Belongings
A Thesis
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Fine Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University
By Nickolaus Larsen, B.F.A Graduate Program in Art
The Ohio State University 2019
Thesis Committee Alison Crocetta, Advisor Ann Hamilton George Rush © Copyrighted by Nickolaus Larsen 2019
ABSTRACT
The entries in this document provide context and backstory for the language used, often in multiple forms, in the artworks in my thesis exhibition. The entries are presented alphabetically and cross-referenced—a structure designed to be both easy to navigate and reflective of the way these ideas are linked in my work. As a companion to the other elements of my thesis project, this text is neither exhaustive or definitive; it is a living document designed to be updated as the vocabulary of my work grows and evolves.
ii VITA
2002-2007 ...... B.F.A, University of Nevada, Reno
2016-2017 ...... Graduate Administrative Assistant, The Ohio State University
2017-2018 ...... Graduate Teaching Assistant, The Ohio State University
2018-Present ...... Graduate Research Assistant, The Ohio State University
FIELD OF STUDY
Major Field: Art
iii TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ...... ii VITA ...... iii LIST OF FIGURES ...... vii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1 CHAPTER 2. TERMS AND CONDITIONS ...... 2 American Flats ...... 2 Anti-milestone ...... 2 Art Directing the Real ...... 3 Asshole Mountain ...... 3 Artifacts ...... 4 Artifact Catalog ...... 5 Bear Trap ...... 5 Belongings ...... 6 Bent Rainbow ...... 6 Bleached Denim ...... 7 Bloodshot Eyes ...... 8 Blur/Drift ...... 9 Buffalo Check ...... 9 Buffaloner Mountain ...... 9 Cactus Skeleton ...... 10 Camouflage ...... 10 Cast(ing) Urethane ...... 12 Chimayo Sport Jacket ...... 12 Controlled Burn ...... 13 Cumtrees ...... 13 Darkness on the Edge of Town ...... 13 Day After Christmas Feeling ...... 14 Dead Horse ...... 14 Desert ...... 16 Deserter ...... 17 Desert Hearts ...... 18 Desolation Wilderness ...... 19 Dry Heat ...... 19
iv TABLE OF CONTENTS CONTINUED
Ed Ruscha ...... 19 Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere ...... 21 False Colors ...... 22 Familiar Void ...... 24 Fire Retardant ...... 24 First Aids Test ...... 24 Ghost Townie Pleasures ...... 24 Hanky Code ...... 25 Having a Coke with You ...... 25 Hillside Letters ...... 25 Isotropic Environment ...... 26 I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times ...... 27 Intermittent River ...... 28 Leaving No Trace ...... 28 Limited Resources ...... 29 List-making ...... 29 Low-Water Mark ...... 31 Male Gaze ...... 31 Making Do ...... 31 Map Crevices ...... 33 Mapping ...... 34 Mayor of Ghost Towns ...... 35 Memorabilia ...... 35 Merch ...... 36 Mountain Monograms ...... 36 Nervous Milk ...... 36 Neutral Ground ...... 36 Omar Pierce ...... 36 Outside Jokes ...... 37 Past-Life Casino King ...... 37 Peak Bleak ...... 38 Queer Mountain ...... 38 Rambling ...... 39
v TABLE OF CONTENTS CONTINUED
Razzle Dazzle ...... 39 Roadkill Coyote Fur ...... 40 Settling ...... 41 Souvenir ...... 41 Still Lifes / Lives ...... 41 Sunbleached Flag ...... 42 Sunfinity ...... 42 West Ghost / Spirit Willing ...... 42 Wish Landscape ...... 43 We ...... 44 Wet Sage ...... 44 Year-Round Christmas Lights ...... 45 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 46 APPENDIX A. FRANK O’HARA’S HAVING A COKE WITH YOU …………………….……………. 48
vi LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1. Polaroid of a now-demolished structure at the American Flats site...... 2 Figure 2. Terms classified by Gilad Padva as being associated with either history or nostalgia ...... 4 Figure 3. Muzzle of an unidentified animal, possibly a bear, found on an archaeological survey near Austin, Nevada...... 5 Figure 4. Belongings (Grave) ...... 6 Figure 5. Sign at the entrance to the Rainbow Bend planned community...... 7 Figure 6. West Ghost / Spirit Willing (Bent Rainbow) ...... 7 Figure 7. Detail of Belongings (Queer Mountain) ...... 7 Figure 8. Collage from the Belongings book ...... 9 Figure 9. Detail of Belongings (Cabin Skeleton…) ...... 11 Figure 10. Sport jacket with Chimayo weaving found on an online retailer’s Instagram feed in the summer of 2018...... 12 Figure 11. Still from the video A Steady Diet of Bleak Truths (Honest Enough) ...... 14 Figure 12. West Ghost / Spirit Willing (Already Gone) ...... 15 Figure 13. Deserter (Shade) ...... 18 Figure 14. Ed Ruscha’s REVIEW IT LOOK IT OVER AND WHAT EVER ...... 20 Figure 15. Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles County Museum on Fire ...... 20 Figure 16. Belongings (Everybody Knows…) ...... 21 Figure 17. False Colors (Sunburnt Butt) ...... 24 Figure 18. Aerial view of the hillside letter overlooking Reno, Nevada...... 26 Figure 19. Detail of Belongings (We Found Ourselves…) ...... 27 Figure 20. Two works from the collaborative exhibition I Wonder If I Care As Much ...... 28 Figure 21. Belongings (Queer Mountain) ...... 30 Figure 22. Black-and-white medium-format photograph that was printed on a t-shirt that became part of a sculpture in the West Ghost / Spirit Willing exhibition...... 37 Figure 23. Belongings (Souvenir) ...... 40
vii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION
This thesis document is a companion to the artwork in the Belongings exhibition and the book of the same name. While language is a component of most of the artwork and comprises a significant portion of the book, there is not a lot of context for that language. Lists of objects, materials, characters, and places (nouns, in other words) are presented without any narrative structure or backstory. This reductive form of storytelling is intentional, allowing for multiple reads of many of the texts (see, for example, PEAK BLEAK). This document, on the other hand, is as an opportunity to examine some of the histories behind these texts that may not be immediately accessible in the artworks or book. This document is also a place to present ideas, found in research outside of the studio, that have become important to how I think about what and why I am making.
In terms of structure, this document takes the form of a gazetteer or geographical dictionary. Entries are listed alphabetically and cross-referenced. Structurally, it owes a lot to Helen Carlson’s Nevada Place Names, the definitive compendium of Nevada place-name facts that pulls folklore, history, and legend into her study of geography. I do not think of my work as geographical (maybe, at times, psychogeographical), but it does address landscape, and Carlson’s structure provided a useful framework to start fleshing out my relationship to that landscape from a variety of angles. I have felt similarly inspired in this effort and in my recent work by this quote from Robert Adams:
Landscape pictures can offer us 3 verities (truths): geography, autobiography and metaphor. Geography is, if taken alone, sometimes boring, autobiography is frequently trivial, and metaphor can be dubious. But taken together…the three kinds of information strengthen each other and reinforce what we all work to keep intact—an affection for life…What a landscape photographer tradition tries to do is show what is past, present, and future at once. You want ghosts and the daily news prophecy…It’s presumptuous and ridiculous. You fail all the time (Lippard 173-174).
1 CHAPTER 2. TERMS AND CONDITIONS
AMERICAN FLATS. A contemporary archaeological ruin; the site of an abandoned cyanide processing mill south of Virginia City, Nevada. In the early 1940s, all of the metal in the mill buildings was removed to be used in the World War II war effort, leaving only the concrete skeletal structure and former cyanide pools intact. Until its demolition in 2014, the site was used illegally as an outdoor gallery of spray painting and found sculpture; nearly every reachable concrete surface was covered in layers of painted text and Figure 1. Polaroid of a now-demolished structure imagery. at the American Flats site.
“American Flats” is the name of one of the bandana colors in the FALSE COLORS series. I have a polaroid of a terrible painting I did with two friends out there some time in the early 2000s (Figure 1), and the dominant color in the piece is a kind of pale blue made even duller by the unprimed concrete surface it is painted on. The polaroid was taken on an uncharacteristically overcast day, and the pale blue of the painting nearly lines up with the horizon (unintentionally); this has always read to me as a kind of bizarre color inversion between the building and the sky. The American Flats are used as the setting in one of the poem vignettes in the BELONGINGS book.
ANTI-MILESTONE. I do not remember where I first came across the term “anti-milestone”; for that reason, I am not sure that I am using it in the same way as that original source. I take it to mean an event that is not significant in the traditional sense (a wedding, a graduation, etc.), an event that was not significant at the time but takes on some importance later, or a kind of non- event related to the everyday in a way that parallels how I think about ARTIFACTS and vernacular materials. The narrative(s) suggested by the texts throughout the BELONGINGS 2 book are not hyperbolic or particularly dramatic; they are much more quotidian low-key affairs. In being recorded and bound together in a book, these events are given a kind of significance, though it is not always clear if that significance is positive or negative. The anti-milestone nature of the vignettes creates this ambiguous space.
ART DIRECTING THE REAL. I have made objects that lived in the world as artworks. They were exhibited in galleries and discussed in terms appropriate to that context. I have made designed objects—t-shirts, blankets, hats, etc.—that went out into the world in a different way. They were meant to be used and handled, and they did not bring with them the air of preciousness associated with gallery-bound artworks. In the last few years, I have made a number of things that lived in between these two categories, often taking the form of everyday (though culturally charged) objects that are then presented in an exhibition context. This has raised some questions: Are these objects to be used in a performance? Have they had a previous life? If so, what? In the consistency of their aesthetic, they almost read as branded goods, and their formal display feels related to both merchandising and domestic decoration— how do we make sense of that? Can an object be a kind of fantasy artifact while remaining tethered to a real history and its (sub)cultural associations?
In his text Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, Jose Esteban Muñoz compares the work of artists Jim Hodges and Andy Warhol, with a particular focus on their shared use of camouflage. While examining the strategies that these artists deploy, Muñoz introduces a phrase that helped frame the way I thought about the objects I have made that live in the no man’s land between art and design. He states, “Both of these queer culture makers [Warhol and Hodges] are interested in art-directing the real” (Muñoz 126). In other words, they have taken the known and the everyday in a very specific aesthetic direction to the point that it becomes hyperreal, idiosyncratic, and/or fantastic. The forms and materials never become completely divorced from their culturally understood contexts, but they been pushed into another realm and take on an otherworldly quality.
ASSHOLE MOUNTAIN. Asshole Mountain is an alternate name for the Sutro Springs Obsidian source—a location where prehistoric Native American tribes used to quarry obsidian—in Storey County, Nevada. This site is also sometimes referred to as Double Springs or Flowery Range. 3 Nevada Place Names, the definitive geographical dictionary compiled by Helen Carlson, does not list the origin of the Asshole Mountain moniker or how that name relates to the location.
In a writing class last spring, I wrote a draft of a poem that included a line about “visiting Asshole Mountain.” One of my classmates, who was reading the poem and giving feedback as part of the seminar, made a comment in the margins that she assumed the phrase was “some sort of gay sex thing or euphemism.” Perfect. Asshole Mountain is used as the setting in one of the poem vignettes in the BELONGINGS book.
ARTIFACTS. For six years, I worked in the archaeology field in the Nevada desert. In that context, an artifact is a very specific thing—a remnant cultural object or material that can be used to understand the human history of a location. In talking about my work, I have leaned heavily on the term, using “artifact” to describe any item with a backstory (real or imagined). These objects and narratives have been deliberately ambiguous in their time stamp, allowing for a read that is both historical and speculative. Similarly, some of the objects I have made and referred to as artifacts could also be described as MEMORABILIA or SOUVENIRS. In those labels, I was referencing Gilad Padva’s distinction between history and nostalgia (a line I have intentionally blurred in my work) and their associated categories (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Terms classified by Gilad Padva as being associated with either history or nostalgia (Padva 5).
Figure 1. Terms classified by Gilad Padva as being associated4 with either history or nostalgia (Padva 5). ARTIFACT CATALOG. An artifact catalog is the list of all the artifacts found during the survey of an archaeological site. The texts included in the BELONGINGS book take the loose form of an artifact catalog. What started as material or media lists like those found on wall labels used in exhibitions became something else when placed in relation to landscape imagery. Photo- documentation of an environment coupled with the artifact catalog could start to tell, or at least suggest, an archaeological story of that place. Through the cataloging of the found materials (in reality or as a fiction), an emptied-out landscape could become charged with both history and new possibility.
BEAR TRAP. I have a tattoo of a bear trap drawing on my left wrist. My two best friends also have the same tattoo; we got them at the same time and filmed the process for a video that was part of an exhibition the three of us did together. The bear trap drawing is also a ring of mountain peaks with an empty basin inside. Topograhically, this is Reno, Nevada—my hometown. For many reasons, it makes sense to conflate this place with a trap that is difficult to get out of.
The image of the bear trap is also connected symbolically to one of my favorite things discovered during my time working in the archaeology field. The muzzle of an unidentified animal, thought to be a bear, was found sticking out of the ground almost as if it had been intentionally buried in a grave or somehow consumed by the surrounding desert (Figure 3). The haunting photograph of this discovery is something I have used as a reference in a number of ways, including as a sculpture in my thesis exhibition (Figure 4). The bear Figure 3. Muzzle of an unidentified animal, possibly a bear, found on an archaeological survey near Austin, Nevada. is held permanently—trapped—in the landscape. 5 BELONGINGS. Belongings is the title of my thesis exhibition, the book of which it is a part, and, by extension, this writing. In all three instances, I was thinking about the term in two ways. First, it literally means one’s movable possessions—a matter-of- fact description for some of the kinds objects I have been making (shirts, bandanas, patches; see ART DIRECTING THE REAL). Second, the term “belongings” turns the idea of belonging into a noun—in other words, giving form to the idea of being a part of something. Shirts, patches, bandanas are all ways we can signify our association with something outside of ourselves, whether it be a band, a political sentiment, or—in the case of the bandana— Figure 4.
Belongings (Grave); bleached denim, cotton cord, cast a queer community of folks interested in urethane, and latex sculpture; 30" x 10" x 10"; 2019 similar sexual possibilities (see HANKY
CODE).
In the Belongings book, many of the texts are lists of materials—possessions—that, when put in relation to an imaged landscape, suggest a story of the humans who once occupied that space or who could occupy it in the future.
BENT RAINBOW. Rainbow Bend is a planned community in Lockwood, Nevada, a small unincorporated territory just outside of the Reno metropolitan area (Figure 5). While completely unintentional, the branding and street names of this community have always felt pretty gay to me. I have driven past Rainbow Bend many times (the community is on the way to the dump and a frequently visited canyon with a dense population of wild horses; see DEAD HORSE), and I like imagining it as some sort of bizarre queer community constructed out in the middle of
6 the desert. The small population of folks who live there seem completely unaware of the symbolism that could be projected on to their community’s identity.
From the name Rainbow Bend, I started thinking literally about the idea of a bent rainbow, what that might look like visually and what that might mean in terms of my relationship to a larger gay visual history. The rainbow has long been a symbol for the LGBTQ community—could bending that form be a kind of queering of queerness, and what form could the rainbow be bent into? Ultimately, I found the language—the term “bent rainbow”—more evocative than I did the experiments in form. In a collaborative work that became a part of the exhibition WEST GHOST / SPIRIT WILLING, I spray painted the phrase on a bed sheet and hung the sheet in an empty roadside sign a mile or two beyond the Rainbow Bend community. OMAR PIERCE, a friend and collaborator, photographed me hanging the sheet, and I am in the final image we used in the exhibition. It is intentionally unclear if “BENT RAINBOW” here is referring to the figure (me), the location, or both (Figure 6).
Figure 5. Sign at the entrance to the Rainbow Figure 6. West Ghost / Spirit Willing (Bent Bend planned community. Rainbow); medium-format photograph on fabric;
60” x 60"; 2018
Figure 6. West Ghost / Spirit Willing (Bent BLEACHEDRainbow); medium DENIM-format. Bleached photograph denim on fabric; exists in myFigure thesis 7. Detail exhibition of Belongings as an (Queeractual material, used 60” x 60"; 2018Figure 5. Sign at the entrance to Mountain); bleached denim, cast urethane, inthe sculptural Rainbow Bendform planned and as community. a substrate for a large-scalepaper, painting latex paint, (Figure colored 7pencil,), and thread, as language cord; in 96” x 180”; 2019Figure 6. West Ghost / Spirit one of the poem vignettes in the BELONGINGS book.Willing (Bent Rainbow); medium-format photograph on fabric; 60” x 60"; 2018
7 Last summer, I started looking for places around Ohio that I could get large amounts of used denim work jeans. I was interested in the past life of that material coming forward in the artworks I wanted to make. I also wanted to see how navigating the preexisting jean form (rather than working with by-the-yard fabric) might influence the structure and composition of a work. The process of MAKING DO and the formal improvisations that occur when raw material is hard to come by is something I have been thinking about for a while now. As an example, the composition of the large-scale denim painting Belongings (Queer Mountain) is broken into five panels, each of which is as wide as the length of the reused pant legs.
The decision to construct a map- painting out of material recognizable as jeans was also way to weave a human presence into the fictional landscape I was creating without ever literally depicting the figure.
Figure 7.
Detail of Belongings (Queer Mountain); bleached denim, cast urethane, paper, latex paint, colored pencil, thread, cord; 96” x 180”; 2019
BLOODSHOT EYES. “Bloodshot eyes” is a color in the series of FALSE COLOR bandanas. In the BELONGINGS book, it is a material in one of the poem vignettes and coded, through the key symbology in the front of the book, as a DESERTER proxy.
Every time I return to my hometown or anywhere in the arid west, my eyes immediately dry out and go bloodshot to the point that it often looks like I have been crying (this lasts a week or so). This phenomenon, new since moving away from the desert, is a bodily reminder that I do not live in that environment anymore. I am now a visitor no longer fully adapted to its conditions.
8 BLUR/DRIFT. In his book Pirates and Farmers, Dave Hickey describes Nevada as a state of “just blur and drift – no places” (Hickey 93). I love that idea. Not only did I use “blur/drift” in one of the poem vignettes from the BELONGINGS book, I have also thought about that description a lot when imaging the Nevada landscape. Layering, projection, or turning an image into pattern are all ways in which I have abstracted the landscape, unhinging the image from the specific location it depicts and, instead, visualizing that place as blur and drift.
BUFFALO CHECK. Buffalo check is the name for the traditional red-and-black flannel pattern (often thought of as “lumberjack flannel”). It appears in the BELONGINGS book as an element in a collage (Figure 8) and as text. I am attracted to buffalo check flannel and work wear in general (see also BLEACHED DENIM) as both clothing I wear and as material in the things I make; the piece of flannel used in the collage was from a shirt that I literally wore to bits. Like denim, it is a kind of “masculine fabric,” which, as a phrase, has some queer contradictions built into it. I have used buffalo check flannel in quilt-like collages and in some of the CAST URETHANE paintings; in both instances, it is a signifier for a certain kind of ruggedness or more specifically rugged Western-ness that has become fashionable in recent years.
Figure 8.
Collage from the Belongings book; half-toned image, solvent transfer, buffalo check fabric; 8” x 8”; 2018
9 BUFFALONER MOUNTAIN. Buffaloner Mountain is a hill alongside Interstate 80 between Sparks, Nevada and Lovelock, Nevada. Its name comes from the fact that the ridge of the hill looks like the back of a buffalo. This is not a common name for this location; it is a short-hand inside joke between OMAR PIERCE and me. He said that name once a long time ago, and that was how we have referred to it ever since. Buffaloner Mountain is used as a setting in one of the poem vignettes in the BELONGINGS book and is coded, using the key symbology in the front of the book, as an OUTSIDE JOKE.
CACTUS SKELETON. Cactus skeleton is the retail name for dehydrated Cholla cactus. In scale and in its knobby surface, the hard cactus skeleton pieces resemble perforated bone. In my work, I have used them as vestiges or SOUVENIRS of the desert that then gets repurposed into something else when brought into a different environment. Cactus skeleton exists in my thesis exhibition as a material thing and as language in one of the poem vignettes in the BELONGINGS book.
CAMOUFLAGE. In the last few years, I have thought about and made use of camouflage in my artwork in a number of different ways. Some examples: In the FALSE COLORS bandana series, I embedded camouflaged text into the color field background as a way to slow down the read of the work and to force a kind of up-close intimacy. The text only reveals itself when the viewer is close enough to the pieces to see that the “color field” actually consists of halftone pattern and that that pattern is being disrupted as a way to define the text (see Figure 17).
In the topographical shirt I made and included in the thesis exhibition, I was thinking about distance and context as it relates to camouflage. Camouflage is designed for a specific environment and, when taken from that environment, actually has the opposite effect of being quite visually apparent and even jarring.
In a series of projection pieces from early last year (and in a more recent work included in the thesis exhibition), I projected RAZZLE DAZZLE camouflage pattern onto images and objects, creating a condition in which those images and objects were obscured and could only be fully seen when viewers positioned themselves between the image/object surfaces and the projector, thereby blocking the projected camouflage pattern (Figure 9).
10 Camouflage is deployed in different ways in these three artworks, but my interest in it as a form is rooted in a few consistent truths: 1) Because camouflage only functions within a given landscape or environment, it has a sense of place and belonging to that place visually encoded within its pattern; 2) Camouflage is a point of intersection between landscape and clothing (see ART DIRECTING THE REAL); and 3) Camouflage is a visual survival strategy.
Figure 9.
Detail of Belongings (Cabin Skeleton…) cast urethane, latex paint, colored pencil, projected image; 84” x 84”; 2019
I do not think of the way I have used camouflage in my work as an analog for a kind of “passing”; however, I am interested in the ability to determine when and where to be seen and to what to degree. For this reason, I have made use of the RAZZLE DAZZLE style of camouflage more often than the concealed color or mimicry styles. Razzle dazzle is not about disappearing or concealing one’s presence; instead, it relies on the use of bold pattern to visually confuse, creating a condition that makes the camouflaged subject difficult to understand in terms of scale, form, direction and speed of movement, etc.
Jose Esteban Muñoz also draws the concept of camouflage into the realm of queer aesthetics when comparing how it has been used by the artists Jim Hodges and Andy Warhol. He states, “For both artists, camouflage is an aesthetic production that does more than duplicate nature’s form…Queer aesthetics attempt to call the natural into question…Warhol’s camouflage attempts to bring out a radical impossibility in the world of the natural. Jim Hodges beautiful Oh Great 11 Terrain can be seen as both a continuation of Warhol’s approach to camouflage and entirely its own advancement in the aesthetic project of picturing a queer utopian ‘wish landscape’” (Muñoz 139-140).
CAST(ING) URETHANE. Cast urethane or casting urethane exists in my thesis exhibition as an actual material, used in sculptural form and as a mark-making medium in a large-scale painting, and as language in one of the poem vignettes in the BELONGINGS book. While used in few different ways, I have gone back to this material in a number of my artworks for its ability to coat an object or surface, giving it a new skin, or, in the case of the aforementioned painting, a new topography.
CHIMAYO SPORT JACKET. Last summer, I found an image of a jacket online that I talked about for months (Figure 10). From the image, I could not tell if the jacket was retro or vintage, part of a collection or a personalized one-off, and I spent a long time trying to imagine the man that could pull it off (see ED RUSCHA; MAYOR OF GHOST TOWNS; PAST-LIFE CASINO KING). Materially rugged, Southwestern in pattern and color palette, and unexpectedly feminine in its details, the jacket felt like an artifact from a Figure 10. Sport jacket with Chimayo weaving time/place/culture that never existed or at found on an online retailer’s Instagram feed in the summer of 2018. least that I had never had access to.
I want the objects I make—often nameable things (bandanas, patches, t-shirts; see ART DIRECTING THE REAL) with layered subcultural meanings—to have the same feeling. When objects are not immediately placeable or legible in terms of their time stamp, a space is opened up to start playing with the narrative that object is a part of. It can simultaneously speak to past, present, and future conditions.
12 CONTROLLED BURN. A controlled burn, sometimes referred to as a prescribed burn or burn- off, is an intentional wildfire set by forest fire crews for the purpose of reducing fuels (dead or dried-out trees and grasses) before the summer fire season. While these burn-offs getting out of control are rare, it does happen. I like the phrase “controlled burn” as a potential oxymoron and metaphor. Attempting to harness something as unpredictable as a forest fire as a preventative measure is smart and maybe necessary but ultimately doomed to fail in dramatic fashion at some point.
CUMTREES. A crude name given to the Callery Pear tree due to the fact that its white flowers produce a strong scent often compared to semen. In the Reno area, Callery Pear trees are the first ones to bloom in the spring, and every year there is a week or two where the city— particularly in the downtown and university districts—is overwhelmed by this intense smell. I have always been amused by how casually this term is used for these trees and the community- wide shared knowledge of this bodily fluid that it implies. As a strong sensory signifier of a time of year in a particular place, “cumtrees” is listed as one of the materials in a poem vignette in the BELONGINGS book.
DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN. “Darkness on the Edge of Town” is the name of Bruce Springsteen’s fourth (and, in my opinion, best) album. The phrase “darkness on the edge of town” has always resonated with me because my parents’ home (and my longest permanent residence) is literally on the edge of town; when you come over the hill that drops down into the valley where their neighborhood is situated, you can see very clearly where the light from the suburban street lights falls off and gives way to the darkness of the desert hills behind the houses. In the “Darkness on the Edge of Town” lyrics, Springsteen talks of secrets and desires and the edge of town as a kind of charged boundary (darkness here meaning not just lack of light but also something a little seedy). In terms of material culture—both the literal materials that comprise my work and the implied material language of the poem vignettes—the artworks weave together objects thought of as domestic or suburban with things that feel a little bleaker and of the desert. The darkness on the edge of town is a place where these two sensibilities meet.
13 DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS FEELING. The feeling the day after an event with a lot of buildup that ultimately ends up being less than what you imagined (see ANTI-MILESTONE). As a kid, I remember this feeling most acutely the day after Christmas; as an adult, I associate it strongly with my relationship to art exhibitions. The decision to make a book as a substantial part of my thesis was, in small part, a way to counteract this feeling by extending the life of the work and ideas beyond the short window of the exhibition. The phrase “day after Christmas feeling” was used in one of the poem vignettes in the BELONGINGS book.
DEAD HORSE. The phrase “beating a dead horse into a sculpture” was used in a collaborative video project from five or six years ago. As text, sits over a slow clip of my hands arranging dozens of VHS copies of the movie Pretty Woman (Figure 11). This bit of text also exists on its own, without any immediate image reference, in the BELONGINGS book.
Figure 11.
Still from the video A Steady Diet of Bleak Truths (Honest Enough). This work was part of a larger collaborative installation with Omar Pierce.
On one hand, the phrase is a kind of eye-rolling play on words; on the other, it feels like an apt description of the creative process or the effort of a long-term project. However, the metaphor shifted a bit last summer when a literal dead horse became a part of my work for the first time.
In June 2018, OMAR PIERCE and I decided that we were going to create some images of texts embedded in the landscape. We had a loose idea of how these images might come together as a kind of visual poem, but we set out with the idea that we were going to be responsive to the experience of this desert road trip; the texts, and therefore images, would come organically out 14 of that. In Lockwood, Nevada, a small unincorporated community less than ten miles outside of Reno (our departure point), we came across the dead body of a wild horse along the side of the road. We decided we would photograph it, and we debated whether or not to include text (we were planning to spray paint the texts on bed sheets, and we had a supply of both paint and sheets in my car). Earlier that day, Omar had told me a story about he and his dad had recently discussing the fact that both of them had separately come to the conclusion that “Already Gone” by the Eagles was one of the best songs of all time. As we were discussing whether or not to include text in the image of the horse, I remembered that story and proposed that song title as language that might be appropriate to the situation. He agreed. We painted the text on the sheet, covered the horse as if the sheet were a burial shroud, and then photographed the entire scene from a slight elevation (Figure 12).
Figure 12.
West Ghost / Spirit Willing (Already Gone); black-and-white medium format photograph on fabric; 60” x 60”, 2018
Afterwards, while packing up the photography equipment and getting ready to move on, an elderly couple drove up as asked what we were doing. We told them we had just photographed the horse’s body, to which the wife exclaimed, “Good! People need to see this!” They went on to explain how and why the horse ended up in this spot in the first place. She had apparently
15 contracted a contagious eye infection, and the local sheriff had decided that she needed to be put down for the safety of the rest of the herd. That happened four or five days before we arrived on the scene, and the couple had made the drive out there every day since to see whether the sheriff was going to deal with the body or let it rot on the side of the road.
Within fifty feet of the horse’s body, we also found the remains of a dead coyote and a dead hawk, apparently unrelated. The images of all three bodies became a part of an exhibition Omar and I did together titled WEST GHOST / SPIRIT WILLING.
DESERT. It is difficult to fully articulate the degree to which the desert, as both an idea and a physical location, has manifested in the artwork I have made in the last few years. I have thought about the way the limited material resources of the desert influence object form in the DESERTER series. I have thought about the futility of capturing the nuance of the desert color palette in the FALSE COLORS series, and I have conflated the history of a desert ghost town and wilderness area with autobiography and speculative fiction in the texts, maps, and artifacts that comprise the BELONGINGS works.
While the desert is literally present in much of this work—in materials such as CACTUS SKELETON and in images—the idea of the desert as a place defined by what it lacks has become an important conceptual foundation as well. The psychoanalytic and philosophical conception of lack and its relationship to desire is a bigger conversation than I will take on here, but I appreciate the way Jose Esteban Muñoz succinctly connects that concept to the process of making. He states, “Queer cultural production is both an acknowledgement of the lack that is endemic to any heteronormative rendering of the world and a building, a ‘world making’, in the face of that lack” (Muñoz 118).
There are a number of authors and theorists who have thought about the aesthetic, cultural, and environmental conditions of the desert West; here are some of their thoughts, all encountered in the last few years, that have stuck with me.
If the desert purges the fake and accentuates the truth, as its devotees insist, then in architecture and design it seems to expose some very strange truths (Banham 89). 16 Here opposites converge; progress meets tradition; urban sophistication meets wild imagination; and individuality meets community (Lippard 135).
As I got older and started to re-evaluate the ideologies behind my work, I became more interested in creating designs and ideology that embraced human imperfection. I don’t know if it’s related to the desert or not (Andrea Zittel, Julin 20).
Nothing about the landscape is opaque and concealing. If the presence of something animal is undisclosed, it is due to its alert stillness, or its celerity out ahead of you, or its subterranean or nocturnal life. My own pet theory is that human morality, competitiveness, and prurient interest in one’s neighbor are reduced here, not encouraged or conditioned by tree cover and mutual obscurity, as in New England (Blanchfield 144).
DESERTER. I made of series of sculptural works in the fall of 2016 and winter of 2017 that I called the Deserter series. The first piece in the series was a kind of lean-to or shade structure built with the materials—ropes, tarps, etc.—that I had used to move all of my belongings to Ohio a few weeks earlier (Figure 13). The subsequent works in the series (a poncho, a small number of bandanas, and a series of patches) were all realized by destroying the form and repurposing the material from the previous iteration (i.e., the shade structure was destroyed and the material turned into the poncho, the poncho was destroyed and turned into the bandanas, and so on).
This work was exploring the idea of MAKING DO and the formal improvisations necessary when material resources are limited. I was thinking about both living in the desert and moving away from it, and the term “deserter” spoke to that—in my mind, a deserter was both a person from the desert (though the term is never used that way) and a person who leaves or deserts something (the traditional definition of the word).
In the BELONGINGS book, “Deserter Proxy” is one of the coded terms in the key at the beginning, and the materials or ideas labeled as such are things that speak to the dual condition of having a sense of belonging in a place and being some distance from it (see, for example, BLOODSHOT EYES).
17
Figure 13.
Deserter (Shade); sunbleached, dyed, and digitally printed fabric, thread, wood, t-shirt, rope, tarp, tarp tape, 1” buttons; 126” x 50”; 2016
DESERT HEARTS. Desert Hearts is a 1985 romantic drama directed by Donna Deitch set in Reno, Nevada. The film follows an English professor from Columbia University who temporarily moves to Reno in order to get an expedited divorce from her husband. While there, she begins a relationship with a local woman, and the arc of the film tracks her coming to terms with her first homosexual relationship. The movie, which was recently reissued through the Criterion Collection, is considered a queer cinema classic and has been described as the first feature film to positively portray lesbian sexuality.
18 I am ashamed to say that, not only had I had not seen Desert Hearts until relatively recently, but I had never even heard of it until it was screened at the Wexner Center of the Arts as part of their Criterion reissue series. The movie was released in my lifetime, filmed in neighborhoods that I lived in for years, and is a well-known piece of the queer film canon, but it took me moving to Ohio for it to make it on to my radar. At the risk of overstating it, this realization forced me (and continues to force me) to reconsider what I think I know about the place I am from, particularly in relation to its artistic and queer history. Desert Hearts is a healthy reminder of what else might be out there (e.g., QUEER MOUNTAIN).
DESOLATION WILDERNESS. Once known as “Devil’s Valley,” this federally protected area of land just to the southwest of Lake Tahoe was renamed Desolation Wilderness after the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964. Like the QUEER MOUNTAIN Wilderness area, Desolation Wilderness is completely undeveloped with no access to utilities or any permanent residents. While an undeniably beautiful and dramatic place, the name “Desolation Wilderness” has always held my attention and been equally, if not more, evocative for me. Desolation Wilderness is used as a setting for one of the poem vignettes in the BELONGINGS book.
DRY HEAT. In summertime in the arid West, it is almost a punchline or cliché call-and- response to hear one person commenting on how hot it is and another person to say something along the lines of, “yeah, but at least it’s a dry heat.” Taken literally, this phrase points out the lack of humidity in the air and, therefore, mugginess even when temperatures reach 100+ degrees Fahrenheit. I like a dry heat as much as the next person, but I am attracted to this bit of language because I think it holds other possibilities as well—maybe something related to a sense of humor? Also, something sexual? I can easily imagine a desert road trip romance novel (what my grandma used to call a “nickel nasty”) titled Dry Heat. I used “dry heat” as the name of one of the bandana colors in the FALSE COLORS series, and it also appears in one of the poem vignettes in the BELONGINGS book.
ED RUSCHA. Easily one of my favorite artists. His series of mountain paintings (Figure 14), which pair short bits of text painted directly in front of dramatic mountain landscapes, are maybe the most obvious influence on my recent work, but “Los Angeles County Museum on Fire,” is
19 hands-down my favorite painting of his, maybe my favorite painting period. A visually austere composition embedded with a dark sense of humor, it is a beautifully dry, crisp, and unblinking joke at the expense of a gatekeeper institution (Figure 15).
Figure 14.
Ed Ruscha; REVIEW IT LOOK IT OVER AND WHAT EVER; acrylic, pencil and charcoal on canvas; 2004
Figure 15.
Ed Ruscha; Los Angeles County Museum on Fire; oil on canvas; 1965-68
Ed Ruscha literally found his way into my work about a year ago. Challenged to describe the man who could pull off this CHIMAYO SPORT JACKET I had become fixated on, I started writing a series of short character descriptions, a few of which came together as a poem in both 20 the BELONGINGS book and thesis exhibition. “An Ed Ruscha type avoiding his own openings” was one of the characters/lines in that poem (see also MAYOR OF GHOST TOWNS; PAST- LIFE CASINO KING). Ed as a character or, as the poem says, a “type” in relation to the jacket made sense to me—he has the rugged cleaned-up cowboy affect that suits the jacket, and I could see him getting a kick out of its curiously feminine rhinestone buckles and buttons. The bit about “avoiding his own openings” is a little harder to parse. I was definitely thinking about an artist having exhibitions and, therefore, exhibition openings, but I think the term “openings” also suggests areas of vulnerability—which may or may not be sexual—more broadly.
The poem, never intended as a one-liner, came out of a sincere effort to put language to the projected fantasy of the sport jacket.
EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE. Everybody Knows This is Nowhere is the name of Neil Young’s second studio album and that album’s title track. The phrase “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere” appears twice in my thesis exhibition—as an artifact in one of the poem vignettes (“a warped copy of Everybody Knows This is Nowhere”) and as printed text on a Polaroid used in a sculpture (Figure 16).
Figure 16.
Belongings (Everybody Knows…); found figurine, cast urethane, cactus skeleton, latex paint, polaroid; 2019
21 The BELONGINGS book and exhibition are, in the broadest sense, about a fantasy location and landscape. While QUEER MOUNTAIN is a real place, my inability to get there during a planned trip left me able to only speculate about its true nature. From those speculations, I started to project about what may have happened there in the past or what could happen there in the future. These were fictions that became starting points for much of the writing in the book and most of the artworks included in the exhibition.
The decision to include the phrase, “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere” was, in both instances, a sobering reminder that all of this is a falsehood and that everyone is aware of it. This fictionalized QUEER MOUNTAIN does not exist; it is nowhere (which, etymologically speaking, puts it close to utopia derived from the Greek meaning for “no place”).
FALSE COLORS. I made a series of colored bandanas embedded with text that I titled the FALSE COLORS series (the title is borrowed from Roy Behrens’ book False Colors: Art, Design, and Modern Camouflage). As a title, it made sense to me because the process by which the bandana colors were coming into being was inherently flawed, creating colors doomed to be inaccurate translations of their referents. Here, I also thought about something Derek Jarman said in his book Chroma, which is entirely about his relationship to color: “I’ve placed no color in this book, as that would be a futile attempt to imprison them” (Jarman 42).
I used photographs that I had taken with the idea that if these colors were derived from my images than they were my colors and I was entitled to name them. I reduced the images down to five-pixel-by-five-pixel resolution and then extracted each of those pixels out and turned it into a color for a bandana. I knew I wanted to embed camouflaged text into these color fields, and the only way to do that without changing the color in some way was to create a half-tone pattern in the field that would be disrupted as a way to define the text. In other words, from any distance, the bandana would read as a solid color, but, as a viewer got closer to the object, they would be able to see the diagonal half-tone line pattern being shifted in order to reveal the text embedded in the field (Figure 17).
With this series, I was thinking about the bandana as a piece of both queer material culture and material culture associated with the American West. By trying to capture the nuanced colors of
22 the desert through a photograph and then translate them digitally onto cotton bandanas, I was, to borrow Jarman’s phrase, “futilely attempting to imprison them.” I was also trying to express both an intimacy with that environment through color names related to my experience of of that landscape and a more idiosyncratic color palette.
In HANKY CODE, the colors of bandanas are signifiers for shared sexual interests and their placement on the body indicators of desired roles. The colors of these bandanas are generally standard primary and secondary colors (blue, red, green, etc.), and I was interested in what might be implied or opened up in making a series of bandanas that were much more nuanced and specific in their color (subtle variations of pink, a range of blues from sky blue to almost black, etc.). In other words, can a greater variety and subtlety of colors be used to reflect greater possibilities for queer coupling? This is an ongoing question in my studio.
Figure 17.
False Colors (Sunburnt Butt); bleach and colored pencil on digitally printed cotton bandana, thread, 22” x 22” each; 2017
23 FAMILIAR VOID. The desert is sometimes described as a void or even the void (see William L. Fox’s The Void, The Grid, and The Sign). In that context, “familiar void” would mean the desert you know well or have an intimate knowledge of. When the phrase appears in one of the poem vignettes in the BELONGINGS book, this was deliberate and important, but I also kept coming back to familiar as a near-synonym for familial, and the idea of a void in a family offered a second and very different charge to the poem. At the time of its writing, I had not spoken to my mom in nearly six years.
FIRE RETARDANT. Fire retardant is a chemical compound used by forest firefighting crews to wall off and extinguish wildfires. The compound—a mix of water, thickening agents, borates, and ammonium phosphates—is bright red in color and dispersed from an airplane. Often, after a wildfire, the only remaining color in the landscape will be the black of the charred vegetation and the red stain on the ground of the dispersed fire retardant. This stain or series of stains around the edge of the burn zone become a monumental painting on the land. “Fire retardant” is listed as one of the materials in a poem vignette in the BELONGINGS book.
FIRST AIDS TEST. An ANTI-MILESTONE referred to in a poem in the BELONGINGS book.
GHOST TOWNIE PLEASURES. The boom-and-bust nature of the mining industry in Nevada has left the state with over a hundred ghost towns, many with still-standing bits of architecture and infrastructure (see, for example, AMERICAN FLATS). In a landscape without much privacy offered by the vegetation, some of these abandoned places have become cruising spots, locations where men looking to have sex with other men can go to find a partner.
The term “townie” has a few colloquial uses. It can refer to a resident of a big college or university town who has no affiliation with the school or simply a long-time resident of a town who has never lived anywhere else and never plans to. In the latter context, the idea of a “ghost townie” suggests someone who stubbornly chooses to stay somewhere with nothing left to offer; everything and everyone has moved on. At best, he might find someone to have a brief anonymous intimate encounter with (“pleasures”).
24 “Ghost Townie Pleasures” is one of the coded terms in the key at the beginning of the BELONGINGS book.
HANKY CODE. Sometimes called bandana code or flagging, hanky code is a color-coded system of handkerchiefs or bandanas used by gay men to non-verbally communicate sexual interests. In Gay Semiotics: A Photographic Study of Visual Coding Among Homosexual Men, Hal Fischer explains that, “handkerchiefs signify behavioral tendencies through both color and placement. A blue handkerchief placed in the right hip pocket, for example, serves notice that the wearer desires to play the passive role during sexual intercourse” (Fischer 8). In the era of the internet and its ability to connect niche communities, hanky code has largely disappeared as a practice.
In my work over the last few years, and most specifically in the FALSE COLOR series, I have explored the bandana as a piece of both queer material culture and material culture associated with the American West. In hanky code, the bandana colors are generally standard primary and secondary colors (blue, red, green, etc.), and I was interested in what might be implied or opened up in making a series of bandanas that were much more nuanced and specific in their color (subtle variations of pink, a range of blues from sky blue to almost black, etc.).
HAVING A COKE WITH YOU. Having a Coke with You is a poem, written by Frank O’Hara in 1960, that became a touchstone for me as I was writing the texts that comprise the BELONGINGS book, specifically as I started to think about the time stamp of materials (see Appendix A). O’Hara brings together contemporary and classical material references in a way that gives the poem a feeling of being both of a specific moment and timeless.
To this point, Jose Esteban Muñoz elaborates, “This poem tells us of a quotidian act, having a Coke with somebody, that signifies a vast lifeworld of queer relationality, an encrypted sociality, and a utopian potentiality…Though the poem is clearly about the present, it is a present that is now squarely the past and, in its queer relationality, promises a future (Muñoz 6).
HILLSIDE LETTERS. Also known as MOUNTAIN MONOGRAMS, hillside letters are letters— built from rocks and concrete and sometimes wood or metal—on a hillside overlooking a town or 25 small city (Figure 18). The letters are usually the initials of the town or some other language or symbol associated with that town’s identity, and they often become a point of pride for the town’s community. In his book How to Read the American West: A Field Guide, William Wyckoff states, “Simply put, hillside letters have become geoglyphs, iconic signatures into which place- based identity is etched.” The Reno-Sparks-Carson City area of Nevada has the highest density of hillside letters in the West.
Figure 18. Aerial view of the hillside letter on Peavine Mountain overlooking Reno, Nevada.
My favorite view of the hillside letters near where I am from is not on the ground—the vantage point they are designed for—but from the air. In the flattening of the landscape that comes from the aerial view, these letters read almost as tattoos, or etchings as Wyckoff suggests, on the land surface. I was making a direct reference to this view in the way I chose to situate the text in the piece Belongings (We Found Ourselves…) (Figure 19).
26
Figure 19.
Detail of Belongings (We Found Ourselves…); thread, roofing paper, felt; 68" x 68"
ISOTROPIC ENVIRONMENT. William L. Fox uses the term isotropic environment to describe any place, like the desert of the Great Basin, that appears much the same in all directions. In his book The Void, The Grid, and the Sign, Fox argues that the grid structure of things like the Township and Range system gives us a way to cope with the cognitive dissonance that comes when trying to orient ourselves in a landscape with few distinguishing features.
It is maybe too tidy of an explanation, but I have thought a lot about Fox’s claim when mapping or imaging the desert landscape in my own work. It is easy to get lost in the vastness or emptiness of a desert landscape, but creating smaller parts that comprise a bigger whole (not unlike the Township and Range grid) has been one strategy I have used to stave off the visual fatigue or boredom that vastness and perceived uniformity can elicit (see, for example, the textile work from the exhibition I Wonder If I Care as Much) (Figure 20).
I JUST WASN’T MADE FOR THESE TIMES. “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” is the fourth track on side B of the Beach Boys’ 1966 album Pet Sounds. The song—a downbeat anthem about depression, social alienation, and the unshakeable feeling you were born in the wrong place at the wrong time—is referenced in one of the poem vignettes in the BELONGINGS book.
27
Figure 20.
Two works from the collaborative exhibition I Wonder If I Care As
Much, 2015
Background: digitally
printed and found fabric, thread, colored pencil, 1” buttons; 72” x 168’
Foreground: cut and formed steel, 42” diameter
INTERMITTENT RIVER. The Truckee River runs 121 miles from Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada Mountains to Pyramid Lake in the western Great Basin desert. In drought years, the river will stop flowing in spots and turn into a creek just a few inches deep in others. This intermittent river provides all of the water to the 500,000+ Northern Nevada residents that live along its course.
I have used “Intermittent River” as the setting for one of the poem vignettes in the BELONGINGS book and as the name of one of the bandana colors in the FALSE COLORS series.
LEAVING NO TRACE. The practice of leaving no trace or packing out everything you pack in is standard for those venturing out into the desert; as a policy, it is a refrain one hears often in relation to the annual Burning Man festival. Like the idea of the CONTROLLED BURN, it is a
28 well-intentioned but fraught idea that may fundamentally be at odds with human nature just as the idea of a controlled burn is fundamentally at odds with the nature of fire. A short bit of text on the last page of the BELONGINGS book: “We knew deep down there was no such thing as a controlled burn or leaving no trace.”
LIMITED RESOURCES. The concept of limited resources, specifically as it relates to (and defines) the desert, is something I explored most directly in the DESERTER series; however, I have continued to think about the way MAKING DO with the materials at hand can drive form in unexpected directions through material-responsive improvisations. In the work in my thesis exhibition, this is most clearly evident in the structure of the painting titled Belongings (Queer Mountain) (Figure 21). This large-scale composition, comprised of bleached denim jeans, is broken into five panels, each as wide as the length of the reused pant legs. Different areas of the surface had to be pieced together in different ways to accommodate the thick material and hardware of the jeans, and the pictorial landscape of the painting is defined by the layers and hemmed details of the pants. The decision to make the painting on pieced-together jeans rather than canvas or some other traditional material was, on one hand, conceptual (see BLEACHED DENIM), but it also came out of a curiosity to see how the setting of material parameters might affect the development of a work in a way that I could not have predicted at the outset.
LIST-MAKING. Referencing Barthes’ Sade, Fourier, Loyola, Jose Esteban Muñoz states that, “Utopia is measured far less against theoretical statements than against the organization of daily life, for the mark of utopia is the everyday; or even: everything everyday is utopian: timetables, dietary programs, plans for clothing, the installation of furnishings…” (Muñoz 22-23).
To dietary programs and plans for clothing, I would add list-making as a way of organizing daily life (and, therefore, a potentially utopian practice). I have made lists for as long as I can remember. The act of writing things down in an organized way (to say nothing of crossing them off) soothes me, and I feel immediately less overwhelmed by being able to literally see what I am up against. In the fall of 2017, I made a list of concepts that were finding their way into my artwork at the time, and I presented that list, which I was calling a table of contents, as an artist statement. Jen Bervin, a visiting artist/poet that semester, saw the list hanging on my studio wall and referred to it as a catalog poem. I had never heard that term before nor had anyone ever 29 referred to my writing as poetry, and she encouraged me to think about my practice of making lists as part of my work rather than as something separate and in relation to it.
Not long after, I started keeping lists of materials. They could be artifact catalogs or packing lists. They could be the media information for a sculpture that never existed. When paired with images of the desert near where I am from, they start to tell a story that conflates archaeological inventory, autobiography, and speculative fiction. This pairing comprises the majority of the BELONGINGS book.
Figure 21.
Belongings (Queer Mountain); bleached denim, cast urethane, paper, latex paint, colored pencil, thread, cord; 96” x 180”; 2019
30 LOW-WATER MARK. A high-water mark is the maximum recorded level or value; in a flood situation, this level is often literally marked on surfaces as a record of how high up the water came. In contrast, a low-water mark is an invisible low point, as the water would have to recede even further to reveal it. As text in one of the poems in the BELONGINGS book, the phrase is meant literally as it relates to water (see INTERMITTENT RIVER) and as a metaphor for the absolute bottom. (see ANTI-MILESTONE).
MALE GAZE. Since first encountering the term in undergraduate art history classes, I have always heard “male gaze” as “male gays.”
MAKING DO. Late last year, I wrote an essay on my relationship to the idea of “making do.” Rather than pull excerpts from that text to suit the format of this document, I have decided to include it here in its entirety:
I am from an underdog city in an underdog state covered almost entirely by uninhabited underdog landscape. It is changing now with the invasion of Bay Area tech companies looking for tax breaks and the year-round presence of Burning Man, but, when I was a kid, Reno was still a small town of bars and casinos without any sanctioned places for young people to see art or music, to see each other, to be out. As kids without access to most of the city, house shows—usually a few couple dozen people crammed into a basement space to see one or two out-of-town bands alongside a few local openers—were the only alternative. Those of us who were not musicians figured out how to participate in other ways. We learned “graphic design” by collaging together bits of drawings to make posters for the shows. We started taking photos because photos were needed for record sleeves, liner notes, etc. When our friends’ bands went on tours of their own, we figured out how to make merch for them to take with them. As is true in many small-town D.I.Y scenes all over the country, we figured out how to survive with minimal resources. We made do. A punk lesson. A queer lesson. A desert lesson.
Great Basin archaeologist Ben Barna describes the act of “making do” as the modified reuse of easily accessible, often free, materials in remote areas. From 2010 to 2016, I worked in the archaeology field in the same desert landscape Barna studied, and I saw this strategy reflected in the artifact record firsthand (it was common to see Euro-American glass refashioned into
31 Native American projectile points or old railroad ties turned into building structures, for example). Because raw materials are hard to come by, unexpected improvisations are necessary to fulfill material needs. The resulting objects hold both their current form and the residue of their previous lives. I want my sculptures to do the same thing.
Two years ago, I made the first artwork on my own after nearly three years of working collaboratively. I think of the piece, titled Deserter (Shade) (see Figure 13), as a kind of shade structure; roughly ten feet by four feet, opaque except for a semitransparent window about seven feet up, and easily moved by one person, it sits at an angle in the corner of the room, creating just enough space for me to squeeze behind. The irregularly shaped frame structure is made of lumber left in my studio by a previous occupant, and the main body of the piece is repurposed fabric, tarps, and rope—all materials used in the process of moving my life to Ohio a few weeks earlier.
The decision to repurpose the materials used in the move was, on one hand, practical. I was in a new place, and I did not know where to find what I needed (and I wasn’t exactly sure what that was anyway). I had also made the decision not to bring my large archive of materials, accumulated over years working in the same studio, with me to Ohio. More importantly, I wanted to see what might come from intentionally limiting my own resources, by responding to only what was at hand. I bound the thing together with packing tape and shredded strips of fabric. Two sections were joined by rope that held my belongings to the roof of my Jeep as I drove across the country. The shower curtain from my old apartment became a window. The finished piece landed somewhere I couldn’t have anticipated at the outset, as the form continually shifted to accommodate the limitations of the materials. This level of improvisation was new for me, an uptight maker accustomed to executing a specific plan or sketch. I kept on with the strategy of making do, as the shade structure was eventually taken apart and refashioned into four subsequent sculptures, each one carrying with it marks and traces of the iterations before. In specific terms, the shade structure became a drugrug-style poncho that was then turned into a small number of bandanas and finally a series of 173 patches (or badges, same difference). Each of these forms spoke to a kind of need, whether physical or social, and the decision to destroy one form to create the next was a way of prioritizing these needs in real time.
32 Eventually, I quit working with the same material over and over, however. I sent the patches out into the world and entombed the rest of the remnants in urethane, a hard punctuation mark to a process that had reached its natural end. The reality is I do not just want to make do. I would have never ended up in Ohio to begin with if I was happy with the limited resources of the desert I’d moved away from (strictly speaking, the term desert here refers to a place lacking water, but it’s easy to let that definition drift toward other things in short supply: exhibition opportunities, affordable housing, boyfriend material, etc.). I want this landscape that I feel a strong connection to provide more. It doesn’t, so I fantasize and I project, but I’ve never abandoned it completely. The painter Lari Pittman speaks in similar terms about his artwork: “I won’t leave a painting—I won’t leave it down—and I think it comes from a deep cultural pathology that homosexuals might have and that is to fix things up, of looking at things and fixing them up.” (Art 21, 2007).
When I photograph unremarkable spots in the desert—ghost towns and desolate landscapes— part of my attraction to these places is their potential to be fixed up. I’m looking at what is there, what isn’t, and what could be. Pittman’s claim is a big one, and I don’t know if I would apply it as broadly as he does, but it certainly resonates with me. It’s worth noting that I don’t see “fixing up” and “making beautiful” as the same thing, however. Fixing up, to me, is about fundamentally improving something, about leaving it better than you found it, not just making it look nice. To fix up, in this case, might actually mean to complicate. It might mean to offer up a new look or a new space. During my time working in the archaeology field, I experienced, on a number of occasions, a shift in my understanding of a place that I knew very well as I learned more about it from my archaeologist coworkers. This new knowledge charged these spaces with both history and possibility. With the texts I’m writing and presenting alongside the landscape images, I hope to do the same, to suggest an improbable past and a speculative future that isn’t visible in the emptied-out terrain, to embed queer culture into high desert nature in a way that I’ve never known, and to think about the possibility of returning to that environment at some point and not just making do but making over.
MAP CREVICES. Cartographic theorist James Corner uses the term “map crevices” to refer to the structural elements of a map that reveal both invisible context and, often, the cartographer’s intent. He states, “Map crevices such as frame, scale, orientation, projection, indexing, and naming reveal artificial geographies that remain unavailable to the human eye…As both
33 analogue and abstraction, then, the surface of the map functions like an operating table, a staging ground or a theater of operations upon which the mapper collects, combines, connects, marks, masks, relates, and generally explores” (Corner 199).
MAPPING. I started mapping, or more specifically mapmaking, in 2010 when I took a job in the archaeology field. Creating personal maps—idiosyncratic geographical compositions—became a part of my artwork not long after and has continued to be a strategy for making ever since. The large-scale painting Belongings (Queer Mountain) is, first and foremost, a map of a fictitious landscape (see Figure 21). Below are some thoughts on mapping that struck me and/or resonate with how I am thinking about the practice:
Mapping, by contrast, discloses, stages, and even adds potential for later acts and events to unfold. Whereas the plan leads to an end, the map provides a generative means, a suggestive vehicle that “points” but does not overly determine (Corner 212).
Deleuze and Guattari draw an important distinction between “maps” and “tracings,” describing the former as open, connectable, “experimentations with the real,” and the latter as repetitive redundancies that “always come back to the same” [from A Thousand Plateaus] (Muñoz 228).
I suppose I knew then what I found articulated much later (by cartographic theorist James Corner): any image can be a map and any map can be a gameboard…By the time I rolled to determine the daily “turn” of each “player,” I had mostly exhausted the fun of the game. It was about the activation of potentialities…A map is a depot of futurities, a staging ground, a theater of operations…its performative power comes from its being both analogous— indexical—and compositional (Blanchfield 142-143).
We attempt to describe and to project upon the radically fictional nature of the American landscape, to quarry as well as to contribute to the accumulated layers of aerial representation and their agency of transformation (Corner 138).
34 The only way the individual can remain free in the 21st century spectacular city is by mapping onto it the contours of her own intimate preoccupations (Self 22).
Making maps can be about coping with a place’s conditions or about a more internal process of finding the way: meditating on a place and one’s place within it (Hoffman 53).
Regarding artistic atlases, the French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi- Huberman wrote of “a tool not for the logical exhaustion of possibilities given but for the inexhaustible opening up to possibilities that are not yet given.” Such an atlas concerns less the cataloguing of the world than embracing polyphony, new relations, and analogies (Evers 88).
MAYOR OF GHOST TOWNS. About a year ago, I was challenged to describe the man who could pull off this CHIMAYO SPORT JACKET I had become fixated on (see Figure 10). In response, I wrote a series of short character descriptions, a few of which (see also ED RUSCHA, PAST-LIFE CASINO KING) came together as a poem in both the BELONGINGS book and exhibition.
I have thought a lot about the idea of ghost towns as places with nothing left to offer; everything and everyone has moved on. In that context, the mayor of such a place seems like a particularly sad (albeit romantic) title to hold. The jacket felt like an artifact from a time/place/culture that never existed, and the phrase “Mayor of Ghost Towns” has a similar temporal impossibility built into it. As fantasies, I am attracted to both ideas.
MEMORABILIA. In describing the kinds of objects I make, I have leaned heavily on the term “artifacts” as a way to indicate that object’s previous life (real or imagined). Upon finding Padva’s categorical distinctions between history and nostalgia (see Figure 2), it also made sense to me to start thinking of some these objects as pieces of memorabilia or SOUVENIRS. In using all three terms, often to describe the same object, I was intentionally blurring the line between history and nostalgia, autobiography and fiction. Memorabilia, in this context, refers to
35 any object kept or collected more for its historical interest rather than for its personal significance or sentimental value.
MERCH. Some of the first artworks I ever made were used on posters, album covers, or as merchandise (“merch”) for friends’ bands (see MAKING DO). T-shirts, pins, and patches are the D.I.Y. merch trinity, and I have continued to work with all three forms to this day. While discussing the first series of bandana sculptures I made, another student said that the cluster of works looked like “merch for an unknown band or a brand of goods, but I don’t know what is being promoted.” I do not think this feedback was meant positively, but, to me, it meant there was a kind of visual identity embedded in these objects and, therefore, the opportunity for them to become signifiers not unlike the way color operates in the HANKY CODE system.
MOUNTAIN MONOGRAMS. See HILLSIDE LETTERS.
NERVOUS MILK. “Nervous milk” is a term I first came across in the book Libra by Don DeLillo, a historical novel about the life of Lee Harvey Oswald. At one point in the story, Oswald’s Russian wife is trying to calm herself down before breastfeeding her baby because she does not want to give him “nervous milk.” I read Libra years ago, but that language stuck with me. It is a super evocative symbol of the non-genetic but toxic stuff that can be passed down from a parent to a child. In that context, it is used in one of the poems in the BELONGINGS book.
NEUTRAL GROUND. “Neutral ground” refers to the no man’s land not controlled by either party in a conflict. Neutral ground can also suggest the neutrally colored ground or background in an artwork or, similarly, the neutral colored ground in the landscape (as in the pale tan of the desert floor). I wanted to conflate these possibilities—neutrality as an objective condition and neutrality as a color characteristic—when I used the term “neutral ground” as a setting for one of the poem vignettes in the BELONGINGS book.
OMAR PIERCE. Omar Pierce is a long-time friend, studio mate, and collaborator. Over the last eleven years, we have worked together on a book, several video projects, three exhibitions, close to a dozen individual artworks, and a t-shirt subscription series. Our most recent collaboration—an exhibition, titled WEST GHOST / SPIRIT WILLING, at Skylab Gallery in 36 downtown Columbus, Ohio—brought together large-scale medium-format photographs printed on fabric, found objects, t-shirts as sculptures, and an overhead projection to tell the story of one surreal day we spent together in the desert on the outskirts of our hometown.
OUTSIDE JOKES. “Outside Jokes” is listed as one of the categories in the key at the beginning of the BELONGINGS book. This term, a play on “inside jokes”, was a way to think about a kind of humor that comes from an intimacy with a place or landscape rather than a person (the traditional definition of an inside joke). Before we found the DEAD HORSE, OMAR PIERCE and I left town that day with the idea of making a series of text pieces embedded in the landscape that we were half- seriously calling outside jokes. The bits of text that have been coded as outside jokes through Figure 22. the key symbology all speak to the shorthand Black-and-white medium-format photograph that was printed on a t-shirt that became part of a sculpture in that develops when you get to know the West Ghost / Spirit Willing exhibition, 2018. something—in this case, a place—intimately (see, for example, BUFFALONER MOUNTAIN).
PAST-LIFE CASINO KING. As described in the MAYOR OF GHOST TOWN entry, about a year ago, I was challenged to describe the man who could pull off this CHIMAYO SPORT JACKET I had become fixated on at that time (see Figure 10). In response, I wrote a series of short character descriptions, a few of which (see also ED RUSCHA) came together as a poem in both the BELONGINGS book and exhibition.
The “Past-Life Casino King” is a type you run into occasionally in Reno and, I would imagine, Las Vegas. He moved there to make a living as a gambler and did that for as long as he could, either until he lost everything or became so good that the casinos blacklisted him. For whatever reason, he never left and still haunts the city the same way the specter of its past as a gambling 37 mecca continues to. In the fantasy I have conjured, at some point in the heyday of his gambling career, he got a little flashy and indulgent, and the CHIMAYO SPORT JACKET is an artifact from this era.
PEAK BLEAK. It could be a place—one of the studio diorama mountain images included in the BELONGINGS book is labeled “Peak Bleak.” It could also be a condition—the highest level of bleakness ever achieved. While I have had no interest in addressing the current political climate directly in my artwork, the last two years have been the darkest I have ever experienced. Graduate school, my time in Ohio, and the Trump presidency will, unfortunately, be forever linked in my mind. I hope we have hit “peak bleak” politically because I hate to imagine how it gets worse from here.
QUEER MOUNTAIN. The Queer Mountain Wilderness study area is an uninhabited fourteen- mile stretch of wilderness located in west-central Nevada northeast of Death Valley. The harsh terrain has no permanent structures or residents, and there is no access to services or utilities.
Queer Mountain is hard to see. I tried, unsuccessfully, last summer after finding it on a map while planning a road trip somewhere else. I had never heard of Queer Mountain before, even though it is only about four hours from my hometown. When I got down to the outskirts, it became clear pretty quickly that I was not going to make it; an intense fire season followed by a wet winter had washed out all three of the roads into the QM Wilderness Area, and I was forced to head back the same way I came without seeing any of it. It was not until later that I started to think of this failed trip—my inability to reach this place—as an analog for a kind of desire or fantasy. This was a starting point for a lot of the work that became my thesis exhibition.
Belongings (Queer Mountain), the large-scale painting in the exhibition, is an attempt to image this place that I did not have access to. It conflates four of the ways archaeological sites are visually recorded—aerial view photography, site overview photographs, topographic maps, and stratigraphic diagrams—with the full knowledge that all of these efforts are inadequate fictions. In the case of the overview photo (the traditional horizon-line pictorial view of the landscape), I was unable to take that photograph on site because I was never able to get on site, and so I created a diorama model in my studio that I literally and metaphorically projected on to and 38 photographed instead. In the simplest terms, the texts in the BELONGINGS book are ARTIFACT CATALOGS of the fictional Queer Mountain site; however, since Queer Mountain has never been home to permanent residents, even in prehistoric times, the impossibility of a substantial artifact record suggests a narrative that is more speculative.
RAMBLING. A short text from the BELONGINGS book:
WE RAMBLED ABOUT RAMBLING BUT SETTLED ON SETTLING.
Here, rambling takes on two different but related meanings, both of which point to a kind of non- committal, directionless position: rambling as in talking in a lengthy, unclear manner and rambling as a way of moving about or wandering in a kind of aimless way.
In the simplest terms, everyone I know is constantly talking about the idea of moving somewhere else but never actually putting a plan in place to make that happen.
RAZZLE DAZZLE. Razzle Dazzle camouflage was developed during World War I by British illustrator, marine painter, and designer Norman Wilkinson. Given that the two primary backgrounds for naval ships, the sea and the sky, are constantly changing in color and light, Wilkinson knew it was impossible to fully conceal these vessels (Behrens 86). Instead, he came up with the idea of using bold graphic pattern to visually confuse opposition forces, creating a condition that made the razzle dazzle ships difficult to understand in terms of their scale, form, direction and speed of movement, etc.
In a series of projection pieces from early last year (and in a more recent work included in the thesis exhibition), I projected razzle dazzle camouflage pattern onto images and objects to the point that they were obscured and could only be fully seen when a viewer positioned themselves between the image/object surfaces and the projector, thereby blocking the projected camouflage pattern (see Figure 9).
I do not think of the way I have used camouflage in my work as an analog for a kind of “passing”; however, I am interested in the ability to determine when and where to be seen and to what to degree. To that end, the razzle dazzle style of camouflage has made more sense to 39 me than the concealed color or mimicry styles. I have also worked a lot with images as patterns, specifically halftone patterns, and the razzle dazzle form of alternating black and white stripes is a scaled-up version of that same structure.
ROADKILL COYOTE FUR. In Spring of 2017, I bought a coyote pelt from a vendor on Etsy. The pelt was taken from a coyote that had been hit by a car, and so it was imperfect, in pieces, and only recognizable as a coyote if you were familiar with the texture of their fur. I bought it without a specific plan, though I thought it would make its way into my artwork at some point. Despite some half-hearted attempts, that never happened until two years later, when I incorporated it into the last piece Figure 23. I made for my thesis exhibition Belongings (Souvenir); cast urethane, latex paint, coyote fur; 10” x 10”, 2019 (Figure 23).
The piece, a square tablet of CAST URETHANE with a circular tuft of coyote fur coming through its surface, is an excavation. In this case, the pelt is an ARTIFACT, not of its original desert context but of my studio. As a remnant bought online, it became a symbol of distance or lack of intimacy. In that context, the piece in the thesis exhibition becomes a SOUVENIR with a backstory, not of the landscape it originally came from but of my studio practice during my time away from that landscape—a time spent trying to understand my relationship to it at a distance. In the table of contents I wrote as an artist statement (see LIST-MAKING), “Roadkill coyote fur bought online” was one of the entries.
40 SETTLING. In a short text in the BELONGINGS Book (see RAMBLING), “settling” takes on three possible meanings: 1) to decide on or accept something that is not ideal; 2) to move to or occupy a location; and 3) to become calmer or quieter. This layering of the term is borrowed directly from the lyrics to the song “Range Life” by the band Pavement. The chorus:
I want a range life, If I could settle down, If I could settle down, Then I would settle down
SOUVENIR. In On Longing, Susan Stewart describes a souvenir as evidence that validates and also stands in for, in a metonymic way, a narrative that the possessor is holding onto. I have used the terms souvenir, memorabilia, and artifact to describe some of the things I make, sometimes using all three in relation to a single object. In doing so, I am intentionally blurring the line between history and nostalgia (see ARTIFACTS), autobiography and fiction. That said, I think the differences between these three terms are worth parsing out. An artifact is a remnant cultural object or material that can be used to understand the human history of a location. A piece of memorabilia is any object kept or collected more for its historical interest rather than for its personal significance or sentimental value. A souvenir is a specific object (unlike a piece of memorabilia, it cannot be replaced) that holds value for the owner because of the story it is a part of. Whereas a piece of memorabilia may be seen as valuable to a large number of people (e.g., a piece of sports memorabilia), a souvenir is only significant to its owner because only they recognize and are connected to its backstory.
STILL LIFES / LIVES. “STILL LIFES / LIVES” is a category in the key at the beginning of the BELONGINGS book. I had never considered the distinction in the two spellings until I was told that the plural of still life is “still lifes” not “still lives.” This made me think about the relationship between things frozen in a particular state (an archaeological site is a kind of still life) and the idea of still living in a particular place (see SETTLING; MAYOR OF GHOST TOWNS). The texts coded as “still lifes / lives” through the key symbology speak to that which is fixed—maybe because it is dead, maybe because it is essential—about a specific place or environment.
41 SUNBLEACHED FLAG. “Sunbleached Flag” is the name of one of the bandana colors in the FALSE COLORS series, and it also occurs as text in one of the poem vignettes in the BELONGINGS book. There is a ghostly quality to the way the sun bleaches out material (see SUNFINITY) in the high desert; it makes for a subtle, chalky palette that I have never been able to replicate and that certainly cannot be bought in a store. This bleaching is most evident on flags because we know what the colors of that object should be—the crisp reds and deep blues of the American flag, for example. Bandanas are sometimes referred to as flags, and HANKY CODE has also been called flagging. In this context, “Sunbleached Flag” can also refer to the more nuanced and idiosyncratic color palette I was trying to create in the FALSE COLORS series.
SUNFINITY. Nevada averages close to 300 days of sunshine a year. At a high elevation—even the valley floors are 3,000 feet above sea level—that means an intense amount of sunlight, often with no clouds in the sky at all (“sunfinity”), hits the ground. This light has the power to crack materials in half, change the color of objects (see SUNBLEACHED FLAG), and dry out anything and anyone in its path (see BLOODSHOT EYES). It also creates an incredibly harsh light to shoot photographs in during most of the daylight hours. Black-and-white film has been the best method I have found to photograph the landscape when bathed in this harsh light.
WEST GHOST/SPIRIT WILLING. West Ghost/Spirit Willing is the title of most recent collaboration between me and OMAR PIERCE. The exhibition brought together large-scale medium-format photographs printed on fabric, found objects, t-shirts as sculptures, and an overhead projection to tell the story of one surreal day in a spot in the desert both of the us have a long history with. On this particular day, the place felt different. Entering the canyon location, we immediately encountered the body of a DEAD HORSE (see Figure 12). While photographing it, an older couple drove up and informed us that the horse had been shot by the sheriff and left on the side of the road. It had been there for nearly a week. We continued hiking around the area; in short order, we came across the bodies of a dead hawk and then a dead coyote. The horse, hawk, and coyote were all within fifty feet of each other. This unremarkable spot we had used as a shooting location for a number of different projects (it is an empty bit of desert along the road out to the dump) had become a graveyard. We set out that day thinking we were
42 making a very different body of work; instead, the resulting installation became a meditation on the familiar becoming unfamiliar, the desolate becoming haunted.
WISH LANDSCAPE. On several occasions in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, Jose Esteban Muñoz makes reference to the “wish landscape”, a term coined by Ernst Bloch in his essay “The Representation of Wish-Landscapes in Painting, Opera, and Poetry.” Bloch’s description:
That distance, which leaves the view unobstructed, which does not hide anything, is richer in objects. Even where the painted view lies in the mists, there is not determination but, rather, a standard set particularly for the vastness. As soon as this world, instead of heaven, began to become infinite, the wish- landscape as open distance appeared in paintings…The point where the lines of perspective meet lies an infinity; the lines running in the middle section go beyond a horizon. The figures enclose something new: a centrifugal space. Thus, already at the middle age’s vastness, a vastness of wish (Bloch 278).
Muñoz describes Jim Hodges’ painting Oh Great Terrain, “as both a continuation of Warhol’s approach to camouflage and entirely its own advancement in the aesthetic project of picturing a queer utopian “wish landscape” (Muñoz 140). Unpacking the term a bit further, he goes on say, “Landscape art depicts a natural order, but it does not do so neutrally. Landscape art represents the ways in which the world should look, feel, and be” (Muñoz 141). He draws the term out even further, away from painting and art historical landscape representations, when discussing the fantasy city garden watered by dancer Fred Herko in the film Fragments. He states, “This queer little garden in the gutter nicely corresponds to what Bloch called ‘utopian wish-landscapes,’ animating the desire for a time and a place that is not yet here” (Muñoz 152).
I have been—and still am, to be honest—reticent to talk about my own conflation of fantasy and landscape in relation to the idea of utopia, as I am not interested in perfection nor I am thinking about place in abstract or theoretical terms. On the other hand, Bloch’s notion of the wish- landscape resonates, particularly his descriptions of openness and vastness in relation to how I have imaged the desert landscape in my work. Through Muñoz’s queering of the term, I could
43 embrace it as a descriptor for the fictional map-like works I have made, particularly the large- scale painting Belongings (Queer Mountain).
WE. The texts in the BELONGINGS book fall roughly into two categories: the lists that take the loose form of ARTIFACT CATALOGS and a small number of short narratives that all start with the pronoun “we” (see, for example, RAMBLING). The list texts have a distance to them as if they were written from the perspective of an archaeologist trying to recreate a human (his)story through material remnants. The “we” narratives have the much more direct voice of someone telling their own story. There is, by nature, an “I” in the “we” pronoun, but it also suggests a community or something outside of oneself. While not something I was consciously thinking about at the time, this excerpt from Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies, which I came across again recently while looking through old reading notes, must have been kicking around in my head somewhere:
The poems in my second book, A Several World, the book I wrote in my thirties, default to the first-person plural; repeatedly I find I work myself into a we, and the we I mean is not usually “John and me”—us domestic life partners—but more like this queer kind of family (Blanchfield 55).
WET SAGE. One of the best smells ever. Northern Nevada averages less than eight inches of rainfall each year, and, when it does rain, it tends to come during dramatic summertime thunderstorms. Because the humidity is so low, these intense storms do not make it muggy out. Instead, they clear out all of the dust and particulates in the air, and everything is left feeling refreshed and clean. Sagebrush is the dominant vegetation in the high desert, and the rare rain brings it to life, drawing out the earthy, minty scent of the plant. Post-storm, that scent fills the air, and the bowl-like valley of the Reno area concentrates the smell.
As a strong sensory signifier of a time of year in a particular place, “wet sage” is listed as one of the materials in a poem vignette in the BELONGINGS book.
44 YEAR-ROUND CHRISTMAS LIGHTS. “The only enduring legacy of punk rock is Christmas lights up year-round. That’s it, that’s all that it offered us in the end.” – Michael Stipe, REM (Creator’s Project).
“Year-round Christmas Lights” is listed as one of the materials in a poem vignette in the BELONGINGS book.
45 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Art:21. “Romance.” Directed by Susan Sollins. PBS, October 2007. Banham, Reyner. Scenes in America Deserta. Layton, Utah: Gibbs M. Smith, Inc., 1982. Barna, Benjamin. “A Culture of Making Do: Adapting to the Great Depression in the Rabbithole Mining District.” Master’s thesis, University of Nevada, Reno, 2008. The Beach Boys, “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” track 11 on Pet Sounds, Capitol Records, 1966. Behrens, Roy R. False Colors: Art, Design, and Modern Camouflage. Dysart, Iowa: Bobolink Books, 2002. Blanchfield, Brian. Proxies: Essays Near Knowing. New York City: Nightboat Books, 2016. Bloch, Ernst. “The Representation of Wish-Landscapes in Painting, Opera, and Poetry.” In The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays by Ernst Bloch. Translated by J. Zipes and F. Mecklenburg. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988. Carlson, Helen. Nevada Place Names: A Geographical Dictionary. Reno: University of Nevada, Press, 1974. Cooper, Natalie. Desert Hearts. DVD. Directed by Donna Deitch. Hollywood: The Samuel Goldwyn Company, 1986. Corner, James, and Alison Bick Hirsch. The Landscape Imagination: Collected Essays of James Corner 1990-2010. Princeton Architectural Press, 2014. The Creators Project. “Michael Stipe.” The Creators Project video. 9:59 duration. https://www.vice.com/da/article/nn4vzx/michael-stipe. DeLillo, Don. Libra. New York City: Penguin Books, 1991 (Reissue edition). Evers, Elodie. “Toward Where the Daisies Are.” In Simon Evans, edited by Elodie Evers, 87-89. Bielefeld, Germany: Kerber Verlag, 2014. Fischer, Hal. Gay Semiotics: A Photographic Study of Visual Coding Among Homosexual Men. Los Angeles: Cherry and Martin, 2015 (1977). Fox, William L. The Void, The Grid & The Sign: Traversing the Great Basin. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2005. Hickey, Dave. Pirates and Farmers: Essays on Taste. London: Ridinghouse, 2013. Hoffman, Jens. “Ironic, Loving, Wry, Salty, Campy, Cheeky, Charming, Bitter, Sweet, Rancid.” In Simon Evans, edited by Elodie Evers, 51-54. Bielefeld, Germany: Kerber Verlag, 2014. 46 BIBLIOGRAPHY CONTINUED
Jarman, Derek. Chroma. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Julin, Richard. Andrea Zittel: Lay of My Land. Munich: Prestel Publishing, 2011. Lippard, Lucy. Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West. New York City: The New Press, 2014. Muñoz, Jose Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York City: NYU Press, 2009. O’Hara, Frank. “Having a Coke with You.” Poets.org. https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/ poem/having-coke-you. Padva, Gilad. Queer Nostalgia in Cinema and Pop Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Pavement, “Range Life,” track 9 on Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Matador, 1994. Self, Will. “In Search of a Middle.” In Simon Evans, edited by Elodie Evers, 21-22. Bielefeld, Germany: Kerber Verlag, 2014. Springsteen, Bruce. Darkness on the Edge of Town. Columbia Records JC 35318, 1978, vinyl record. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1992. Wyckoff, William. How to Read the American West: A Field Guide. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014. Young, Neil. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. Reprise Records LC 0322, 1969, vinyl record.
47 APPENDIX A. FRANK O’HARA’S HAVING A COKE WITH YOU
Having a Coke with You is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully as the horse it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it
48