The World Is Their Canvas

If you had to pick just one landscape to illustrate the curious obsessions of the L.A.-based Center for Land Use Interpretation, it might be this haunted high-desert wasteland two hours west of Salt Lake City.

Glimpsed at 80 mph from the passing interstate, the stark panorama blurs into a mirage of dazzling white salt flats ringed by scrubby brown mountains. Here and there, a sun-bleached motel or abandoned car announces humanity’s presence. Superficially, it all could be another generic Rand McNally dot on the epic canvas of the American West.

But if you scratch the surface--which, it might be said, is the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s primary reason for being--the terrain begins to yield its bizarre treasures, revealing itself not as a vast man-made junkyard but a kind of living museum where paradox and contradiction are as common as sand in the Sahara.

Under the blazing afternoon sky, Matt Coolidge, 35, surveys the hallucinatory vista, his eyes veiled by a pair of dark sunglasses. If he looks more like a CIA mole or Hollywood location scout than a mild-mannered geography major from Montreal, well, Coolidge would be the first to remind you that appearances can be misleading.

“We believe that narratives are told through a landscape as much as they might be through a movie. You just have to learn how to read the landscape,” says the director of the center, an idiosyncratically ambitious 8-year-old nonprofit that’s trying to reshape the way Americans see and think about their country’s man-made topography.

Like its even quirkier Culver City next-door neighbor the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the center resides at a conceptual crossroads where science, social history, environmental studies, art, folklore and pop culture intersect. Imagine a gene-splicing experiment involving the Sierra Club, the Smithsonian Institution, Outward Bound and your favorite “The X-Files” episode and you may have a vague sense of where this unclassifiable institution fits on the map.

“They’re a group that really exists in between a lot of our conventional definitions,” says Ralph Rugoff, an art critic and head of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at the California College of Arts & Crafts in Oakland.

Adopting an approach that might be described as outsider science meets gonzo tourism by way of contemporary art, Coolidge’s group employs a multimedia, multidisciplinary approach to shedding light on places that, as he puts it, exist as much in most Americans’ “imaginations as in their actual experience.” Seen through the center’s interpretive lenses, the American landscape turns out to be a far more complicated, and revealing, place than can be conveyed in iconic postcard vistas or captured in a day-tripper’s mental Polaroids.

By giving people the tools to chip away at the crust of history, myth, romance and language that encases our perceptions of landscapes, the center hopes to bring viewers and visitors “closer to the ground.” “We like to say we work in the interpretive layer that’s between a physical object and the perception of that object,” says Coolidge.

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Sites You Won’t

Find in the Guidebooks

Exhibit A is this deceptive void of Wendover, roughly an 11-hour drive from the Culver City headquarters of the center, affectionately known as CLUI (rhymes with “Huey”). As tourist draws go, it’s not exactly Disneyland, but CLUI regards it as pure analytical gold.

Those pristine alkali flats Coolidge is pointing to? They’re part of a massive, and still very active, U.S. Air Force test-bombing range. Those “desolate” ranges tapering toward the horizon? They’re strewn with local points of interest that you won’t find listed in many guidebooks, though you will find them cataloged in fascinating detail on the center’s Web site, www.clui.org. Among the attractions: copper smelters, magnesium chloride plants, America’s largest chemical weapons storage facility, monumental outdoor “earth art” works such as Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” and a historic marker indicating the site of a turn-of-the-century settlement-turned-leper colony founded by Polynesian Mormons.

At the edge of this arid expanse, awkwardly straddling the state line, the Siamese-twin towns of Wendover, Utah, and Wendover, Nev., form an incongruous pit stop for weary big-riggers and low-rent gamblers. From the Nevada side of the border, sparkling new casinos glare across at crumbling bungalows and rows of ghostly military barracks that have mostly stood empty since World War II.

As for that ominous 50-foot tower, a rusting hulk that looks like vintage 1940s, it’s the handiwork of the Walt Disney Co., which built it for its 1997 action thriller “Con Air.” A few hundred yards away, at the edge of a U.S. Air Force base, the “Con Air” plane sits parked, surreally, next to a weather-beaten hangar that once housed the Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

CLUI revels in such mind-bending juxtapositions, which explains why the center has established its largest off-site presence here. Though it operates out of a remodeled 2,000-square-foot office building on Venice Boulevard and also maintains a one-room Desert Research Station in Barstow, 90 minutes northeast of L.A., CLUI has made its small but growing compound of buildings in Wendover an open-air laboratory for test-driving its large inventory of theories and projects. Nothing here is quite what it seems, and the story that you take home will partly depend on the story you came looking for.

Coolidge recalls the sense of having struck pay-dirt when he and other CLUI staffers first visited the area eight years ago. “As soon as we rolled over that hill coming down the I-80 from Nevada into Wendover,” he says, “it was just like Mormons coming over the hill: ‘This is the place!’ ”

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Founded in 1994

in the Bay Area

Since 1994, when it was founded in the Bay Area, CLUI has been scrutinizing the nation like a French deconstructionist perusing “Finnegans Wake.” From backwoods Maine to the Mojave Desert, it approaches the American landscape as a giant, profoundly conflicted text that must be sifted and mined for encrypted meanings, in keeping with its official mission statement: “to increase and diffuse knowledge about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized and perceived.”

That rather bland-sounding credo, however, masks a considerably more complex and subtle agenda. The brainchild of a group of former college friends, several of whom were art students seeking a more practical application of their talents and interests, CLUI has two complementary personas. One is dry, scholarly and scientifically neutral, the other elliptical, subversive and, in the words of feminist art critic Lucy Lippard, purposefully “eccentric.”

Structured as a non-hierarchical collective of about 10 core members, CLUI is augmented by an informal coast-to-coast network of volunteers and specialists who rotate in and out on a project-by-project basis and serve as field correspondents. The majority are in their mid-20s to late 30s, and their backgrounds run the gamut from geology and engineering to architecture, landscape design, fine arts, video production, graphic arts, neurology, you name it.

Even they can’t easily say where each of CLUI’s identities begins and ends. “It’s funny: The center isn’t exactly art, and it isn’t exactly an environmental activist group,” says volunteer Zelig Kurland, a student at L.A.’s avant-garde Southern California Institute of Architecture. Not that Kurland and his colleagues are eager to categorize CLUI: Their work, they believe, speaks for itself--though you must listen closely to hear it.

To date, the center’s biggest single project has been assembling and maintaining a massive database of man-made landscapes and sites. Through painstaking field research, careful archiving of photos, public records and other primary source materials, and lots of constructive wandering around in the middle of nowhere, the center has put together a detailed picture of nearly 3,000 “anthropic” sites, or places made or altered by human beings.

These range from the lethal to the vaguely ludicrous: abandoned quarries, aborted hazardous waste incinerators; picturesquely decaying resorts; “deleted communities” obliterated by reservoirs, dams and other human interventions; obscure historical landmarks; and other oddities. The center’s goal is to expose and chronicle the multiple narrative layers that tell the story, or stories, of a given place. Eventually CLUI hopes to create 12 “interpretive nodes” around the country, modeled on its Wendover facility.

“We take a historical look at a contemporary landscape,” says Coolidge, savoring the concept’s Zen koan-like qualities. In other words, a toxic-waste dump can tell as much about today’s system of values as a pioneer cemetery tells about those of the past.

Endorsing a notion of democratic accessibility, CLUI then makes its research available, free, to any person or group that wants it, for any purpose, as an educational public service. Several of its remote facilities are open to visitors on a self-serve basis. Though these buildings are kept locked, posted signs give visitors a toll-free number to call. When they do, a recorded voice message supplies the lock combination.

What you do with the information you obtain is pretty much up to you--an equal-opportunity approach that some find maddeningly apolitical, but others deem a plus. “I think environmental people get frustrated [with CLUI] because they say, ‘Where’s the political punch line?’ And Matt [Coolidge] adamantly refuses to deliver one,” Rugoff says. “That frustrates some people, but ultimately it makes the project much more fluid and ultimately able to reach more people.”

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Using Art to Investigate

the Landscape

Perhaps what most distinguishes CLUI from the great, gray mass of think tanks, intellectual clearinghouses and earnest environmental groups is its ability to form alliances with artists and use art to interrogate and respond to the landscapes it investigates.

During its brief existence, the center has collaborated with many artists and exhibited at institutions throughout the United States and Europe, including L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art, MIT’s List Center for Visual Arts and the Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Over the past half-dozen years, CLUI has mounted numerous photo-text exhibitions and sponsored other art projects related to its research. It also runs a residence program for artists at Wendover.

The Wendover compound includes a remodeled, air-conditioned trailer where staff and volunteers live and work, a studio for visiting artists, a small gallery space and an exhibition hall where the center keeps a permanent display on the region’s startling array of historic and contemporary land uses.

CLUI’s collaborations have made it as well-known among artists and curators as it is to eco-heads and academics. “I think they [CLUI] are artists in the non-art world. They’ve figured out a niche that’s missing in the art world,” says Sue Spade, curator of the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Museum, which worked with CLUI on a recent exhibition “Ecovention: Current Art to Transform Ecologies.”

For that show, CLUI created 22 photo-text panels that examined “superlative” Ohio sites, from a nuclear power plant to the nation’s last major surviving shoelace factory. Another recent CLUI exhibition documented how the post-Sept. 11 installation of concrete berms and bollards has transformed the elegant plazas of Washington, D.C.

It’s not hard to detect a faint rhetorical giggle behind the text’s seeming objectivity. Photos also are shot in a way that smudges the line between sober documentation and stylized “art photography,” making the familiar look slightly alien, the alien strangely familiar.

“The way they compose things, there’s always something a little off,” Spade says. CLUI also publishes a monthly newsletter, the Lay of the Land, and other publications written in scrupulously deadpan prose.

CLUI’s projects have been sanctioned with critical praise and dollars from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lannan Foundation, the LEF Foundation, the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department and the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, among others. It’s a list that more conventional arts group would envy. “We’ve been very fortunate that our supporters understand what we’re doing and don’t want to mess with it,” Coolidge says.

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Guided, Offbeat

Bus Tours

Periodically CLUI varies its repertoire by conducting guided bus tours and other off-beat extracurriculars known as “extrapolative projects.” Lively, all-day affairs with themes such as “Antelope Valley: The Cradle of Aerospace” and “Nellis Range Complex: Landscape of Conjecture,” these tours cater to the same bourgeois passion for novelty and self-improving adventure as, say, a road trip to the Getty.

It’s customary on such outings for CLUI staffers to provide running commentary, pointing out legal bordellos, deserted 19th century therapeutic bathhouses and other arcane landmarks frequently “hidden” in plain sight. During lulls, participants may be regaled with screenings of blandly officious government videotapes detailing the marvels of the passing terrain--a 1950s nuclear test site, for example, or the Hinkley Compressor Station, the PG&E; plant immortalized in “Erin Brockovich.” These might alternate with “Zabriskie Point,” Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 art film on the wretched excesses of American culture.

One of CLUI’s 1997 “hinterlands” tours of the Salton Sea and Imperial Valley concluded at an abandoned yacht club on the north shore of that noxious man-made reservoir. Waiters hired for the occasion served cocktails to the tourists; hors d’oeuvres included a variety of smoked, salted and dried fish.

Now and then, CLUI tour buses will bring along a regional expert, or “briefer,” who’ll hop aboard to discuss some aspect of the trip in greater detail. One, Phil Patton, a journalist and author of “Dreamland: Travels Inside the Secret World of Roswell and Area 51,” accompanied a tour of the Nellis Range, a Connecticut-size chunk of Nevada that encompasses the notorious Area 51, reputed site of secret extraterrestrial comings and goings.

Patton remembers the tour group as typical of CLUI’s eclectic constituency. “There are the sort of people who will go see Mel Gibson in the crop-circles movie,” he says. “Many of them also are the military buffs. And there were a lot of movie people. I can’t break down how many were true nuts. A lot of people in the software business are drawn to this kind of thing: There’s symbology and there’s a system to be hacked.”

One of CLUI’s ur-texts is Dean MacCannell’s “The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class” (Schocken, 1976). A behavioral sciences scholar, MacCannell argued in his now-classic book that the tourist had become the archetype of “modern-man-in-general.” “Increasingly, tourism is a point of view which we all share,” Coolidge says.

But does a site exist if no one’s around to experience it? CLUI has explored that issue, too, with its “Sound-Emitting Device Project,” which Coolidge describes as adding a sonic “vector” to the experience of place. One such device, the “Water Ghost Installation,” in the middle of dried-up Owens Lake, uses a solar-powered tape loop, mounted in a box on a steel pole, to mimic the sound of running water. The spectral noise evokes L.A.’s infamous water-rights wars and creates a provocative aural/visual pun for the pleasure of the few who happen upon it.

“It’s a little bit of a treasure hunt,” says volunteer Lisa Boulanger, referring to CLUI’s stealthy stratagems. “It makes you a little bit of a collaborator.”

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‘Turn Out the Lights

and Lock Up’

Twilight on the Utah salt flats. The mountains are sculpted in primordial light, and one can easily imagine this place millions of years ago as a vast inland sea. A breeze drifts across the plain, but the real soundtrack is an engulfing stillness broken only by the occasional whoosh of an 18-wheeler.

It would be easy to romanticize such a landscape on such an evening. But once you’ve looked at America through CLUI’s eyes for a few days, you’re warier of such comforting conceits.

At a time (post-Sept. 11) when many private companies and government agencies are leery of dispersing details about their affairs, CLUI has become a rare repository of reliable, hard-to-obtain knowledge about the vast terra incognita we inhabit.

All the center asks in return, Coolidge has said, “is that people turn out the lights and lock up when they leave.”

Is that all, really? Not that democratic enlightenment isn’t among humanity’s worthier goals.

Is CLUI interested in beauty, a visitor asks? Or is “beauty” a veil that keeps us from seeing the world around us, the world we insist on steadily remaking in our own image?

“Yeah, people at the center are. I know I am,” Coolidge replies softly. “But some of the things I find beautiful are things that are honest and clear. Isn’t it Keats who said ‘Beauty is truth?’ There’s this aesthetic sense of truth that’s like beauty. It’s clarity. It’s the sense of things being true.”