Whereas mineral water springs from faucets on the edge of sand dunes,
contemporary culture is dedicated to the simulation of a total oasis.
And yet, the desert grows.
Whereas new days are born in the East, the West is nightly death. In
ancient Egyptian myth Amentet – personification of the latter – resides
in a tree on the edge of the desert and receives souls who have departed
from life. Beating a modern literary path across these Western Lands,
William S. Burroughs catalogued a host of local horrors: poison, snakes,
centipedes, spiders, guns and bloodsucking. At sunset: the end of the
world as we know it. But Amentet – though Goddess of Death – is also
associated with fertility, and offers new arrivals bread and water.
Thus, she supplies travellers with provisions for their onward journey
through another life, in the strange new day to come. Likewise,
convenience stores, gas stations, and restaurants dispense basic
necessities.
Celluloid testament of the new day: Desert of the reel. Death, the West,
mounted on a white horse and wearing sunglasses, deals law. As the
dusty mesa stretches, uninterrupted, as far as the eye can see, nothing
checks its stride. The new law pushes in every direction – touches
everything – and brooks no resistance. Clapboard houses and baby
carriages are blown to smithereens and ash: Atomic sunrise; Western
dawn, as if the earth now turns in the opposite direction. In this
landscape there is no place like home, unless, like the House in the
Middle, it is tidy inside and out, and painted vibrant white. On this
day you may wish to memorialize a loved one who has passed away by
scattering their ashes upon the wind. For this you will require a permit
and some rules must be observed. Remains must be cremated and
pulverized, and should not be distinguishable as such. Nor should they
be left in any type of container.
Endless day of the desert: Deserts stand magically ‘free of time’ as –
according to J.G Ballard – they have ‘exhausted their own futures’. Now
they belong to human afterlife. The modern conjuring trick performed in
every Atrocity Exhibition renders the Storex Sedan Crater on Yucca flat,
created during one of the Operation Plowshare atomic tests, near
indistinguishable from Canyon Diablo – the result of a meteorite impact
that rocked the Western plain with the energy of more than 20 million
tons of TNT. This anti-miracle is repeated until you believe it, as
though it was never otherwise. In the museum of the desert our
contemporary culture is for all time, like a footprint on the moon.
Tripping highways and dust, on the road, those who cross the desert
encounter mirages and chimeras ‘surpassing all conception.’ Near the
horizon lies a ‘Town that Never Was’. Off the asphalt, after the
multimedia display, accompanied by award winning catering, guest
astronauts will talk to you about how even the smallest tasks are
complicated by a microgravity environment.
The clearest way into the universe is through a wilderness. But when we
try to discern the wild by itself ‘we find it hitched to everything
else.’ Burning rubber, electric motors and aeroplanes are entangled with
granite and cacti. Fossils run through fuel pumps; the ‘natural’ is
cultivated by legal instruments, taxonomies and monopolies of power. The
prophets of conservation are also the champions of bureaucracy. But to
what end? Today, before it can be left alone, the desert must be subject
to massive educational access; made an example, with appropriate
interpretation. Veneration requires a system of profane interfaces,
including wayfinding, PR, crowd control, and risk assessment.
The desert flows through each of us, and what looks like despoil may be a
most fundamental condition. To view the desert traveller as an alien
neglects his mineral and thermodynamic composition. Better, consider him
a grotesque decoration: Of the grotto – like a stalagmite or salt
column. On a geological timescale everything is a confection or
ornament. Viewed through the lens of eons, landscapes move like liquid;
crystals pass through bloodstreams and bladders. Today’s museum of the
Western desert is an image of the fluidity of the contemporary
afterlife.