Hello World

Santa Monica camera obscura

Page 238
After the wide screen of the desert, the round reflector plate of the camera obscura is comfortingly confined and I’m strongly moved to take a picture of it even though I know perfectly well that my camera will automatically flash and the entire image will disappear. But I take the picture anyway, and the image does disappear, and so, as predicted, I have nothing to show for it. The picture looks just like a round blank table, which is what it is – there was never anything there in the first place.
The episode described here is fraudulent. I did visit the Santa Monica camera obscura, but not the day after my trip to Death Valley. In fact I went there some months later, in April 2003, en route to a conference in Santa Barbara. Also, I was not alone, but with Simon Mills from trAce plus two other people who were already there in the dark when we arrived. In England there would be an awkward silence in such a situation, but in the US it's natural that we should speak to each other, and so it was that I discovered one of the men was the distinguished artist David Rokeby, who has made a number of works about surveillance and who was there to give a talk at UCLA the next evening. Of course it made sense to encounter him there - the most obvious place in Santa Monica for him to be.

Jeremy Deller

Page 235

After Trona, the road suddenly becomes terrifying. One moment I am on a reasonably flat minor highway and the next I’m driving along the top of a mountain and below me a narrow and unbelievably steep road winds its way down to a flat mesa which I will later discover is the Panamint Desert. At this point, I believe I am descending into Death Valley. Wrong. Nowhere near it.

For the first time, I’m frightened by the prospect of driving and to make matters worse, my knees have now turned to jelly. I can’t guarantee that I can manage the controls. My knuckles are white on the steering wheel. Why had I not expected this? Why had it not occurred to me that if I went to the mountains I would have to do mountain driving? Am I that unrealistic? It seems like I am.

There is nowhere but go but onwards. With the windows closed against the desert wind and my eyes squinting against the glare, I continue doggedly. Past the turn-off to Ballarat Ghost Town (pop. 1) and past another to Panamint City (pop. 0). The view is stunning as I cross this flat plain skirted by mountains on every side, but by now I’m too nervous to enjoy it. I’ve moved from one extreme of imagination – an unreal optimism about what the desert is like – to the opposite extreme of being too afraid to stop and get out in case the car won’t start again or I get bitten by a rattle-snake.

Today my sister sent me a link to this very descriptive article by Glen Helfand in Artforum about the work of British artist Jeremy Deller. Like me, he became fascinated by California, but he seems to have been much more realistic about the desert than I was.

Trona

Page 235
At Trona I stop and take some photos of myself standing next to the car. I'm sun-burned and squinting against the light. Behind me, the flat desert floor is white with potash - the whole place is an enormous open-cast mine.