de DESERTSHORE de Jan Tumlir / Brian Kennon

http://www.2ndcannons.com/desertshore-cover.html

1. Dusted

 

Desertshore, my title, is borrowed from the 1970 album by Nico, the cover of which shows the po-faced chanteuse posed against a sandy expanse, riding a white horse, drawn along by a child. In order to guess at where she is going, one might want to start the point of departure. Famously, Nico was born under the sign of Mars, during the punishing bombing raids of the allied powers on an already defeated Germany. She grew up amidst the ruins of Berlin, before setting off for London and then New York to pursue a “triple-threat” career in modeling, acting and singing. Catching the attention of Andy Warhol in the latter half of the sixties, she was foisted on the band he was managing at the time, The Velvet Underground, thereby putting the finishing touch on what remains to this day the ideal art-rock equation. As she began work on Desertshore, however, the VU had already disbanded, and her solo status is clearly reflected in the desolation of the cover image, which is taken from a film by Philippe Garrel titled La Cicatrice Interieure. Nico and her child guide are located in the middle of nowhere. Only their darker complexions and brown riding boots distinguish them from the uniform whiteness of the desert backdrop and the horse. As in a film by Antonioni, one might imagine that they are on their way to disappearing.

 

Then, again, Nico could be completing the journey that brought so many of the principal players of the post-war avant-gardes from Europe to New York and then still further, ever more “far out,” as Clement Greenberg would say. While, in the years immediately following the war, the imagination of advanced art is rooted in the experience of big-city life, in the sixties and seventies, it begins once more to wander. From the city’s industrial outskirts (Robert Smithson) we pass by the suburbs of Newark and New Jersey (Dan Graham), across the interstate expressways (Douglas Huebler), through the agrarian heartland (Robert Oppenheim), the plains of Texas (Donald Judd) and New Mexico (Bruce Nauman), all the way to the desert (Ed Ruscha) and the California shore (Bas Jan Ader). If any genre could be said to dominate this era, it is that of the travelogue, the road picture. And if any particular sort of landscape is being sought, it is directly opposed to that of urban verticality and congestion: this landscape is overwhelmingly empty and flat.

 

This is the experience of a landscape that comes after the city. In spatial terms, it is peripheral to the city center, and in temporal terms, as well, it is what one encounters on one’s way out of the city, having lived there for a time and now seeking a change of scenery. Temporally, then, it implies a simultaneous surge forward and backward: every mile that separates us from our former urban home also draws us “back to nature” and closer to our original, animal selves. For all its therapeutic value, however, this journey between vertical and horizontal vistas is often shrouded in disaster, especially in film. The flattest landscapes are those of the desert and shore, and these also are the favored sites of science-fiction film-makers wanting to explore the event of the apocalypse, which is the world’s end and also beginning, on a budget. The end-times are eagerly awaited by those who believe they already wear their “true face.” These pure-itans gather at the water’s edge and deep in the sandy interior to bear out the destruction of the cities that lie in between. In the flattest landscapes they will be turned into spirits, or else remain put to start over, as a species, “from scratch.”

 

Whereas the VU had trained its collective sights on images of urban squalor and decay, Nico’s Desertshore is very much a “back to nature” album. Track titles like “My Only Child,” “Le Petit Chevalier” and “Mütterlein” circle around themes of motherhood and childhood, but in a far from reassuring manner. Every cozy lullaby and nursery rhyme is chilled by the singer’s trademark hollow, haunted tones. Meanwhile, the classically-trained John Cale, here operating as “arranger,” has put down his consistently oppressive orchestration of this material to a prodigious intake of cocaine. Nico, for her part, was well into her second decade of addiction to heroin, a drug she would in time administer to her young son. The album’s continual vacillation between sleepy and nerve-rattling ambiances may be understood, accordingly, as the outcome of a push-and-pull struggle between these two former band-mates out to kill each other’s buzzes. Which “white horse,” which “white powder,” will win out in the end? Which version of the void will swallow us whole?

 

As with so many of this era’s representative documents, the course of self-exploration leads swiftly to self-annihilation. The landscape will ultimately consume the voyager, but not in the way one might have wished. In the desert, one becomes neither whole nor pure, for the burning sand is cut from the first moment with toxic substances imported directly from the shadiest side of the city street. Already, for the audiences of the day, such a “bummer ending” would come as small surprise, but presently, for us, this outcome is not nearly so dire. In the revisionist remake of Desertshore – which is how I would like to think of this text – the landscape as a metaphor for drugs will in turn become a metaphor for something else.

 

 

2. The Fata-Morgana Machine

 

In Fred McLeod Wilcox’s film Forbidden Planet – itself a revisionist remake of Shakespeare’s The Tempest transplanted to a distant galaxy – we are presented with the same torqued triangle of the toxic single-parent, the still-undifferentiated child and the gender-shifting “help.” This comprises the standard three-point configuration of the frontier drama, and Forbidden Planet could have been filmed on Desertshore, with Nico’s part played by the scientist-king Morbius (whose name sounds like Morpheus, calling up associations to Morphine and to dreams), the child-guide played by Alta, Morbius’ pretty young daughter, and finally, the white horse played by “Robbie” the robot. When, in the course of a routine exploratory mission, a spaceship with an all-male crew crash-lands on Altair 4, as the planet is called, it quickly becomes clear that they are not wanted there. A preliminary tour of the grounds reveals an earthly paradise; Morbius and his daughter live in open-plan splendor, enfolded by lush greenery, babbling brooks and a bevy of wild animals that gently take food from their palms. The visitors initially think that Morbius is just a greedy bastard who wants to keep it all for himself.

 

When at last he informs them that his former community of fellow settlers has been decimated by indigenous elements, the captain and crew revise their initial assumptions. Perhaps Morbius really is concerned for their well-being. However, the question of contagion only grows more complicated as the film progresses, and it soon becomes impossible to tell whether it is due to the planet poisoning the visitors or the other way round. Morbius blames the disaster on the mysterious race of the Krell, Altair 4’s original life-form, according to him, who are many or one – this, too, remains pointedly ambiguous. Like Caliban in the Shakespeare version, the Krell are figures of fantasy who impart to this planet its edenic aspect. It is an illusion, an image, claims Morbius; underneath its mask of abundant verdure, Altair 4 is just grey ground planted with crosses and the bodies of the dead.

 

The frontier drama is often driven by external, non-human forces. The adventurous explorer is drawn toward the horizon-line, toward flatness and nothingness, like the proverbial “moth to the flame.” He hears a voice; he answers to a call. In the case of Morbius, we can assume that it issues from the Krell, whose power he is now attempting to harness in his laboratory. A sense of blind striving lends to every voyage into unknown territory a mystical aura, yet the Krell, like all the gods of men, must be somehow embodied. In this regard, the special-effects team of Forbidden Planet has confronted a familiar challenge: how to materialize the immaterial? Their solution, at once utterly unconvincing and right on the mark, is to have the Krell flare up suddenly like a “tiger burning bright.” Incised in crude cartoon line directly onto the surface of the film, its wavering form is experienced by us as yet another cloaking image, but this time a literal one, behind which everything else we see can be labeled illusion.

 

It will turn out that the Krell are not so much gods as “demons of the mind,” conjured up by Morbius as a defense mechanism, a means of repressing his own growing desire for his daughter. Altair 4 transitions from garden of plenty to dessicated womb to the extent that its principal characters are shadowed by the incest totem, and it is obviously in the interest of overcoming the same that Morbius seeks, via “science,” to master the powers of illusion. The visiting spaceship effectively catches him in the act of transgressing. Every other consciousness has been snuffed out; there is nobody left to judge – that is, until they (we) show up.

 

No doubt, when it premiered in 1956, this Freudian showdown brought the film to a satisfyingly novel conclusion. But today, we might be more inclined to look past the motivations of the human characters and toward that of the planet as such, Altair 4. If neither the fantastical Krell nor the demented Morbius can be blamed entirely for what has transpired, then perhaps the landscape is itself partly “guilty.” Just what is it about this place that synchs up and vibrates so sympathetically with the imaginations of its visitors? If Forbidden Planet is in truth Desertshore, then why does it present itself to the minds of men as another, more hospitable, place? In the desert, the heat causes the air to ripple like boiling water, turning the atmosphere reflective. There, the visions that this planet induces would be termed a mirage – that is, a chance convergence of environmental, perceptual and psychological factors – but what if this process were somehow more motivated, intentional? What if the landscape were feeding us images of exactly what we most need or desire in order to lure us deeper into itself, to decompose us into itself? In the end, we may find that the landscape is this narrative’s principal actant, and that the characters we have been following all along have only served to distract us from this fact.

 

Called out of the city, which is built to stand upright like its inhabitants, the adventurous explorer sets his sights on the horizon in pursuit of the truth. On Forbidden Planet, like Desertshore, it will be revealed that life as we know it is an illusion, a fever-dream, and that it is instead death that rules the day. The promise of the horizon is that of the flat-line, the relaxation of all tensions. The flattest landscape is implicitly the most formless. In it, all form is gradually ground down; everything standing must fall, including the body. Those who are drawn toward the horizon will eventually be reduced to horizontality themselves.

 

In the end, it is revealed that everyone on the Forbidden Planet shares the same malady in differing degrees – the delusion of consciousness – and this diagnosis applies as well to us, the audience. It is basically because we have been fooled by images that we are all there, or here. The image acts as the lure, but underneath, it is the empty ground that consumes us, the so-called “desert of the real.” No surprise, then, that the cinema has itself been described as a “fata-morgana machine.”(Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop Young & Michael Wutz, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, pg 140.) In truth, “there is no there, there,” just shifting patterns of grain that we want to recognize as (mistake for) signs of life.

 

The images come and go; nothing remains behind on-screen, which is smooth and entirely without memory. Only in the mind of the viewer do these images congeal, even if just for a time. From our place in the darkness, we are treated to the spectacle of life in reverse, as though the last neural surges of a memory that has already shut down. The movie-screen as “desert of the real” is either a graveyard or a womb, and should one forego choosing between these two options, and instead accept them both, then every ostensible end will inevitably open onto a new beginning. Pulled out of the regular succession of seconds, minutes, hours, days and so on, that comprise our lives, Robert Smithson claims that we enter the movie theater as a “black hole in time.” But what if this was not merely a point of interruption in the spatio-temporal continuum, but the very seam around which our experience turns as a loop of eternal recurrence? On Desertshore, we are especially prone to this sort of circular reasoning, as it is, as mentioned, an apocalyptic place. It is made up of both the dust that we finally become and the water that we initially emerge from.

 

 

3. The Sand-Box Monument

 

When “on Saturday, September 30, 1967,” Robert Smithson set off on A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey from “the Port Authority Building on 41st Street and 8th Avenue,” he brought along for the ride “a copy of the New York Times and a Signet paperback called Earthworks by Brian W. Aldiss.”(Robert Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam, Berkeley & Los Angeles / London: University of California Press, 1996, pg 68.) In this way, an otherwise uneventful journey into a landscape that many would consider mind-numbingly banal becomes at once tinted with the aura of the fantastic. Announcing his proper space-time coordinates in the very first sentence, the artist swiftly proceeds to give these “the slip” with the mention of Aldiss’ time-traveling fiction. The New York Times serves a transitional purpose in this regard, for it is here that the experience of the present is converted into language, words, thereby preparing it for the complete literary overhaul to follow. Smithson does not go into detail about Aldiss’ book; the name of the author is enough to ground his account in the genre conventions of science-fiction.

 

Once aboard the bus that will transport him out of town, Smithson begins skimming through the newspaper’s arts section, listing the various exhibitions and events on offer: “a ‘Collectors’, Critics’, Curators’ Choice’ at A. M. Sachs Gallery (…), Walter Schatzki was selling ‘Prints, Drawings, Watercolors’ at ’33 1/3 off,’ Elinor Jenkins, the ‘Romantic Realist,’ was showing at Barzansky Galleries, XVIII-XIX Century English Furniture on sale at Parke-Bernet, ‘New Directions in German Graphics’ at Goethe House…”(Smithson, pgs 68-69.) One is struck, above all, by a pervasive sense of temporal discontinuity, but isn’t this precisely one of art’s most salient features – that is, that it remains behind yet keeps getting made anew? The seemingly arbitrary order of this listing so straightforwardly transcribed comprises something like a core-sample of the territory of the art-world at this time. Accordingly, Smithson prompts us to look for related discontinuities in the landscape of Passaic, and to see our spatial passage across this territory as, simultaneously, a temporal passage through it.

 

“On page 29,” at the top of a column by John Canaday entitled “Art: Themes and the Usual Variations,” Smithson locates the segue that will enable him to shuttle freely between the contexts of the newspaper page and the outlying object-world, this being “a blurry reproduction of Samuel F. B. Morse’s Allegorical Landscape.”(Ibid.) The connection is made in strictly visual terms, by way of this acutely conventional work that Smithson reproduces in turn in his magazine-essay-as-art. Being the first, the artist insures that every ensuing image, casually snapped by himself en route, will be bathed in its allegorical afterglow. The point requires no rhetorical support or elaboration since the painter F. B. Morse has already rendered his visual impressions as a kind of argument. Every detail is subtly motivated by the course of his gesture, every stroke of the brush is laden with meaning, an écriture that is designed to be read somewhat like words are read, which is something that cannot be said as well for the photograph. The photograph conforms to an illusory logic that restores to every detail or fragment the sense of a whole precisely by confining these to a single flat surface. It is only due to their placement on the magazine page, following the painting, that these particular photographs may be seen for what they are: not reality as such, nor simply illusion, but historical documents, artifacts, monuments of monuments.

 

If New York is here equated with the present, it is to push its outskirts toward the future and, at the same time, the past. The further Smithson travels from the city center, the more the landscape becomes temporally destabilized, to vacillate uncontrollably between the pre- and post-historic. As “the bus passed over the first monument,” the artist reaches impulsively for his Instamatic; “the monument was a bridge over the Passaic River that connected Bergen County with Passaic County.”(Smithson, pg 70.) Clearly, this thing is not intrinsically monumental, only the picture and its caption make it so. Further on, he describes “the steel road that passed over the water” in more detail: it is “in part an open grating flanked by wooden sidewalks, held up by a heavy set of beams, while above, a ramshackle network hung in the air.”(Ibid.) He steps off the bus to take the view reproduced in the article as The Bridge Monument Showing Wooden Sidewalks, and then looks around.

 

Along the Passaic River banks were many minor monuments such as concrete abutments that supported the shoulders of a new highway in the process of being built. River Drive was in part bulldozed and in part intact. It was hard to tell the new highway from the old road; they were both confounded into a unitary chaos. Since it was Saturday, many machines were not working, and this caused them to resemble prehistoric creatures trapped in the mud, or, better, extinct machines – mechanical dinosaurs stripped of their skin. On the edge of this prehistoric Machine Age were pre- and post-World War II suburban houses. The houses mirrored themselves into colorlessness.(Smithson, pgs 70-71.)

 

Next, writes Smithson, “as I walked north along what was left of River Drive, I saw a monument in the middle of the river – it was a pumping derrick with a long pipe attached to it. The pipe was supported in part by a set of pontoons…”(Smithson, pg 71.) The second monument is accordingly titled Monument with Pontoons: The Pumping Derrick, whereas the third monument, The Great Pipe Monument, comprises “the rest of it,” the remaining length of pipe that artist follows back out of the water “about three blocks along the river bank till it disappeared into the earth.”(Ibid.) So far, his language has conformed more or less to the objective dictates of his Instamatic apparatus – even his comparison of a construction site to something like The Land of the Lost is not so unusual, after all – but as we approach the fourth monument, the words take to literary flight.

 

Nearby, on the riverbank, was an artificial crater that contained a pale limpid pond of water, and from the side of the crater protruded six large pipes that gushed the water of the pond into the river. This constituted a monumental fountain that suggested six horizontal smokestacks that seemed to be flooding the river with liquid smoke. The great pipe was in some enigmatic way connected to the infernal fountain. It was as though the pipe was secretly sodomizing some hidden technological orifice, and causing a monstrous sexual organ (the fountain) to have an orgasm.(Ibid.)

 

Monument number four, The Fountain Monument, is presented from two different perspectives: a “Bird’s Eye View” and “Side View.” This generic concern for informational accuracy may be contrasted with Smithson’s increasingly hermetic commentary, which culminates in a pathetic fallacy of near-epic proportions: “A psychoanalyst might say that the landscape displayed ‘homosexual tendencies’...” Hesitating for a moment, he then appears to step back – “but I will not draw such a crass anthropomorphic conclusion,” he writes – only to dive right back in. “I will merely say, ‘It was there.’”(Ibid.)

 

Appropriately, the last monument is captioned The Sand-box Monument, or The Desert. It is here that Smithson catches the first glimpse of the analogy for entropy that will end his essay: “Picture in your mind’s eye the sand-box divided in half with black sand on one side and white sand on the other. We take a child and have him run hundreds of times clockwise in the box until the sand gets mixed and begins to turn grey…”(Smithson, pg 74.) “Clockwise,” the child may be seen as an agent of time, and it is fitting that our journey should wind up here with this concrete metaphor, as this magazine-essay-as-art was from the outset determined to show us something wholly out of the reach of a more conventional art. Let’s recall, in this regard, the somewhat dismal list that we began with: “Prints, Drawings, Watercolors at ’33 1/3 off,” et al. The art object is made to resist and outlast time; this is the very basis of its status as fetish. In A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey, however, Smithson is more concerned to factor the element of time back into this equation from which it was expelled. His photo-text monument is comprised of art plus time, and in this sense we may assume that The Sand-box Monument is where all of the other monuments will end up, and where we ourselves will end up. Once again, it would seem, the artist has brought us to the desert to die.