Lest we forget the reasons we left Los Angeles…

…David Maisel will show us our immersion, remind us of our experiences and invoke our readings, i.e. Mike Davis.

I couldn’t sleep last night, so I got on the internet and began searching for more aerials of Los Angeles and happened upon the work of David Maisel – specifically the Oblivion series (Los Angeles) and Terminal Mirage series (Great Salt Lake in Utah).

I feel terribly ignorant not knowing this work, but glad I found it at this time when it's so relevant to my own work. I must have come across it before now… and even have vague memories of reading something in Art in America (5 or 6 years ago?) about someone’s exquisite aerial photography of toxic sites. Something must have lodged in my subconscious… though I can recall no names or specific details about the work.

Maisel’s photos of Los Angeles are haunting. When I look at them I’m both mesmerized and simultaneously sinking inside. I loved so many things about living in L.A. (the diversity, the people, the food), but there were other things that deeply disturbed me and contributed to my misery.

I don’t remember a day of living in L.A. when I didn’t feel trapped and implicated, when I wasn’t engulfed in noise, pollution and over-consumption. I was weighted with an enormous guilt for the near decade I was there – always thinking of the environmental destruction: the driving, the water consumption where there is none, the city sucking the life and resources from elsewhere to support its overgrowth.

This is why Frank and I were so eager to leave. So whenever we begin to feel nostalgic for L.A., we have these images to remind us of why we left… which makes me think that, as cultural and historical documents, they’re already embedded with a future potentiality for viewers to feel both loss for the great project, regret for even pursuing it and resignation that it could have been no other way.

But of course, the consumption and environmental destruction are not limited to L.A., and a lot of what I associate with L.A., SUVs in particular, were less to do with place than time. What was happening on a grand scale in L.A. was happening in sprawling suburbs across the country. There seems to have been a consumption explosion that just happened to coincide with our years in L.A. It’s not just L.A. – the entire U.S. is caught up in the all-consuming destruction. We are all implicated.

I wonder about those North Americans who haven’t had their consciousness raised through lived experience in a place like L.A. where the reality is visible and undeniable – will they continue to ignore the seriousness of the problems because it’s not in their face every day? Does the whole landscape and climate have to transform into versions of Los Angeles before we stop and take notice? And if we can’t even take notice, what has to happen before we take action? I say this because at least in a place like L.A., there is a discourse about the problems (because they are so obvious and difficult to ignore) and activism on a grand scale to meet the grand scale of the destruction. At the same time, many Angelenos adopt a complicit resignation because of the enormity of the situation and recognize their individual powerlessness to effect change on the scale necessary. The problems are deep and structural and bigger than any one of us.

Below are some quotes from David Maisel that I pulled from this interview where he discusses the Salt Lake images and sublime beauty:

…I think there’s also a twinned process of seduction and betrayal involved- a viewer might be seduced by the colors and forms of these images, and then, in a sense, betrayed once knowledge of the subject becomes clear. It parallels the way we are seduced, and ultimately betrayed, by a certain level of consumerism that exacts such tolls on the environment. Yes, I want my SUV and my wide-screen TV and… oops! There goes the ozone layer! Imagine that!

…I’m motivated by the notion of discovering and revealing sites that might otherwise remain unknown or unseen- be they clear-cut logging sites, strip mines, cyanide leaching fields, etc. My photographs of these sites are intended to be reflective of some sort of internal, psychological state as much as they are documents of a particular site. And, I consider myself a visual artist first and foremost- as opposed, perhaps, to a photojournalist or a documentarian. I'm most interested in making images that have a kind of depth-charge, that have a certain poetic or metaphoric impact visually.

…Beauty has been seen as problematic for the visual arts in general because we no longer trust beauty as a serious means of investigation. But it can be. Beauty wedges into artistic space a structure for continuously imagining what we do not yet know or understand. For an object or an image to possess beauty does not mean that it is empty of meaning or shallow. In fact, beauty can be incendiary. It can be subversive. It can make us cringe.