Center for Land Use Interpretation

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CLUI logo

History

The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) is a non-profit research organization, founded in 1994 by Matthew Coolidge, involves exploring, examining, and understanding land and landscape issues. The Center employs a variety of methods to this end, engaging in research, classification, extrapolation, and exhibition. The mission statement of the CLUI is to "increase and diffuse knowledge about how the nation's lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived."^[1] The organization produces exhibitions about land use phenomenology in the USA, and displays them at its exhibit locations and at other museum and non-commercial and educational venues as well. The CLUI produces publications, online resources, tours, lectures, and other public programs across the country. Activities of the Center are summarized and discussed in its annual newsletter, The Lay of the Land, available in print to subscribers as well as online. The CLUI's main office is in Los Angeles, on Venice Boulevard, across from downtown Culver City, where it operates a display space open to the public. It also operates other facilities and interpretive sites in the USA.

Neither an environmental group nor an art collective, CLUI resists categorization by maintaining a diverse, eclectic program of activities that invite a closer examination of "humankind's interaction with the Earth's surface." CLUI is the lead agency for the establishment of the American Land Museum, a network of exhibition sites in various interpretive zones across the country, which together form a dynamic portrait of the national landscape.

"The increase and diffusion of information about how the nation's lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived."

Matthew Coolidge

"Man made landscape is a cultural inscription that can help us better understand who we are and what we are doing."

Matthew Coolidge

CLUI and Art

"CLUI presents itself as an unbiased public resource on land use, an institution that, while informed by the tools of the arts, nonetheless goes to great lengths to avoid being restricted to the confines of the art world. Signaling this extra-art world identity in all aspects of its self fashioning—from its administrative name and institutional voice its circular seal and unassuming office front headquarters—the Center presents itself as a new kind of institution, one that finds in the alternatively banal and esoteric details of American land use a better way of understanding the world—a way, as one CLUI guide book explains, of developing a "theory of the present."[3]

Not surprisingly, the Center's non-committal, even apolitical stance towards hot-button political topics like nuclear testing ranges and hazardous waste facilities has proven to be challenging for many critics, and much of the critical literature on CLUI consists of efforts to identify an "authentic" political motive behind the project.[5]

Such efforts, however, tend to overlook a peculiarity about the project that is far more foundational in nature: namely, the belief that the contemporary world can be effectively understood through an examination of land use. "The complex processes that constitute globalization take place on a high level of abstraction ... How do you document electronic communication, financial capital flow or deregulation?"[6] While most responses to this question, in art and theory alike, respond by paralleling the increasing abstraction of the world around them—the proliferation of images in today's biennial exhibitions of airport terminals and global maps overlaid with directional arrows are cases in point—CLUI's response is surprisingly straightforward.[7] By focusing less on their causes than on the effects these forces have on everyday life, the Center's work exposes the question of locating—of identifying where exactly we are at any given point—to be one of the fundamental problems of the present world. As Coolidge explains, though "there is no substitute for being there, especially in these increasingly virtual times," in the end we have "a lot left to learn about being there and not being there."[8]

The American Land Museum

Along with the creation and application of arts of the center itself, the center is involved with the creation of a new museum opening soon. The museum if "The American Land Museum", which is a collection of locations across the country, selected to express the character and identity of the contemporary American landscape. Each location is an artifact, presented as an exhibit. Being actual places, these exhibits are connected to the continuous ground, and cannot be dislocated and transported into a conventional museum. So they remain where they are, and the museum is established around them, like a picture frame around a picture. Similar in some ways to the National Park system, the American Land Museum is a continental collection of places, meant to be experienced directly to the degree that it is possible and permissible. Unlike the park system, the sites are mostly owned by private entities, which are ultimately responsible for controlling access to them. Not all the exhibits are easy to explore, but they all are part of the contiguous and shared American landscape.

The Politics of Place

In its efforts to create what the Center has described variously as "a selective, macrocosmic portrait of place" and "a narrative of place that can, if successful, shed light on the human experience," CLUI's practice intersects with a model of site-specific art that rose to prominence in the 1990s, at or around the same time that the Center was founded.[11] The relationship of site-specific art to place was in fact the subject of much critical address among curators and art historians at this time.

As much a political problem as it was an aesthetic one, the new alliance between concerns of art and place also brought troublesome political implications. By playing into romantic ideas like those promoted by thinkers from Heidegger to Lucy Lippard about the value of a self-enclosed and intimately experienced understanding of the local, such work risked participating in a false politicization of the local. The danger of this, David Harvey has argued, is that, "place comes into its own as a locus of some potentially un-alienated direct sensuous interaction with environs. But it does so by hiding within the fetishism of commodities and ends up fetishizing the human body, the self, and the realms of human sensation as the locus of all being in the world."[15] By promoting an understanding of the local as a self-contained retreat, his words suggest, artists, critics, and activists alike participate in masking the extent to which the local is not only intimately intertwined with but is itself a dialectical product of the global.

Against this critical backdrop, CLUI's engagement with place is difficult to situate. Indeed, there are many ways in which the Center's work resembles the kind of place-based work that so many critics have called into question. CLUI artists, for example, are often imported into "one place after another," for a limited amount of time to create projects that address the details of the (broadly defined) local environment through a combination of photo and textual documentation, interactive digital views, and extended bus tours. And like the exhibitions that critics have questioned, the resulting works are intended to expose overlooked aspects of that environment in such a way as to enrich their audience's understanding of place. Furthermore, as the bus tours demonstrate, these goals are accomplished as an extension of the Center's commitment to the importance of physical presence at a site. Yet, as the discussion that follows will reveal, if the Center's work in some ways resembles this model of place-based site-specific practice, it also complicates it in important ways. What model of place, after all, can be assumed to be presented in bus tours that cover 500-mile expanses of space in a single day? And what kind of authentic understanding of place is offered by focusing on generic sites like power plants and water reservoirs? Beyond this, how does the Center's eagerness to contextualize its sites not only as local investigations but also in a nationwide database fit in with this model of place-based art?

Scale

To return to the question of how CLUI makes space compress and expand in its visits to everyday sites, then, it is useful to note one further point of correspondence between CLUI and Smithson. Indeed, just as Smithson's depiction of the Spiral Jetty consisted not only of different viewing angles on the sculpture but also of different mediated approaches to it—whether these approaches were textual, cinematic, or photographic—CLUI, too, spreads its documentation of sites out across multiple mediums, including the in-person views of a site enabled by the bus tours, photographic documentation in their exhibitions, and interactive re-scalable Google map views offered in the Land Use Database. Often drawing on the juxtapositions and descriptions enabled by the Internet technology in the tours' narrations, they ensure that these various approaches are each called upon to inform, enliven, and enrich the other. One of but many examples is the earlier quoted narration, in which Coolidge describes the Great Salt Lake as a "giant puddle at the bottom of the Great Basin." Though earlier presented as a demonstration of the Center's characteristically wry tone, we can now also see it as a statement that destabilizes our perspective and sense of scale. It suggests a zooming outward, as in an aerial view, or re-scalable Internet map, until the giant lake is, indeed, reduced to the size of a "puddle." By introducing this distant point of view into the minds of viewers literally on the ground, the Center betrays its indebtedness to Smithson and sheds light on the way ideas borrowed from land art function as a central part of its methodology."

Exhibitions

The Best Dead Mall In America; Dixie Square Mall, Illinois

The Best Dead Mall in America: A Photographic Documentation of the Dixie Square Mall in Harvey, Illinois (2003).

The CLUI also executes exhibitions such as "The Best Dead Mall in America" and A View into the Pipe (an excavation exposing Los Angeles' main sewer pipe, offering a rare glimpse of the inner workings of the metropolis). Activities include guided bus tours and interpretive programs as well as initiatives like the Land Use Database, an online resource of unusual and exemplary sites throughout the United States designed to educate and inform the public about our landscape as it is altered to accommodate the complex demands of society.

Located 20 miles south of downtown Chicago, the 800,000 square-foot mall has been abandoned for over 23 years, and in that time, the mall has been transformed into a new kind of post-shopping experience.

From the outside the general form of the mall appears intact, and all of the rambling megastructure is still standing and is navigable. Faceted facades and colored wall treatments subtly echo the anchor stores at the ends (that type of brick—must have been a Sears; those vertical stylings—Montgomery Ward?). The shape of the structure is more difficult to discern than it once was, as a new growth forest of trees is doing well in the parking lot, plazas, and alcoves around the outside of the building, breaking through asphalt, and overgrowing out of planters. Behind the rusty cyclone, the garden center has finally gone to seed.

Inside the unlocked or doorless doorways is a space beyond the language of design. Surprising and exotic textures and forms are visible within the faint remnants of the familiar commercial layouts of the 1970’s branded spaces. The interior lighting, natural, haphazard, and high contrast, brings full visibility to some spaces, while others remain occluded and mysterious, where senses other than sight are summoned to experience the space. A true manifestation of a deconstructed architecture, inside veneer exfoliates, panels peel, and drop ceilings drop. Holes appear, and spread, giving angular views of the structural layers.

This “dead” mall is actually more alive than many of its living counterparts: the building lives through its continuous transformation and integration with its surroundings. Visitors are free to interact with the space, to make modifications, adjustments, renovations, as they see fit, and to make it their own, if only for indefinite moments. Organic matter lives and thrives, especially in the random atriums formed by the partial roof collapses. Grids of floor tile are covered in carpets of moss, with flooded puddles, which resemble a landscape of forests and lakes seen from above, teasing one’s sense of scale and cartesian formality.

This is an inside out architecture, where full trees have reclaimed some of the interior space, breaking through the linoleum and the concrete floors, and where drifts of snow are free to migrate through the corridors as far as they can, and hallways become avenues of ice. Conversely, some of the interior materials have begun to spill out the service doors and other apertures, a belching of soaked drywall, carpet, mattresses, old appliances, display cabinets, bringing some of the inside out to the exterior spaces.

Additionally, the exhibit for the Dead Mall Competition, hosted by the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design during fall 2002 / spring 2003, is now on view inside the mall. While not officially open to the public, the exhibit will, like the mall itself, be on display indefinitely. As part of this monument to the mall era, copies of the Dead Mall competition print outs are hung throughout, and have become part of the surficial material of the mall interior - its fate merged with that of this, perhaps the most emblematic of them all, the über dead mall of America.

Online Resources

The CLUI makes a collection of "unusual and exemplary" land use sites in the United States available online, through the Land Use Database. Site-specific images in the database are taken by members of the CLUI, and are attributed to the CLUI Photo Archive. Another archive of non-site-specific images taken by members of the CLUI, known as the Morgan Cowles Archive, is also available online.

Program Areas

The Center's programs and projects cover many types of land uses in the USA, including those related to agriculture, energy, industry, mining, communication, waste management, water resources, transportation, commerce, housing, recreation, and defense and preparedness. Many of the these exhibitions and public programs are described in their respective Program Areas online.

External links

• Organization website
• The CLUI land-use data base