BECK 2000 Over Illuminated World

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Michelangelo Antonioni's curious 6lm

Zabriskie Point (1970) is remembered

largely for its famous closing seguence of

sloqr-motion explosions, iu; his femde

protagonist Daria imagines the

destruction of the Carefree development-resot"t in the Arizona desert and all it

stand.s or.To the accompaniment of Pink

Floyd's Caretul With that Asre, Eugene,Antonioni presene the annihilation of

buildings, firrnitue, clothes, food,

television, and books with an exguisite

eye for the aesthetic properties of things

coming apart.

tl The Carefoee reson is clearly modelled

on the houses Ftank lJoydWright built in

the desert around the outskirts of

Phoenix, and which became the fantasy

homes for aspirational post-war

Angelenos. (Most of the land, incidentally,

to the south and east of Phoenix is

comprised of Indian resenrations.) Daria's

allegiance to native cultures - the hippie

paraphernalia of Sioux and Narajojerrellery, the long, uncut hair, the

meaningrfully empathic look exchanged

with the Mexican or Indian maid - clearlyinforms her discomfort at being in thispl,ace, and reneds her awareness of the

snbjugation and displacement of the

region's indigenous inhabitants. Daria

works for the Surmy Dunes Corporation,

which is behind the desert derrelopment,

and has arrangred to spend tirne with herboss at Carefoee. Ttris tryst prorrides thepretext for her trip frorn LA to Phoenix, adrilre of some tluee hundred miles, which

temporalty, howsler, takes Daria tluough

millions of yeals, from the geologicalgrround zpto ofZabriskie Point to

suburban wish-fulElment.

tl The vision of this present erupting,fragrmenting, atomising, is a willed return

to the grranular existence of geological

history. The violence of civil disorder andindustrial development which fuame the

Elm are, subseguently, revealed to be a

raer€ prelude to the violence inllicted by

the desert, to which the trapprngrs of

human eristence iue seen to return.The

libenting potential written onto the

uacant desert space by Daria and her

confirsed drop-out protester friend Mark,

whose death at the hands of the police

prcmpts her vengeful vision, is at thesame time endangered by the

encroachment of a bourgeois leistrre elitewith visions of Edenic reclamation. firedispersal of the sigms of this culture intoshimrnering pattertu of light and colour

might be seen as a kind of radicalformalist recoil &om the comrnorlificationof modernism, as the geometric

abstraction of nature at its most

cr]rstalline absorbs the sedimentalgarbage of corupicuous consumptionback into part of its ovynelementalgnandeur.

fl Wright's utopian interest in thepossibilities of organic form inarchitecftrre was confirmed by the Oora ofthe desert, where he finds in the Sagruarocactus the "perfect exanple of reinforcedbuilding construction. Its interior verticalrods hold it rigidly upright maintaining

its grreatOuted columnar mass forcenturies."flJ. The irurer ribs of theSagruarowere, indeed, used as stnrcfirralelements in Papago and Pima shelters,andWright senses a kind of naturalduration in the.cactus which resists thevicciSitudes of history. fire Sagruaro,incidentally,like the one sitting in thecorner of the Sunny Dunes executive's IrAoffice, bears in its scientific form thename Carnegiea gigantea, after steelmagmate Andrew Carnegie, whosefoundation established the DesertLaboratory in Tucson in 1903 or the studyof desert ecologry.

tl Iotur C.Van Dyke was born in NewBrunswick, New Jersey in 1856, o aprominent and respected family. Afterreading law at Columbia he becamelibrarian of the Gardner A. Sage Libraryof New Brunswick Theological Seminary,and in 1889 became the first professor ofart history at Rutgers College. By 1897,when respiratory problerns promptedhirn to to visit his brother in SouthernCalifornia,VanDyke was a well krwn artczitic, hiends with Sargent,Whistler andMarkl\rain, author of a number of booksof art appreciation, and a regrular

contributor to upmarket magazines. Hewas a prominent Rembrandt scholar,

remembered almost exclusfirely in the

obituaries of 1932 or challenging of theattribution of nearly a thousandRembrandts around the world.The Desert[Z],best knwn today of all VanDyke's forty-plus books, recounts his

e:cperiences duing tluee years spentaround what is now called the ColoradoPlateau - which includes the Mojane,Colorado, and Sonoran Deserts - between1898and 1901,eguipped with a pony, afew pounds of supplies, and only a foxterrier for company.The book broke fromthe conventional distrustful view of thedesert as barren, hostile, and unpleasantand, as "the first work to praise the desertfor its beauty", claimsVan Dyke er(pertPeter Wild, The Desert"led the wayin a major shift of the ctlture's outlookon the arid portion of its naturalheritage"[3].

tl Van Dyke liked to present himseU asthe ideal composite of cultivated, urbaneaesthete and Roosqreltian outdoorsnuul,as much at home in the Painted Desert asthe galleries of Europe. To a large extenthe was, yet the picture of seU-sulficientnomad is somewhat comptomised by thefact that many of his desert visits weremade by train, he often stayed on hisbrother's ranch or in good hotels,and his loorvledge of desert fauna washardly srlffigignl to sunrine for longperiods alone in harsh conditions.He would not have lasted for long "under

the delusions that ratOesnakes are in fact

sluggish and that Gila monsters areharmless".

l[ The Desert s dedicated to one AMC,which, although not enlarged upon byVanDyke, tunrs out to be Andrew MichaelCarnegie. Van Dyke msned comfortablyin the circles of preeminent industrialis6and art collectors like Carnegie, HenryClay Frick, and Frankfiiomson.According toVan Dyke, it was he whogruided Carnegie's first irwestrnent of sixthousand doll,ars inAmerican art and whocontinued to acguire art for him duringhis later life. Lilce his friend Bernard

F

o



Berenson,Van Dyke was a connoisseur of

Renaissance art, and like Berenson, this

skill was Put to work in stocking the

collections of wealttry indlsglelists and,

srrbseguently, in shaping the taste of

Amenca's uPPer clasg.Van Dyke had' it

appears, a standing invitation at Frick's

house. and was well enough tnrsted to

edit Carnegrie's autobiogrraplry.

lndeed, it has been suggested thatVan

Dyke's trip to the desert wag, in fact,

precipitated by Carnege, who wanted

someone to debner coru;cience monery oa former emplqpe sacked, Persecuted,

and ruined after the Homestead Strike

and who had taken refuge &om the law in

northern Merico. Needless to say' nothing

of this 3tory makes its waY into

The Desert,which is solely concerned

with diginterested acts of acute

perception.

tl Van Dyke's aesthetic was essentidly

derived Eom Ruskin's belief that the

highest beauty tay in natue and that the

reptlesentation of &rture was the highest

ideal of art. Like Ruskin, forVan Dyke the

tceryo art was the meticulous utilisation of

the factrlty of sight, or eren' as Ruskin

himseUwrote,"that the aight is a more

important thing than the drawing."Van

Dyke's nature books are fourded on this

principle, pusfring the belief in the

primac4T of vision furttrer beyond Rttskin

to the point where a moralfidelity to

natune is superseded by the pover of the

seer over natlEe.

u Ruskin's interest in abstraction suggests

that the kind of separation of form and

substance often perceived in the peculiar

degert light would hatre made perfect

sense toVan Dyke, making the southwest

the ideal place to erplore his ideas'

"Ttte perception of solid Form is entirely

a matter of experience," claims Rtrskin'"\Me 8ee nothing but Bat contours; and it

is only by a series of e:rperiments that we

End out that a stain of black or gray

indicates the dark side of a solid

substance, or that a faint hue indicates

that the objea in which it appears is far

array.fire whole technical Pwer of

parnting depends on our recovery of what

may be called the innocence of the eye"'

The titles of two ofVan Dykeb books

suggests how far nature artd art were

interchangeable for him: Art tor Art's

Safe[a] and iVature{or its Own Sa&e[S].

Both texts ofler technicd discrrssionsof light,line and color; both are

technical studies of beauty. Irandscape

should clearty be approached with

the same discrPline as art. Nature

provrdes the ultimate aesthetic

erperience for those who lsrow hosv

to appreciate it.

tf"The deserl," writes Van Dyke, "is

practically colored air" [6], and his tocs

teem with colour words as he applies his

connoisseur's eye to the intricacies of the

space before hirn: Plain upon plain lea&

up and out to the horizon - far as the eye

L!

can see - in undulations of grray and gold:

ridge upon ridge meltsl into the blue of

01grliclanl sky in lines of lilac and purple;

fold upon fold sver the mesaa the hot air

drops its veilingrsof opd and topaz.Yes; t

is the kingdom of sun-firre.For errcry color

in the scale is attuned to the key of !l,ame,

every air-warp comes with the breath of

flame, e\tery sunbeam falls as a shaft of

llame[?J.

t[ For ]tears, painters hane been trying to

put onto carnrrasthis landscape of color'

Light,and air,with form dmostobliterated, merely suggested-.." Artists

like Corot and Monet have told tts, he

says,"that in painting, clearly delineated

forms of mountains, vallel/s, trees, anrd

rhrerg, kill the 6ne color-sentinent of the

picture". The landscaPist must "get on

with the least possible form and to

Euggest errcrphing by tones of color'

shades of light, drifts of air.WhY?

Because these are the most sensuous

gualities in nature and in art.

The landscape that is the simplest in form

and the finest in color is by dl odds

the most beautiful"[8].

![ Claiming that nattre cotrld be vienpedas art via the acguisition of perceptual

technigue,Van DYke, was far &om

, adrrccating an Emersonian democtacy of

vision. His notion of the artist wae firnty

aristocratic, consisting of that elite class

of men able to "see mote beauties and

deeper meanings than the gEeatmajority

of mankind." Indeed, he clearlY

considered himsetf to be one of that

class, commenting to his editor that ffte

Desertwas "a whole lot better than the

$'vash which today is being turned out alt

literature, and it will sell, too, but not up in

the hundreds of thousands. It is not so

bad as that. My audience is only a fewthousand, thank God."Van Dyke was

writing, not to democratise appreciation

of natu:re,let done art, but to educate

well-off, like-minded connoisseurs about

the beauty to be had in the arid regions'

as if the southwest were some old master

in need of validation bY a highlY

disciplined specialist. firere are clearly

landscapes that ale worthy and those that

are unworthy of refined eniryrnent. For

Van Dyke, as in art and audienceg, so in

lartdscape, there wEls,lg one critic notes,"beautiful nature and there was preterite

natule, andVan Dyke wasted few words

on what was alreadY lost."![ ln February 1968Peter Reyner Ban]tam

&sne out of IrA to see the lights sf r'ae

Vegas.It was only upon his return the

next morning that he noticed in the early

light the "unexpected and unprepared for

occasion" of the Mojane desert. becoming"more and more astonished at the

scenery along the waY". He is so

astonished, in fact, that he errcnhrdly

pulls off the interstate and drhres out to

view the landscape. So begins Banham's

fascination with the southwestern deserts,

a fascination which challenges not itutt his

prcconceptions about landscape but

about, he says, himseU:"I had utcqnered

an asPect of myself that I did not

lorw"[9].

tf At a conference in l,ondon earlier this

year the American architeA Robert Stern,

referring to the well known photogrraph of

Banham crycling across the deserr in

bootlace tie and Stetson hat, remarked

that "Englistr people shouldn't we.rr

clothes hke that."Ttre serious cridcism

behind this flip sartorid Putdwn is that

Banfem's project as a 6itic and theoristof modern architecture - drawing as he

did upon the capitalist rrcrnacrrlar of

American space.at a reiuvenating model

for a class-ridden, war-torn Europe -

offers nothing mote than a besotted

tourist's conception of the United States,a

Hollywood inspircd vision of cw counry

and neon wilderness.

tl Banham comes in for similar' and much

more suatained, abtrse in PeterWild's

anthology of American desert writing'

The Desert Reader.It iswild, incidentdly'

who, over the last decade or so' has

virtuatty singrlelundedty resurrected Van

Dyke's cateer from obscurity' as editorand co-editor of Van Dyke's auto-

biographR his selected letters, reissues of

some of his most notable nature books,

and as author of numetous journal

articles. Inboducing a selection fuom

Bantrarn's l9g2 book, Scenes n Anerica

Deserla,Wild admits that'it has taken an

outsider, a foreigmer, sczambling slter our

treasured deserts to suggest a different

perspectine" &om the "romantic strain

that runs so deep in most Americans as to

rigidify them on matters of beauty."What

this outsider has to offer, however,"can

set the nature loner's teeth on edge"Wild

presents the reader Bantram's czedentialswith balely conceded contemPt:"English-born, educated at the University

of London. critic of international renmn'

and professor of art history at the

Unfircrsity of California, Santa Cruz." He

offers the titles of Banham's books as

evidence of some profane and dangerous

mind at work:"Theory and Desigm in the

Firsi Machine Age andThe New

Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic. Especially

tailored to make presenrationdists cringe

is The Architecture of the Well-Tempered

Environment."

t[ As if this wasn't condemnation enougth,

Wild"sucks

in the breath imagningpdward] Abbey's r€sPotrse to a man who

applauds the freeway as'a work of art,

both as a Pattern on the maP':13a

monunent agrarnst he sky' and as a

kinetic e:rperience."' Banham,he

concedes, aPPrcciates the desert, but"not for its organic harmonn as a refuge

from technology, but as an inviting stagre

for technologry on which'anything

becomes thinkable, and maY

cotrsequently happen."'As"the student of

popular culture, tBanlnml is a man who

can soar oner what many anAmericart 2

7



with skinned sensitivities and fears for

the future finds abhon€nt: the chaos of

Ios Angeles, the garishness of LasVegas."

tl Not satisfied with mere contempt,Wild

then moves to absurd speculation: "Hour

much of this is a put-on, vve cannot lcrovtr

... How much of this is seU-delusion - weils6 sarur6t ho$r." Compared toVart

Dyke, whom, in "a tylricdly Americanfashion, we honour ... for his blend oftoughness and refinement, braving the

desert done to derrelop an esthetic of

what he had lfued through," is it possible

to learn anything from Banham, "learned,

his clothes neatly pr€ssed," as he steps"out of his air-conditioned car". Perhaps"we do hane to consider, whatener ourprejudices on the score, that it is possible

for a manr such as Banham [to] make a

valid obsenration about what he sees ...

This much we should gnant hinl."

tl Banham, for his part, is not withoutprejudices of his w4 alrd it is not hard to

see wtryWild becomes so hostile.

Disorssing desert rnrriting, Banhamwonders "whether I have lost or gained,

as compared with Americans of mygeneration who were properly prepared

for the deserts by having read the'right'

books.In their cornrersation,I seem to

hear the sepulchnl echoes of fi:ced and

orthodox views on the desert. All too

often the second phrase in a first

connersation with a new-found desertfueak goes:'You're into deserts, huh?Fantastic! Hane you read ...?'and there

follours the name of an author like Mary

Austin, Edward Abbey, John Russell

Bartlett, JohnWesleryrPwell, Cla.rence

Dutton, jB Jackson, Lieutenanrt

Sitgneaves...It's almost as if no one should

be admitted to the desert until he has

completed a literary training course inthe formation of right attitudes to the

wilderness ... right ttri*ing is thepassport that admits one to the sased

tract; those not nersed in the holy torts ...

are unclean".

tl Witd rlicmissss Banham from an

isolationist position which views the

Englishman as t€presentatine of "a

European tradition extolling a

contemplative detachment, an doofttess

hom, if not a homor of ... the

conseguences of enrcryday physical

redity." Curiousln he turns a blind elE to

similar aftinrdes clearly qrident inVan

Dyke. Banham hirnseUseenrs to sense this

defensiveness in desert l<lr/ers,

aclcrowledging the grulf that separates

him from the natine tradition ]retsuspicious of prescriptine readings oflandscape.

t[ Gfirenwild's hostility to Banham, andBanham's own sceptical resistance to the"holy te!ts," il is dl the more remarkable

that Barham has any time forVan Dyke.

Yet, dong with Doughty's Thave/snArabia

Deserta frrom which he takes his oqrn title,

The Desert"permanently shaped my view

of Amenca Deserla"; it was a "sensational

discovery not long after I first met theMojane, and its fine wrought prose stillsparkles in memory."

T Banfram's story of his disconery of the

book would not seem out of place in aHaurthorne romance, as he describes a

stay at the Garnble House in Pasadenawhere, ferreting around in an old linencloset which held the remains of theformer Garnble family library, he comesacross a "ve!y period-looking slimrrolume, The Desert " Naturally, he beginsto read "at random," and is instantly.smitten. "Hours later I was still there,

having dready consumed half the book,but became conssious of cramps in mylegs from standing still se long.I creakeddoqmstairs, and finished the text and -

sligh0y stumed - put it back on thesheU."[0] Returning on another visit, heresohres to steal the book but finds it hasalready gone.

fl DespiteWild's jealous gnrarding of thesouthwest from city folks, Banham is anEuiluteand sympathetic rreader ofVanDyke: "He is an eye in the desert, acoruroisseur of views, a skilled sanorer oflights and colors. If he sneers at'progress' and appears contemptuous ofthe human race, it is largely because theirconseguences obscure and internrpt hiscomrnitted enjq;rnent of the visualwonders of the arid Southwest, and thataridity is the essence of what he sees anddescribes. He is a fanatic celebrant ofdry, pu.re,unobstructed air ... and ... hewill admit no impediment to perfect

sight."[ll]

tl The regions of the American desertWest,as Mike Davis notes, "ha\re few

landscape analogrues anlnrhere else onearth ... [t]heVictorian minds werre

trarelling through an essentiallyextraterresEial terrain. far outside theirerrperience," ca{singr them to "erentually

cast aside a trunkful of Victorianprcconceptions in order to lecogmizenovel forms and processes in nature".Photognapher Tirnothy O'Snllinan had toabandon "the Ruskinian paradigrms ofnature representation to concentrate onnaked, essential form in a way thatpresaged modernism."

O'Sullinan's picnrres, it has beensuggested, had "no imrnediate parallel inthe history of a.rt and photognaphy ... Noone before had seen the wilderness insuch abstract and architecttrral

forms."Irikewrse, geologist Clarence Dutton hadto create a "new landscape langruage -

also largely architectural, but sometrmesphantasmagorical - to describe anunprecedented dialectic of rock, colourand light."

tl The notion of the desert as a landscapewhich demands a modernist nocabularyis shared by Bantnrn: "It is ... anerwironment in which'Modern Man'ought to feel at home - his modernpainting, as in the works of Mondrian,irnplies a space that srtends beyond the

confines of the can/as: his modernarchitecture. as in the works of Mies nander Rohe, is a rrgctangrularpartition of aregrular but infinite space; its ideal

inhabitants, the sorlpfiues of Giacometti

stalking metaphysically tluough that

space as far as it infinitely ertends"llzl.

tl Banlnm's'Modern Man'is no more theordinary man than is Van Dyke s.Whatvalue Banham gees in the desert ispredicated upon the correct kind ofvisual awareness, a kind of refinementwhich can block off troublesome sigms ofaesthetic dreariness (what we mightotherwise mistake for the actualconditioru of a place) and rerrel in pure

form.Van Dyke is clear on this point whenhe remonstrates that the desert "is notwlgar or ugly.The trouble is that weperhaps have not the proper angle ofvision.If we urderstood all. we shouldadmire all."pgJ.fire "proper angle of

vision" is what Banlnm suggests is

needed in viewing LasVegas, which, hewrites, is beEt seen in late afternoon foomthe air, "when there is iust purple sunsetlight enough in the bottom of the basin topiek out the cr,ests of the surrounding

mountains, but dark enough for enerylittle lamp to register." Under these veryspecific conditions the mundane or banalis transformed, by coloured light, into avision. As inVan Dyke, this is aconnoisseur's view of landscape; theemphasis is on the right time and theright prospect: "Then - and only then -

the vision is not tawdry, but is of a magicgarden of blossoming lights, welling up atits center into fantastic fountains of

everchanging color ... it was manrellousbq;ond words. And doomed - it isalready begrinning to fade, as energy

becomes more eqpensive and thearchitectule less irwentive.It won't blo\pawily in the night, but 1nu begin to wish itmight, because it wilf never make nobleruins, and it will never discorrer horr tofade away gnacefully" I I 4].

fl Again,likeVan Dyke, Banlnm registersthe fragri$ty of desert existence, and thebeauty he sees is a tragic beaury vaguelyapocalyptic, as if the varnish of destirry isbrushed across the surface of theenvironment. Iras Vegas is marvellousonly because it is doomed, and theprocess of its fading is what gives it valueas spectacle.fire to\rn's predicted lack of

nobility andgrrace

rn its final days makesBanham wish oblivion upon it rather thanhane to look at its unpicturesqne remarns.To elenate form orrer substance is toprivilege effea over material conditions,and bothVan Dyke and Banhamconstantly emphasise the raptures ofeffect, of the retinal sublirne, overanfhing as remotety unsightly asordinary human life in the desert.

t[ One of Banham's aims in Ns book is, ofcourse, an exarmi&rtion of desert

architecture, anrd much space is occupiedrriscussrngthe merits and otherrnise of

I



railway statiotls and truck stoPs as well as

the more cartonical arclutectural faces

left lryWright and others.Yet it is when

faced with nast oPen sPaces and dramatic

prospects that Banham redly ges going.

He looks at the landscape to confirm what

he already knows about his modernist

aesthetic preferences. As JaneTompkins

says of the desert as the site for the

Western filrn, it is chosen "because its

clean, spare lineg,lucid sPaces,and

absence of ornament bring it closer to

the abstraa austerities of modernarchitectural desigm than arry other kind

of landscape would." As an architecture

critic, Banham is obnriously interested in

habitation. and, indeed, his main sriticism

of desert ecologrists s what hE salls ths"the misanthropic, get-those-bums-out-of-

rny-backyard tone of a certain kind of

latter-day consenntionist..." [l 5]. ln

contrast to the deliberate erasure of

human presence inVan DYke's book,

Banlam claims that for him "the most

engraging of all desert guestioru [is]:'Ifthis is a desert, what are all these people

doing here?"'[16].While Ban]nm is no

misanthropist, he is often far fromintercsted in the desert inhabitants he

comes actoss.He can be nery sniffy about

the habits and tastes of ordinary

Americans: they either create

abominations in beautiful places, cannot

tell art from kitsch (as in [,asVegas, whose

reception a3 art depends upon a nery

specific set of aesthetic coordinates), or

are incapable of properly reading their

own landscape.

fl Nowhere in Scenes inAmerica Deserta

do6s Banham more reveal the limitations

of his aesthetic loyalty to the sublirne'effects'of natule than during a trip from

Alberguerque through Mesa Verde, whichhe claims is "psychologically, the most

bafiling journey I can nour recall, an

experience that has left pennanent marks

on rrry view of America, a nagging

suspicion that, at the very heart of my

understanding of this treasured

landscape, there is a vacuum of

incomprehension ... A sense of strain, of

doom, almost, orrerhungrthe whole

trip" I I ?]. Ban]rarn,aesthetically speaking

and literally, takes a wrong rurn through

the town of Bernalillo and into the "seedy

and poverty-stricken" environment of

modern Natine Arnerican life.I\pical of

the primacl of the optical in Banham' thisplace G 6rst and foremost "distlesstng to

my eyes." "I was just not readY for

Indians, their life style, therr artifacts' or

their cutnrre that day," he complains, "and

the sense of alienation got worse as the

day went on"[8]. One wonders what,

other thart tndians, Banham e:(pected to

find at the Coronado Historic Monunent'

the site of an ancient fiwa pueblo.It dso,

curiously, seems to surprise artd disturb

him that the frescoes around the kiva are

concerned solely wrth water.

T teavrng Bernalillo, Banham heads for

Taos.He is depressed by the "heaps of

puke-covered beer bottles at the

roadside" which ruins his image of heroic"ten feet tall" farttasy Indians, and

becomes involved in a dangerous

highway incident with an Indian driver

which leanes his mood "permanrently

bent"[9]. Nenertheless, on reaching Taos

he heads off to take pictures of the

famous zlggurat.fitere, howgver, he

comes upon a scene he "could not bring

himself to photognaph." It is a white-

robedpriest who, for Banham, is utterly

inscrutable,leaving him feeling that he

had seen "a piece, a smdl corner, of a

culture that felt more dien, unlmwn than

arything I had encountered before.The

sense of having come up against a glass

wall tluough wilch seeing was possible

but comprehension was not stayed with

me all through the hurried drive back to

Albuguergtre ... and has never rcally

gone awiry since"[20].'lf Banftam admits that this "sense of

alienation ... earned me no sympatlry nor

understartding from anybody at all"' yet

puts this down to the sixties rrcgrue or

Native culturc which, a few ]tea$ later'he

says,reneded itseU as the elsatz

mysticism it always was.While Banham is,

at least initially, prepared to accePt that'he

might just be "an igmorant and

insensitirre Limey with no feeling for the

land and its inhabitants", his ttltimate

defence is merely to swipe at Anglo-

America's ptetensions about their ovrn

corurections to Native culture. The lack of

sympathy he claims he receines is plainly

ftom the exclusinely white audience he

reads metonymically as the American

population. Banham speaks to no Indians,

although there are clearly plenty of them

around in theWest he might tdk to. Hemay complain that he remained"psychologrcdly isolated, culturally

separated from the scenes I had

observed", but there is little attempt' on

the enidence presented, that he sought a

mor€ informed PersPective.Tfie

complaints of alienation begrin to seem

tokenistic, particularly when a measured

obserrntion about the inacceseibility of

other cultures is folloqted by sweeping

Eurocentrism. For example, Banham

considers that "the business of

interpretation ... of Indian life and

settlements in any European tongrue s

haught with imminent danqers whenit

goes abone or beyond the most basic

human physiological necessities or the

firndamental aws of physics"[Z1]. A few

pages later he is happy to state that "Ttre

mountain and the plain, the vertical artd

the horizontal are the baseline

iconognaphy of Amenca Deserta as surely

as they are of the Painting of Piet

Mondrian"[22].

fl Elsewhere, Anglo readings of

landscape are not so welcome. "In

Monument Vdlery, the seeminglY

uncontrollable Anglo-Saxon tendencry to

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find - erren force - resemblance at the

slightest justification, reduces the

potentially noble stacks of the main

valley, and the adjacent Valley of the

Gods, to cafloon grrotesgues.They have

been Disneyfied in dl the tourlst

literatule as the Mittens, the Sitting Man,

Camel Butte, Elephant Butle, Sitting Hen,

Bear and Rabbit, King in His Tluone, Big

Chair, Submarine, altd one of Nature's

gEeatestspeoacles has been reduced to

a rar€e shw fit for a Southern California

fireme Park"[Z3].!l Seeing Mondrian in the landscape is

permissible, it seems, while seeing

mittens, elephants, and hens is not.The

difference is in the effort. the effort "to

ttrink away that junk and see the scene

again as I first sunrqled it", purified of

comrnodifi ed projection and smoothed

back to an elemental formalism.

tl fire presence of Banlam's doctoral

supewisor Nicolaus Pevsner is never

mole enident than when popular taste is

brushed awiry.Ttre nernactrlar is only

legitimate when transformed by the

cultinated spectator.ln this Banltam falls

victim, as he surely does in hisbewildered and defensive rcspotrse to

Nathre culfirre, to the colonialist trappings

of the modernist tourist-adventurer.In his

desert book Bar&am deploys, as Caren

Kaplan says of Jean Baudrillard's writings

on the AmericanWest, "exilic melancholy

to establish a world of vanishing

substance and lost directions". Like

Baudrillard, Banham "appear[s] mired in

the sublime redm of romanticized,

trnified intensitieg."

tl In this light, Banham's belief in seeing

the desert as the home of 'Modern Man'

carnot be read as "innocent or separable

&om the dominant orientalist tropes incirculation throughout modernity".

Indeed, as Kaplan makes clear, "fiie more

the point of view of the tourist is rejected

by the modernist, the more it reaaserts

itself as a structuring gaze."What makes

Bantram's book interesting, hmever, is

that he is conscious of this problem even

as he continues to reproduce it. He

begins Anerica Deserta by admitting his

unarnidable debt to Doughty's Arabist

recorultmction of far-off desert lands as

the exotic imaginative playgrroutd for the

British erplorer (and, by extension, for

the British schoolboy reading of such

places as the space of his imperialistfuture adnentures). He also quotesVan

Dyke's ourn recogmition of the gap

between Anglo imagnnary and Americart

actudity - "The fancy has pictured one

thing; the reality shours quite another

thing. Where and hw did we gain the

idea that the desert was merely a sea of

sand? Did il come hom that geogrraphy of

our youth with the illustration of the sand-

storm, the Oytng camel, and the over-

excited Bedouin?" [2al.Yet the cnrshing

hony is that Banham insists that "My

gEeatesrdebt wed to [Doughty] is that

he made me see hov truly strange and

martrellous is the American desert by

imbuing me with a vision that is so alien

to the arid Southwest - a vision that was

so totally inapplicable that he made me

miss some telling points, it is true; but

mosOy he made me see it foesh,with eryes

as near innocent as I have brought to any

new scenes arqrwherren my life"[Z5J.

tl Banham longrs for Ruskin's innocent

eyes, for vision entirely trrunediated by

his personal, national, and educationd

backgrrounds, yet he claims to haveachiEned this through an immersion in

the English imperial radition. Elsewhere,

he worries about his raining as an art

historian being an impediment to plain

sight, and yet it is this training that he

continually calls upon in order to

strucnue what he sees.T}is anxiety of

authenticity in fact at times ovenvhelms

Bantram's text, alshe constantly reveals his

seU-conscious projection of nalues onto

the land and then longs to be rid of them.

Ttris turbulent re0exivity, of course, turtui

out to be the real subject of the book the

irnpossibility of cogmitine innocence and

the sense of irretrie\table loss in the faceof its absence. Banham is testing in the

desert his abi[ty to hane romanrtic

aesthetic experiences, and he lanows in

adnance he will fail, although at times he

thinks he has got as close as he will ever

get. Going to the desert for this purPose

is obrviously a spiritud quest, a desire to

abandon habitual thought and be

exlposed to elementd forces.The fact that

vision in the desert so rlisorients

common-8ense peteeption is essential to

this guest.

fl Banfram admits that "'fite clear Iight of

day'is such a foeguent metaphor for the

rational operations of the logical mindthat to find light su.herting reason is

botrnd to be unsettling"[26]. T]te

erwironment appearc to be engaged in a

battle for cogmitine supremacy, playtng

tricks, sutnrerting normal modes of

comprehension. ln this struggle for

understanding, asVan Dyke clairns,";..we are very fregtrently made the

victims of either illusion or delusion. The

ey€ or the mind deceives us, and

somebmes the two may join forces to our

complete confusion.We are not willing to

admit different reports of an appearance.

The Anglo-Saxon in trs insists that there

can be only one truth, and everythingelse must be error"[27].

fl Attempts to order readings of the

desert along rational lines are doomed if

Van Dyke is right, and his offhand

dismissal of the reliability of empirical

reason is also an admission of the

limitations of Anglo models of percepuon

when faced with a trulY unloourn

landscape, even though it is the rational

application of a structtrring gaa;ewhich

leads hirn to this conclusion.The desert

thus provides a mea$t for culhual

siticism as the rePort of the senses, that

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most reliable of empiricd sources' rs put

into guestiotu "The rcality is one thing,

the appearance quite another thing: but

wtty are not both of them tnrtiful?"Van

Dyke admonrshes us (Anglo-Sarons) for

being "shJr" about accePting such

phenomena as "a pink air, a blue shadm,

or a 6eld of yellw gltas8,"and for

clingnng to the habie of a casual

adhetence to prirnitirrc correspondence

models of lctwledge: air is colotrrless,

shadows are €trqf or blown, gra$ ls

gneen. "The pt€conceined irnpression ofthe mind reftrses to malce room for the

acnral impression of the q7es, and in

conaeguence we.rre misled and deluded-

... But do the eles themselnes afwap

report the tnrth?Yes; the tnrth of

appearanceg, but as regrads the reality

they may deceirrc you qrite as completely

ag the mind deceirns You about the

aPparcnt"[281.

![ If, facing the desert, then,we must

abandon preconcePtions of the mind

whichwill onty mislead and delude and

girrc oursehres over to the tnrth of

appearances, we must enter a world of

doubt and uncertainty, a world apparenttyat odds with understanding.

t[ Banham, another Anglo-Saron, is

bemitched by the kind of light that goes"straigrht ttuough the eye," and drawn

to\rard the rapture of "antunmediated

aesthetic response." But he does not tread

too far, for just at the point of surrender

he begins to "suE)ect the presence of

something else," other tlesPonses not so"simplistically pleasurable". To enter thig

world, "to hate it dl around, all day, to

see it between ourselnes and dl solid

objeas ... and to be able to avoid it only

at dawn," would be to accePt something

possibly threatening in the extleme."[S]uch an omnipresence of colored light'

brilliant, raw, subtle or hallucinatory, may

be almost too much for our sensibilities

to handle, especially if we come from thelreiled grqyer atrnospheres of Northern

Europe ... lndeed, one might wonder if

we take cover behind the srurglasses of

our technological culture ... because the

light is so erreme, and the

independence of color artd form so

unsettlingt, that it someholv thteatens our

established psychologres ... and errckes

unirrvited responses with a dirrectness that

!B lifficult to bear"[29].

tl EmerEon clairned that Anerica's"ample geogrraptry dazzles the

rmagrinauon", and it is this bedazzlement

bryan etrvFonment that poun straighttlrrough the elee which 3o unnerees

Banham-Michel Foucault describes

madness as reason dazzled, offeringrthe"simplest and most general defutition" of

classical madrtess as deleriurn, which' as

he suggrests, g a word "derhred from lira'

a furrw: so that deliro actually meirns to

mde out of the furroq awaYfrom the

proper path of reason".'ll During the nineteenth century the

\-

deeeil was generally considered to be a

contemptuous and traitoroua pl,ace, a

terain wtdch refirsed to willingtly come

under the plough of American

emngelical redempdon of the heathen

continent. The Anglo-Saron sensibility

VanDylce srripea at is also responsible

for the legacy of Jeffersonian agrrarianism

which tegitimated erpansion as the

corilrereion of sarnge nanue tluough

orltirndon. Indifference and often hostility

tward the deserts of the Southwest was

in large part due to its recalcitrance, itsaridity forming a geogEaphical barrier to

the consumrnation of manifest destiny.

Van Dyb's work was partty responsible

for a marked shift of attitude tward the

regrion" transforming hostility to

appreciation through an appeal to

Victorian aesthedcg. but the deske to

canl,e into the land the furrouts of "the

prcper path of reason" remain, through

the Progrressfirc rigationists' rhetoric of

emancipation to the boosterisrn of New

West corporations. So, wttenVan Dyke

and Banham consider the degtabilising

effects of beingrin the degert, it is a

tentative step torrard a kind of delerium,tmard unreasonable erperience, and a

step which is made against the very real

pressures of forces determined to plough

under the treachery of that wttich

unsettles becatrse it refuses settlement.

firese are the forces destr,oyed in Daria's

vision, a vision the logic of Arrtonioni's

6lm bringrs us to understand would not

hane been possible without the

radicalising trip tluough the degert.

I'rke Zabriskie Pornt,Vart Dyke's book

ends with a vieion of destruction, whete"the globe itself'will "become as desert

sand blovrn hither and yon tluough

space".In the face of actual politicd andsocial evils, as withVan Dyke and

Banham, Antonioni's e:rplosions become a

form of aestheticised aplocalypse, a

modernist despair which seeks solace in

formd play seded offfrom the

brutalising power of everyday life.

Ianrdscape is again no more than the sum

of its effects. Ttre innocence of the eye is

again obtained ttuough a blocking off of

nrlgar truths, like Vart Dyke's work as a

middle mart for robber barons, and

Banlnrn's resistance to the presence of

Native peoples in his pristine modern

space.If the desert ovenurns visud

systenu and deetabilisee establishedpsychologies, it does so here in the

senrice of an Anglo gtrest for novel

eqperience, for'etfect', which renders all

the world a curatorial playgrround for

refuied sensibilities.

Notcr

$l Peter ReynerBanham,Scenes Amenca

Deserta,ThamesandHud.son.cndon,

I982, .73.

[2] JohnC VanDyke, ?he Desert:

Further Studies NatunlAppearariceg

Sampson our.Marston. ondon. 90l

[3] PeterWil{ ed., TheDesertReader,

Universrty f UtahRess,SaltLakeCity l99l .

[a] JohnCVan Dyke,,4rt orArts Sake. 893.

[5] JohnCVan Dyke,Natr.re or itsOwn

Sa.ke: rrstSfudesrn NaturalAppearances,

Scribners.NewYork I 898.[6Jop.cit.,TheDesert,p.87.

[7] ilcid., .a3.

[8] iloid.:pp.S&-?.

[9] op.ot.

ll0l ibid., p.ls34.

[U i]cid., .157.

ll2l ibid.,pp.61-2.

[3] op.crt., heDesert,.l?3.

[4 ] op.cit.,43.

flsl ibid.,p.157.

061 bid., p.i58.

[7 ] b id . ,p . l l4 .

l lSl ibid., . l16.

[9 ] ibid.,pp.lI8-e.

[20J bid.,p.129.[2ll bid., p.I25.

l22libid, p.133.

[23] ilcid., .142.

[24] op.cit.,TheDesert,p.23.

[25] op.ctt., 166.

[26] bid.,p.225.

[27] op.cit.,TheDesert, .i09.

[28] lcid., p.109-10.

[29] op.cit., p.2234.

Blbttognaphy

Banlram,Peter ReynerScenes Amenca

Deserta [ondon:ThamesandHudson,1982).

Baudritlard, JeanAmeica Tlans.Chris Tbrner

(l-ondon:Veno, 988).Lirnerick, PatriciaNelson Desefl Passages:

Encounterswith theAmencanDeserb

(Albuqr:erqr"re: niversityof New Mexico Press'

r98s).

Ponte,AlessandraTheHouse of Light and

Enfopry: nhabiting he Amencan Desert'

Asemblage30 1996): 2-31.

Teagrue, avidW TheSouthwesl Amencan

LiteratureandArt: ?ie Rtseof a Desert

AesThettcfucson:Universrtyof AitzonaPress,

1997).Ch. 5. A DesertParadox'.

Tompkins, JaneWesto[Everythng:

The nner We of WestemsOxford:

Odord Unirrerstty ress,1992)

725.29.c.95.1892.VanDyke, john C The Desert:Further

Sfudres nr Natural ApPearances

(london: Sampson ow Marston, i90l).

Wild, Peter, ed. Ihe Desert Reader

(Salt Lake City: Ururcnsttyof Utah Press, l99l)

Wild. Peter. and Davtd W Teagrue.eds.

The SecretMe of Jotn C.Van DYke:

Selecled I'etters @eno and Las Vegas:

Universrry of Nevada Press, 1997).

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