Nevada land art
1962 – 1980’s
At first there were the early anonymous anomalous droppings, placements, or leavings in service station restrooms, roadside sites, even friends’ houses and apartments; curious and found objects placed/abandoned for unknown others’ discovery, amazement or bemusement. Later these activities moved into the desert landscape - mirrors, colorfully repainted auto parts, strange findings gathered into tin boxes and left in rock shelters or on outcroppings, peaks, and playas. One example, “200 Yards of Stuck”, planted eight pistons from a demised 318 Dodge in a carefully measured rainbow line [back before the rainbow got politicized] in the sand southeast of Wizard’s Beach at Pyramid Lake in 1971.
A 1977 project displaced bleached wood from Lake Abert, Oregon, east into the desert for the assembly of anonymous/anomalous sculptures; driftwood moved from lake’s edge to dry lakes, playas and hilltops, set up as monuments to be photographed, mapped, and left to the elements. These things, others like them, and things abandoned by others [this category most often of the vehicular persuasion although architecture was not immune] of similar impact and strangeness, were documented as photographs, some of which became reconfigured as drawings or prints during the seventies and into the eighties.
1985 – 1996
Beginning in 1985 I worked on a mountaintop designated by the BLM as “poor cobble” outside Winnemucca, Nevada, cleaning, alleviating damage done by wayward Caterpillars, and turning an abandoned radar station into living space. A 10’ X 16’ miner’s shack became a small observation post/painting studio, half a mile of obtrusive fencing was surreptitiously removed, and eventually an additional 16’ X 24’ studio was built on the most damaged part of the ridge with large salvaged windows aimed miles to the west across several ranges to King Lear Peak, miles south down Grass Valley [some 3000’ directly below] to the Tobin Range, and north, beyond Winnemucca town, to the Trout Creek Range in Oregon. From this site dozens of oil and hundreds of watercolor paintings were made over a ten-year span depicting light and weather in all seasons. Installations fashioned from the materials available in the middens of neighboring derelict mines and settlements were installed around the mountaintop as well but we eventually moved on, to the edge of the Smoke Creek Playa, ninety miles due west.
1995 -ongoing
Although long on fantasy – I’d worked up an elaborate plan for the restoration of an abandoned ranch in Grass Valley as a text and drawing epic [“The Dream of a Home in the West”] in the early nineties at Radar - this whole thing really got going in October, 1994, with Dave, my long-term partner there, cold-calling the notoriously legendary John Casey to make yet another offer, as he’d been doing for more than a dozen years, on the derelict [Casey’s properties were all famously derelict] Parker Ranch near Gerlach. It was snowing hard on Auburn Peak at the time, and I’d spent the morning in my studio. As I came in to fix lunch Dave, somewhat pale, emerged from the bedroom where he’d been working the phone all morning to say “Casey caved’.
So we found ourselves, in early March of the next very wet year [1995], moving the first of three trailers onto land on the edge of the Smoke Creek Desert, hooking up tiny solar for power, and beginning to clean up Parker Ranch and the adjacent Wall Spring, which Dave spun off to me later after I had more or less managed to manage a merry crew of malfeasants of Gulf War Special Forces vets and local ranch kids in clearing the ruins of the long-neglected Parker, whose two artesian wells had flowed unrestrained since the sixties [the wells had been punched through in the early twentieth century by Sam Parker, the original homesteader and driller of most of the early wells in the area]. Within a few months ditches were restored, many huge dead cottonwoods cut up, their trunks saved for sculpture or firewood while the slash, dead cows, house wreckage and tumbleweeds were burned. The detritus from property abandoned for decades was disposed of, some going into monuments of commemorative bricolage, much into bonfires the malfeasants delighted in igniting at dawn after nights of acid and artillery practice over at Deephole, where they were staying. In a remote gulley half a mile south the cast iron leach-field plumbing, extricated from the muck of a future pond, became secret sculpture; the bullet-lacerated ‘49 Ford coupe found upside-down in the driveway was repositioned upside-down ten feet up atop a bier of railroad ties [railroad ties being an ubiquitous local building/fencing material] in an old corral. Seemingly endless tangles of barbwire were gathered into manageable snarls and placed in gardens of anonymous dangerous rusty clusters out on the greasewood flats. The old house, with surprising difficulty, was demolished [burned at dawn, of course], a new one erected on the site and the “ranch” repurposed to habitat restoration and, hopefully, cultivation of native grasses.
At the foot of the Buffalo Hills and half a mile north Wall Spring, treeless in the early 1900s, had flowed out at ground level beside the road, Nobles’ cutoff originally, then the wagon road to Susanville and now, if you happen to work in the Washoe County Assessor’s Office, called after a valley sixty miles away in California, so if you inquired after us in town you’d probably end up in Cedarville. Fucking County. Of course there were never any buffalo around here either, but any chukar hunter knows where the Buffalo Hills are. By the end of the century, with almost a hundred years of wells flowing next door, Wall Spring had sunk twenty feet below the surface to become a sinkhole choked with cattails and cow carcasses surrounded by a dilapidated couple of strands of barbed-wire shaded by a brittle half-century-old old cottonwood - the only tree on the quarter section aside from an ancient Juniper near its eastern border. The rest of the vegetation consisted of various sages, greasewood, pretty much no grass save cheat., and gardens of clusters of rusty barbed wire.
After Dave’s domestic well came in, the drillers moved to Wall and drilled on the small rise a guy from the gyp plant witched for me; they hit a good artesian flow of sweet 78 degree water exactly as predicted which overflowed down to a sandy depression, volunteering the first of our eventual five ponds, which remained inches deep and filled with sagebrush until the next year when I drained it, burned the sage off, dug it out with a dozer and shaped it into a couple of lobes with a small conical island.
By then there was also a backhoe-excavated upper pond, which we were trying to stock with koi, and an intermediate, or “lunch”, pond [so called because, in the absence of any cover save flimsy travel trailers, my wife Linda constructed a ramada beside it where we ate at least our lunch, often in howling winds and dust]. Water flowed from the original well, which had, coincident with the level at Wall Spring, about two inches of head, into the koi pond, downhill to the lunch pond, down again into the big lower [original] pond and out of that towards the desert, raising cattails as it went. A year or so later, with a bigger dozer, I dug a larger deeper pond to the north, went under the driveway with a culvert to a small round [“Frog”] pond and ran a ditch [dug by Dave with his considerable backhoe expertise] east to meet the lunch pond…this excess so stressed our well that we dug another, deeper, at the west end of the big north pond, but despite dozens of feet of clay between the two gravels, they communicated; not much was gained. Balancing the waters, with the upper well being most critical [and both sensitive to barometric pressure] is a delicate task, but having the water means that, after considerable initial coaxing, trees and grasses grow, bringing in more creatures to feed on one another as well as bass and bluegill from Drifting, Pennsylvania, which have spread throughout the system. We’ve also put up some buildings, and more or less retired the trailers, though they’re handy for guests.
This whole effort is just another manifestation of my art “activity”; a reconfiguration of landscape with both environment and esthetics considered long term, far closer to Hamilton-Finlay’s “Little Sparta” [though less iconic or ironic] than Heizer’s various complexities, and certainly more modest. Around the ponds and towards the playa various discrete objects have been arrayed: Linda Fleming’s sculptures from various decades [www.lindaflemingsculpture.com], my own installations [generally assembled from findings, salvage or thievery] as well as various benches and seating arrangements for optimum viewing of sites artistic or scenic. Our most recent acquisition is the weathered cab of a WWII Dodge military truck originally documented north of Pyramid Lake in 1970, drawn by me in 1971, re-photographed and subsequently repurposed/positioned in 2009. The cumulative effect of all this, coexistent with the water features, is an idiosyncratic and somewhat stealth ‘sculpture park’…with, equally anomalously, a koi pond next to a dry lakebed.
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© michael s. moore 2010