On January 17, 2009, the Center for Land Use Interpretation will debut an exhibition about oil in America at Blaffer. The Center (often referred to a CLUI, pronounced clue-y) is a collective "dedicated to the increase and diffusion of information about how the nation's lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived." They are currently conducting research from their field station on the Buffalo Bayou as part of their residence with the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center.
The Center's informational displays defy categorization and are quite different from the paintings, sculptures, and videos we normally show here at Blaffer. So here's a recent article from the New York Times as an introduction to their work. The group's website www.clui.org is also a great resource.
Take Nature, Add Humans, Observe Results
IN 1957 an Air Force B-36 accidentally dropped a hydrogen bomb onto empty scrubland outside Albuquerque. Although its nuclear payload was unarmed, the bomb’s conventional explosives detonated on impact, creating a crater 12 feet deep, dusting the area with plutonium and killing a luckless cow.
There used to be a town in New York State called Neversink. It sank from view in 1953 when the area was flooded to create a reservoir for New York City.
The longest straight stretch of highway in the nation crosses the desert near Barstow, Calif. A road sign advises, “ABSOLUTELY NOTHING NEXT 22 MILES.”
Hundreds of sites like these, from the quirky to the quotidian, have been documented by the Center for Land Use Interpretation, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit organization founded in 1994 with an unusual educational mission. As dispassionately observant as anthropologists or space aliens, the center’s staff members and volunteers roam the American landscape, recording and cataloging signs of humanity’s interactions with nature. Anything from a trailer park to a strip mine, the Salton Sea to the Erie Canal, a building shaped like a picnic basket to a replica of ground zero for the Oliver Stone film falls within the group’s purview.
The approach is a mash-up of geography, geology, environmental studies, art, architecture and history. Occasionally the group’s projects betray a Surrealist wit as well. The center once placed a loudspeaker in a lonely Maine forest and broadcast the recorded sound of a tree falling.
More often, though, the center simply documents sites in photographs and descriptive text, letting each place express its own inherent character, be it an oddball tourist attraction like the World O’ Tools Museum in Tennessee or a historically curious place like Coon Butte in Arizona Crater, where NASA trained Apollo crews because the area resembled the surface of the moon.
The organization’s founder, Matthew Coolidge, studied geomorphology — the evolution of land masses — at Boston University. “I’d sit in geography class hearing about braided streams,” he recalled in a recent interview. “But when I looked out the window, I didn’t see any streams. I saw buses and buildings.”
It occurred to him then that a geographer might treat the built environment and the natural landscape as one.
“Increasingly humans are part of the geomorphological process,” he said. “There isn’t a molecule on the surface of the earth that hasn’t passed through some human agent of change. It’s unavoidable, don’t you think? There are six billion of us now. I don’t see how we could tread lightly.”
Mr. Coolidge and a small group of friends founded the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Oakland, Calif., then moved the office in 1996 to its current home in Los Angeles, next door to a similarly eccentric institution, the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Grants from foundations finance the work of a staff of 10, augmented by volunteers around the country who, Mr. Coolidge said, include architects, urban planners, art students and teachers, photographers and “just people interested in what we do.”
For the rest of the article, please see http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/arts/design/24stra.html?_r=1&n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/Subjects/G/Geography&oref=slogin
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