Prior to their visit to Sun Tunnels and Spriral Jetty, Anne and Martine visit the Center for Land Use Interpretation. These are Martine's reflections following the visit:

The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI)

The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) is part of a kind of reformulation of land art that took place in the 1990s, when Andrea Zittel also made her High Desert Test Sites (see our report) and Noah Purifoy worked on his sculptures (see our report). In it, the focus shifted to land use, the genius loci and the question of what man's place in it was. CLUI is more a research club than an organization that makes art or plans: they are tremendously interested in uncovering invisible human and economic forces acting on the landscape. They have an exhibition space in Los Angeles, a residency program in Wendover, Utah, and an extensive online database.

Large-scale lithium mining

Once you adopt the CLUI view, you can't turn it off. That supposedly empty West American landscape is then suddenly filled with copper mines, large-scale agriculture, military sites, oil fields, nuclear test sites and uranium mines. The Great Salt Lake located near Wendover changes with that view from a beautiful pink-purple, salty body of water to a site ravaged by desiccation, poisoning and future large-scale lithium mining.It gives us an additional layer of meaning for the works of art by Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson that we visit here, who were well aware of these aspects of the landscape.

Land use in Flevoland

CLUI shows it all, but does not judge, and that is its strength. The club is generous with its knowledge: in Wendover, we are given a code to the door of the small exhibition room so that we can enter on our own. We wonder if that would work in Flevoland, a small information room about the landscape that you can enter unaccompanied. What certainly can be done is to look at land use in Flevoland with CLUI's gaze, because here too the landscape is primarily an economic and technological phenomenon.

If you find this interesting subject matter, also read the book Undermining. A Wild Ride through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West by Lucy Lippard.