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[F]or the Land itself knows nothing, except that which we impress upon it.
-Damon Farragut
While gaining public attention through recent exhibitions of "anthropic" or human-made landscapes, the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) has also provoked curiosity with its unorthodox institutional practices.2 Like other recipients of the increasingly rare National Endowment for the Arts grants, the CLUI characterizes itself as a cultural organization. However, unlike other art institutions, the CLUI's medium appears to be the human-induced landscape, specifically "terrain that has been changed by the hands of industry, art, commerce or defense."3 Through three separate "divisions"-the Land Use Database, the Land Use Museum, and the Site Extrapolation Division-this art/research collective, founded in 1994, finds a full spectrum of human behavior reflected in what they call "unusual and exemplary" forms of land use.
For the Center, the Earth's surface is a highly cultivated form of human communication. Clearly, the CLUI view of the land is anthropocentric, but unlike activist ecological groups, the Center does not blatantly criticize human alteration of the land. The CLUI's director Matt Coolidge says, "Humans are a part of nature and nature shouldn't be something considered exclusive of humans."4 By including humans in their definition of nature, the CLUI avoids the conventional environmentalist human/nature binary and categorizes land use as a profound and diverse form of human communication. The CLUI informs us that "[t]he strip mine, the nuclear proving ground, the aqueduct, and the Spiral Jetty each have something to say about us, and collectively, such geotransformations constitute the vocabulary of the language of land use."?
The CLUI defines the term "land use" as a broad range of human land-based activity-tourist, recreational, utilitarian, scientific, commercial. This inclusive portrait exists autonomously, without an overt political agenda. By insisting that human activity and cultivation of the land consciously be incorporated into the term "land use," the CLUI creates a dialogue with these developments. The Center's images document a cultural history of the consumer-oriented, post-industrial existence that most human beings share. In a review of the Center's recent "Hinterland" exhibition, the Los Angeles Times compares the show to the Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.) work on America during the Depression.6 Taken together, the photographs create a documentary survey of the vacant, post-industrial landscape that...