(excerpt from Allan Kaprow’s Easy)

The following are notes written in the aftermath of a February 2011 enactment of Kaprow’s 1972 piece…

What could a “stone” be other than a rock? It’s a noun and a verb…its usage as a verb could refer to two actions: to throw rocks at someone or something or to remove a seed (or pit) from a piece of fruit before eating it.

As we walked to the site where we would begin walking “downstream,” I scanned the side of the road, looking for objects that may somehow embody or strongly contrast the two actions “stone” could refer to. In the end, I selected an object that caught my eye…a neon yellow tennis ball. It is an object that’s hit to be thrown, but I tend to think of it as a dog toy.

The act of “wetting” the “stone” before walking downstream was staged as a collective activity. I asked everyone enacting Kaprow’s Easy to contribute some spit to wet the “stone,” which they did. After the “stone” was soaked in spit, I began walking downstream.

Running through the center of the site we selected was a dry creek bed.  As I walked through the wood to the creek bed, I tossed the tennis ball in the air, to aid in what I believed would be a lengthy process of drying the semi-absorbent “stone.”  The creek bed was channel into a ravine, and I climbed inside to walk.

At a point, I could no longer walk “downstream” safely.  I debated whether to climb up out of the ravine, and decided against it. I stood tossing the ball in the sliver of a ravine, becoming more and more time-conscious. I had no means of tracking time, yet was aware that I needed to return to a seminar room at UCSD (for a discussion with Kaprow scholar Jeff Kelley) by 3 PM.

I was concerned-scared, in fact-that the “stone” would take too much time to dry. After tossing for 10 or 15 minutes, I started ripping bits of fuzz off the tennis ball. There was a point, where I coated the ball in dry dirt to absorb moisture…my hands were soon coated in fuzzy mud as I desperately tried to dry the “stone.”  I began tossing the ball again, alternating between tossing and pulling off fuzz. When the ball was dry to the touch I threw it as hard as I could, toward the cars blurring past on Genesee.

Queríamos levantarlos…
(nada de viento).

La Migra
inched
cerca de la línea.
Never stepping away from the truck
He just stared.

Cuatro niños
inched
cerca de la línea.
Never stepping away from the truck
He just stared.

Could a plastic bag, sticks, and tape
Volar a través de la línea?

Our field of view expands. Silver, green, and blue mylar hover above stainless yellow, red and black, courtesy of SAN DIEGO DEPT. OF ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH. A white crest laps the transition from sand to saline agua. Two dark forms emerge irregular, long, and low in the distance.

A blurry figure emerges and walks to the post. She pauses, reaching for the four ribbons linking the pressure-treated to floating mylar. As she joins four lengths of plastic twine in her palm, each floating mylar shape deflates and falls. One circle, three stars.

She lowers her arm, the ribbon pulls from the post, detaches. We move in, focused on the now-shapeless mylar. The blue, green, silver have faded, but not in our field of vision. Framed by the distant dark forms, the the shapeless material is now transparent plastic.

Still by the side of the transparent material, an earthen dam ahead bridges Spooners and Monument. We focus on the culvert at the base of the berm. Darkness fills the frame.

Cut. She faces the culvert, turns, walks from the basin toward a hillside boat. A truck pulls up.

“What are you doing here?” She holds the balloons. “Yep…Would you believe it? That people have birthday parties here? All of the time.”

A brine-filled trench opens to the sun setting behind the hills. The water is vodka-pristine, an industrial reflecting pool, psuedo-arctic and sublime in the evening light. The nearby power-lines murmur like dabbling ducks. The sound of exploding IED’s rumbles in the hills. We take a picture.

Multiple forces compete and coalesce in the production of land(scape). Geology, the largest privately-traded corporation in the United States, workers living in the town of Twentynine Palms, rock-hounding tourists, the mineral halite, the US Bureau of Land Management…are several parties involved in the production of the Bristol Dry Lake, a salt mine just East of Twentynine Palms.

The lakebed is part of an extended geographic network ranging from Los Olivitos, Venezuela to Watkins Glen, NY. At these sites, halite mining takes place under the management of the Cargill Salt Company. A drill presses into rocky earth. Water fills the cavity, dissolving rock salt. The resulting brine is pumped to the surface. It settles in trenches, until impurities sink out of the liquid. The water is boiled off, leaving fine salt, suitable for your table. However, very little salt produced today ever makes it to a table. Most is eaten by industry (the automobile industry, in particular, is the world’s largest consumer of salt).

“Extraction of oil, gas, uranium and other products is often visible…but incomprehensible, because we don’t know how to look at it aside from a shudder or a shrug.” (Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local) In the case of the Bristol Dry Lake, the shudder I experienced, initially, was one of being seduced. Location scouting in the Mojave as one of a collaborative trio of artists, I was seduced by a sublime vision of the crystalline landscape at sunset. Scars of the mining operation, the brine-filled ditches appeared as an awesome image, irrespective of their other implications.
“Salt, whose strangeness has always awed men’s minds, has never been less understood by ordinary people. Its secrets have become the preserve of chemists, whose complex and arcane skills cut them severely off from the comprehension of most of us. At the same time, never has common salt more effectively ruled human behavior.” (Margaret Visser, Much Depends Upon Dinner)

It’s important to underscore the role of geology, of the halite itself, as an active player in negotiating the geo-political network of which it is part. It can seduce just as easily as be mined (and the desire for raw materials/their profits may be similarly described in terms of seduction/being seduced). As Michael Pollan muses over the human-subject/nature-object way of conceptualizing the world in The Botany of Desire, I wonder “what if the grammar is all wrong; what if its nothing more than a self-serving conceit?”

(repost + edit from curatorialagent.tumblr.com)

We are in sight of a culvert connecting two sides of a canyon, separated by a berm, a road, and a wall. The culvert is a looking glass. It is also a passageway.

This is a place of detachment, but there are still eyes watching all over. Border Patrol watches via radar. We are watching through a camera lens. A man in a red shirt waves from the other side when he sees us. Scott tries to zoom in on the construction workers with the Bolex’s long viewfinder. Someone is waiting for night to fall somewhere in these hills.

We were preparing for a shot in open view on the hilltop, where the building of the second wall as buried clothing left near the wall. I wanted to pull these things up from the earth, put them in a bag and carry them away.

The white Jeep skids to a stop.

“What are you really doing?

Do you realize where you are? You are too far south. You have crossed one fence. People shoot from across.

I have a gun. You do not. I have a car. You do not. I am watching, they are watching, too, and they do everything.”

He drives off in a cloud of dust.

There is a very sophisticated game at play, here. We are unwitting, and naked in full view on the hilltop. We cover ourselves and start downhill.

A red shirt wrinkles in the dust ahead. I think we should make the shot, but we’re way past the time when that was all right. We do it anyway. Ash asks, “What do you think people watching from across the fence think when you are out here picking up clothes?”

Before, it was about redemption, an act of kindness toward things that have been cruelly treated. It’s not that simple. There’s doubleness to everything here. Including us.

Poetic justice comes in the form of approaching city lights. We are dazzled and cross unwittingly. There is a long line from the checkpoint, and we are moving slowly. People are walking in the streets backwards with icons and blankets and food. There’s a man or a woman waiting for us at the end of this line. They have power to keep any one of us from going any further.

“What are you doing here? Yeah…well, if you see anyone…don’t approach them.”

We walk towards a parking lot, and then a beach. A blonde cowgirl silently kisses a latino cowboy. Their horses watch from the nearby corral. We watch, wanting to take a picture. We don’t dare come close.

The second time we see the oracle, we are walking on the beach. A lone jeep is stranded in the sand, the oracle comes to pull the other officer out, and gets stuck in the process. Across the fence, people gather on an overlook.

There is a family of four, and we jointly laugh at the stranded officers. What fools! The people across the fence are watching, and laughing, too.

We notice a piece of kelp, rubbery and tubular, starting as and air-filled node and tapering to a point. Piles of kelp lay like bodies, rotting and smelling and breeding flies.

“Sometimes, at night, we are lying on the beach, just to watch. They come over and lie down next to us, thinking we’re seaweed, and that’s when we get ‘em.”

We can hear the sound of laughter across the fence. We are dangerously close, a couple more steps and the oracle could swoop down and throw us in jail for the night. Trespassing, US property. It’s terribly uncomfortable to look through the fence and see people on the other side.

The two kids are now lying in the sand, making sand angels, as their mom looks on. Dad helps the Border Patrol, checking tires before they attempt a third time to escape the sand.

We walk up the hill toward the wall. A man carries a guitar behind his back. Two kids are running along the wall and we don’t know if its play or fear.

It’s one thing to cross the wall, it’s another thing to walk in its shadow. When you cross, you pass between realities. When you walk alongside the wall, reality is suspended. You apprehend two realities at once and are not responsible for at least one of them. It’s the same on either side, so long as the other side is visible.

Cast off over a hillside chaparral, it bore the usual signs of aging, a sunbleached skin, wrinkled with gravity.  It was a slow, unwitnessed entropy, maybe over months, maybe years.

Nobody much roams these hills, save Border Patrol.  There are a couple of hikers, people ride horses along the dusty ATV paths that cut the landscape.  Does anyone even attempt to cross now?  These clothes have settled in the hillside, become a permanent, aging feature.  Old-timers.

Near the chaparral and that old, wrinkled coat lay two baseball caps.  One said “LA,” the other said “San Diego,” in cursive embroidery.  Were these destinations or just readily available sunshade?  A bookbag slumped, near empty.  I unzipped the front pocket.  It held a broken pair of wraparound sunglasses, cheap headphones, a bible, a toothbrush.

There was a sudden string of earthquakes.  And no one came to clean up the wreckage.  Were these things left purposefully?  Are they memorials to the little violent eruptions that take place on this hill?  Are these objects altars, left out of respect for the bodies they were cast from?  Are they untouched because they have the weight of someone else’s suffering, or is it just that nobody cares to pick them up?

Arms and collars stretch up out of freshly moved earth.  When they put in the new fence, the bulldozers plowed indifferent to these things that once covered bodies.  The top surface of this new ground is sprayed with dyed-green hydroseed.  Erosion control.

I remember very clearly walking along one of the paths travelled by BP’s trucks and ATVs.  Pressed in the dust was a woman’s fleece jacket, tire-tread worn on top of the usual entropy.  I cried a little, and picked it up from the ground.  

A white van parked on the side of the road, near a fallow field.  Two men on ATV’s flanked the rear of the van.  A man stood between them, dressed in black, his hands on each side of his head.  I passed slowly, and tried not to look.

The park is opened Saturdays and Sundays.  The lot is nearly empty.  I walk to the beach, and pause to read the warning signs.  You may not drive or bring dogs on the beach.  There is no lifeguard.  There are rip-currents and sewage.  Neither the city nor the state are responsible for injury or illness you contract by swimming.

A thirty-something and his two sons sit on the beach.  The two children run in the sand.  I am watching as they run south and my eye hits a chain-link fence.  I look through the first fence to another.

Above the two fences, a group people stand on a hillside.  Nobody is swimming, but we all look out to the Pacific, imagining that we see land somewhere out there.  There are then two borders we share; this fence and that ocean.

If you walk along the fence from the ocean, you’re up the first of many hills.  There is a paved road, once the chain-link is replaced by a row of parallel steel rods.  There is a gate, and a sign, explaining the rules for entry.  Maximum Occupancy: 25.  Government issued photo ID is required to gain access.  Individuals and organizations are responsible for ensuring the public access area remains a clean, litter free environment.  The exchange of items through, over, or under the fence is prohibited.  Physical contact with individuals from Mexico is not permitted.  No weapons permitted.  Disturbing, moving, or altering infrastructure designed to limit access is prohibited.  Two of these points make me want to violate this last point, at least to spit on the sign.

I continued walking in the shadow of the fence.

Amboy road starts in Twentynine Palms and ends in Vegas, a hybrid of “Ambush” and “Envoy.”  Over the mountains, you see the flash of exploding IED’s and a low rumble follows.

The land is divided into 5 acre plots, with one shack per plot.  Our shack is a tent city, and the roof is beautiful at night.  There’s an old piano, I open the keyboard and don’t even play a note.

We go to The Palms for a broken karaoke machine, a pool table, stories from a Marine sporting a hat over long hair and a beard, the sweet voice of a man who looks a bit like the Penguin from Batman, and $1.00 PBR.  I leave the bar to walk the highway at night.  Oncoming headlights silently float as distant and singular orb.  The sound comes when they separate, and I get off the road.

Bagdad exists a cardboard and shipping container fascimile no less than a half-hour’s drive.     The street signs are in Arabic, they are shining new, like you’d find in any Western City.  Bagdad Highway ends abruptly when mountains rise in the east.  I never see this city, but it is vivid in my mind.

Carlos Monsivais, “Where Are You Going to Be Worthier.” Translated by Sofia Ruiz-Alfaro and excerpted from Postborder City: Cultural Spaces of Bajalta California