of foreign and familiar, remembered and discovered, lost and found.

MKE to LAX via MSP

MKE to LAX with a layover in Minneapolis.
Suspended between layers of clouds.
Views we were never meant to see.
Descending into thick, disorienting whiteness. The Twin Cites emerge from below, miniature streets blanketed with unexpected snowfall.
Night flight.

Before we set foot in Death Valley, we must fly over it; its location only traceable by the satellite image on the in-flight monitor.
From 36,000 feet, the cities become organic clusters of light, but the stars remain unchanged.
Descending upon the vast organism that is Los Angeles, the freeways flow with liquid illumination.

Before we know it, we've joined the flow, another cell seeking its destination.
Aided by GPS, we arrive at The Fort to warm welcome.

Follow us to Death Valley beginning December 17 2012!

This picture is not from Death Valley. Rather, it is from another residency we participated in last year with the Center for Land Use Interpretation in the salt flats region near Wendover, UT.

At the moment, Death Valley exists only in our imaginations, pieced together from random film footage, internet ramblings, vintage photographs, and memories from our last desert voyage. No matter how we attempt to understand the place now, it is guaranteed to be completely different than anything we can conceive of now. In this world of vicarious experience, we relish the idea of total immersion in a new (and very real) place.