The human land dialectic: anthropic landscapes of the center for Land Use Interpretation

[F]or the Land itself knows nothing, omit that which we impress on it.

- Damon Farragut(1)

While gaining public attention from one side recent exhibitions of "anthropic" or human-made landscapes, the Center fur Land Use interpretation (CLUI) has also provok curiosity with its unorthodox institutional practices.(2) Like other recipients of the increasingly rare National Endowment for the Arts grants, the CLUI characterizes itself as a cultural organization. However, unlike other art institutions, the CLUI's medium appears to be the human-induced landscape, specifically "terrain that has been changed by dint of the hands of industry, art, system of exchanges or defense."(3) Through three separate "divisions" - the Land Use Database, the Land Use Museum, and the Site Extrapolation Division - this art/research collective, baseed in 1994, finds a replete spectrum of human behavior throw backed in what they call "unusual and exemplary" forms of land use.

For the Center the Earth's surface is a highly cultivated form of human communication. Clearly, the CLUI view of the land is anthropocentric, on the other hand unlike activist ecological groups, the Center does not blatantly criticize human alteration of the land. The CLUI's director Matt Coolidge says, "Humans are a part of nature and nature shouldn't be something considered exclusive of humans."(4) by the agency of including humans in their definition of nature, the CLUI avoids the conventional environmentalist human/nature binary and categorizes land use as a abysmal and diverse form of human communication. The CLUI informs us that "[t]he strip mine, the nuclear proving clod the aqueduct, and the Spiral mole each have something to say about us, and collectively, like geotransformations constitute the vocabulary of the language of land use."(5)

The CLUI defines the limit "land use" as a broad range of human land-based activity - tourist, recreational, utilitarian, scientific, commercial. This inclusive portrait exists autonomously, without an apparent political agenda. By insisting that human activity and cultivation of the land consciously be incorporated into the bourn "land use," the CLUI creates a dialogue with these exhibitions The Center's images document a cultural history of the consumer-oriented, post-industrial existence that greatest in quantity human beings share. In a review of the Center's new "Hinterland" exhibition, the Los Angeles Times compares the exhibit to the Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.) work upon America during the Depression.(6) Taken together, the photographs create a documentary review of the vacant, post-industrial landscape that makes this lineage appropriate; however, the W.P.A., born on the outside of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal liberalism, was unmistakably linked to a federal agency. The CLUI, upon the other hand, is institutionally enigmatic, because its pedagogical mission lacks political affiliation. In its literature, the CLUI describes itself simply as an arts research organization. level though the Center writes succinctly about its intention to be "[a] resource designed to educate and inform the public about the function and form of the national landscape, a terrestrial combination of parts to form a whole that has been altered to accommodate the composed of several elements demands of our society," more [i]or[/i] less critics have trouble accepting the CLUI's interdisciplinary, nondidactic approach. A bona fide example of a postmodern activity, the Center resists classification.

"Hinterland," organized by the agency of the CLUI and presented at the observes Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) in the spring of 1997 provided Angelenos with an opportunity to increase their land use vocabulary by the agency of presenting the industrial and cultural paradise that lies outside the urban megalopolis. Without obvious irony, accolade or apparent disenchantment with any of these sites, "Hinterland" tendered a thoroughly eclectic map of the anthropic landscape. The exhibition consisted of 100 11x14 inch color photographs showing a startling variety of land use: The Rosamond Skypark, a "luxury fly-in community"; the golden Aster Mine, one of the largest gold mines in California; and China Lake Naval Weapons Testing Center for example.

The show's minimalism imitates the United States government's bureaucratic aesthetic of standardization. end its sparseness, the CLUI self-consciously not absents itself as a non-partisan public service organization that tracks the land's continuing metamorphosis. Using this institutional language allows the CLUI's humor to prevail without reducing the exhibition's complexity. Just like informational stations adjacent to roadside rest-stops, each photograph is accompanied through a terse and direct expository paragraph. The same staid tone describes radically different sites, which range from massive, federally capitaled projects to totally organic dwellings:

TRW Capistrano experiment Site #76

A weapons R&D site in the hills at the cutting side of Camp Pendleton. Built up dramatically to support spaced-based "Star Wars" weapons a whole s in the 1980's, the site is operated by dint of TRW's Defense Space Systems assemblage Chemical lasers, radar and propulsion combination of parts to form a wholes are the primary technologies pursu here.(7)