Read on th American desert - Alvaro Velasco - HCT

Read on the American Desert by Ă lvaro Velasco

MA History and Critical Thinking Architectural Association 2014

He ran. He never looked back at the fire. He just ran.

He ran until the sun came up and he couldn’t run any further. And when the sun went down, he ran again.

For five days he ran like this until every sign of man had disappeared. —Travis, Paris,Texas. 1984.

Wim Wenders

PreLiminary

I only know one way of finding out how far one can go, and that is by setting out and getting there.

Henri Bergson

What can you find when every sign of man had disappeared? What is the fascination we find in the wilderness? The desert appears as the place we yearn for when looking for a change: A new beginning. But along with its emptiness—the void to be filled—, is present inconspicuously the menace of a disappearance by exhaustion. The two faces of every creation. The two of writing a text. ‘Fear of the blank page’.

One letter after the other inhabiting the empty background, mixing the delirium of the new with the trepidation of a possible debacle. Two sentiments facing each other, pushing opposite directions. The reader gives more attention to the end of the stories, without considering that it is more crucial to decide how to start. It takes much more to begin than to finish; to create than to destroy. Every word constructs a new world, every story a new universe to be inhabited. In that sense, the art of building is the same as writing. They both construct a new milieu by facing the void. The written word takes us to a “fictional” world while building places the user in a ‘real’ one. Through this, a paradox is produced when writing about architecture: up to what point the writing becomes real and the building becomes fictional?

There is a re-construction of the building, made out of words fixed with grammatical joints and knots. Columns aligning piles of letters over the foundations of footnotes. Words and text blurring the real and fictional.

In this written world, the reader finds himself as inhabitant, or more as a traveler, guided by words of his cicerone—or Virgil in the Divine Comedy—, the writer. As such, it seems fitting to organize a Thesis as a travelogue. A travel guide to, as Henri Bergson pointed, a place never visited. As every journey worth going to, it is a venture to the unknown. A trip to a very exceptional space. A space that is the ultimate tabula rasa of European architectural visions. A vacant landscape that is crammed with promises of creation of Western culture. A territory that appeared empty when we arrived but was already full for the eyes of the conquistadores because they bore the prophesied frontier myths of European culture. A journey to the American southwest.

The trip is steered by two travel guides and an album of photographs. Reyner Banham’s Scenes in America Deserta(1982) and Jean Baudrillard’s Amérique(1986) will lead our steps while Richard Misrach’s Desert Cantos(1987) our sights. The travel-thesis will intend to show their stories, placing them against the background of the actual American waste land, showing that European architectural exploration of the American desert reached its fullest understanding(or even delusion) with the two texts, perfecting what European tradition wished to see when gazing at this landscape. Though the question remains when reading their alluring accounts, what do we face into the desert?

Gustave Doré. Illustration to Dante’s Inferno. Plate VIII: Canto III: The gate of Hell. 1857.

“Abandon all hope ye who enter here” FIG. 1.

Henry Holiday(1839-1927). Bellman’s Map for The Hunting of the Snark(Lewis Carroll).

ACT ONE A voice(off):

To the North, nothing.

To the South, nothing.

To the East, nothing.

To the West, nothing.

The curtain falls. End of Act One. (Author unknown. Learnt around 1947, recalled in 1973) —Species of Spaces/ Espèces d’espaces. 1974.

George Perec

There is something in my Spanish background that seems to be stubbornly fixed in the idea of terra incognita. In the pre-Roman times the westernmost point of the known world was located in the northwest coast of Iberia. A point of no return, the finis-terrae [end of the earth]. Also a Greek legend put the limits of the known land at the tip of the peninsula: the columns of Hercules or the Non-Plus Ultra [Nothing farther beyond]. But the “Non” was erased after the discovery of America in 1492, opening up an entire New World to the European perspective. The borders of the terra incognita were displaced from the coast of the Ocean to the shorelines of the new continent.

America was a huge void on the map delimited by a border of ignorance—a cluelessness about what laid behind. As the time passed by, the avidity of the conquistadores re-traced the cartographic limits.

But the movement of filling the void of the maps was not only led by them. America was a vast new-discovered desert1 land, apparently meek to receive the stories of the sailors. From a European Perspective, the American desert was a mythological blank slate. The empty space of the map was little by little filled with mythologies and superstitions. Supposedly, discovering was linked with putting the eyes in what never seen before, with the wonders that were there more than with the generation of fantasies. However, this land bore a peculiar fragility to break the borders of real and fiction. As John Keats put it:

1. There is an interest in the historians for such a strange object of research as the desert. Afterall, the father of History, Herodotus, focused his work in the cultures of the Persian Desert. But this interest of the Western World seemed to disappear for centuries after the publication of his The Histories.(450s-420 BC).

2. Keats, John, 1982. Complete Poems. Edited

by Jack Stillinger. London. The Belknap Press. p. 34.

...like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien.2

Because Cortez, not only opened his eyes to a new ocean. He also had an insatiable desire of unveiling the unknown. So, he headed for one of the most mythicized lands of the New World: California.

A landscape that even the act of its naming already bore the seed of the myth. Its appellation was first cited in the Spanish chivalric romance novel Las Sergas de Esplandián [The Adventures of Esplandián], by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, first published in 1508.

The book mentions that Map of the New Land discovered by Cortes the 3rd of May 1535.

Archivo General de Indias. Mexico, 6.

Amérique septentrionale, 1650.

N. Sanson d’Abbeville

3. cf. Portillo, Alvaro del, 1982. Descubrimientos y exploraciones en las costas de California, 1532-1650. Madrid. Ed. Rialp. pp. 130-132.

4. cf. Portillo, Alvaro del. Op. cit. p. 138.

5. cf. Portillo, Alvaro del. Op. cit. p. 156.

6. Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1998. Democracy in America. Hertfordshire. Wordsworth Ed. p. 371 7. As quoted in Norton, Jody. Summer 1992.

America by Jean Badrillard: Christ Turner.

In Discourse, vol. 14, No. 3. p. 167.

8. cf. Traugott, John. Oct-Dec 1961. A Voyage to Nowhere with Thomas More and Jonathan Swift: “Utopia” and the Houyhnhnms”. In The Sewanee Review, Vol. 69, No. 4. p. 559.

A. Holbein, Illustration of Utopia, 1518. The lower left-hand corner shows the traveller Raphael Hythlodaeus describing the island.

“...at the right hand of the Indias, there was an island called California, very near to the part of the Earthly Paradise, which was populated by black women, without man amongst them, almost like Amazons on their way of living(...)their weapons were made out of gold(...) in the whole island there was no other metal.”3 So, even though that land was not an island, the first conquerors found on it a kind of magical allure that brought them to call the new territory California. An enclave that, even before being discovered, was baptized with an epithet fruit of a chimerical illusion.4 But the 3rd of May of 15355, Cortez set foot in this land setting in motion the conquest of this mythical space from the west coast. Centuries went on and hundred of expeditions disclosed broad regions of the New World, transforming the terra incognita into a form of European’s world. The discoveries from both shorelines of the continent revealed vast territories in the map, but the movements still left a parenthesis in the atlas of America. There was still a virgin land left to be discovered, a frontier not easy to be trespassed. In front of them there was the last citadel, the American desert. In 1831, another illustrious visitor berthed at American lands. Alexis de Tocqueville embarked on a trip to discover the meaning of democracy in the New World. However, from his journey he didn’t only reach conclusions regarding the modern way the Americans regulated social relations—“the society of the modern world, which I have sought and which I seek to judge”6—, but his journey took him to the frontiers of this civilized world, leaving a deep impression on his memory: “At the extreme borders of the confederated states, where organized society and the wilderness meet, there is a population of bold adventurers who, to escape the poverty threatening them in their fathers’ home, have dare to plunge into the solitudes of America seeking a new homeland there...It is hard to imagine quite how incredibly quickly the ideas circulate in these empty spaces.I do not believe that there is so much intellectual activity in the most enlightened and populous districts of France.”7

There was an ironical connection between the homeless in the deserted spaces of the West and the connoisseur in the overcrowded streets of Paris. The revolution was not only something of the Parisians but also the vagrants of the New World. The “West” became the house of the deserters of the system. Whatever the cause that brought them there, the inhabitants of the not-yet civilized world projected upon the desert the illusion of a better future.If one were to follow that “West” farther west, the desert turned into the natural land of the people decided to start anew. Certainly that seems paradoxical: a territory governed by desolation, in which life becomes completely flimsy, ended up being the soil that received the seed of a new beginning. But Utopia has always been imbued with contradiction, starting by the first use of the word . Thomas More gave birth to this word through the lips of Raphael Hythloday.— the Portuguese sailor that the author is introduced in Antrewp and narrates More the story of the island that he found in the New World. Now, the last name of the character seems foreign to his Portuguese origin. And that is because Hythloday is an invention of More. The word means “nonsense” in Greek—part of the humorous tone of More’s book 8. So, Utopia has nonsensical quality in its

origin. On that account, this apparent contradiction of the outcast seeking a genesis in the desert follows the line of More’s Utopia.

Or the non-sensical poem of Lewis Carroll The Hunting of the Snark (1876), whose map could perfectly be the one of the desert. (Fig.1) The matter is that there is a point of sanity in the non-sense-ness, and the life in the desert has something of it. If not, something must be hidden under the surface of this barren land.

That desire of starting anew was the force that attracted many (inhabitants) during the twentieth century.9 With the myth of the golden west, the California Gold Rush brought new waves of civilization to the American wastes. But the dwellers that I am referring to are not the avid gold-miners. The adventurers of this period were not “colonizers” in strict sense, because they did not intend to bring civilization but precisely to break away from it. When the move to the West reached the Pacific, the myth looked realized. However, Los Angeles showed that the fulfilled utopia was hampering, and they decided to turn their backs and discovered again the desert behind them, that was forgotten because been surpassed by the technology of the iron horse. They go to the desert with the idea of new Exodus longing to begin a new life. In the interwar period, some of the first escapees of the metropolis started going to the Southwest “seeking solace and renewal in the purified, dry desert air and in the rituals performed by ‘primitives’ still living at one with nature and the gods”10. Mabel Dodge Luhan migrated in 1919 to the Indian Pueblo of Taos, looking for ‘Change’(with a capital C)11. A redemption that she found in Native American cultures. She dedicated her life(and money) to the defense of Indians’ rights. She and his followers12 saw in the Indians the incarnation of real American values of egalitarianism, environmental consciousness, religion and symbolic art. The same view of the canonical primeval man secundum Semper: “The first sign of human settlement and rest after(...)wandering in the desert is today, as when first men lost paradise, the setting up of the fireplace and the lighting of the reviving, warming and food preparing flame.13” Possibly the Indians found comical to be “discovered” again in the XXth century, for a third time (some people argue that the Vikings could have precede Columbus in the discovery of America).

9. In the famous 1909 edition of Baedeker’s travel guide to The United States: with excursions to Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Alaska, they announced the mysterious unexplored lands of the desert.

“We now cross the vast bed of a dry lake, and at (1737 M.) Mojave we join the track of the Southern Pacific Railway, which out train follows to(1805 M.) Bakersfield.(...)

The country between here and the mountain-ranges on the E. and S. is still almost unexplored[no bold in the original], and is inhabited by the Mariposa and Moquelumnan Indians, whose hand-work, in bowls and baskets, is highly valued by collectors.” (p. 525) 10. Ponte, Alessandra, 2014. Photographic Encounters in the American Desert. In The House of Light and Entropy. London. AA Publications. p. 45.

11. As she wrote in Edge of Taos Desert, the fourth and last volume of her autobiography. cf. Ibid. p.45 12. Mabel Dodge Luhan established a literary colony in Taos, and she moved to her cause influential figures from postwar America and European intellectual life: painters like Adrew Dasburg, Marsden Hartley and Georgia O’Keeffe; the photographers Paul Strand, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Laura Gilpin; the stage designer Robert Edmond Jones and Martha Graham; and the writers Willa Cather and Mary Austin. Luhan’s house was a vivid centre of culture in the desert. (cf. Ponte, Alessandra, 2014.

Op. cit. pp.45-46) 13. Semper, Gottfried, 1989. The Four Elements of Architecture, trans. by Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfrang Herrman, New York, Cambridge University Press. p. 102.

F.Ll. Wright at Ocatilla Camp. Arizona.

14. As quoted in Lind, Carla, 1996. The Lost Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright. Vanished Master Pieces. London. Thames and Hudson. p.2.

15. Smithson, Robert, 1996. Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Ed. Jack Flam.

Berkeley: Un. of California Press. p. 109.

16. Smithson makes his own the words of Michael Heizer in his famous essay A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects(1968) in which he promoted the work of the first wave of land art artist. (cf. Smithson, Robert, 1979. A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects, in The Writings of Robert Smithson. ed. Nancy Holt. New York. New York University Press. p. 83) 17. Ibid, p. 87 18. Ibid.

19. cf. Turner, Christopher, 2013. Desert Utopia. In Icon, no.119, May. pp.92-99.

20. Griffin, Jonathan. Jul/Aug 2013. Escape from New York, in Apollo, vol. 178, no 611. p.62-67.

O’Keeffe and friends at Monument Valley, Utah, 1937.

Hippies’ Geodesic Domes.

Gianfranco Gorgoni, Smithson Building Spiral Jetty, April 1, 1970.

Donal Judd at Marfa.

This sympathy for the naivety of the Indians was no so much shared by other desert lovers. Frank Lloyd Wright’s amazement was not related with the innocence of the bon sauvage: “the Indian Hopi house is no desert house with its plain walls jumping out to your eyes from the desert 40 miles or more away”. However, he also professed love for the desert after putting his foot on Arizona’s sand in 1928. In this trip, he received the commission of Dr. Alexander Chandler’s new resort, San Marcos-in-the-desert. For the completion of this project, he designed one of his most famous shelters in the desert, the Ocatilla Camp, that served as an on-site house for the architect and his apprentices.

Ocatilla was built by Wright and his assistants by their own hands. A zig-zag walled stockade surrounded the camp creating an esplanade for light tent structures of wood and canvas. He presented the project as a perfect harmony of architecture with this landscape: triangular structures resounding the mountain range, walls painted in dry pink sand color, light constructions as ocatilla flowers...But, at the end, Wright built a protected bastion against the destructive strength of the desert. In a lecture to students in 1950, Wright denounced the unrestrained tendency of Western civilization: “we have ruined more, wasted more, trampled on more than any civilization the world has ever seen—in a shorter time too14”. He went to the desert to avoid the contamination of that civilization. But, it seems ironical that precisely this work in the desert ended up trampled by the extreme conditions of his beloved land where he fled from the excesses of Western culture.

The destructive capacity of the desert was even more drastic with other figure of the desert. Years later, Robert Smithson starred one of the most influential migrations in the art world. In 1968, the American artist decided to escape, changing his studio in New York for the alfresco space of the Southwest. Smithson initiated a movement that led several artists to new practices influential for Land Art. He saw in the wild landscapes of Texas and Utah the perfect canvas for his interventions; the ground became his raw material. As he put it “When the artist goes to the desert he enriches his absence and burns off the water(paint) from his brain. The slush of the city evaporates from the artist’s mind as he installs his art”15 His movement was a denouncement of the city, as a hermit that testimonies with his withdrawal into the desert, preaching “the alternative to the absolute city system”.16 The “deliverance from the confines of the studio”, movement that he initiated, “frees the artist to a degree from the snares of craft and the bondage of creativity.”17 The liberation from the constraints of civilization would bring the artist to the release of his works. “Our culture has lost its sense of death, so it can kill both mentally and physically, thinking all the time that it is establishing the most creative order possible.”18 However, tragically, in his run away from the demise in civilization, death was waiting for him at his Eden place. His body ended up in the sands of Amarillo,Texas.

But the art world had already put his eyes in the desert, and some other artist followed the strong ideas of Smithson, using the desert as a creative laboratory. In 1972 Donald Judd bought a property in a desert place also, like California, named after a fiction. His house in Chinati is located in Marfa, town founded in 1883, named after the family servant from The Brothers Karamazov—and all because the wife of the railway overseer happened to be reading Dostoevsky at the time19. He moved there from his workshop in New York’s SoHo disillusioned with the glib and harsh Manhattan art scene. His son recalls that “Don never liked New York. He lived in New York because

you have to, if you wanted to be an artist. He thought New York was too loud and it was too claustrophobic. If you live in New York you can never see the horizon. 21”The panorama of an uncontaminated land was the perfect pale background in which to place the essential geometry of his works. Almost a primeval space for creation. In that sense, the desert is not that far from Judeo-christian idea of creation. The first versicle of the Genesis, the beginning of the beginning, narrates: 1 In the beginning God created heaven and earth.

2 Now the earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep, with a divine wind sweeping over the waters.

The desert is the genuine place for creation. Most notably, the Creator of the Genesis organizes the World from the desert. And the space of creation remains along the Bible. In the Exodus, God creates His peoples in the desert. There He also gives instructions for the Tent in which He will dwell. God creates in the desert, and gives this power to Man. And Man goes back to the desert to create.

For Christian culture, the East is Jerusalem—the beginning, the dawn light—while the West is what lies ahead, the unknown future. The Eastern facade is the entrance to the temple and represents the birth of Christ; the Western one the Second Coming20. But something fascinating happens in the Sistine Chapel. The Creation and the Last Judgment touch each other in the Western edge. A very specific encounter that hypostatizes Western conception of the desert : the place where everything started and where everything ends.

Creation and destruction.

The “formless void” to be filled is what, at the end, the retreat one is looking for. The American desert has historically been considered by the Old World as a white canvas to test new ideas. A landscape in which to place the object and see it un-contaminated, in its entire purity. The space for creation. A thought that also has colonized American visions. As Paul Shepard put it: “If ideas have habitats in which they originate and prosper, then the desert edge might be called the home of Western thought.22” The movement of running away from the city to the remote desert to create anew from scratch.

But in the last decades, the border of this tabula rasa has become extremely easy to trespass. What it used to be distant has got close. The desert now begins at the edge of your house’s plot.

The limit is still existing, but not fixed. Movements of irrigation and desertification compose a kind of tug-of-war that remarks the tense situation between city and its other face; the stress between the civilized and the virginal. Ultimately, the border between the existing and the myth is easily transgressed. In this last tension is in which the journey started, led only by an album of photographs and two travel guides, through ideas whose home is precisely homelessness.

Stills from Paris, Texas by W. Wenders, 1984.

21. cf. Solnit, Rebecca, 1996. Scapeland, in Wilkes, Anne, Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach. Boston.

Bulfinch Press. p. 39-40.

22. Shepard, Paul, 1982. Nature and Madness.

San Francisco. Sierra Club Books. p.47

FIG. 2.

Richard Misrach. Window. 1982.

Canto The Terrain.

The Creation of Adam. Michelangelo.

Sistine Chapel.

Travelogue

At the beginning there is not that much. Light. Complete overabundance of light. My eyes can barely distinguish the bluish and pale purples blurred amidst the sparse mist. It takes time to unfold what lies in front of you when facing this luminescence. And once recomposed, everything seems misleading. There is not—the mythically promised— straight horizon; only the broken jagged blue silhouette of the Sierras enclosing you. The mountain range seems so far that you could die on the try to reach it. And at the same time, the luminous dazzle brings it so close that you could cut your fingers on its sharp edges. A hysterical reaction produced by the paradox of being in such a vast space and nonetheless feel so trapped. No exit, completely surrounded by the background. With that vanishing prospect of no exit, I decide to close my travel guide. In front of me the weird sensation when scrutinizing its cover. My vade mecum was published in 1982. The background of the image seems pretty conventional: two strata of mountain ranges, highly moulded by the intense shadows, skirting the limpid sky. The cloud-less vacuum is only distorted by the author and his work: P. Reyner Banham(in a light coral red, waved by the undulated peaks), Scenes in America Deserta (in white, crowning the volume as a legend in a Roman frieze). However, flipping the book, the image turns surreal. The background is filled with the bizarre presence in the foreground of the figure of a “modern conqueror”. His garments are autochthon: brown leather boots and jeans with turquoise-studded belt, cowboy shirt bejeweled with shoestring tie, and the Stetson hat consummating the paraphernalia 23. His hands grasp tightly the aluminum steed—a Bickerton portable bike— while his eyes are fixed in the vanishing point of his journey. The adventurer hero is the writer himself: Peter Reyner Banham, historian-lover of bloody-mindedness-critic of Architecture. In the interior of the book, his travels in America are unfolded in a labyrinthian structure. His story starts at Baker, CA, a desert town some a hundred and seventy miles northwest of Los Angeles. It was a blazing day on February, 196824. “We had not intended to go desert viewing”, Banham recounts, “we intended to visit Las Vegas to enjoy and photograph the famous

23. Tim Street-Porter, author of the shot, commenting on Banham’s attire: “I mean, he was kind of overdoing the whole look—Stetson, cowboy shirt(...), the whole effect contrasting bizarrely with his East Anglian accent.”(Pedro Ignacio Alonso & Thomas Weaver in conversation with Tim Street-Porter, 2011. AA Files. no 62. London. AA Publications. p. 30.)

24. cf. Banham, Reyner. 1982. Scenes in America Deserta. Salt Lake City.

Peregrine Smith Books. p.7.

Cover of Scenes in America Deserta. Banham, Reyner. Cambridge. The MIT Press. 1989.

25. Ibid. p.7. It seems relevant that Banham sets the beginning of his trip in February 1968, only one month before the publication of Architectural Review’s article A Significance for A&P Parking Lots or Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown— prequel or base of the influential book Learning From Las Vegas, published in 1972. Even more relevant is the fact that Banham, eminent historian of architecture, does not mention these authors at all, when Las Vegas is present in many passages of the book. What Banham sees in that city is the trial of how far his notions of a transformed, or controlled, environment can go(cf. Whiteley, Nigel, 2002. Reyner Banham. Historian of the Immediate Future. London. The MIT Press. p. 224), more than Las Vegas of an architecture of the semiotics(Venturi).

“It may sound strange, almost blasphemous, to say so, but it is Las Vegas that one comes nearest to seeing gross matter transformed into etherial substance by the power of light”(Banham, Reyner, 1975. Age of the Masters: A Personal View of Modern Architecture. New York. John Wiley & Sons. p. 62) 26. Ibid. p. 158.

27. Ibid. p.8.

28. Ibid. p.11.

29. Banham calls this kind of experiences more a kind of Saint Paul’s conversion on his way to Damascus. “...not upon the road to Damascus, but on the road between the Best Western Motel and Denny’s Restaurant in Williams, Arizona.”(Banham, Reyner, 1982. Op. cit. p. 15) 30. Banham, Reyner, 1982. Op. cit. p. 11.

31. cf. Ibid. p. 228 32. Ibid. p. 228 33. Desert Cantos: Photographs of the American Desert was an traveling exhibition scheduled in Palm Springs(JanuaryMarch, 1987), Oakland(April-July, 1987), Philadelphia(October, 1987), Santa Barbara(February-April, 1988) Wellington, New Zealand(March-May, 1988) and Toledo, Ohio(May-August, 1989). cf. Misrach, Richard, 1987. Catalogue of Desert Cantos. Albuquerque. The University of New Mexico Press. p.6

light.25” It is in this lost village where they found “strange people and strange vehicles” that called the narrator’s attention. Probably, at that point, Banham starts wondering “the most engaging of all desert questions: If this is a desert, what are all these people doing here?26” He decides to turn off the main stream that leads to Las Vegas and get into a trifling trail that takes him to “a location that has no name on any map.27” In this terra incognita— un-mapped land—Banham comes across one of the most striking scenes, “a vision of the desert’s ultimate splendor.28” He finds himself facing a tableau full of subtle transitions of colours decomposing the view in “ethereal internal luminescence” of a mist amid the mountain range and the beholder. Banham faces a kind of fata morgana that he considered as his baptism29 as “desert freak”. From that moment on, he explains: I would be tempted to admit that romantic memory might have played tricks with me, were it not that it is all recorded, however dimly, on the film I exposed that morning. Mine eyes dazzled, my sensibility was transfixed, my consciousness transformed. By being in the right place at the right time I had seen something so far beyond all my previous experience and knowledge that I knew already that I would never be the same again.(...) I knew that I was a desert freak.30 The event leaves Banham in shock. His well-read sensible English background was unable to give response to the luminous spectacle of the desert. The aesthetics of the desert are a mystery that hath Banham in thrall31. And the book is the desperate search of the author for an answer. The different “scenes” follow a structure like a navigation in a maze that opens view to landscapes reached through un-blacktopped roads, godforsaken human interventions in the wasteland, inscrutable panoramas... to return—as in a déjà vu—, in the last chapter, to the original scene and reflect on the desert splendor he found in that ‘illumination’. However, he concludes completely trapped by the arid hillocks. His journey remains lost in the sand, with his conclusion: I have not done what one has been supposed to do in deserts ever since the time of Moses—I have not ‘found myself’. If anything I have lost myself, in the sense that I now feel that I understand myself less than I did before.32

Nevertheless, even if the travel guide only leads to oblivion, the journey is worth the reading. Banham demonstrates a subtle sensibility through eloquent descriptions of the desert landscape. There are fantastic passages in which the author presents the scenes with a rich lexicon of colours and qualities of surfaces. At the same time deep and pleasant, it is a text that could be subtitled: ‘revelation and reflections of a desert-freakism convert’.

Like a gospel of a preacher in the desert, every chapter is introduced by a ‘Revelation’ giving way to contemplations on what the desert means for him and what its status is. One of the first disciples of his sermons was Richard Misrach. A photographer based in Los Angeles, Misrach is found in the American Desert developing a research between 1981-85. The result of his scrutiny was put together in 1987 in an exhibition titled Desert Cantos33. In the catalogue of the show, Misrach acknowledged that “Reyner Banham’s Scenes from America Deserta was a major source of inspiration during the course of this project.34” The name Cantos, comes from the body of work of Ezra Pound35, in which “each canto—each series or subsection—

Richard Misrach. San Gorgonio Pass. 1981.

although independent, adds another dimension to the understanding and definition36” of the whole, in this case, the understanding of ‘desertness’37.

However, Misrach is not a disciple of only one master. His research is deeply rooted in many discussions of the time. His approach to the desert as landscape is influenced by the questions presented in the mid-seventies in the realm of photography. New Topographics.

Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape was an exhibition curated by William Jenkins at George Eastman House, Rochester in 1975. It presented 168 works of ten artists. Even thought the show itself was not a blockbuster, it is regarded in the history of the discipline as a turning point in landscape photography towards its use as reflection on contemporary society38. It supposed a paradigmatic shift of the sub-genre of landscape photography away from the sublime interpretations of photographers like Timothy O’Sullivan, Ansel Adams or Edward Weston, switching the attention to the mundane39. Jenkins describes the works in the introduction of the catalogue as “non-judgmental” in their character40; nonetheless, however of the approach to the object—distant vision, non-intromission of the photographer, distant approach—,the portrayed scenes were interpreted as critiques to the conditions of the man-altered landscape and their repercussion in environment, “as an ecological, social, or political commentary41”. The background of the whole exhibition was not the desert itself—as it is in the case of Misrach—, but the presence of photographers such as Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal shooting in New Mexico, Colorado and California made the American desert the passive subject of their plates. They presented a Southwestern landscape in state of nascent colonization. The urban sprawl is portrayed in state of becoming. Sites under construction, foundations of new structures, electricity pylons, point the wounds in the natural soil and foresee the future transformation of the landscape. The long term sedimentation of the desert plays the counter-part to the rapid spread of housing and industry in that years. They present an interesting reflection on landscape exploited by Man, but they lack the self-reflection on this environment polluted by the presence of camera-man.

34. Misrach, Richard, 1987. Op. cit. p.101.

Misrach’s erratum in citing the work of Banham—the correct title is Scenes in America Deserta and not “from” America Deserta—it is not simply anecdotical.

The fact that Misrach was born in LA provides him with a kind of “native” vision of the desert—even though, it seems that nobody is “from” the desert; there is always a feeling of not-belonging in the beholders of the desert. The actual title of Banham’s book points to the idea that the desert is not a place where one is born, but also, negates the idea that the desert is only a space of frontier which one is always trespassing and never is “in”.

35. Precisely Pound represents the antipode of the movement into the desert that we have been talking by now. Schwartz tells us that ‘American culture was an insupportable desert from which Pound(...) found it necessary to depart.”(Schwartz, Delmore, 1970. Ezra Pound’s Very Useful Labors. In Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz. ed. Donald A. Dike and David H. Zucker. Chicago.)

36. Misrach, Richard, 1987. Op. Cit. p.95.

37. For the original exhibition of 1987, Misrach had composed four cantos—The Terrain, The Event, The Flood and The Fires—, each one related with one of the elements of nature. The body of work has continued expanding and there are more than twenty different cantos.

38. cf. Salvesen, Britt, 2010. New Topographics. In New Topographics. George Eastman House, Center for Creative Photography and Steidl Publ. Germany.

39. A more documentary-style vision of Walker Evans was one of the most influential sources for the photographers of New Topographics.

40. cf. Nordström, Alison, 2010. After New: Thinking about New Topographics from 1975 to the Present. In ibid. p. 73.

41. Ibid. p. 73.

Richard Misrach. Cover of the catalogue of Desert Cantos. Univ. of New Mexico. 1987.

Timothy O’Sullivan. Headlands north of the Colorado River Plateau. 1872.

Robert Adams. TractHousing, north Glenn and Thorton, Colorado, 1973, Stephen Shore. Wilde Street and Colonization Avenue, Dryden, Ontario, August 15, 1974 42. Garry Winogrand participated in an exhibition at Eastman House, previous to New Topographics, that could be considered predecessor in photographing man-made landscapes. Contemporary Photographers Toward a Social Landscape, 1966. Curated by Nathan Lyons, he introduced the catalogue saying: “This broadening of the source of experience could imply that our concept of “landscape” should be revaluated from the classical reference point of natural environment to include as a referent the interaction of a “nexus between man and man, and man and nature.”(Lyons, Nathan, 1966. Introduction to Contemporary Photographers Toward a Social Landscape. Horizon Press in collaboration with Eastman House, Rochester, New York.p. 30.)

43. In 1900, Charles Rockwood was commissioned the transformation of a vast uninhabited land into the “Imperial Valley” by a system of canals to re-direct the Colorado River. In 1905, an unexpected flood destroyed the structure, transforming what it tried to be a new Eden from the desert into a wasteland.

44. Misrach, Richard, 1987. Op. cit. p.96.

45,46. Ibid.

47. An original appreciation of Victor Hugo that Banham puts in Frank Lloyd Wright’s mouth. cf. Banham, Reyner, 1982. Op. cit. p. 16 Frank Gohlke. Irrigation Canal, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1974. From New Topographics.

Although the theoretical background of Misrach was more linked with new topographics, his Desert Cantos manifested essential differences in the composition of the pictures. While the new topographics shows an interest in non-conventional framings, changes in the point of view, attention to the banal...Misrach is more concerned with traditional ways of composition—an emphasis on symmetry, equilibrium and centrality of the captured subject. He looks for the beautification of the scene while new topographics presented a more humdrum aesthetic. In his election of scenery and composition, his cantos could be more linked to the work of Garry Winogrand42, William Eggleston or Joel Sternfeld that also approached the American desert from similar eyes.

Misrach’s cantos portray the paradoxical fragility of the vast space as the desert. The intervention of human being on the desert is minimal in origin, but it triggers the catastrophe. For example, the canto titled The Flood shows how the equilibrium is easily broken. In this series, Misrach documents the havoc after an unexpected inundation that destroyed the canals of irrigation in Salton Sink43. In his shoots, there is an absence of the trigger—only flooded ruins—, only catastrophe. In the tradition of O’Sullivan, human being was flimsy in front of the sublimity of nature, but Misrach turns it the other way around with the power of the four elements—each of his four cantos correspond to one—under his control. As he sees it, “(...)the desert may serve as a backdrop for the problematic relationship between man and environment44”. The wasteland he portrays rejects the “stereotyped and clichéd45” idea of the desert as unknown land—the land of the new beginning—by presenting the actual “‘civilized’ cultural landscape of America—the result of man’s conquest of the last great physical and psychological barrier.46” Desert Cantos states the idea that ‘the desert is now everything but deserted’. In doing that, Misrach follows Banham in the negation of the desert as the place “where God is and man is not.”47 But in stating the same judgment, their response is very different. While Misrach presents a critique against the “invasion”—a kind of ecologically conscious defense—, Banham is fascinated by the human interventions48. The British is not aligned with, what is called in Scenes in America Deserta, the “get-them-bums-outta-my-backyard syndrome49” that tries to prevent any human contamination in the

“pure desert”. That is the reason why Banham decides to recall his ideas about the desert—correcting Misrach— in the essay he wrote for the catalogue of Desert Cantos. His The Man-Mauled Desert50 precedes the actual plates of Misrach in the catalogue. In it, Banham sets the atmosphere to be found in the pictures: “The desert that Richard Misrach presents here is the other[original italics] desert, the real desert that we mortals can actually visit—stained and trampled, franchised and fenced, burnt, flooded, grazed, mined, exploited, and laid waste.” Not the desert of his imaginary that he presented in his scenes. But still a desert that, for him, “deserves close attention that we are normally too squeamish to lavish on it, because there is great visual beauty there still.51” For Banham, not all human action in the desert should be cause of scandal and denouncement because “some humans(...) can make the desert better by their interventions.52” And he turns to remind that Misrach is intervening in the desert as well.

Even with the apparent hygiene of the action, photography is one more human intrusion on the wilderness. As much pollution as the ones the photographer is denouncing. However Banham remains in his fascination with human works in the desert, without entering in the issue of human trampling the landscape.

Maybe that was because the topic of environment caused him some troubles back in 1970. It was 19 of June, closing day of the International Design Conference at Aspen(IDCA). Banham was presiding the conference which that year was focused on ‘Environment by Design’—something more than natural after his publication only some months before of The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment53.

The discussion the previous days had been tense. The members of the American liberal design establishment, promoters of the conference, had to faced the new trends of ecological consciousness brought by an assortment of environmentalist, designers and architecture students54. But in this closing session, the last word was for the guest country. The French delegation—composed by members of The Atelier Populaire and Utopie group—was ready to polemicize. Françoise Jollant-Braunstein made his way to the stage, startled by the language barrier and the presence of such an audience, but still ready to fight the Americans55. However, Braunstein was only the ventriloquist. The sharp speech was actually words of Jean Baudrillard56. “The French

Garry Winogrand. Apollo II Moon Shot, Cape Kennedy, Florida, 1969.

Garry Winogrand. White Sands, 1964

48. Specially in the chapter “Marks on the Landscape” Banham analyzes his fascination with human artifacts in the desert landscape.

49. Banham, Reyner, 1982. Op. cit. p. 197.

50. Banham, Reyner, 1987. The Man-Mauled Desert. In Misrach, Richard. Op. cit. p.1-6. The title of the essay resembles the subtitle of New Topographics. Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape.

51. Banham, Reyner, 1987. Op. Cit. p.1 52. Ibid. p. 2. Banham qualifies Misrach intervention in the desert—because, even apparently higenic, photography is one more human intrusion on the wilderness—as making it better.

53. Banham, Reyner, 1969. The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment. Chicago. University of Chicago.

54. cf. Beck, Martin, 2012. The Aspen Complex. Berlin. Sterberg Press. p.111 55. Françoise Barré, member of the French group explained how “we thought we would teach them a lesson(we were under the effect of May ’68).”(Quéheillard, Jeanne. Memories of Aspen 1970. In Rosa B, 5th issue(internet version: http://www. rosab.net/) 56. Jean Baudrillard was decided by the rest of the French delegation to write a “declaration”, their only intervention in the IDCA. (cf. C.R.É.É. magazine, NovemberDecember, 1970. Paris. Translated by Patricia Chen for Rosa B, 2013. internet version http://www.rosab.net)

Richard Misrach. Diving Board, Salton Sea, 1983 Canto The Flood.

group(...)has decided not to bring a positive contribution57”Braunstein left clear. And he continued pointing, “The burning question of Design and Environment has neither suddenly fallen from the heavens nor spontaneously risen from the collective consciousness: It has its own history. Professor Banham has clearly shown the moral and technical limits and the illusions of Design and Environment practice. He didn’t approach the social and political definition of this practice. It is not by accident that all the Western governments have now launched(...)this new crusade, and try to mobilize people’s conscience by shouting apocalypse.”

57. Baudrillard, Jean, 1970. The Environmental Witch-Haunt. Statement by the French Group. In The Aspen Papers: Twenty Years of Design Theory. Banham, Reyner(editor), 1974. London. Pall Mall Press. p.208.

58. Ibid. p. 208.

59. Ibid. p. 209.

60. Ibid. p. 210.

61. cf. C.R.É.É. magazine, November-December, 1970. Op. cit.

62. Banham, Reyner(editor), 1974. Op. cit. p.222.

Reyner Banham in the IDCA, 1970.

This way, Baudrillard was correcting both the establishment and the hippies ‘dropouters’ by asking them to rethink the whole base of environmental consciousness. He continued, “...ultimately the real issue[of environment] is not the survival of the human species but the survival of political power.58” Baudrillard criticized the discussion of ecology seeing that “once again, this holy union created in the name of environment is nothing but the holy union of the ruling classes of the rich nations.59” The new trend of Mother Nature consciousness was another strategy of political power, a new witch-hunt to control pollution. In Vietnam “the fight against communist pollution”, at home “the fight against water pollution.” And the peroration of the speech closed with “Aspen is the Disneyland of environment and design(...) a Utopia produced by a capitalist system.60”

The harangue was greeted with a polite applause, followed by absolute silence. No discussion. Only silence. Braunstein abandoned the stage with a sensation of defeat. They didn’t generate the expected debate61. However, Banham was deeply shaken. He was specifically mentioned at the beginning of the speech. The historian was blamed precisely for failing in realizing the history of the environmental issue, with its social and political implications. The wound was deep, as he recalls in the introduction of The Aspen Papers(1974): “as chairman of that stormy last session...I could suddenly feel all these changes running together in a spasm of bad vibrations that shook the conference.62” And that was because that speech supposed a symbolic moment in Banham’s career. Baudrillard’s words endorsed the idea that Banham passed from having a “guru-like status among sections

of the avant-garde63” to be considered among the supporters of the Establishment. Banham deemed it as “the most bruising experience of my life. And I am just beginning to recover now.64”

That discussion of Aspen only remained in environmental issues, but still it is very relevant to our journey because it introduces the relation between Banham and Baudrillard. A polemic that would continue being at each other’s throats, with their opinions on the Pompidou Centre65. Ultimately reaching its most catty in my two travel guides. Banham writes Scenes in America Deserta in 1982, and four years after, Baudrillard follows the call of the desert, and publishes Amerique66. In this response, it only seems ironic that the cover of the English translation of Amerique ended up being presided by a photograph of Richard Misrach67, Banham’s ‘first disciple’.

America narrates Baudrillard’s reflections in his journey through that country. New York, Salt Lake City, Washington, Los Angeles...are all contemplated over a background of sand. The idea of desert goes through the whole book68:“...for us, the whole of America is a desert.69”. And this idea is seen for this peripatetic as a critique of American culture. The desert where everything ends, with no other exit than the last chapter, titled ‘Desert for Ever’, and its death warrant: “This country is without hope.70” It seems ironical that this critique to American culture was published only three years before ‘the other half of the World collapsed’. The passages on the desert are the most rhapsodic fragments of the book following the lyric idea of the desert as white canvas, a void landscape to be filled with one’s own thinking.

American culture is heir to the deserts, but the deserts here are not part of a Nature defined by contrast with the town. Rather they denote the emptiness, the radical nudity that is the background of every human institution.

At the same time, they designate human institutions as a metaphor of that emptiness and the work of man as the continuity of the desert, culture as a mirage and as the perpetuity of the simulacrum.71 In facing the covers of my two travel guides, it seems more evident their relation. Almost identical backdrop: the canonical image of the American Desert used as background. But a very different response to the landscape. Whereas Banham, through his cultural sunglasses,

63. Whiteley, Nigel, 2002. Reyner Banham.

Historian of the Immediate Future. London. The MIT Press. p. 264. The Banham of Theory and Design in the First Machine Age(1960), The New Brutalism(1966) and The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment(1969).

64. Banham quoted in John Maule McKean, “The Last of England?—Part 2.” Building Design(August 27, 1976), pp. 26-27.

65. In the same year both write about that building. Baudrillard considered it a “monument to the games of mass simulation, the Pompidou Center functions as an incinerator absorbing all the cultural energy and devouring it” in his L’Effet Beaubourg(1977), while Banham characterized as “the only public monument of international quality the ‘70s have produced.”(Enigma of the Rue dy Renard, Architectural Review, May 1977).

And in his book Megastructure(1981), “the most comprehensive standing memorial to the aspirations and style of the megastructure”—in fact, this building is the summit of the book.

66. Baudrillard, Jean, 1986. Amerique. Paris.

B. Grasset.

67. Baudrillard, Jean, 1988. America.

Translated by Chris Turner. New York.

Verso. The photograph used in the cover is titled ‘Waiting, E.A.F.B., 1983’, that belongs to the canto ‘The Event’. There is not direct evidence of the intervention of Baudrillard in the design of the cover of Verso, but in this I follow the idea of Richard Poirier of “if not actually initiated by the author, the design must have been done to please him, intent as he is on the primacy of the visual image.”(Poirier, Richard, 1989. America Deserta. In London Review of Books, Vol. 11. No. 4, 16 February 1989.)

68. In fact, ‘desert’ is the most used word, 124 times in 128 pages that compose the book.

69. Baudrillard, Jean, 1988. Op. Cit. p.99.

70. Ibid. p. 123.

71. Ibid. p. 63.

Jean Baudrillard and Jean Aubert in the IDCA, 1970.

Placing the American flag on the Moon.

Neil Armstrong, left, and Buzz Aldrin, right.

Taken from the Eagle Lunar Module. 1969.

Challenger STS-6 Crew photos.

Landed at Edwards Air Force Base. 1983

72. Baudrillard, Jean, 1988. Op. Cit. p. 5.

73. cf. Ibid. p. 86.

74. Banham dedicate a long passage to talk about Kitt Peak solar telescope. He considers it “the most marvelous and moving of all mankind’s works in the desert.”(184-185). He only discusses its monumental presence in the landscape, without any mention—along the six pages he dedicates to the telescope—to ‘outer worlds’ connections other than its relation with arcane Indian desires of trapping the image of the Sun. cf.

Banham,Reyner, 1982. Op.Cit. pp.184-89

Cover of Scenes in America Deserta. Banham, Reyner. Cambridge. The MIT Press. 1989.

sees in the desert the place of lightheartedness, a new beginning, a place in which to push forward his une architecture autre, Baudrillard sermonizes “I sought the finished form of the future catastrophe of the social in geology, in that upturning of depth that can be seen in the striated spaces, the reliefs of salt and stone(...)the desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, and ecstatic form of disappearance.72” If Banham’s desert is the renovation of life, Baudrillard’s one illustrates the other face, the death, the end of the end. Banham and Baudrillard preach the two extremes of what to be found in the desert: a pure tabula rasa for a new beginning—emptiness as life to come—and the paradox of the end and catastrophe—emptiness as death. The womb and the grave. Genesis and Apocalypse.

Misrach’s photograph in the cover synthesizes Baudrillard’s idea of the desert. In the center of the frame, the American flag presides the camp. The centrality of American culture in his discussion.

Recalling the settling pioneers, the improvised bivouac is congregated around the Stars and Stripes; for Baudrillard, the symbol of the selfpublicizing of the finest successful enterprise, the US73. This ensign, centuries ago, colonized this land, and since July 20 1969, it is doing the same in the “new deserts”—as the Moon and the vast emptiness of the outer Space. The photograph was taken in the landing of a Challenger space shuttle in 1983 at the Edwards Air Force Base, CA. In the last fifty years, once American culture has civilized what appears un-domesticable, the Southwest has also become the door to new expansions. The space is the next terra incognita to conquer. The start and finish line of the Space Race. This condition is not coming only through takeoff and landing of space shuttles, but also with a network of solar telescopes74, antennas and other measuring devices that allow assessing any extraterrestrial activity. What used to be the wild void in the map has now become the space of control and disclosure of the mysteries of Space. The waste lands of the Moon are repeating the cycle that the New World lived in the 1500s. Neil Armstrong, a new Cortez.

The oddness of the image comes precisely by the normality of the characters. The surrounding landscape is what de-contextualizes this picnic scenery, transforming it into a dantesque joke. Two of them

just turn to welcome us with a cup of filtered coffee, while other two mysteriously point their binoculars to the distant horizon—in the absurdity of looking one each other. It is as if, as Baudrillard mentions, “Americans end up not seeing each other” because of the indifference generated by the slogan ‘I will respect you doing your staff and you will respect mine’75. The rest of the paraphernalia generates an improvised scenario under which lays the desert76. This works as a metaphor of Baudrillard’s idea of American culture as absolute construction—“Utopia achieved77”—under which there is only the dust of the desert. The desert is there as a “primeval scene78”—for dust you are and to dust you shall return79. Los Angeles, Washington, Salt Lake City, New York, all simulacra80over a barren waste land...“Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, London, unreal.81”

But the key point of the images is in the centre of it. The blurring red figure of the kid kneeling to play in the arid ground provides the image with a touch of spontaneity—a sensation of snap-shop in motion. The image appears as a casual documentation of an unexpected shot, as if it was not constructed. But, in fact, the image has nothing of unplanned. First of all, the cover of America crops a substantial part of Misrach’s original, in which another group of ‘daytrippers’ breaks the sensation of isolation. Secondly, Misrach usually shots with a large format camera mounted in optical bench, with all the apparatus its use implies. In ‘getting into the dark cloth’, the photographer makes more evident that every image is an internalization.

The act of framing codifies the subject of the shot. Even the desert— what for Baudrillard would be the primal scene—, is domesticated.

What is there is not longer the untouched vast space, but its encompassment in the limits of the visor. 82The large format camera makes more evident that photography is the generation of an interior; the one of the camera obscura. And, with Roland Barthes, turn our attention from the exterior—the portrayed landscape—to the interior, the camera lucida. But this interior does not only remain in the enclosed chamber of technology, but goes even deeper: the photographs “carry me back somewhere in myself(...)Looking at these landscapes of predilection, it is as if I were certain of having been there or of going there”. In last instance, what the photograph is pointing at is not the shot object,

Space shuttle landed at Edwards Air Force Base, CA

Photograph of Kitt Peak Solar Telescope by Banham

75. cf. Baudrillard, Jean, 1988. Op. Cit. p.94.

76. cf. Ibid. p.69.

77. cf. Ibid. Chapter 4. pp.75-106.

78. Ibid. p. 63. and p.126.

79. Gn 3, 19.

80. “America is a giant hologram”. cf. Baudrillard, Jean, 1988. Op. cit. p.29.

81. Eliot, T.S., 1922. The Waste Land.

London, 367. T.S. Eliot makes the same critique of characterizing the modern metropolis as unreal in his famous The Waste Land.

82. cf. Barthes, Roland, 2000. Camera Lucida.

London. Vintage. p. 39-40.

Richard Misrach. Waiting, E.A.F.B., 1983.

Canto The Waiting.

Cover of America(Translated by Chris Turner. Jean Baudrillard. New York. Verso.

1988.

Richard Misrach. Window. 1982.

Canto The Terrain.

Richard Misrach shoting with a 8x10 camera in the desert.

Walker Evans by Peter Seker, 1935-1936 83. cf. Pedro Ignacio Alonso & Thomas Weaver in conversation with Tim Street-Porter, 2011. AA Files. no 62. London. AA Publications. p. 31.

84. cf. AA Files, no. 62. Op. cit. p.35.

85. After Scenes in America Deserta, Banham only published A Concrete Atlantis.(1986) 86. cf. Banham, Reyner, 1981. A Grid on Two Farthings. In Design by Choice. Ed. by Penny Sparke. London. Academy Editions. pp.119-120 87. Poirier, Richard, Feb. 1989. America Deserta. In London Review of Books. Vol. 11 No. 4. p. 3-6.

88. Vargas Llosa, Mario and Damgaard Liander, Johanna, 2005. A Novel for the Twenty-First Century. In Hardvard Review.

No. 28. pp. 125-136.

89. cf. Ibid. p.7.

90. cf. Ibid. p.15.

Film still of BBC 2 programme Meet the British, 1975.

object, but at the very interior of the contemplating subject. This way, the desert is any more something external, but an interiorized landscape. And that is the way that the foreigners of the American Desert come to know this place. Once photographed, the desert becomes habitable; not anymore a terra incognita, a white canvas or a crossing landscape. It is not that far from the work of the architect that generates an interior; the placement of a window and behind it, a room.

(Fig. 2)

In Banham’s cover, the setting is more evident. We can see it overall in the amount of shots that Tim Street-Porter conserves. In the final one, the hard sunlight illuminates the face of the cowboy, casting a defined shadow in the limpid arid ground. It is the most ironic of his scenes83. A paradoxical mix of farcical comic tinge with an elegiac quality in the solitude of a man in the middle of the desert. How someone fundamentally social decides to portrait himself in the vast solitude of the wilderness84? This mestizo ambience of mourn and joy enfolds what was nearly the last book of Banham85. But the solitude of the cover takes our journey back to Banham’s point: the American Desert is all but deserted. In posing with his foldable Bickerton in the desert, it is as if he was saying: London and the Mojave are almost the same86. But on seeing his portraits with the bicycle in both places, it is obvious that they are not. The sharpness of his define silhouette against the aseptic background is the antipode of his blurred contour in London. To the desert one goes looking for illuminating skies, not the sunless days of the City. But, at the same time, he is right, London has something of desertness. His portraits in the city present deserted streets. Even T.S. Eliot dedicated his most remarkable poem—The Waste Land—to the capital seeing as a desert, depicting the sterility of Modern life in its streets. But Banham turns the idea the other way around: it is not that London seems like a desert, but that the Mojave is like London. Here it is another big difference between my two travel guides. While Banham presents a desert full of people, Baudrillard does not introduce a single person87. Who are the ‘lunatics’ inhabiting such a waste land?

At this point of the trip I decided to read this relationship between Banham and Baudrillard in the key of my Spanish library: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. The most known scene of Cervantes’ book helped me to understand the differences between the British and the French. The passage of the giants/windmills in which the hidalgo Don Quixote—misled by his madness, product of reading too many chivalric romances— charges against a group of windmills thinking them as the mythical creatures, ending in the calamitous result of a minor catastrophe; while his squire does not stop repeating: “They are windmills”. They face the very same reality, but with a different response to it. As Vargas Llosa put it, “Don Quixote de La Mancha, is first and foremost an image(...)”, almost a pure abstraction—don Quixote the line and Sancho the dot— “which portrays the human condition in all its contradictory and fascinating truth.88” And Banham and Baudrillard seem to encapsulate the two extremes that configure the European condition in facing the desert. In Banham’s book there are characters, but their presence has the quality of being a bit surreal. A guy driving up in the Death Valley with a pig as cargo; a bunch of desert freaks ready with their buggy vehicles in a service station of Interstate 1589; a frustrated sadistic psychopathic ex-combatant of Vietnam having breakfast at Denny’s, Williams, Arizona90; a desert loner—known as the Nipton Troll— that monitors the

world’s meteorology from his headquarters in a culvert under Nipton Road where he feeds the coyotes(that he considers vegetarians)91; “an elderly lady in a print dress and wool cardigan riding a tall dignified English bicycle,(...)the sort that has an elaborate tracery of cordage to keep Edwardian skirts out of the back wheel and a wicker basket on the front of the handlebars92”, heading his pedalling south about ten miles out of Shoshone, CA; and so on. After starting the book with a shining baptism, the narrative turns into a kind of visionary fiction in which Banham is delighted in his desert freak condition.

The other face is Baudrillard, with a more down-to-earth sancho-panza vision. The kind of narrative of ‘man complaining of the world in his pure solitariness of the desert’. A truant loner preaching dearth: “what is arresting here is the absence of all these things— both the absence of architecture in the cities, which are nothing but long tracking shots of signals, and the dizzying absence of emotion and character in the faces and bodies.93” The continuation of the praxis of preaching in the desert, a tradition that started with John the Baptist—“A voice of one that cries in the desert”(Jn 1:23)—, and that between the prophet and Jean Baudrillard, there was another John, even more influential for desert lovers: John C. Van Dyke. Also Banham acknowledges him as source. In 1899, Van Dyke jumped “the wire fence of civilization(...) to places where the trail is unbroken and the mountain peak un-blazed94” in search of the purity of natural beauty. His is a kind of misanthropic movement, fleeing from the destruction produced by civilization95. And in The Desert, he narrates the impressions of his perambulation in the American Southwest. The reflections follow the researches he published in previous books96 on theories of pure visibility. As he presents the text: You cannot always dissect a taste or a passion. Nor can you pin Nature to a board and chart her beauties with square and compasses. One can give his impression and but little more. Perhaps I can tell you something of what I

Preparatory photographs. Banham in bicycle.

Tim Street-Porter.

91. cf. Ibid. pp. 59-60.

92. Ibid. p.98.

93. Baudrillard, Jean, 1988. Op. cit. p. 124.

94. Van Dyke, John Charles, 1901. The Desert. Further Studies in Natural Appearances. New York. Charles Scribner’s Sons. p. X. 95. cf. Ibid. Preface.

96. Van Dyke, J. C. 1898. Nature for its Own Sake. And Van Dyke, J.C. 1893. Art for Art’s Sake.

Salvador Dalí. Quijote 16, El poder del pensamiento(The Power of Thought). History of Don Quixote Suites.1981

97. Van Dyke, J.C. 1901. Op. cit. pp. X-XI. 98. Banham, Reyner, 1982. Op.cit. p. 211.

99. Idea that he brings from Van Dyke himself. Ibid. p.223.

100.Ibid. p.228.

101.Ibid. p.221.

102.“For those who live here, in all probability, the desert has little of this strangeness. It still has extreme attributes - hot, vast - but it is home, familiar, banal.” (Ingraham, Catherine, Summer 2006. Expansive Resourcefulness. In Log, no. 8.)

have seen in these two years of wandering; but I shall never be able to tell you the grandeur of these mountains, nor the glory of color that wraps the burning sands at their feet. We shoot arrows at the sun in vain; yet still we shoot.97

Words that resound to Banham’s conclusion in the last chapter, The Eye of the Beholder. On it, Banham recollects his impressions facing other scene of “exquisite and evanescent beauty98”, this time in his way to Cowhole Mountains. He tries to find the aesthetic answer, incapable as he is of believing that beauty “just is”.But, he cannot give a rational response to “an apparent separation of color from substance 99 ”, a peculiar phenomenon produced by the desert, and concludes ...I have no convincing answers to those questions(...) I have lost myself, in the sense that I now feel that I understand myself less than I did before.

What I have truly found, however, is something that I value, in some ways, more than myself. Beauty may indeed lie in the eye of the beholder, but that eye must have an object of vision, a scene on which it can fasten, and I have found that scene.100 Van Dyke passages are extremely delicate descriptions of a subtle observer. The eyes of the writer recall in every tonality of the landscape, amazed as he is by the colored pure air of the desert. Banham’s lexicon in his scenes is very much heritage of Van Dyke’s writing. America Deserta brings from Van Dyke the idea of the desert as the place to find uncodified “pure aesthetic response101”. Stripped from any cultural background, the beholder finds himself in the desert nimble from the loads of tradition. A condition that Banham yearned for in his very first book: ‘The architect who proposes to run with technology knows now that he will be in fast company, and that, in order to keep up, he may have to emulate the futurists and discard his whole cultural load, including the professional garments by which he is recognised as an architect. If, on the other hand, he decides not to do this, he may find that a technological culture has decided to go on without him.’

Tim Street-Porter, Banham in America Deserta.

The well-known conclusion of Theory and Design in the First Machine Age shows Banham’s radical nudity on approaching History of Architecture. Something of this flavour runs in his approach to a space already emptied of cultural loads. The landscapes of the southwest enjoy a kind of un-codified condition for the eyes of Banham. But the whole book leaves the reader with an essential—and at the same time almost absurd—question: What is a guy from West Anglia doing with a foldable bike in the lost landscapes of the Mojave? An important question because the radical bareness that Banham preaches is not that easy to achieve in facing the desert. Enigmatically, one’s roots are not a cinch to uproot in such a waste land. The fascination with the desert is a nonnative exhilaration. For the locals, there is only boredom in the continuous infinite of this landscape102. And Banham’s attraction to the sublimity of America deserta has something of Britishness: a kind of naïveté on approaching ‘the wacky gardens of the brothers of the New World’. As much as Baudrillard’s reaction has something of Frenchness: the critique of the Empire and, at the same time, a fascination for the primitiveness, the primordial character of the scenes in the desert. The intrigue of the desert is mostly a foreign

obsession, and so, the cultural nudity that Banham preaches is contradictory: you cannot arrive to the desert stripped from your cultural background because “going to the desert” is precisely a cultural reaction. But this question takes us to another: who is actually ‘from’ the desert? It seems as if Mother Nature has begotten no children in this death land. Everyone here is foreigner and tourist. And it is to this second group to which the natives of the desert are linked: the American Indians. As Alessandra Ponte argues, the local culture of native Americans has “been stereotyped and commodified in order to satisfy an ever-growing and variable tourist industry.103” An issue that does not appear evident over the ground of the fantastic scenery—maybe due to the efforts of the Natural Park Service of cleaning the environment. But, under the surface, it hides hundreds of corpses (the tendency of dumping the death bodies in the desert has a long tradition). In Banham’s text there is no more mention about the Indians than his alien impressions on seeing the native priest in the mythical ziggurat of Taos104—that he compares with a marmoreal Roman sculpture—, some reflections in the imaginative architecture of Spruce Tree House and Cliff Palace105, and allusions to the Indians as environmentally conscious culture—from which he sees himself “an ignorant and insensitive Limey”106. Baudrillard mentions the problem stating that the extermination of the Indians came to an end by means of reviving them as extras for Henri Ford107,108. But it is a problem not really puzzled out. At the end of the XIX century, Aby Warburg noted in the diary of his travel to the South West that “the Indians do not like to be photographed.109” The Indians manifested their reluctance to their exposure to the new gadget. They thought about the photographic camera as a magic device capable of appropriating the soul of the subject. And it is true, because their identity has always been given by the paleface portraitist; with the only role for them to play the Indians on the way they were defined110.

Banham and Baudrillard’s condition of foreigner day-trippers is manifested in their book in the lack of exploration of one of the most intriguing states of the desert. In the tawny rays of the

“Picture Boat” crew at Diamond Creek. The photo shows Timothy O’Sullivan, fourth from left, with fellow members of the Wheeler survey and Native Americans, following ascent of the Colorado River through the Black Canyon. 1871

Family Group of Seven Inside Tipi, William Henry Jackson.1871

Pow wow at the Eastern Navajo Tribal Fair (entering dance). Danny Lyon. Crowpoint, New Mexico. 1997.

103.Ponte, Alessandra, 2014. Op. cit. p.38.

104.cf. Banham, Reyner, 1982.Op. cit. p.119.

105.cf. Ibid. pp.121-124.

106.Ibid. p. 120.

107.Baudrillard, Jean, 1988. Op. cit. p.70.

108.Baudrillard also denounces Tocqueville’s lack of critique against the situation of the Indians and Negroes, even though he describes lucidly their extermination. cf. Ibid. p. 88.

109.Warburg, Aby, 1998. Excerpts from Aby Warburg’s Diary. In Photographs at the Frontier: Aby Warburg in America 18951896, eds. Benedetta Cestelli Guidi and Nicholas Mann. London. Merrell Holberton Publishers with the Warburg Institute. p. 155 110.Alessandra Ponte wrote an essay deepen in the identity of the Indians along the XXth century. Ponte, Alessandra, 2014. Op. cit. p.37-65.

Aby Warburg in Oraibi, Arizona, May 1896

111.In 2014, the BBC filmed a programme analyzing the status of the MexicanAmerican border visiting this centre in Tucson. The Lost Migrant. In BBC Our World. July 2014.

112.Data from http://www.migrationpolicy. org/article/mexican-immigrants-unitedstates-0

US-Mexico border fence expansion project- between Yuma, Arizona and Calexico, California

last hours when the Sun seems to melt in the mountain peaks, it is the time for the visitors to rush to the charming neon lights of the closest motel. The night in the desert is not the time for the desertlovers. The whole environment suffers a transfiguration. The delusions produced by excess of light give pass to absolute silence. The real emptiness of the desert is perceived when the show lights are off, and the horizontal surface disappears in darkness and the focus is in the verticality of the sky. It is the time when the disembodied infinity of the outer space comes to meet you with the stars. But very few face this condition of the desert. And the ones who make it, do not do it in amusement. The night in the desert is the time for the immigrants trying to cross the border.

Already in the 80s, the Mexican immigrant was the top spot among all immigrants groups in the USA. They look for the ‘American dream’ in the promised land, but first they have to live an exodus through the Arizona and Sonora deserts, in which death is waiting for them. More than two thousand unidentified corpses lay in the morgue of Tucson, Arizona111. But the figures don’t seem to set back the temporal nomads, because, since year 2000, the number of immigrants from Mexico has increased 42%(from 4.7 million to 6.7 million112). Their lives depend on their resistance against the hazards and the skill of their ‘coyotes‘—the experimented cicerones that guide the migrants in a space empty of referentiality. It is one of the most sensitive political issues of America in which immigrants mixed with drug dealers, delinquents and hardening policies for the frontier and militarization, try to get a better life from within a very tense border space.

There is a dark/criminal side of the desert.

War is the hottest issue about borders. The tense frontiers with America are not only physical—the one with Mexico—but, in the 1980s, they seem to be associated with the desert. If in the 1970s the locations in which the US developed military operations were mostly Vietnam or Cambodia, in the 80s— when Banham and Baudrillard write— the set for the fights was Iran, Libya, Egypt and the Persian Gulf. A background so abstract that, in 1991, Baudrillard wrote The Gulf War Did Not Take Place—a series of three essays published in the

French newspaper Libération and the British The Guardian. The desert and the development of war equipment are two issues very entwined in the American desert. From the first test in the Trinity Site, Alamogordo, New Mexico, to the famous Nevada Test Site, 65 miles from Las Vegas; the American desert has been the laboratory in which War was developed. There is a kind of allure on the image of a dense smoke cloud being drawn against the limpid sky. However, the desertness of the test sites is even more related with the desolation of the deserted landscapes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Because, as Banham says, the desert is a “landscape where nothing officially exists113”

It is interesting that Banham goes back to the topic of the desert in 1982 when there is a discussion on the disappearance of the outside. The debate on Architecture was not anymore in the terms used by modernity of interior-exterior. The cities of Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Leonidov, Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford...were left aside by new reflections on plug-in city, non-stop city, the aerodynamic city, the closed city, the continuous city...which reemphasized the idea of interiority. The utopian cities would consist on an absolute controlled interior environment. But Baudrillard discusses—again in apocalyptic terms—the jeopardizing effects of architecture as absolute constructed environment: In years to come cities will stretch out horizontally and will be nonurban(Los Angeles). After that, they will bury themselves in the ground and will no longer even have names. Everything will become infrastructure bathed in artificial light and energy. The brilliant superstructure, the crazy verticality will have disappeared. New York is the final fling of this baroque verticality, this centrifugal excentricity, before the horizontal dismantling arrives, and the subterranean implosion that will follow.114 The desert would represent the absolute exterior, counteracting the idea of absolute interior. A landscape stripped from human intervention in which life seems unattainable. The overwhelming power of the millennial process of erosion under the blinding light to oppose the wooziness of ephemerality and artificial light. However, in the reactionary movement of withdrawing to the desert there is embedded a paradox: moving to an absolute outer space looking for intromission. In the tradition of Western thought, fleeing to the desert is a search of the absolute inside in the absolute outside. The visit of the desert is not only about a search for an exterior in a more and more claustrophobic city, but it is like a pilgrimage, a flip—from the pure exterior to pure interior—of the traveller into himself. And that is product of an individualistic society. Baudrillard denounces, in a time when neo-liberal ideas were emerging in America, the high number of people alone in the cities. “People here who think alone, sing alone, and eat and talk alone in the streets is mind-boggling.115” The new flâneur, the man eating alone in public116. “It is the saddest sight in the world.(...)He who eats alone is dead.117” But Baudrillard’s excursions in the desert are also product of an individualistic culture.

However, the problems is not easy to resolve. Once the utopia is in absolute freedom, how you manage it? How to live together? The solitude of city and the solitude of the desert are different. But they are both a slow motion death.

113.Banham, Reyner, 1982. Op. cit. p.44 114.Baudrillard, Jean, 1988. Op. cit. p.21-22.

115.Baudrillard, Jean, 1988. Op. cit. p.15.

116.Ibid.

117.Ibid.

Atomic Test, Nevada.

Nagasaki after the Atomic Bomb. 1945

Baudrillard’s flight into the desert is as much an intromission

Aerodynamic City, Archizoom, 1969.

Arizona Desert, Superstudio, 1970

Supersurface, The Happy Island project, Superstudio, 1971

118.Banham, Reyner, 1982. Op. cit. p.44.

119.Baudrillard, Jean, 1988. Op. cit. p.67.

120.The title of the book follows Charles M. Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta(1888), canonical British view on the desert, that Banham acknowledges in his text. (cf. Banham, Reyner, 1982. p. 153)

Reyner Banham in Curtis Howe Springer’s Resort, Zzyzx, CA. Tim Street-Porter.

as Banham’s. They both carry out a process of internalization of the landscape. The writer and beholder does not imprint what is there as a light-sensitive film. In the books, they present their impressions from the American desert. But these impressions when internalized crumple, distilling little by little their ideas of what the desert stands for: Banham’s desert of new beginning, and Baudrillard’s desert of death. The process is not only about the exterior, the desert that is there.Their movement is the creation of an oasis: a state whose condition is a parenthesis in the desert; the place where they stay is neither civilized—they escape from the city—nor wild—nor the forsaken desert. An archetype of this condition: Las Vegas, a liminal city, an island surrounded by the wild, being both a product of supermodernity and surviving untamed. That is the only point in which they coincide. Banham says, “loving the desert implies accepting, if no more than that, the presence of Las Vegas.118” To which Baudrillard acknowledges: “Reyner Banham is right: Death Valley and Las Vegas are inseparable; you have to accept everything at once.119” The last hour of the night shows the unresolved nature of Las Vegas, when the bacchanal is coming to an end and the first rays of the dawn threat to destroy the montage, showing the barrenness over which it is constructed. It is a fantasy, as other constructions in the desert. The oases of Scenes in America Deserta and America are places in which the frontier between wild and cultural is very weak.

There is a photograph of Banham that records this idea. The scene: a bearded cowboy gazes to the distance under the bluish shadow of the last sunlight of the day. The mysterious appearance of the mist in-between the ever-present mountain ranges in the background separates them in layers as the mise en scène of a diorama. The grid of glassless steel skeleton and modern-style window hole here frame the view of the landscape. The place where the character is standing shows the desolation of a desert resort. At his feet, dry is the pool and dry the concrete; the pools remain empty, but waiting meek to be filled. The paradox of a modern approach to the desert, ruins of a dreamed oasis in the waste land. A place neither interior, nor exterior. What is deserted there, the vast landscape of the background or the desolated debris where he stands? America Deserta does not figure in any map as such120. Where is Banham and where is his desert?

July, 1844. A travelling-carriage from Pantechnicon, Belgrave Square,

Banham with bicycle, Mojave Desert. Tim Street-Porter.

121.Dickens says in The Reader’s Passport, introductory chapter of his book on Italy, “the great part of the descriptions were written on the spot, and sent home, from time to time, in private letters.”(Dickens, Charles, 1998. Pictures from Italy. London. Penguin Classics. p.6.)

122.George Perec also experimented with this format in his 243 Postcards in Real Colour. In Perec, George, 2008. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. London.

Penguin Classics.

123.Banham, Reyner, 1982. Op. cit. p. 92.

124.cf. Meikle, Jeffrey L., 2009. A Paper Atlantis. Postcards, Mass Art and The American Scene. In The Banham Lectures. Essays on Designing the Future. Ed.

by Jeremy Aynsley & Harriet Atkinson.

New York. Berg. p.112.

125.In Summer 2013, Log magazine number 28 included, as a freebee, a postcard with Banham in Southwestern apparels.

126.In the famous Banham’s passage on the influence of cultural filters on beholding the desert, he says: “for my own affluent generation of tourist, those cultural filters are also physical facts, one in front of each of your eyes. We see sunny places by courtesy of Zeiss, Bausch&Lomb, Correna, Sundym and Polaroid,(...) balanced forgotten on our noses.(Banham, Reyner, 1982. Op. cit. p. 6) He points to the sunglass, that we can take off to desire. But it seems interesting that the very same firms he mentions, are producers of lenses for the photographic camera.

London, harbours Charles Dickens on his way through the continent.

Destination: discover the marvels of the other side of the Alps. Final product: Pictures from Italy(1846). No one more travel book written upon Italy, but one with the familiarity and spontaneity of a volume constructed from postcards of his trip121,122. The narrative presents the trustworthiness of a subtle observer that introduces non-stereotypical snapshots of the country with the freshness of a telegraphic style imprinted in the linen behind the scene. Banham has something of that mood. “Route 66,(...)the very place names have the chepo charm of postcard sunsets.123” His vivacious descriptions of the American desert produce on the reader the nostalgia of the post received from exotic lands124,125. Image and written text so entwined as the two faces of a card126. A kind of epistolary constructed with the authority of the beholder of that scenes. In his very last essay, the inaugural address in 1988 as the Sheldon H. Solow Professor of Architectural History in the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, written but not given

Cover of Log n.28, Stocktaking, that includes a postal of Banham.

Mythical Vernacular Monuments. Reyner Banham.1982

because of his death, he legitimizes his approach to History of Architecture with the authority of the “‘Rhetoric of Presence’: I have been there and seen for myself, and that is my license to speak.127”.

But, as G.K. Chesterton argued on Dickens’ pictures, it could be argued the same for Banham’s:

Banham in London.

Homo Vitruviano , Michelangelo, 1490.

Alternative homes and living. American Southwest. Danny Lyon 1968.

127.Banham, Reyner, 1988. Actual Monuments. In Banham, Reyner, 1996. A Critic Writes: Essays. London. University of California Press. p. 283.

128.Chesterton, G.K., 1985. Dickens and Christmas. In A Chesterton Anthology.

London. The Bodly Head. pp. 101-102.

129.It is a set of slides with Banham’s voice in the background in which he analyzes the influence of grain elevators in the development of continental modern architecture. cf. Banham, Reyner, 1982. Mythical Vernacular Monuments.

London. Pidgeon Audio Visual.

130. Title of Banham’s famous essay in 1965.

131.Foucault, Michel, 1970. The Order of Things. London. Tavistock Publications Limited. p.47.

130.cf. Blair, Gregory. In http://gregoryblair. com/rapid-excursive-succession-jean-baudrillard-and-the-philosophy-of-the-desert

...there is no need whatever to worry about them as a phase of the mind of Dickens when he travelled out of England. He never travelled out of England.(...) His travels are not travels in Italy, but travels in Dickens-land. (...) Dickens abroad, then, was for all serious purposes simply the Englishman abroad; the Englishman abroad is for all serious purposes simply the Englishman at home.128 Banham is an ‘Englishman at home’, equipped with his foldable bike, ready for “townie” life. Banham’s travels are not in the American Southwest. They are travels in Banham-land.

He dedicated his last book—A Concrete Atlantis—to analyze the myths of the Modern Movement in the American industrial buildings. In Mythical Vernacular Monuments129, a kind of video-lecture with images and his voice, Banham translates Gropius’ statement in The development of modern industrial architecture: “In other words, he[Gropius] sees the grain elevator building as a kind of noble salvages, unspoilt by education and sophistication.”; the kind of desert he presents. The life in the American desert is Banham’s own myth. The land he talks about is not an exterior one. Banham is at home—because a home is not a house130. Seeing the records of his trip, his desert is the one in which man—himself—is in the centre. A kind of homo Vitruviano’s desert. A cosmografia del minor mondo[Cosmography of the microcosm] in which there is all white outside the circle.

However, Baudrillard follows a similar movement. The desert he visits was already present in his mind while writing Simulacra and Simulation(1981).He does not go to the desert on the fashion of Columbus or Cortez to discover something new, but in the fashion of Cervantes’ book. “Don Quixote reads the world in order to prove his books131”, and Baudrillard reads the desert landscapes in order to confirm ideas he published five years before. His desert is the climax of hyperreality, an empty space in which artifice has been taken to an extreme in which the border between real and hyperreal has evaporated, simulating scenes and episodes that supersede reality132.

His America is the one stereotyped by Europe: the space is vast, the vehicles and food fast, and the Americans fat. And, following the cliché, the desert is sublime, a reminder of the Second coming.

But, even though these scenes are only frames of their visions and ambitions, there is always something in the American desert that stubbornly slips in the set. The American desert is not a white canvas in which to test, confirm or prepare the future. The desert is already an overloaded canvas, full of unresolved conditions. Against the desert of emptiness, there is the actual desert in which death waits for the foreigners and natives, borders are disputed, atomic threats are carried out, poison is spread and the future of humanity is launched to the Space. The American desert is a liminal space.

FIG. 3.

Tim Street-Porter. Banham in the Desert.

Western World Development, near Four Corners, CA, Wim Wenders 1986

Then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.

Michel Foucault In Conclusion.

The Order of Things.

133.cf. Turner, Victor, 1967. Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage. In The Forest of Symbols. USA. Cornell University Press. p.93+105.

134.Deleuze, Gilles, 1993. Cinema and Time.

In Deleuze Reader. Edited by Constantin Boundas. New York. Orphelia Books. p.185.

The American desert seems to be the perfect place for escaping culture. Following the traditional understanding of liminality —Victor Turner’s state of transition in which the subject is withdrawn from the values, norms, sentiments and techniques of his society133— the desert is a space in suspension in which there is an inversion of normative social and moral structures. A situation of degree zero of thought in which to operate from without and test the ideas you bring there—as Banham and Baudrillard did. A radical space in which, as Foucault put it in the very last line of The Order of Things, Man could be erased from the the centre, overpassing more than five hundred years of tradition. There, the figure of Vitruvian man in the centre is melted in the sand, disappearing after the renewing sandstorm. However, this optimistic view of liminality is not produced in the American desert. This desert is a liminal space, but that reduced understanding of liminality does not apply here. What is known by ‘the house of light’ is full of shadows. There is a dark side that eclipses the luminous landscape. While the metaphorical allure of the desert as landscape of deterritorialization is still appealing, in fact the American desert is a space of social control, surveillance and survival. The footprint of human being seems to be soft on the white canvas, but actually it is perpetual, like the track of Neil Armstrong in the new deserts of the Moon. The millennial geological processes that configure the desert are disturbed eternally by “one small step for man”.

Its dark/luminous sides do not follow the tradition of ‘beholding’ the desert. The cliché of the ‘sand-scape’ as optical— Banham’s ‘Scenes’, Van Dyke’s ‘Pure visibility’—and sound—Misrach’s ‘Cantos‘— landscape is not anything but remaining on its surface.

This landscape is full of optical tricks, illusions and fake oasis.

Something deeper than sight and hearing is necessary. As Deleuze points out about surveying images, we have “to treat(...)not only the optical and sound, but the present and the past, and the here and elsewhere” because “they constitute internal elements and relations which must be deciphered, and can be understood only in a progression analogous to that of a reading.134” The desert is a landscape to be read. This legibility of the American desert was already present in some works of New Topographics, like the deserted sceneries of Lewis Baltz(Fig. 4) that try to overpass the ‘postal-style’ or cliché visions. What they show is the liminality of a landscape in ambiguous state, in transition being both a womb and a grave.The suspended

135.Ibid.

136.From Latin harena, arena: ‘sand, sandstrewn place of combat.’ (cf. Oxford Dictionary) 137.Jaspers talks about the “axial age” in a similar way to liminality: periods or places in-between two world-views and between two rounds of empire buildings(cf. Jasper, Karl, 1953. The Origin and Goal of History, New Haven and London. Yale University Press. p. 51) 138.Ibid. p. 3.

condition of the site does not only talk about the present, but the framed elements—the virgin land against the white foundations in the deserted landscape, the electricity pylons in the background— establish relations in and outside the photograph—the invisible systems that cross the desert—, about the present and the future— the landscape as archeological site of a future condition—that at the end point to a non-visual, silent presence that is only legible as a page, the landscape as a book. When scrutinizing the desert, we can not only look at the here and now, but we have to read also the tense present and the tense past that are here and elsewhere in the conditions of these lands. As the reader that knows how to read what lies beneath the blank page, the reader of the desert has to deepen in the relations produced in it, even if at first sight not seen. “If we see very few things in an image, this is because we do not know how to read it.135” The archetypal image of the desert—the one that Europeans conceive—hides more than what it shows. When facing an optical hallucination, the sand seems to be the solid ground that bring us ‘back to reality’, the background in which illusion fades.

But maybe this emptied sand, penetrated by nets that are invisible and silent, is in fact the delusion that hides reality behind. The archetypal image of the American desert— concealing something of the landscape under the cliché–is but a mirage in reverse.

The liminal condition of the desert, including both the luminous and the dark, does not nullify its potentialities, but amplifies them.

Like the fruitfulness of the virgin sheet that does not come from being a tabula rasa but from being the arena136 in which the writer struggles, arranges, frames, wipes and conceals, or shows, the data already contained within his mind. In the same way, the desert is not an emptied set but paradoxically a charged void, full of tensions but also of potentialities held latently. The creative capacity of the desert comes from a liminality—understood as Karl Jaspers 137—of a space suitable for asking radical questions138, being the border between all-powerful culture and the novelty of virgin land. However, these questions do not come from the scratch, from the perfect withdrawal. The reader of the desert as the writer in front of the blank page has to face the catastrophe embracing the chaos as it is, with its complexity both in lights and shadows. The creation comes in this risk of embarking on a journey with such a company attempting to leave it behind.

FIG. 4.

Lewis Baltz. Foundation Construction, Many Warehouses, 2891 Kelvin, Irvine, 1974.

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