Australia Image Expresses Contrast

Fresno, Calif.--This is an image that is used on many of the “about Australia” links at the Australian government Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade web site. Most of the links you click on at this page will demonstrate the use of this image. It appears to be a section of a satellite photograph of a portion of Australia’s coast.


The image uses geography to convey define Australia and, conversely, conveys Australia as a geographically-defined country. One of the main themes of the image is contrast.

The image juxtaposes what appears to be desert landscape (on the right side of the image) with tropical seas (on the left side of the image). The contrast of right side to left side embodies other contrasts as well: dry is contrasted with wet, desert with ocean, muted & dusty beiges with vibrant blues & greens.

The image of a landscape expresses naturalness, a kind of romantic simplicity & down-to-earthness that is associated with nature & the environment. On the contrary, the juxtaposition of unusual colors, along with the various shapes of the islands, coastlines, clouds, etc., conveys abstraction & modernity. The image is both abstract art & concrete nature; it is both sophisticated imagery & simple reality. It is both modern expression & romantic history.

By extension, Australia embodies all of these contrasts as well.

Field Guide to the Hyperreal Colorado Plateau: Grand Canyon Experience in Las Vegas, Nevada

Fresno, Calif.--Field guide entry: Grand Canyon Experience is a tourist gift shop located on the Las Vegas Strip (at 3791 Las Vegas Blvd. S.).

This retail outlet’s name suggests that the emblems of the Colorado Plateau on display here would focus on the Grand Canyon though there are a multitude of icons, images & design elements that represent the entire American Southwest. The store is roughly divided into three sections with each section running from the front of the store (facing Las Vegas Blvd.) to the back of the store.

The middle section is a “canyon” (with fake rock walls & a trompe l’oeil ceiling painted like a clouded sky) that extends from the floor of the first level to the ceiling of the second level.

Like most hyperreal environments, this simulated canyon is “better” & easier & safer than the real canyons of the Colorado Plateau. Unlike the real Grand Canyon, which requires a long & arduous descent to the bottom, & an even more demanding assent to get back out, the hyperreal Grand Canyon on the Strip has an escalator to quickly whisk “explorers” upstairs.


On the escalator ride up visitors can easily spot Indian relics on a ledge partway up to the second floor.

The ladder can represent Indian pueblos in New Mexico (i.e., the ladders posted outside pueblos to allow inhabitants to move up & down between floors). The ladder might also represent Ancestral Pueblans (formerly the Anasazi) who may have used ladders used to move into & out of kivas. The clay pot further represents historical Indians.

Elsewhere, at the bottom of the down escalator (from the second floor to the first floor) is a small vestibule with artificial rock lining its two walls.

The rocks are set in layers with different sized stones & (slightly) different colors in each layer. The different layers may represent the many strata of sedimentary rock that often defines the Colorado Plateau as a geological wonderland (in a way similar to the “geologic fireplace” Mary Colter designed for the Bright Angel Lodge).

Other symbols of the Colorado Plateau & the desert Southwest one finds at the store include:

• A helicopter resting on the second floor: symbolizes not only the air tours one can purchase to visit the Grand Canyon (esp. from Las Vegas) but also the ideology that an air tour is an appropriate way of visiting the Canyon.
  
  
• Vigas (log rafters that stick out of the exterior wall): represent New Mexican pueblos & the Santa Fe style of architecture & design.
  
• The hiking Kokopelli-like figure on the exterior sign & on the helicopter inside: combines the common (to the point of being clichéd) Kokopelli figure with hiking as an appropriate activity (or hiking attire as a suitable personal style).

More information about the design of the exterior signage can be found at the Neon Survey website.

(All of this description is just the design & theming of the store; none of it even touches on the symbolism of the merchandise that is sold there--which would require a blog entry 10 times as long as this one.)

Different Perceptual Approaches to Landscapes

Fresno, Calif.--Environmental controversies often involve different sides of the issue who see the landscape differently. In an excerpt from the May 11th edition of the High Country News about the development of solar energy generation in the Mojave Desert, two different perceptions of the desert are described:

There’s a way of looking at the Ivanpah site, passing by it on the I-15 freeway, that makes it seem like a fine place to put a concentrating solar plant. In fact, in the shadow of Primm, Nev., an unmitigated monstrosity of casinos, fast-food chains and amusement park rides, a few thousand acres of mirrors might actually look like a work of art.

But there’s another approach to Ivanpah, literally and figuratively. You can start driving there from the Marine base at Twentynine Palms, and thread your way up through the Mojave National Preserve. You can rumble along busted-up tarmac roads past the original Roy’s Motel along old Route 66 and the eerie black protuberance of the Amboy Crater, and pass through the Joshua tree forest at Cima, as dense as any stand of coastal redwoods. When you come at it this way, the Ivanpah Valley belongs to a continuum of open space extending west across the rugged Clark Mountains. It’s a swath of land stuck between segments of the Mojave Preserve that remains unexploited simply because no one has gotten around to exploiting it. (p. 22)

Judith Lewis. “High Noon: As the Climate Warms, Environmentalists Square Off Over Big Solar’s Claim to the Mojave Desert.” High Country News 11 May 2009, pp. 6-9+. http://www.hcn.org/issues/41.8/high-noon

The differences come from the different approaches to the landscape—both literally & figuratively as the article asserts. The literally different approaches are the geographically different routes: the high-speed interstate vs. the slower-speed two-lane highway. The figuratively different approaches are the different assumptions about what is in the landscape & what it can & should be used for.

These two different experiences form different sets of inferences & actions toward the landscape. The same is true of other landscapes (i.e., the Colorado Plateau) & other approaches (e.g., walking vs. driving).

"Fantasy Trails across Popular Terrain" Part 2

Fresno, Calif.—In an earlier post I summarized Mark Neumann’s thesis that the Grand Canyon is a setting against which people play out personal stories of their authentic lives.

The fact that visitors need a setting for their own stories appears to conflict, then, with the Park Service’s need to tell the geological & historical story of the Grand Canyon. (One might presume that the Park Service “needs” to tell this story because they believe it’s the story visitors actually want to hear or the story they would benefit most from hearing.) The Park Service interpretation, therefore, forces the visitor’s story to play second-fiddle to the larger story of the Canyon.

(Now imagine the same philosophy applied to national parks, monuments, battlefields, wild & scenic rivers, etc. all around the Colorado Plateau & across the entire country.)

No such conflict at Disneyland, however, because Disneyland is a place designed to allow visitors to experience their own authentic stories/lives. (The question of whether those stories are really authentic is widely discussed elsewhere; here I’m speaking of the intent only.) So, Disneyland does what the Park Service refuses to do: acknowledge some of the core reasons visitors travel & cater to those reasons rather than fight against them.

At the Grand Canyon visitors make the Canyon the backdrop of their own stories in spite of the Park Service’s interpretation. At Disneyland visitors make the theme park the backdrop of their own stories because it’s designed for that purpose.

For instance, Disneyland’s story is largely backgrounded even though stories are provided at Disneyland. Attractions either create or, more often, recreate stories from folk tales & literature (princes & princesses in Fantasyland, Tom Sawyer & Huck Finn in Adventureland, ghosts at the Haunted Mansion, etc.) or from films (Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom, Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage, etc.). But these stories merely serve as the setting against which visitors can live out their own stories.

Many attractions not based on explicit storylines also feature their own backstories (e.g, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad’s backstory of how mines & a town being built on a sacred Native American site cause ruin). But again, these stories are backgrounded in favor the visitors’ own experiences creating stories on the rides.

Disney’s niche as story-maker for visitors’ own stories is especially well-illustrated by Adventures by Disney, the tour travel arm of the Disney corporation.



This magazine advertisement suggests that the place, Monument Valley, along the Arizona/Utah border, is really nothing more than a backdrop for the individual traveler’s own story. The advertisement does not promise the visitor that they will see the sights (a more common perception of what travel is all about) but that the visitor will live the stories associated with those places.

In one sense, the places are almost interchangeable because what matters most is that the visitor experiences a story, not that the visitor see & learn about that specific place. Perhaps that is part of the contemporary critique of places becoming generic: not only are the places themselves becoming more & more generic but our meaning & use of them is also becoming more & more generic.

And as I’ve said before: I suspect that this is all true of Las Vegas, too. Perhaps that would be a good subject for a future post.

New Topography

Fresno, Calif.--In the U.S. the word “topography” refers to the study of surface features. For example, topographic maps show elevations. Or, when I’m out driving or hiking I often use the word “topography” to refer to a landscape that is anything but flat (the city of Fresno, where I live, has little topography while the foothills of the Sierra, just a few miles to the east, has topography).

An influential 1975 exhibition titled “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” displayed photographs that emphasized the human-constructed & human-influenced aspects of landscapes. It portrayed an alternative to the pristine nature landscapes in the photography of Ansel Adams, et. al.

The use of the word “topographic” in the exhibition title came from the perception that the photographs conveyed information rather than displayed beauty. Unlike older landscape photographs, the newer photographs didn’t convey the beauty or emotion of the landscape & they were photographed with a “casual disregard” for the technical aspects of the image. (In retrospect, both of these claims seem premature since the photographs are full of opinion & emotion & were composed & printed with technical care.)

I like the idea of a “new topography;” however, I would like to remove the phrase one step further from its original use & use “topography” to mean a record of how landscapes are cultural constructs—especially within a 21st Century culture of consumption & images (& the consumption of images).

Here’s the progression of terms:

• 1st: topography (a la the United States Geological Survey) = recording the physical surface of the land
  
• 2nd: topography (a la “New Topographics” exhibition) = recording the human-produced landscapes
  
• 3rd: topography (a la my new topography) = recording the cultural meanings of landscapes
  

Because the phrase “new topography” has already been appropriated by the photography exhibition I’m somewhat hesitant to use it again to mean something different. I’ve considered proposing a new word that combines “place” & “culture”—something like “topoculture”—which might work for my purposes. But at the same time I like the idea of reinhabiting an older word with a new purpose. Adding the adjective “new” in front sounds more hip, more cutting edge; perhaps I could call it “neotopography.”

Using the phrase “new topography,” on the other hand, adds a new layer of meaning to the older definitions of “topography.” It doesn’t change or eliminate the older meanings but rather adds another meaning, another strata of meaning, to them. The addition of another layer is consistent with the way that symbolic & social meanings are like layers of meaning added to the shape of the material landscape.

In the older sense a topographical survey was a literal mapping of the surface terrain: the task was to identify landforms & geographic features, & mark them on a sheet of paper in a graphical form that others could use (i.e., create a map).

A new topographical survey would go beyond the “new topographics” of the 1975 photographic exhibition (with its emphasis on the human-constructed & human-influenced physical landscape). A new topographical survey would become a mapping (symbolically or otherwise) of the symbolic, cultural, rhetorical, & socially-constructed landscape.

In this sense, “topography” would recapture its broader & more original meaning (evidently still used in Europe) as a description of a specific place.

Post Script: A paper I presented at the 2003 convention of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers presents a similar argument in a more academic context, albeit with different labels (e.g., recontextualization), & perhaps a little too much emphasis placed on hyperreality & simulacra landscapes (even though these remain interesting ideas). An abstract can be found here: 2003 APCG abstracts (scroll down to "Alan Razee").

"Fantasy Trails across Popular Terrain" Part 1

Fresno, Calif.—Mark Neumann’s book On the Rim: Looking for the Grand Canyon (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1999) explains how the Grand Canyon is a setting for stories. Many of the stories are narratives of national identity, westward expansion, democratic ideals, & individual perseverance.

But many of the other stories played out against the backdrop of the Grand Canyon are personal narratives of individuals looking for so-called authentic experience. That is the subject of Neumann’s fifth chapter, “Fantasy Trails across Popular Terrain” (pp. 165-211).

Neumann argues that the stories of & about the Grand Canyon that people experience in the media are the stories & places they come to the Grand Canyon to experience. While at the Grand Canyon, people watch themselves through the eyes of ideal spectators as if they were in a story. In short, they don’t witness the Canyon as much as they witness themselves witnessing the Canyon.

These media representations of the Grand Canyon, Neumann continues, are more interesting than the real Canyon because the representations tell people more about themselves than the actual place. Travel guides, for instance, don’t tell people what to see at the Grand Canyon as much as they tell people who they might be. In other words, the meaning of the landscape is less important to many people than the meaning of their lives within the landscape.

In a nutshell, people don’t go to the Grand Canyon to see & learn about the Grand Canyon itself; they go to the Grand Canyon to see & experience & learn about themselves; they want the Grand Canyon to be a place where they can experience their own authentic lives. The Grand Canyon, Neumann says, “is the setting for some other drama audiences will find interesting, thrilling, disappointing” (210).

As a result, Neumann observes that the “official story” told by the National Park Service—the story of the Canyon’s long geologic history & the sense of human insignificance it creates—is not always the story people come to hear. People don’t come to hear the definitive official story; they come to “have a story worth telling by living as if in a story” (210).

“Next to the maps, visitor centers, and management plans that keep the Grand Canyon for future generations, motion pictures, novels, and television programs would continue to remind the public that the canyon was a stage for their own ordinary lives, their humor and romance, and the backdrop for scenes of extraordinary adventure” (211).

Although Neumann does not address it, what is true of the Grand Canyon is likely to be true of most landscapes around the Colorado Plateau (& perhaps true of most national parklands & scenic landscapes throughout the country & the world).

Furthermore, Neumann’s conclusions imply a more compelling interpretative strategy & a better use of interpretation resources—money, ideas, & manpower: instead of telling the story of the Grand Canyon (& other natural landscapes), help people live & tell their own stories within those landscapes.

Elsewhere in his book (pp. 303-304), Neumann addresses the comparisons between the Grand Canyon & Disneyland that some people make (as well as the work others engage in to disavow those comparisons). And that got me wondering whether Disneyland’s success results from Disneyland being a place that allows & encourages people to live & tell their own stories.

Disneyland is full of stories (fairy tales & popular movies & children’s stories), but the explicit point of their presence is to serve as a backdrop for the visitors’ own lives. At Disneyland people live their lives like stories because that is the way Disneyland is designed to be. At the Grand Canyon (& other Colorado Plateau landscapes) people live their lives like stories in spite of the efforts of the government visitor centers & natural & cultural history museums to force an official story onto the visitor.

(And everything I say about Disneyland can be applied just as well to Disneyland’s urban-size alter-ego of Las Vegas, Nevada.)

"Colorado Plateau" or "Four Corners"?

Fresno, Calif.—The region of the Colorado Plateau goes by a number of different names. The names are not completely arbitrary, however, since each name is used to highlight a particular aspect of the region.

For example, the phrase “Colorado Plateau,” on the one hand, usually refers to the physical geography of the region. The phrase “Four Corners,” on the other hand, is typically used to mean the people who live (or lived) there & the area where they live(d)—this especially means the Navajo. These are generalities, of course, but a quick search of Google will show you that these generalizations about name use are trends.

So we might sum up these two prominent regional names by saying that “Colorado Plateau” is a geological, biological, or ecological province, while “Four Corners” is an anthropological or sociological province.

Another difference between these two names is their scope. “Four Corners” seems limited to the area immediately surrounding the actual Four Corners Monument: perhaps all the landscape within 100 miles of the monument. “Colorado Plateau,” meanwhile, encompasses a larger area that extends all the way north to the Uinta Mountains, all the way south to the Mogollon Rim, all the way east to the Rocky Mountains, & all the way west to the Grand Wash Fault.

Other names are occasionally used, too. The American Automobile Association recreation map of the region is called “Indian Country.” Presumably the heavy concentration of Indian reservations in the area is a defining characteristic of the region.

The name “Golden Circle” has also been used (perhaps more historically than the other names) to describe the region as a compact collection of national parklands & tourism sites. I’m uncertain whether it’s a “golden” circle because the region is so rich in places to visit or because it’s a region where tourism vendors can make a large profit.

All of these issues are part & parcel of the definition & identity of the Colorado Plateau.