WENDOVER, Utah — If you had to pick just one landscape to illustrate the curious obsessions of the L.A.-based Center for Land Use Interpretation, it might be this haunted high-desert wasteland two hours west of Salt Lake City.
Glimpsed at 80 mph from the passing interstate, the stark panorama blurs into a mirage of dazzling white salt flats ringed by scrubby brown mountains. Here and there, a sun-bleached motel or abandoned car announces humanity's presence. Superficially, it all could be another generic Rand McNally dot on the epic canvas of the American West.
But if you scratch the surface--which, it might be said, is the Center for Land Use Interpretation's primary reason for being--the terrain begins to yield its bizarre treasures, revealing itself not as a vast man-made junkyard but a kind of living museum where paradox and contradiction are as common as sand in the Sahara.
Under the blazing afternoon sky, Matt Coolidge, 35, surveys the hallucinatory vista, his eyes veiled by a pair of dark sunglasses. If he looks more like a CIA mole or Hollywood location scout than a mild-mannered geography major from Montreal, well, Coolidge would be the first to remind you that appearances can be misleading.
"We believe that narratives are told through a landscape as much as they might be through a movie. You just have to learn how to read the landscape," says the director of the center, an idiosyncratically ambitious 8-year-old nonprofit that's trying to reshape the way Americans see and think about their country's man-made topography.
Like its even quirkier Culver City next-door neighbor the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the center resides at a conceptual crossroads where science, social history, environmental studies, art, folklore and pop culture intersect. Imagine a gene-splicing experiment involving the Sierra Club, the Smithsonian Institution, Outward Bound and your favorite "The X-Files" episode and you may have a vague sense of where this unclassifiable institution fits on the map.
"They're a group that really exists in between a lot of our conventional definitions," says Ralph Rugoff, an art critic and head of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at the California College of Arts & Crafts in Oakland.
Adopting an approach that might be described as outsider science meets gonzo tourism by way of contemporary art, Coolidge's group employs a multimedia, multidisciplinary approach to shedding light on places that, as he puts it, exist as much in most Americans' "imaginations as in their actual experience." Seen through the center's interpretive lenses, the American landscape turns out to be a far more complicated, and revealing, place than can be conveyed in iconic postcard vistas or captured in a day-tripper's mental Polaroids.
By giving people the tools to chip away at the crust of history, myth, romance and language that encases our perceptions of landscapes, the center hopes to bring viewers and visitors "closer to the ground." "We like to say we work in the interpretive layer that's between a physical object and the perception of that object," says Coolidge.
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Sites You Won't
Find in the Guidebooks
Exhibit A is this deceptive void of Wendover, roughly an 11-hour drive from the Culver City headquarters of the center, affectionately known as CLUI (rhymes with "Huey"). As tourist draws go, it's not exactly Disneyland, but CLUI regards it as pure analytical gold.
Those pristine alkali flats Coolidge is pointing to? They're part of a massive, and still very active, U.S. Air Force test-bombing range. Those "desolate" ranges tapering toward the horizon? They're strewn with local points of interest that you won't find listed in many guidebooks, though you will find them cataloged in fascinating detail on the center's Web site, www.clui.org. Among the attractions: copper smelters, magnesium chloride plants, America's largest chemical weapons storage facility, monumental outdoor "earth art" works such as Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty" and a historic marker indicating the site of a turn-of-the-century settlement-turned-leper colony founded by Polynesian Mormons.
At the edge of this arid expanse, awkwardly straddling the state line, the Siamese-twin towns of Wendover, Utah, and Wendover, Nev., form an incongruous pit stop for weary big-riggers and low-rent gamblers. From the Nevada side of the border, sparkling new casinos glare across at crumbling bungalows and rows of ghostly military barracks that have mostly stood empty since World War II.
As for that ominous 50-foot tower, a rusting hulk that looks like vintage 1940s, it's the handiwork of the Walt Disney Co., which built it for its 1997 action thriller "Con Air." A few hundred yards away, at the edge of a U.S. Air Force base, the "Con Air" plane sits parked, surreally, next to a weather-beaten hangar that once housed the Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
