UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO Space Travel, or: Lessons in Critical Distance A Thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts by Sarah Ruth Farnsworth Committee in charge: Professor Brian Cross, Chair Professor Norman Bryson, Co-Chair Professor Alain Cohen Professor Ricardo Dominguez 2019 © Sarah Ruth Farnsworth, 2019 All rights reserved. The Thesis of Sarah Ruth Farnsworth is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: ____________________________________________ ____________________________________________ _____________________________________________ Co-Chair _____________________________________________ Chair University of California San Diego 2019 iii DEDICATION There are many people to thank, but first and foremost is my advising committee, who has stuck with me through thick and thin and put up with a lot of my bullshit over the past three years. Countless meetings, babbling, blathering, long-winded e-mails, and occasional breakthroughs. Thank you, thank you, thank you: Professor Norman Bryson Professor Alain Cohen Professor Brian Cross Professor Ricardo Dominguez I then would like to thank members of my visual arts cohort and program-at-large, to whom I am eternally grateful. What a little family we have created over the past few years! I am honored to have shared this time with you, exchanged ideas, clinked glasses, and likely spilled tea in your studio. I would especially like to thank the following people, who have been instrumental in my own growth as an artist: Jessica Buie Dillon Chapman Allison Evans Tanner Gilliland-Swetland Grace Huddleston Maya Misra Maya VanderSchuit Paolo Zuñiga I would also like to thank the following people for their continued support and belief in my work: Steve Bird Lucas Coffin Professor Teddy Cruz Kate Edwards Professor Anya Gallaccio Lorena Gomez Mostajo Tad Linfesty Professor Rubén Ortiz Torres I could not have done any of this without the support of my parents, Deborah and Geoffrey Farnsworth, who encourage me each day and continue to inspire me. Finally, I would like to thank Cole Goodwin, who has been my best friend, sounding board, and biggest fan since the day I badgered him in Teddy’s class our very first quarter. Thank you for everything. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page…………………………………………………………………… iii Dedication…………...…………………………………………………………… iv Table of Contents………………………………………………..………………... v List of Figures ………………………………………………….…….………….. vi Abstract of the Thesis …………………………………………………………... vii Part 1: Space Travel, or: Lessons in Critical Distance………….………..……… 1 Part 2: Color Processing and Other Emotional Endeavors..…………………… 12 Works Cited………………………..……………………………….………….. 34 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: A diagram of ergonomic design …………………………………………………. 13 Figure 2: Page spread from Larry Clark’s Tulsa………….………………………………… 16 Figure 3: Nan Goldin - Nan After Being Battered, 1984, from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency ……………………………………………………………………… 21 Figure 4: Cindy Sherman - Untitled Film Still #30, from series Untitled Film Stills.……… 22 Figure 5: William Eggleston - Greenwood, Mississippi, from William Eggleston's Guide………………………………………………..….………………………… 26 Figure 6: Nan Goldin - Suzanne with Mona Lisa, Mexico City, from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency……………..…………………………..….………………………… 26 Figure 7: William Eggleston - Untitled Confederate Flag, Tennessee, 1973……………….. 27 Figure 8: Cover of John Berger’s Portraits………………..……………………….……….. 32 vi ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS Space Travel, or: Lessons in Critical Distance by Sarah Ruth Farnsworth Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts University of California San Diego, 2019 Professor Brian Cross, Chair Professor Norman Bryson, Co-Chair Space Travel, or: Lessons in Critical Distance by Sarah Ruth Farnsworth is an exploration of color, space and emotion as experienced on the highways of the American Southwest. This project spans one year and four states, resulting in a book of photographs and text, as well as an accompanying photographic exhibition. vii Part I: Space Travel, or: Lessons in Critical Distance 1 November 3, 2018. 8:16 PM - 8:27 PM PST Salton City, CA. Sea and Sun Motel, Room 1 Today I photographed a dead dog on the side of the road and my stomach still churns from the smell, the flies wafting off its body as the cars pass, that and bad Ceviche from some restaurant in town. I'm in this motel in Salton City watching the Dodgers lose the World Series, and I never thought baseball moved me until that final inning with the crowd giving up and the flies wafting as the cars pass. I don't actually know what the fuck I'm doing out in the middle of the desert sometimes. Maybe I'm just chasing a certain kind of light. Maybe I'm chasing my mother. She always tells me these stories of her and Dad in the old CJ5 just tearing shit up, falling in love. But my own narrative leaves me gawking at stuff on the side of the road. Once a year, Mom and I head out to the Sierra Nevadas by way of the 395, which once extended into downtown San Diego, but now starts way up at Hesperia and cuts through the Mojave. Once you're on it you're on it and you go a few hundred miles before you turn onto Line Street and then you're up in the mountains for five days or so and then you head back down. Obviously I'm oversimplifying things. It's a six-hour drive from my parents' house and the minute we get onto Highway 395 my mom asks me how my life is going. The Mojave flying past. As a child, I committed the entire drive to memory, dog-earing the zones where the conversation tenses. This, the annual trip, for an annual drive to have this annual conversation, near-boiling in the desert heat. 2 My lover asked me today what I mean when I say intimacy, and for the sake of clarity I think it's important to define these sort of terms. In the case of my mother, it's the type of relationship where we have to completely vacate all other zones of our lives to really communicate with one another. Like two Francis Bacon paintings plunging motionless through nothing at ninety-two miles-per-hour, the highway a straight line we contort ourselves around. No cell service. And it's within this thin membrane of steel – all cramped up for hours, the Eastern shore of California crashing over the windshield – that we continue to find something real within each other again and again. But I have yet to give a proper answer to the person lying next to me. It's almost too windy to think and the TV is buzzing. Earlier I went on a walk in the neighborhood surrounding the motel to get some air and found this trampoline I think I might photograph. I saw myself as a kid in Temecula jumping up and down in pigtails – there was an ant hill underneath full of fire ants and I would try to spit on it through the mesh. Polypropylene burning my skin as I lie prone in the sun. I roll over to my lover and he asks me how my stomach is. But I don't respond. The sun has burned a hole straight through – I curl up and let my organs slide out to make a space for him. Is this intimacy? The walls of this motel are thin and this works in both directions. The sex is loud and yes, pull my fucking hair. Let this whole arid town experience my rather internal sensations. Meanwhile, I haven't shit in two days because god forbid I vocalize a real interiority. Kundera understands the conundrum I face and subjects Teresa to it ruthlessly. The soul: wanting to eject itself from the body: needing the body to propel. The body: turned inside-out by the soul's excitability: mortified by itself. Teresa fucks a stranger silently then shits in his toilet. I will wait until tomorrow when we stop to get gas. 3 (But the light in the bathroom is lovely, we can both agree on that.) Tomorrow we'll go driving, much like today. There's no site or destination, just the infinite potential for distraction, the car like those jellyfish that follow the arc of the sun. I wrote a paper on them once, the golden jellyfish. They're specific to this lake in the middle of an island. Honestly, I forget most of the details. Only the asymptotic pathway they take against the light. Ours is a more free-associative journey, but perhaps still ruled by photosynthesis. It was on one of these drives where my mother told me that taking courses in marine biology made her decide to be an analyst. Layers and all that. But we're inland, here. When I see a sign for a lake, I assume it's a dry lake. 4 August 14, 2018. 7:42 AM - 7:53 AM PST West Wendover, NV. Wendover Nugget, Golden Harvest Cafe I woke up late and Dad has left without me. I will have to walk to the raceway from here. We have a room for the week on the fourth floor of a casino which lies on the border between Nevada and Utah and I keep gaining and losing time between the two. Waiting for the check and admittedly hungover from last night's cognac and pay-per-view, but this coffee is getting me nowhere. I just keep watching the keno numbers flashing on a grid. The time trials have begun – in fact, in Mountain Standard Time they are quite well on their way. I'll have to walk about two miles East, away from the casinos and beyond the pawn shops, onto the Bonneville Salt Flats. This landscape is a monochrome, a Rauschenberg. From space, one could record the atmospheric changes on its surface.