the new politics of old land

So on my way to Hannibal, Missouri this past Friday I drove through what must of been the most post-apocalyptic looking landscape I had ever seen. Too bad I'm not doing that project anymore... But anyway, the land in-between Peoria and Springfield, Illinois and Hannibal, Missouri looked to be a barren wasteland that stretched endlessly. Everything was dead. Not a single patch of green sprouting from the ground, every crop slashed and dried up, left since last fall. And it was warm, way too warm for early March and the sun got about 3/4 of the way up into the sky with no clouds making it feel even warmer. I thought I might be looking at what might happen if global warming really were to get to a point of no return. It made me think I was driving through The Road by Cormac McCarthy. And that's when I got scared. That book scared the shit out of me.

But after I got scared, I got my idea for this week's blog and presentation. It occurred to me that the land that was so dried up and dead belonged to somebody, some farmer somewhere who was going to grow something on it in a few months and in another few months it would actually yield a crop that somebody or something might eat. This process has been going on for not hundreds of years but for thousands. We weren't the first ones to use this land. But we're the first to see it the way I did on Friday afternoon.

The plight of the Native Americans and the industrialization of the landscape that until Europeans arrived was "pristine" are two subjects that my work until recently hasn't touched upon. My images don't necessarily describe either subject in a literal sense. However, most images do have vast landscapes that at one time or another had Native American settlement or have been named for the Native Americans of that area.

Eldorado Canyon, 2008

My argument or position will be that people of European ancestry have disturbed and will inevitably destroy the landscape that Native Americans have coexisted with for the previous 12,000 years. My images will show the stages of "progress" by which the land has been consumed by development. Often the names of the places which are being developed are from the indigenous people of the area and serve as some kind of memorial to which the new people of the area can remember the old. There is usually minimal thought involved in relating the new development to the land and often what was left there by the Native Americans is dug up and then shoved into "archives" where they are organized by Western European art history standards.

The earliest European development is usually memorialized quite well with informative interpretive centers and plaques that describe the ordeal of the settlers who came upon the "savages" and had to kill them or at least move them in order to develop the land.

Heather, Starved Rock, 2008

Although development in the photos doesn't entirely take over the landscape, it does irrevocably alter the landscape and I would take the position that it destroys some aspect of that place's history forever. The native land and habitat that the Native Americans existed with was altered by Europeans who didn't take into account the history or ideas that had been occuring for several millenia.

That about sums my argument as it stands right now. I've been reading the catalog for Manifest Destiny/Manifest Responsibility, I think that's where most of this got started. Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson's ideas were particularly influential in developing a response and although I don't actually position myself against them (maybe Jackson) I think it's helpful for the purposes of this presentation to counter their ideas politically. Jefferson had a vision for the United States that is usually described as civilized, mechanized and industrialized. The idea of wilderness was used to give their civilizations meaning and an identity from which to build upon. It wasn't necessarily that they were ignorant of the land's original identity, they really just thought they could make it better.