Artist Doug Aitken tips the swimming pool on its side, throwing our equilibrium off like we’ve got water in our ears. Seen this way, the pool evokes the form of the numeral zero. Across from it, in this book, are a grid of billboards, and all of these billboards are blank. Let’s use Aitken’s structure—signs on the left, pools on the right—as we continue.
Here is Richard Misrach from his book Desert Cantos looking at a flooded Texaco sign and an emptied municipal pool.
Here is Stephen Shore looking at a billboard that duplicates the landscape and a swimming pool that interrupts it.
And moving back in time further still, here is Ed Ruscha, perhaps the quintessential California artist of the ’60s, looking at the sign outside an apartment building for his book Some Los Angeles Apartments (above left) and two of the pools in his book Nine Swimming Pools (above right). The great thing about Ruscha’s books is the way they work in opposition. By taking pools and signs as their subjects, for example, they seem to suggest they have an importance worth noting. But by ceaselessly reproducing them with banal, formatted images, he seems to remove their importance as quickly as he notes it.
Another blank billboard (above left) and a man-made reservoir (above right) bring us full circle, back to VanderLans. These are pages from his first book, Palm Desert, which appeared in spring of 1999. The title, he writes in his introduction, comes from a song by Van Dyke Parks on the 1968 album Song Cycle and for the town of Palm Desert, which the song and the book attempt to document.
So the title is a simultaneous allusion to a representation of place and to the place itself. VanderLans writes, “I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of place, and in particular those places immortalized in song lyrics as they become infused with new meaning.” The good vibrations of a name is something to keep in mind.
The book, naturally enough, is both a kind of field guide to the town’s natural features and a Hollywood Homes tour in book form, as VanderLans retraces many of Parks’s steps during the time he lived in Palm Desert, preceding Song Cycle’s release. This idea of the “field trip”—and its relationship to the “field guide”—is something else to keep in mind.
VanderLans depicts a field guide in Palm Desert itself.
What prompts VanderLans’s trip, though, is not simply to haunt Parks’s old home; no, what prompts it is the hope of finding inspiration through mutual understanding. VanderLans writes, “Parks, who hails from the South, often reflects upon California with the keen eye of an outsider. Being an immigrant to California myself, it is easy for me to relate to Parks’s love for the mythological California landscape….” So, a last thing to keep in mind: the émigré’s migration.
The next two books in the Palm Desert trilogy follow like variations on a theme. Cucamonga takes its name from Rancho Cucamonga, a township close to where Don Van Vliet (a.k.a. Captain Beefheart) recorded Trout Mask Replica in 1969, the album to which the book is dedicated.
Again, the vibration of a name: “Whenever I see the name ‘Cucamonga,’ for instance, I think of Frank Zappa and Don Van Vliet… Zappa because he had a studio there and wrote a song called ‘Cucamonga,’ and Van Vliet because it sounds like one of those nicknames he would assign to The Magic Band members.” Again, the union of a “field trip” and “field guide,” here are even more explicit: “I remember as a kid in Holland going on field trips visiting the houses of Rembrandt and other historical figures…. Rembrandt’s house,
[which is] nearly 400 years old, is hardly different from hundreds of other old homes throughout Amsterdam.” In the same breath, the house, like Ruscha’s subjects, is both notable and banal.
And, once again, VanderLans discusses the émigré’s migration: “Gauguin moved to Tahiti, Van Gogh to Southern France, Pollock to New York, Byron to Italy. These are exotic places, conducive to getting the creative juices flowing.” But, whereas Parks was an émigré to Southern California, Beefheart was not. VanderLans closes his introduction by naming Southern California “Beefheart Country.”
The third and final book, Joshua Tree, returns to an émigré as its subject—Gram Parsons, who joined the Byrds in 1968 to produce the album Sweetheart of the Rodeo—but it is darker and more reflective in tone. The book is named both for the tree whose shape the Mormons compared to the outstretched arms of the prophet Joshua, and for the town where Parsons died tragically at age 26. Once again, VanderLans originates his book in the power of a name, and, again, the field trip to match up place with name spawns a field guide, evoked even more strongly here by the use of animal silhouettes like those from Massimo Vignelli’s Audubon Society field guides from the mid-’70s.
More recently, silhouettes of the field guide sort show up in the work of Mark Dion, an artist whose work frequently confronts issues of cataloging the natural world.
These silhouettes crop up far earlier in the work of Ed Ruscha, who was, like Parsons and VanderLans, also an émigré, and, like VanderLans, a maker of books. Ruscha’s book A Few Palm Trees uses silhouetting to show a few typical palm trees from Southern California.
John Baldessari, another quintessential California conceptual artist who was making work around the same time as Ruscha, used silhouettes to great graphic effect in his paintings and found photographs.
The sandy, sorbet-colored bindings of the three books in VanderLans’s Palm Desert series may well derive from Baldessari’s early “message” paintings, executed with the help of a sign painter,
and the colors of these message paintings may well derive from prefab ranch-home siding colors.
Like VanderLans’s projects, many of Baldessari’s and Ruscha’s projects take the form of “capers” that blur the boundaries of performance, tour, and quest. Ruscha’s book Royal Road Test,
for example, documents the throwing of a Royal typewriter out the window of Ruscha’s car. Executed with the musician Mason Williams, (a.k.a. The Thrower), the project is similar in tone to Baldessari’s California Map Project: Part I,
also executed with a musician friend, in which the letters of the word “CALIFORNIA” are placed to scale in the state of California to correspond to their actual positions on a AAA state map. Both projects poke fun rather directly at a well-known typographic dilemma, namely, that language is easier to represent than the world itself.
Running past the site of Joshua Tree and through VanderLans’s introduction is Pearblossom Highway, the road whose name appears in David Hockney’s greatest photocollage.
As Hockney shot tile after 35mm tile of his mosaiclike construction, he moved back and forth through space, just enough to produce a Cubistic sense of dislocation. In so doing, Hockney shows us that while the place may be realistically depicted, the camera may make it even more impossible to know the place at all.
Not only is this the great lesson of California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, a place where place is faked on an everyday basis, but it is also the great lesson of technology, of the man-made, which blesses and curses our perception of the natural world. In Joshua Tree, VanderLans uses Hockney’s back-and-forth technique to produce two images of a hill
that are nearly identical, save for a few paces. But the hill is not the same. As I leafed through this book and experienced this effect, I thought of Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar,” a great parable of the relationship between the natural and the man-made.
I placed a jar in Tennessee
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
Stevens’s tale is a cautionary one: the man-made, though perhaps not as beautiful, will take root because of its promise of perfection. VanderLans sees this too: he observes the strip malls and housing developments that make up the contemporary sprawl along the freeways of Los Angeles and beyond. At the end of his life, Stevens would write of “The palm at the end of the mind,” a mental journey to a kind of paradise in which “The palm stands at the edge of space,” merely “being.” The palm—for Stevens and historically—is a great symbol of redemption, renewal, and return.
