As soon as we’ve realized this, we turn around and see a trail of fish behind us. Fish in John Baldessari’s work,
fish in Mark Dion’s work,
piling up,
and, on page 101 of Supermarket, the name of a fish that’s the name of a town that I’d heard of before.
The town of Cabezon, CA, takes its name from this fish,
which inhabits the reefs in the nearby Pacific. It is entry #420 in the National Audobon Society Field Guide to North American Fishes, Whales & Dolphins, which notes that its eggs are poisonous to humans if eaten. Cabezon the town is notable for its Dinosaur diner—Cabezon fish, like dinosaurs, date back to prehistoric times—and the diner
is a regular roadside attraction complete with a “life-size” dino (above left), like the diner animals Steven Izenour found on his treks for Learning from Las Vegas (above right).
Richard Misrach snapped a photo of the murals that adorn the side of the diner for Desert Cantos.
In Supermarket, VanderLans gives us only the dinosaur’s giant feet.
The first time I’d ever heard the word “cabezon” was in Robert Hass’s first book of poetry, a slim volume called Field Guide, for which he won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1973.
Hass, like VanderLans and I, is interested in the aura of names. He writes in his introduction to Field Guide of “weird Spanish names for shopping centers contrived by people who knew no Spanish and had no sense either of the place or of its physical life” and explains that “the California landscape shows up so much in these poems because… I had, for whatever reasons, a passion for natural history, but also because it was a place for me where language did not belong altogether to desire, to human intention.” In our travels through VanderLans’s landscape of influence, we have seen this viewpoint expressed before, though never quite so elegantly.
We find the cabezon, or, in Italian, cabezone, in the first poem in the collection. Hass calls it “an ugly atavistic fish / as old as the coast shelf it feeds upon.” The fish is ancient, essential, and out of place today. Later in the poem, it’s caught. Hass writes,
But it’s strange to kill for the sudden feel of life The danger is to moralize the strangeness.We seek our origins and we are of our origins. They originate us. What they do not do is offer a lesson. The act of living is not a story but a process, of which dying is a part, a process of aggregating experiences, of forming connections between things and places and ideas that gain in force as we form them. The origins of design, art, and language itself are shared origins that we can trace back to caves in Altamira, Spain, only several miles from another Cabezon: the tourist respite known as Cabezon de la Sal, nestled on the northern coast. The more signs you look for, the more signs you will find. They are everywhere, teeming, and we struggle just to reel them in. Today, the video game Katamari Damacy embraces this nonobjective model of making meaning. As you roll a sticky ball through the countryside, you are able to attract greater and greater-size things based on how many things you’ve already managed to attract. The game has no moral: a player simply must grow through the process of interacting with his surroundings, thereby connecting those things to himself and to one another through the interaction.
The danger is to moralize the strangeness.This is our struggle, both as fish and as fishermen, captives of our chosen countrysides and capturers of it, and we struggle, as Hass does, to see things as they are. We have been struggling with this for centuries. But, in the end, things are what they are, and we are who we are, because of the act of looking itself. In what we’ve seen tonight, we’ve learned that a fish’s eyes look wider. I want to suggest to all of you now that our life as designers (and people too) depends on growth: by seeing more in what we know, by seeing more of what we don’t, and by always looking for connections between the two. We will transform ourselves in this process of working. In his final moment with the cabezon, Hass is transformed in this way. He writes,
Holding the spiny monster in my hands his bulging purple eyes were eyes and the sun was almost tangent to the planet on our uneasy coast. Creature and creature, we stared down centuries.Back to start © 2005 Rob Giampietro
The title, unlike those of the Palm Desert trilogy, is not explained, but ripe for conjecture. How is the desert of California like a supermarket? Is it a site for an essential form of buying? A warehouse of multiples grouped together? A clearing-house? A life source? In flux? The answer is yes, and then some. The word gives a colored context and the suggestion of a great range of concerns and influences. Steering your way through Supermarket, this fact becomes clearer. It is like a viewbook of both California and the history of photography.
On pages 14–15, we zoom past a grid of landscapes like those from Gerhard Richter’s monumental study, Atlas.
The game of hiding the Hollywood sign behind a thrift store building on pages 36–37 quotes Baldessari’s “Wrong” and “Alignment” series in the late ’60s.
The photograph of VanderLans’s shadow on page 44 casts back to Lee Friedlander’s Self Portraits book, quoting his opening photograph from Canyon de Chelly almost directly. It also reminds us of the silhouettes we’ve seen before.
On pages 84–85, the desert dwellings are like a set of overlooked typologies from Bernd and Hilla Becher.
The photographs on pages 132–133 literally re-create Hockney’s famous “Pearblossom Highway” on site. VanderLans is haunting his masters’ haunts and attempting to find himself as a photographer in California. He’s looking for location. He writes, early on, “And when I look into the viewfinder all I see are Ruscha and Baltz and Baldessari and Hockney”—all of whom, save for Baltz, we’ve heard from before.
Baltz is as important, however. Part of the movement christened by the critic William Jenkins in 1975 as New Topographics, Baltz’s famous book, The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California, surveyed much of the same area as VanderLans in much the same way and to many of the same ends.
Also in this camp are others on VanderLans’s list, including Robert Adams, Henry Wessel, Joe Deal, and Bill Owens. Owens, born in San Jose, published Suburbia, his seminal work, in 1972. It was a book of short text interviews and photographs of residents in the new suburbs built in Southern California during the preceding decade.
In looking through Surburbia, it seems many of Owens’s photographs glance downhill at real-estate developments taking shape below.
In so doing, Owens’s process of gazing down mines the specific relationship between the words “typology,”
or the systematic classification of types that have traits in common;
“topography,” or the surface features of a place, region, or object showing the relationships among its components;
and “typography,” or the arrangement and appearance of letters to form words on a page. The page is a topographic view. Its letters are typologies. They are mapped by typography. Owens’s view, I could argue, is a designer’s view.
But people are designers, too, and the ownership of that viewpoint is no more reserved for a designer than it is for a photographer or a writer. What Owens and VanderLans have aimed to describe about the landscape of Southern California is also observed by Thomas Pynchon.
The first-edition cover of his 1965 book The Crying of Lot 49 reminds me of the markings from Altamira. Pynchon’s story begins with his character Oedipa Maas—named for the original origin-hunter, Oedipus—peering down a hillside. Keep in mind that Pynchon’s dad, Thomas Pynchon, Sr., was an industrial surveyor on Glen Cove, Long Island. By the time Pynchon, Jr. was writing Lot 49, however, he had emigrated to California, where Ed Ruscha had just completed his first book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations. As if gazing at another of Owens’s Suburbia photographs, Pynchon’s startling voice-over begins,
mailboxes,
and views of the car and the highway.
The Americans is introduced by that great poet-émigré to California, Jack Kerouac. The image of the jukebox, of mediated music, runs throughout Frank’s book as it runs through VanderLans’s, as it runs through Pynchon’s. The radio is sonic typography, sound broken into bits, beamed, and recombined to communicate to us in our cars and homes.
VanderLans’s list goes on. He cites Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, whose work for the WPA was an early template for Robert Frank. He cites Edward Weston, whose meditations on form and objects in the American Southwest are inescapable here. And he goes further back to the dawn of photography in America, citing William Henry Jackson and Timothy O’Sullivan, both of whom worked in the landscape of California. To this already extensive list, I would add Karl Blossfeldt,
whose typological work with plants informed the Bechers’ later work with architecture; Andreas Gursky, trained by the Bechers, and in whom we can see typologies as well, as in this Prada display of shoes;
Thomas Struth, also trained by the Bechers in Düsseldorf, with landscape studies similar to Richter’s;
and Stephen Izenour, who took many of the photographs in Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown’s seminal book, Learning from Las Vegas, which is shown on the inside cover of Emigre 52.
VanderLans’s most recent books, Bagdad, California and Pages from an Imaginary Book, are similar in content—both are, once again, about the Mojave Desert—but they begin to lead VanderLans down a different route in terms of their form. Bagdad, California begins, like Palm Desert, with the attempt to reconcile the name of a place with the place itself.
In this case, it is the charged name “Bagdad,” in opposition to a photograph that appeared in a book of landscape photography VanderLans had seen 12 years earlier.
In addition to his photographs of “a nonplace like Bagdad,” VanderLans includes a photograph of influential books (above left), as Mark Dion often does in his artworks (above right).
The young artist Carol Bove, currently featured in Greater New York at P.S.1, uses this technique as well, specifically about books from the ’60s.
One of the books on VanderLans’s bookshelf is City of Quartz, by Mike Davis, which is, in very broad strokes, about the history of the city of Los Angeles. Listen to some of the first two paragraphs:
VanderLans also includes bits of scrap metal from along the roadside in Baghdad. One of the bits, shaped like the letter E, has been anthologized before by fellow Dutch designer Karel Martens, shown at the right, and by Paul Elliman in his Bits typeface.
Pages from an Imaginary Book takes VanderLans down a more conceptual path. With a layout similar to City of Quartz,
Pages pairs laser-printed images of desert locales with their quirky names and a note from VanderLans about the form the book was to take. It is a concept, a scavenger hunt, an atlas, a poem, and an oasis, and the book illustrates that VanderLans’s work, like the name of his magazine, has strived to develop a conceptual framework around the émigré in all its varied forms.
Born in Holland, VanderLans is an émigré to America and to California. The landscape he finds there and heroes that landscape has attracted are émigrés too. All of this would be interesting in itself, but VanderLans resists it. Instead, the California he envisions, however foreign it might be, is made native by the creative act of his representation of it. It is his California. The state he is searching for is the one he inhabits. It is the palm at the end of the mind. California takes its name from an imaginary land described in a Spanish novel from the 1500s. It is an imaginary place and a place for the imagination, named in a real book and found again in VanderLans’s imaginary one. We’re all California dreamin’.
30 years before Emigre 42, the artist Dan Graham published “Homes for America” in Arts magazine and changed ideas about the presentation and context of art. The project sought to rationalize the system of housing developments that was just then taking hold in the gridded form of a popular magazine layout.
You can find grids of housing façades in the Bechers (below left) and in siding catalogs (below right), but, in the case of Graham’s project, as one critic notes, “the image of the suburban home, serialized like so many Minimalist cubes in space, finds its graphic displacement on a page layout, itself intended to be serialized in the form of a magazine.”
Graham’s project, explained as such, touches not only VanderLans’s photographic project, but the entire project of graphic design. By stirring conceptual art and photographic presentation in with design practice, Graham has made a whole new list of sources available. We may see his contribution arising not solely from Ed Ruscha or the New Topographics, but from Jan Tschichold,
Josef Müller-Brockmann,
Emil Ruder,
Karl Gerstner,
and Armin Hoffman,
to name just a few. By operating in a fine-art context as a commercial graphic designer, VanderLans has become the functional mirror image of Graham, expanding his émigré status to an additional level: his vocation. He is an interloper, a fish out of water. With a fish-eye view, he is not content to be native, as he is not content to be foreign.
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.
Emigre would now become a full-color glossy with full-page ads, and, with a circulation of 45,000—90 times that of its first issue—it would be given away free to subscribers and read by designers and nondesigners alike. In the spring of 1997, Emigre magazine had entered a new era. VanderLans dubbed the new issue “The Mercantile Issue.”
