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Journey to the end of the cul-de-sac: mythology and place in suburbia
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Journey to the end of the cul-de-sac: mythology and place in suburbia
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Content
JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE CUL-DE-SAC:
MYTHOLOGY AND PLACE IN SUBURBIA
by
Erin Eleniak
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS
(FINE ARTS)
May 2022
Copyright 2022 Erin Eleniak
ii
Acknowledgements
Jennifer West
Thomas Mueller
Mary Kelly
Edgar Arceneaux
Jess Bellamy
Franchesca Flores
Lainey Racah
Sophia Stevenson
Sara Eleniak
Tongva, Chumash, Fernandeño people and their land, which we occupy.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements.……………………………………………………………………………….ii
List of Figures.……………………………………………………………………………………iv
Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………v
Journey to the End of the Cul-de-Sac.……………………………………………………………..1
The American West: Building a Mythology..……………………………………………………..3
The Suburban Imaginary and the Construction of a National Identity…………………………….8
“Free Dirt,” Land Art, and Eco Art Methodologies………………………………………………20
Excavating Feminist Futures at the End of the Cul-de-sac……………………………………….32
Bibliography ..……………………………………………………………………………………41
iv
List of Figures
Figure 1. Free Dirt (a scene or vista of unusual natural beauty). Video by Erin
Eleniak, 2022. Los Angeles.
24
Figure 2.
Spiral Jetty. Earthwork by Robert Smithson, 1970. Holt/Smithson
Foundation and Dia Art Foundation, Great Salt Lake, UT.
26
Figure 3. Sun Tunnels. Concrete and earthwork by Nancy Holt, 1973–76.
Holt/Smithson Foundation and Dia Art Foundation, Great Basin Desert,
UT.
27
Figure 4. Untitled (Silueta series), Color photographs documenting Earth/body
work executed in Iowa by Ana Mendieta, 1977. Estate of Ana Mendieta
and Galerie Lelong, New York, NY.
29
Figure 5. Portal Sur (from Tierra. Sangre. Oro.) Adobe archway by Rafa Esparza
and Beatriz Cortez 2017. Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX. Photo by Alex
Marks.
31
Figure 6. Great White Father. Digital video with sound by Erin Eleniak, 2021. Los
Angeles, CA.
35
v
Abstract
As global ecologies stand in a state of apocalyptic collapse, Journey to the End of the
Cul-de-sac: Mythology and Place in Suburbia seeks to trouble the perceived stability of
suburban idealism in the communities surrounding Los Angeles. A discussion of contemporary
and historical American photographic representations of the land opens the paper, introducing
the concept of “landscaping” in the context of Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis.” I
then introduce the relationship between landscaping, suburban idealism, and the American
Dream. Throughout the paper, I argue that landscaping is an inherently gendered act that invokes
an exploitative gaze to excuse settler-colonial atrocities and the ongoing injustices against
women, indigenous, and people of color. I go on to examine historical and contemporary art
practices that have addressed the land and related issues including ownership, purity, and
violence. Finally, I close with a critical look back at my own past to imagine possibilities for the
future. Using the cul-de-sac as a conceptual framework, this paper suggests that an unmaking of
suburban idealism begins by exposing the flaws in its design.
1
Journey to the End of the Cul-de-sac
As Lucy Lippard notes in her introduction to The Lure of the Local, a landscape does not
exist without human visualization; it is created when a place becomes objectified—beheld, gazed
upon, captured.
1
I am especially intrigued by this definition when I think of the ways landscapes
are engineered in the domestic space; to think of landscaping one’s yard as an objectifying act,
further altering the bounded environment to suit one’s tastes and needs, and based upon a
personalized vision of an “ideal” landscape. I will address the act of domestic landscaping later,
but I bring it up here so that I might introduce both rural (wild) and pastoral (domesticated)
landscapes as spaces of interest for the purposes of this thesis. The pastoral landscape visually
defined nature as given by God, for man’s enjoyment and replenishment.
2
In the United States,
the advent of photography proved indispensable to geographic surveyors who charted newly
acquired western territories at the behest of Washington.
3
Their images of the wild, rural
American West were among the first to define “landscape” for the young nation. These
photographs were dramatic images of nature as awesome yet hostile, inspiring as much as they
were imposing.
1. Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York,
NY: The New Press, 1998) 8-9.
2. Emma Marris, “The Yellowstone Model,” Rambunctious Garden, (New York, NY:
Bloomsbury, 2013) 17-36.
3. Judith Freyer Davidov, “The Body’s Geography,” Women's Camera Work: Self/Body/Other in
American Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998) 296. “…that earlier
photographer, who, likely a member of the U.S. government’s survey team, recorded views of
the vast and seemingly unoccupied territories of the newly conquered West.”
2
This paper is an exploration of the mythic American West in suburbia,
4
beginning with
the early photographic representations that helped to spur nationwide interest in conservation
efforts and adventure tourism for followers of the nascent “wilderness cult”.
5
Continuing onward
to the sites of semi-defunct movie ranches that exist at the edges of the Valleys San Fernando
and Simi, I will discuss the overlapping mythologies of suburbia and western genre films, as well
as their compounding physical and ideological effects on local communities’ self-
representation.
6
Here I will examine the suburban imaginary and its imbrication with the
construction of American national identity. With the southland’s rock-laden hills and chain-
anchored strip malls as a backdrop, I will then turn our attention to the beloved and infamous
virtual commons, Craigslist. As a seemingly unlikely place from which to trouble issues of land
use, class, labor, and indigenous erasure, I use it as a platform to contemplate these, in addition
to finding parallels between the gendered verbiage in “free dirt” ads and early twentieth century
representations of Western land.
7
Beginning with my own work using Craigslist ads for “free
dirt,” I continue on to examine contemporary artworks that deal with representing the land within
the art-historical context of selected Land Art and Eco Art methodologies. Returning the way we
came, I will revisit the suburban landscape as a site for the collapse of frontier mythology.
4. Roland Barthes, Mythologies: The Complete Edition, in a New Translation, trans.
Richard Howard and Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012).
5. Rod Giblett and Juha Tolonen, Photography and Landscape (Bristol, UK: NBN International,
2012) 75; Marris, Rambunctious Garden, 45-48.
6. Laura R. Barraclough, Making the San Fernando Valley:Rural Landscapes, Urban
Development, and White Privilege (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011) 85-113.
7. Stacy Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as a Feminist Space (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2000) 3-16; “For Sale: Free,” Craigslist, September 27, 2020,
https://losangeles.craigslist.org/search/zip.
3
Through works that use humor and self-awareness to relish in the weirdness of Suburbia—a
disruption of mythologized homogeneity and “vanilla” culture—I will investigate the possibility
of creating feminist futures in Suburbia. The cul-de-sac, a former dead end, reveals itself to us as
a useful tool for its own reexamination.
The American West: Building a Mythology
Following the 1890 U.S. census, historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared the frontier
“closed”. In what would become known as the “Frontier Thesis”, Turner proposed that the
settling of the frontier played a formative role in the development of American character.
8
The
frontier landscape represented a savage nature, wild spaces to be tamed; their raw power to be
harnessed, their resources possessed.
9
The West, in all its rugged splendor, represented the
prospect of limitless expansion vis-a-vis Manifest Destiny toward the attainment of the American
Dream.
10
Both images, rural and pastoral, are integral to the mythologizing of American
identity—the former points to the land itself, while the latter indicates the land once tamed—and
both images paint the landscape as female, the object of the male gaze. Stacy Alaimo quotes
Annette Kolodny in her analysis of female-authored nature literature that the American pastoral
8. Ronald H. Carpenter, “Frederick Jackson Turner and the Rhetorical Impact of the Frontier
Thesis,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 63, no. 2 (1977): 117–29,
https://doi.org/10.1080/00335637709383373.
9. Lucy Lippard, Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the
Changing West. (New York, NY: The New Press, 2014) 99.
10. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, (Brooklyn, NY: Verso
Press, 2018) 13-33.
4
experience hinges upon the conception of “‘land-as-woman’”;
11
and that a parallel may be drawn
between the exploitation of the land and the exploitation of women, since—as with unclaimed
land—“‘women have long been positioned as a blank background for masculine exploits.’”
12
As Casey Ryan Kelly and Ryan Neville-Shephard discuss in their analysis of David
Magnusson’s photographic series Purity, the frontier hero’s mission was to tame “savage” nature
and harness its potential to bear the fruits of his labor.
13
Nature was God’s gift to Christian
mankind, for his pleasure, enjoyment, and sustenance. To this end, the purity of the land was
crucial; where “purity” is synonymous with “virginity” and “white” is implicit. Magnusson’s is a
series of father-daughter portraits set against the backdrop of hostile lands; many of them deserts,
seemingly barren save for the appearance of an oil drilling apparatus or industrial smoke rising in
the distance. The girls pictured have all taken a “purity pledge”—sworn to abstain from sex until
they are married—their purity preserved in the eyes of God, and under the watchful eyes of their
fathers. The landscape visualizations from Magnusson’s Purity take elements from both the
bucolic and the majestic-wild landscape images—portraits set against foreboding backdrops of
wilderness turned industrial wasteland show man’s dominion over the natural world—his land
11. Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground, 14.
12. Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground, 13-14; “Although American mythology endows nature
with value, nature is seen as ‘empty,’ not full; in other words, nature is ‘terra nullius’ in
Plumwood’s terms, ‘available for annexation…empty, passive, and without a value or direction
of its own’ that spurs on the delirious pioneer visions of unlimited freedom…it is…a gendered
representation, since, as Plumwood argues, ‘women have long been positioned as a blank
background for masculine exploits.’”
13. Casey Ryan Kelly and Ryan Neville-Shepard, “Virgin Lands: Gender, Nature, and the
Frontier Myth in David Magnusson’s Purity,” Women’s Studies in Communication 43, no. 1
(2020): 1-22, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07491409.2019.1696436.
5
and daughters. The virginal young woman is visually conflated with a subjugated nature, and the
moral Christian father with the frontier hero.
14
“No less than Marlboro Country, American landscape photographv remains
a reified masculine outpost-a wilderness of the mind,” wrote Deborah Bright of the 1985
exhibition, A Vision of Nature, at the Art Institute of Chicago.
15
Mounted at the height of
American conservatism during the Reagan presidency, the show featured six of art history’s most
lauded landscape photographers, all of whom were men. Imogen Cunningham, one of many
female photographers active alongside those six “geniuses” of photography. Carleton Watkins is
generally regarded as ‘the founder of the major photographic tradition of landscape on this
[North American] continent’,
16
his practice inspiring later generations of photographer-
conservationists, including Ansel Adams. Active from the mid-nineteenth through the turn of the
twentieth centuries, Watkins traded in the menacing nature often depicted in the Romantic
tradition of landscape painting, for an equally magnificent yet more serene view of natural
spaces.
17
One of Watkins’ favorite sites to photograph was California’s Yosemite Valley, and
his images contributed significantly to its designation by the federal government as the world’s
first national park.
18
However, its annexation to the state of California in 1864 provided a
devious cover for the systematic genocide and removal of the Ahwahnechee people from their
lands culminating in 1851, when the remaining tribal members “were marched to a rancheria
14. Kelly, “Virgin Lands,” 7-8.
15. Davidov, Women’s Camera Work, 297-8.
16. Giblett, Photography and Landscape, 75.
17. Giblett, 64.
18. Giblett, 74.
6
along the Fresno River in the hot valley below.”
19
As Rebecca Solnit notes, the popular tourist
destination was a battleground before it became a vacation spot.
20
Although Yosemite was the first to win protected status, Yellowstone National Park is
regarded as the “mother” park—it serves as the model for wilderness conservation to this day.
21
However, this “Yellowstone Model”
takes as its baseline the state of the park in 1872, when it
was first established, “‘as nearly as possible in the condition that prevailed when the area was
first visited by the white man. A national park should represent a vignette of primitive
America.’”
21
This idea of “wilderness,” and the cult that it inspired in the 1890s, was one that
was built for white Americans’ enjoyment. Like the beatific scenes from Watkins’ photographs,
it was an image of wilderness that offered rejuvenation of body and spirit; a respite from the
congestion, pollution, and stress of life in the industrial city.
22
As Turner declared the frontier
“closed” in 1893,
23
National Parks and their images, like those taken by Watkins, became time
capsules of the Wild West, and Americans mourned it “by going camping, starting Boy Scout
troops, and reading Jack London stories about hardscrabble life in Alaska.”
24
19. Mark Arax, The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California, (New York, NY:
Vintage Books, 2019) 156-7.
20. Rebecca Solnit, Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press) 222.
21. Marris, “The Yellowstone Model,” 17.
21. Marris, 22-23.
22. Marris, 21-22.
23. Carpenter, “Frederick Jackson Turner,” 117–129.
24. Marris, “The Yellowstone Model,” 21.
7
Turner’s sentiment “that the frontier had created much that was good in the American
character,”
25
was echoed by the concerns of famed Big Stick-carrier, Theodore Roosevelt, who
prescribed a tête-à-tête with nature as the only cure for the emasculating softness of
civilization.
26
As it was the patriotic duty of American women to tend to the domestic sphere,
27
it
was the duty of men to test their mettle against the wild, which “promoted ‘that vigorous
manliness for the lack of which in a nation, as in an individual, the possession of no other
qualities can possibly atone.’”
28
Going “soft”, as he saw it, was a sin against both God and
country, and an unforgivable one at that. The “Nature Man” trope embodied the manliest of
American values; independence, toughness, and democracy. On its surface, this steel-eyed,
weather-chapped character almost seemed apolitical, but his widely-read exploits reinforced the
colonization of nature by setting the wilderness as a stage for “the (re)assertion of a brawny,
bourgeois manhood.”
3030
The eccentric Nature Man eschewed civil society’s comforts as well as
its congestion and cultural friction—and with a stiff upper lip, set off to penetrate the wild dark
void in search of his own physical and mental fortitude—and he was lauded for it. As if he
weren’t problematic enough, the Nature Man trope highlights critical discrepancies in the ways
“nature” has been used to simultaneously uplift and denigrate gendered, classed, colonized, and
racialized groups:
31
25. Carpenter, “Frederick Jackson Turner,” 117-129.
26. Marris, Rambunctious Garden, 48.
27. Kelly, “Virgin Lands”, 6.
28. Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground, 96.
30. Alaimo, 88.
31. Alaimo, 19.
8
Nature has served as a repository for cultures moralism and prejudice: the claim that something is “natural”
justifies it, while at various times higher education for women, “miscegenation,” single motherhood, and
homosexuality have been condemned as “unnatural.”…On the other hand, the erection of culture above a
denigrated nature has fortified racist ideologies by charting a chain of being in which African, Mexican,
and Native American identity was formed by projecting bodily, bestial, and other “natural” attributes onto
people of color.
While Nature Man gained fame for his particular brand of masculinity by a class of educated,
able-bodied, white American men, such narrow proximity to nature was held in contemptuous
regard when attributed to women, indigenous people and people of color.
The Suburban Imaginary and the Construction of a National Identity
Joseph Knowles, Nature Man’s most (in)famous face, was revealed to be a charlatan; his
solitary journey into the wild and subsequent memoir were fabrications;
31
a pre-social media
incidence of fake news. Nevertheless, Turner’s mythic frontier hero won claim to the American
imagination,
32
but the real “frontier heroes” turned out to be real estate tycoons, land speculators,
and advertising boosters; capitalists run amok.
33
At the turn of the twentieth century, weary
Midwestern farmers migrated to the sunny valley just north of downtown Los Angeles, lured by
national real estate booster ads that declared the new city a charming “white spot” and offered
sizeable acreage suitable for gentleman farming, away from the more densely populated urban
center.
34
And so, the suburban landscape was deliberately constructed as a space for white
31. Alaimo, 97.
32. Carpenter, “Frederick Jackson Turner,” 117-29.
33. Barraclough, Making the San Fernando Valley, 61-84; Davis, City of Quartz, 17-26; Lippard,
Undermining, 134-137.
34. Barraclough, 26-29; Davis, City of Quartz, 21-26.
9
conservatism, where “individual, privatized land ownership on agricultural homesteads would
cultivate republican virtue.”
35
This departure from east coast city planning strategies had the
intended effect of racially segregating the population of Los Angeles; and keeping white
residents away from potential radicalizing elements like organized labor.
The good life proved more elusive than advertised; the earth was hard and without a
reliable water supply for the booming population. Even as the Los Angeles Aqueduct opened end
of 1913—
37
dumping 430 million gallons of water daily into the San Fernando Valley
reservoir—farming remained a difficult enterprise. The one-acre plots were hardly enough to
sustain an individual family’s needs, and turning a profit on produce sold at market was even less
likely, due in large part to the monolithic presence of agribusiness in the Valley.
38
Small farmers
were able to survive for a time by forming collectives, which employed restrictive covenants
barring non-whites from participation as landowners, though the fact remains that much of the
labor required to maintain these farms was provided by Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese
immigrants.
38
As any person who has approached Los Angeles from the air might attest, the name refers
much less to a discrete city than to a sprawling behemoth of suburban neighborhoods,
39
35. Barraclough, Making the San Fernando Valley, 29.
37. Arax, The Dreamt Land, 260.
38. Barraclough, Making the San Fernando Valley, 26-30.
38. Barraclough, 51.
39. Davis, City of Quartz, 44-45.
10
repeatedly punctuated by a most notorious feature of suburban grammar—the cul-de-sac.
40
Save
for the reliably comedic interventions by tumbleweeds when the Santa Anas come to town, the
Wild West and its legends of righteous conquest and all-American heroism seem all but
disappeared from the L.A. basin. But I would argue that Los Angeles represents the physical and
ideological terminus of Manifest Destiny, if the “settled home represents the ultimate objective
of westward expansion and the signpost of imperial conquest,”
42
then its suburbs are the
twentieth-century version of the pastoral landscape, with its meandering loops and tracts of
“settled homes.”
It is here (or there) that we will spend the remainder of this paper, exploring Southern
California’s suburban landscape as the physical and ideological link between the colonial
imperative of Manifest Destiny and American national identity, with emphasis on the ideological
landscaping of this space. This uniquely unsettling landscape is also the one from which I
emerged, and it has never failed to instill in me a spectrum of conflicting emotions—comfort,
disgust, freedom, rage, wonder, anxiety, predictability, and suffocation. An introvert by nature, I
found some semblance of belonging in subcultural social spheres organized around music,
beginning with my introduction to riot grrrl and punk when I was thirteen. In these anarchic
commons, I found something that resembled truth, if it was merely a collection of misfit youths
who each wanted a life different from what they had been offered by mainstream society. From
then on, I longed for nothing more than to leave my suburban bubble behind, if not burn it to the
40. Tongson, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries, (New York, NY: The New York
University Press, 2011), 2.
42. Barraclough, Making the San Fernando Valley, 90.
11
ground, and forget it ever existed.
43
What I failed to recognize at the time was that the
orderliness I pushed back against was only a feature of civic design, a façade built to mask the
city’s more eccentric—or perhaps less desirable—underbelly of which we were a part. Although
popular, globally exported notions of “suburbia” as homogeneous—overwhelmingly white,
heteronormative anticommunities—beg disruption,
44
I also want to point out that these are places
where racist, classist, and sexist beliefs continue to gain purchase, making them contemporary
battlegrounds on the far-right end of the political spectrum.
44
This project is also an attempt to
trouble my own relationship to that physical and imaginary landscape just northwest of the L.A.
county line where I grew up, in Simi Valley.
Coded by the patriarchal and colonial imperative to control and protect both land and
family, the western heritage mythology overlaps neatly with the San Fernando and Simi Valleys’
43.
State of California, “Simi Fire,” CalFire, accessed January 7, 2022,
https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2003/; Los Angeles Fire Department, “Woolsey Fire,”
accessed January 7, 2022, https://www.lafd.org/news/woolsey-fire; State of California, “Easy
Fire,” CalFire, accessed January 7, 2022, https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2019/10/30/easy-
fire/; U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “Simi Valley: Resisting Wildfires and Floods,”
Case Study Library, Federal Emergency Management Authority, https://www.fema.gov/case-
study/simi-valley-resisting-wildfires-and-floods. The string of wildfires, during my adult
lifetime, began in 2003 with the Simi Fire, which burned over 100,000 acres; another fire two
years later burned 17,000. The 2018 Woolsey Fire and Easy Fire in 2019 burned 96,000 and and
1,600 acres, respectively. A case study by the Federal Emergency Management Authority
(FEMA) opens with a chewy, unironic paragraph describing the suburb: “Set in a valley between
two hilly and mountainous areas of brush-covered wildlands north of Los Angeles, the City of
Simi Valley faces multiple risks from natural hazards including wildfires, earthquakes, and
floods. Yet it is considered to be ‘the safest city of 100,000 or more’ in California, according to
city officials. The Simi Hills and Simi Valley are considered to be a high hazard area.”
44. Tongson, Relocations, 11-13.
44. Annie Karni, Maggie Haberman, and Sydney Ember, “Trump Plays on Racist Fears of
Terrorized Suburbs to Court White Voters,” The New York Times Online, last modified January
20, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/29/us/politics/trump-suburbs-housing-white-
voters.html.
12
early twentieth-century agricultural histories. In the mid-century, postwar suburban boom, earlier
descriptions of the area as having a rich “Spanish” history were revived to attract a new set of
property owners. Published and distributed by real estate agencies, banks, and other financial
institutions, the ads wooed potential buyers with a romanticized narrative of the Spanish mission
era that derided the indigenous population as barbaric and vulgar, easily won over with the
promise of a meal.
45
Needless to say, these narratives did not detail their exploitation and
genocide. This “mission myth” appealed to the new generation of white, middle-class buyers
flush with funds, and provided them an origin story that satisfied the “old guard” gentleman
farmers. While the 1980s-1990s saw increased immigration by people of color and those in non-
heteronormative relationships,
48
the classic perception of the American suburban experience
pervades at varying proximities. These mythologies, combined with a recent history of rural
domestication, served to reinforce the ideals embodied by the frontier hero, the legendary
ancestor of American national identity.
At the height of Cold War anxiety, Hollywood’s western films reiterated these values
with patriotic flair. Prior to the suburbanization of the Valleys, these semi-rural spaces played
shooting location to hundreds of western films. Like the frontier hero, the western film hero is
often a rugged, solitary figure, such as the character of Ferrell, in The Cattle Queen of
Montana.
49
We first meet Ferrell—portrayed by winner of Suburban America’s Favorite
President Contest, Ronald Reagan—when he rides up on a woman bathing al fresco. After a few
45. Barraclough, Making the San Fernando Valley, 67-68.
48. Tongson, Relocations, 11-13.
49. Cattle Queen of Montana, directed by Allan Dwan (1955; CA: RKO Pictures, 1955) accessed
August 8, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfqdfEhyZ3A&t=24s.
13
moments as creepy voyeur on horseback, the object of his attention becomes aware of his
presence. Ignoring her command to “mosey along,” Ferrell chides her for being out in the
wilderness all alone, as she might fall victim to the bloodthirsty savages’ penchant for taking
white ladies’ scalps. The woman, played by Barbara Stanwyck, asserts that she needs no help
defending herself, yet offers Ferrell a warm meal back at camp, which he declines. The smooth-
talking cowboy turns his horse to leave before pausing to ask the woman her name, to which she
replies, “Sierra Nevada Jones”. We learn that Sierra Nevada Jones is traveling with her father, a
Texas rancher, and Nat, the stubborn ranch hand. They’d driven their herd of cattle over seven
months to Montana territory to secure the elder Jones’ claim on “the 77”, marked by a plaque
which reads, “J.I. Jones 77, June 1, 1887, THIS IS MY LAND.” Embedded in the earth, the
unadorned stone plaque resembles a grave marker, as if to remind the land that the nature of its
life is determined by the man who lays claim to it. Similarly, Sierra Nevada is only free insofar
as she is attached to a man. When her father dies during a cattle heist orchestrated by Ferrell’s
villainous employer—and carried out by his band of Blackfoot henchmen—she is picked up by a
rival band of Blackfoot and carried off to their village. Once there, she becomes friends with the
chief’s son, Coloradus, who vows to help her avenge her father’s death and recoup the stolen
property. Having discovered a piece of his rival’s jewelry at the crime scene, Coloradus is
dismayed that Natchakoa has continued down the “savage” path. He laments that if only
Natchakoa were to go to Washington and meet with the “many wise men” there, he will see that
peace is the only answer, and that to have peace, he must relinquish his violent ways.
When Sierra and Coloradus ride into town together to look for clues, the townspeople
gawk at the sight of a white woman riding in with an “Indian”. Jones’ attempt to stake her
inherited claim on the land is thwarted when she finds out that the land was snatched up by Tom
14
McCord, the same villain who had rustled her cattle and murdered her father. She’s told that her
only recourse is to attempt an appeal, filed with Washington, “in the usual way”. With her father
dead, and her only male companions (the elderly ranch hand, Nat, and the “savage” Coloradus)
ineligible to help her gain property rights through legal union, Jones has no agency whatsoever.
It is only at the conclusion of the narrative—with the help of Ferrell, who (spoiler alert!)
becomes her love interest—that Sierra Nevada Jones is able to thwart McCord’s land grab.
Although the story is framed around the plight of the single female lead character
(diminutively referred to by Ferrell as “Jonesy” right off the bat), the film is really about what it
“means” to be an American. She has grit and determination, sure, but her efforts to outdo
McCord on her own are continuously foiled; her last attempt to gather incriminating evidence is
interrupted by the incidence of attempted rape while she’s a shed on the villain’s property.
Ferrell rides up on the scene just as she’s shot and wounded her assailant, and ready to pull the
trigger again if Ferrell doesn’t get out of her way. He offers to help her “get all the way [to
victory]”; and though she declines his assistance, he imposes it upon her anyway. As it turns out,
there’s a U.S. Army Colonel in town that could very well help her in the property dispute with
McCord. Having never made it to town, she discovered the details of the weapons deal by
eavesdropping on the scheming duo, and, feeling the moral imperative to warn Coloradus of his
rival’s intent to declare civil war, Jones sets aside her task to do so. After hearing Sierra
Nevada’s selfless reason for setting aside her own mission, Ferrell is impressed, telling her,
“Jonesy, I don’t know if you’re lucky or just plain talented, but the Army could sure use you.”
Jones can’t win on her own, she can’t win with the help of Coloradus, and she even can’t
win with Ferrell’s periodic, unsolicited help throughout the story. It is only when she’s brought
into the fold that she wins, though her success comes as an unintended side effect of the Army’s
15
conquest. The Colonel’s interest is not in McCord’s land grab, or helping Jones reclaim the
land—this was the Wild West after all—but in the plan to sell rifles to the Natchakoa. In fact,
Sierra Nevada Jones’s victory is contingent on her ability to prove her allegiance by divulging
logistical details of the weapons deal to Ferrell, an agent of the U.S. government. In the end,
Sierra and Ferrell brush themselves off and head toward the horizon, presumably to settle the
land and live happily ever after.
Coloradus, who promptly joins the couple as they leave the scene, stands in contrast to
Natchakoa, who is regarded as an outlaw for failing to abide by a peace treaty between his tribe
and the U.S. government. Coloradus is looked upon with favor, his moral character positively
affirmed at least three times throughout the film. The repeated announcement of his good
standing with the Army/Washington/Ferrell iterates his willingness to submit, making him
worthy in the eyes of the colonizing state. Sierra’s right to own property is similarly validated by
her loyalty to the state and her demonstration of ideal American character. Ferrell, the Army, and
Washington are all synecdochical references to the United States as a country, and its
(ostensibly) democratic government. Forsaking his allegiance to his tribe for that of the colonial
state, Coloradus’ character fits neatly into the role of “reformed savage” as he steps into the
realm of “civilized” man. Sierra Nevada Jones, the courageous and resilient, “Cattle Queen of
Montana”, proves herself a worthy frontierswoman, but forsakes her own independence by her
union with Ferrell.
At its surface, the film’s portrayal of the title character appears progressive, eschewing
common tropes of female characters in Western film.
50
However, the narrative arch suggests that
50. Mark E. Wildermuth, Feminism and the Western in Film and Television (Cham, Switzerland:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2018),1-16.
16
the restoration of family and the right to property are part and parcel of American allegiance to
the political state, or patriotism. Released in 1955, Cattle Queen serves to reiterate traditional
American values conceived to be under threat during the Cold War era. Here, the patriarchal
family structure is the mode by which the political state is organized, and subsequently, the
model for the distribution of wealth and consolidation of power.
51
Essentializing and
universalizing conceptions of sex and sexual relations notwithstanding, the patriarchal family
structure—so often conflated with notions of “tradition”—is one where power is consolidated in
a male head of household, subsuming individual agencies through marriage and reproduction.
Likewise, American capitalist society is organized around a system of governance wherein a
patriarchal head of state has the ultimate authority to distribute property and grant legal agency.
If we read Sierra Nevada Jones as the metonymical incarnation of the land, as her name seems to
suggest, her union with Ferrell as a symbol of the political state can be read as the consolidation
of the land as property under state control, establishing the United States as a nation. In this way,
The Cattle Queen of Montana is America’s mythic origin story, in which the patriarchal settler-
colonial family’s triumph legitimizes the genocide and forced removal of indigenous peoples
from their ancestral lands, portrayed as willful assimilation into the dominant, “multicultural”
society.
In her ethnographic study of Western heritage identity in the San Fernando Valley,
52
Laura R. Barraclough pays significant attention to the role of classic Western films in its
formation and popularization. Not only do these films serve to reinforce patriotism in the manner
51. Rebecca Coward, Patriarchal Precedents: Sexuality and Social Relations, (Boston, MA:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 130-62.
52. Barraclough, Making the San Fernando Valley.
17
described above, their cinematic scope reiterated pre-filmic conceptions of the land as expansive,
pristine, and void of human presence.
53
Most viewers read these visualizations of the Western
landscape as authentic, despite the fact that the majority of productions used geographic license
in their depiction; scenes for Cattle Queen were mostly shot at Iverson Ranch in Chatsworth and
the Colombia/Warner Brothers Ranch in Burbank.
54
As Barraclough argues, this practice had a
twofold effect; “the westerns shot in the San Fernando Valley were highly effective not only in
narrating regional and national history but also in promoting a generic and highly romanticized
vision of rural landscapes that could be easily translated into suburban contexts.”
55
Beyond the myths promoted by western heritage narratives, their production often
requires crews to alter the physical landscape through the construction of elaborate sets,
sometimes shifting the land itself to that end. The budding film industry made ample use of the
San Fernando Valley floor when it was still mostly rural, as was the case for D.W. Griffith’s
epically racist film, Birth of a Nation.
56
The Valley’s population continued to grow, and over the
years, the rural landscape gave way to increasingly smaller pastoral subdivisions, until the “birth
of suburbia.” Studio lots could be used for interior shots, but westerns required majestic, wide
open views of the landscape unencumbered by signs of modern life. The Santa Susana
Mountains, a range connecting Ventura and Los Angeles counties, became a prime target for
industry-related real estate acquisitions that included Corriganville and Iverson Ranch, two of the
53. Barraclough, Making the San Fernando Valley, 85-113.
54. IMDb.com, “Cattle Queen of Montana: Filming and Production,” accessed September 8,
2021, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046839/locations?ref_=tt_dt_loc.
55. Barraclough, Making the San Fernando Valley, 102.
56. Barraclough, 95.
18
most popular shooting locations for western films. The “movie ranches” were just two of over
forty such locations throughout suburban Los Angeles,
57
but the range’s varied topography could
play the role of desert and jungle and appeared in scenes located anywhere from Mexico to the
jungles of Africa.
58
This physical landscaping compounds the ideological effects of visual
misrepresentation by bringing the mythologized narrative into real, actual space that people
living in those communities encounter, often on a daily basis.
In 1937, stuntman Ray “Crash” Corrigan,
59
visited a Chatsworth cattle ranch while
working on set at Iverson, and immediately saw its potential as a filming location. He purchased
the property and wasted no time in constructing a comprehensive Old West landscape that
included semipermanent structures, both of which could be altered according to the needs of a
particular production. Popular with industry heavies for its perceived authenticity, Corriganville
became the most profitable of the movie ranches, second only to nearby Iverson, capable of
hosting several productions at any given time. By the late 1940s, western film production began
to decline, and Corrigan began to look for other ways to capitalize on his real estate investment.
His solution was to open the ranch up to the general public, who could visit the “authentic” Wild
West on weekends and holidays. In 1949, Corrigan opened his western-themed attraction to
tourists, who could not only visit filming locations from their favorite Hollywood movies, but
watch the making of any number of western television shows produced at the site. The buildings
along Silvertown Street became gift shops and stages for gun fights and other Wild West stunt
57. Barraclough, 98.
58. Barraclough, 100.
59. Barraclough, Making the San Fernando Valley, 98-113.
19
shows, which—coupled with the area’s iconic landscape—provided spectators with an
immersive experience that rivaled Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm in popularity. Even the
landscape itself became an attraction, according to Barraclough.
60
A map distributed to visitors in the pictorial souvenir book directed guests to famous filming locations
including Silvertown, Robin Hood Lake and Forest, Fort Apache, Burma Road, and Vendetta Village — all
of which had been constructed in elaborate collaborations between Corrigan, studio directors, and urban
financiers. The ranch had eleven miles of hiking and riding trails, caves for children to explore, picnic
areas, and places for overnight camping. Visitors could rent horses from the livery stable used in countless
western films and ride throughout the ranch’s scenic acreage.
As an attraction, Corriganville offered visitors the opportunity to play starring roles in a
fictionalized version of American history, set against a rural landscape less than an hour by car
from Los Angeles’ downtown. As a consequence, the San Fernando and Simi Valleys’ origin
stories became tangled up in a web of overlapping narratives that reinforced colonial and
patriarchal control.
The postwar period saw further subdivision of large plots;
61
turning the Valleys’ citrus
groves and apricot orchards into tract housing developments and strip mall shopping centers.
Corriganville remained active as a filming location and tourist attraction through the Cold War
era, until most of the ranch’s buildings were destroyed by a fire in the 1970s; today it is owned
by the city of Simi Valley, and mostly functions as a public park and historic preservation site.
Of the forty-plus such movie ranches throughout the southland, only one was open to
non-white visitors.
62
Likewise, the attractions at Corriganville were offered exclusively to white
60. Barraclough, Making the San Fernando Valley, 106.
61. Barraclough, Making the San Fernando Valley, 61-84.
62. Barraclough, Making the San Fernando Valley, 108; The Murray Dude Ranch in Victorville
catered specifically to black film actors, productions, and tourists, who were excluded from most
recreation facilities at the time.
20
tourists, doubling down on colonial narratives of national identity that originate with racial
purity.
63
Like the racially exclusive farming communities before them, suburban homeowners’
associations play an important role in the maintenance of hegemony.
64
As grassroots lobbies of
the colonial state, this local politics combined with institutionalized redlining and restrictive
zoning practices to effectively bar nonwhite citizens from home ownership in many suburban
neighborhoods in and around Los Angeles. In their roles as cultural enforcers, these
“homegrown” advocacy groups’ concern for the immediate appearance of a neighborhood and its
homes’ exteriors is inextricably linked to the colonial imperative to preserve purity.
65
Free Dirt, Land Art, and Eco Art Methodologies
Barraclough attends to the idea of landscaping as a function and display of one’s identity;
a wagon wheel in the front yard declares one’s “western heritage” just as much as putting on
boots and a cowboy hat.
66
In the suburban and exurban neighborhoods that surround L.A.,
landscaping projects also serve to increase property values. Vegetation, gravel, soil, boulders,
and stone pavers might be trucked in from even farther-out locales, and the artifacts of this earth-
moving process often go unconsidered. The ecological ramifications of such resurfacing don’t
63. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 14. “The colonist
makes history. His life is an epic, an odyssey. He is invested with the very beginning: ‘We made
this land.’”
64. Barraclough, Making the San Fernando Valley, 63. Davis, City of Quartz, 135-198.
65. Barraclough, Making the San Fernando Valley, 63; Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1-62.
66. Barraclough, Making the San Fernando Valley, 17.
21
stop at the property line, such as the carbon footprint of hauling materials and the water required
to create what are essentially desert oases. But what happens to all the earth that’s dug up
because it’s sandy, nutrient-deficient, or otherwise ill-suited to the purpose of sustaining a lush
yard? These mounds of exhumed dirt temporarily assert themselves on the landscape until they
are eventually hauled away, creating something of a nuisance or an eyesore for the homeowners
and their neighbors. Craigslist,
67
an online platform for posting advertisements for just about
anything, presents a novel solution. Buried in the pages of myriad postings for “free stuff,” one
might find offerings of “free dirt” that expound upon its usefulness and quality:
Giving away dirt. No gimmicks, no games, just some free dirt for the taking for whoever wants it. Just
come pick it up we don't need it anymore. Can be used for planting, landscaping, & burying pets. Please
come take it off of our hands!!!
FREE!!FREE!!!FREE!!
Fresh virgin soil straight from the hillside on my property. Soil has not been tampered with in any way and
is free of any chemicals. Other than a few twigs and weeds there are no organic materials in the soil. Soil
has some rocks (sandstone and slate) and clay. This is great stuff for leveling and garden projects,
especially raised beds. Soil is located next to the driveway for easy loading. I have tons of soil available so
no need to ask.
Low-resolution images of the free dirt usually accompany written advertisements to further
entice anyone who may be in the market for such a material, ostensibly someone looking to fill a
large hole or bury a (very large) pet. But they also point to the uncanny, as inverted landscapes
that beg comparison to nineteenth-century landscape photography. Likewise, written descriptions
trade on the notion that worth and desirability are linked to purity, while the colonized land is
offered at no charge as a resource in excess.
Understandably, ads for free dirt on Craigslist elide the unearthing of bloody histories
buried in the material; and therefore its political nature. They make no reference to western
67. “For Sale: Free,” Craigslist, accessed September 27, 2020,
https://losangeles.craigslist.org/search/zip.
22
heritage, romanticized mission mythologies, or national identity. The earth beneath our feet is an
archive of geologic, biologic, and anthropogenic intra-actions that go unconsidered in the
domestic landscaping process. Though (unverified) claims of the dirt’s “purity” refer to the
absence of potentially unwanted matter—tree roots, rocks, chemicals—contamination is inherent
in dirt’s ontology as sites of ongoing human-natural-colonial forces.
68
Its status as abject matter
overwrites the labor of its removal, distribution, and the sociopolitical dynamics of that labor, as
well as those of land ownership.
69
The dirt may be “free” of charge, but in order to use it to plant
a garden, one must already own or have access to property where it can be received and reused.
Hello my name is Jay, we are now exporting fill dirt from one of our property’s, dirt is clean from any
contamination all residential areas. Due to permit reasons we only do delivery’s so we can’t load pickup
trucks. We provide the trucking, via super-10 dump truck, the load up to 10 yards (15tons)
(NOTHINGLESS) 10 yards per load please. You must have area ready and have a wide access for dump
truck. If you have any question please give me a call or text any time I’ll be happy to help you out.
In Los Angeles, the ever-rising cost of housing excludes most of its residents from the prospect
of homeownership,
70
and is just one aspect of the city’s socioeconomic landscape that forces
wageworkers to either rent indefinitely or move outward. This is the fact that many working-
class people who were born and raised in and around L.A., especially nonwhite residents,
grapple with—the inability to own property in the place they call home—and contributes to an
ever-widening gap between those who “have” and those who “have not.” Standing in stark
contrast to Watkins’ images of wild lands “free for the taking,” the images of free dirt on
68. “For Sale: Free,” Craigslist; Jane Bennett, “The Agency of Assemblages,” in Vibrant Matter:
A Political Ecology of Things. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010) 21-38.
69. Gillian Whitely, Junk: Art and the Politics of Trash, (London, UK: I.B. Tauris, 2011), 1-30.
70. Davis, City of Quartz, xi-xxiii.
23
Craigslist are inverse landscapes; visualizations of an excess afforded only to those in an
increasingly elite class of potential home buyers.
The value of free dirt lies in what cannot be seen, in what Jane Bennett calls its “thing-
power”;
71
its ontological impurities are fertile ground for thinking-with, for “staying with the
trouble.”
72
Within “free dirt’s” perverse, low-res landscapes lie gaps in information, room for
marginalized content; truths obscured by resampling for purity. The very idea that dirt might be
given away for “free” calls back to the colonial concept of terra nullius;
73
“land belonging to no
one” fit the narrative of westward expansion and limitless extraction of a land whose original
inhabitants were denied personhood, and the earth itself reduced to the value of its resources.
Sifting through pixels and mounds of dirt particles offers an opportunity to visualize the
landscape more wholly,
74
or at the very least, to examine one’s own memories of place—and the
mythologies that inform those relationships. How can we think the future with a pile of unwanted
dirt?
In Free Dirt (a scene or vista of unusual natural beauty),
75
I seek to dislodge purity-
based colonial conceptions of land by pairing the inverted landscapes found through a free dirt
Craigslist search with fictitious, romantic descriptions of the material in question. The voice over
narration, formatted as if reading the actual ads, guides viewers as a cursor navigates the screen,
71. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 6.
72. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2016), 35.
73. Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground, 11-14.
74. Lippard, Undermining, 1-2.
75. Erin Eleniak, Free Dirt (a scene or vista of unusual natural beauty), 2022, digital video, Los
Angeles.
24
clicking on image after image of dirt on offer. Some images are slower to load than others,
revealing the contents of the frame like some weird striptease, as the voice over offers, “wild
dirt, free and untouched. easy access guaranteed.” Other “ads” reference the unknowability of the
dirt’s life cycle, rendering any suggestion for possible application absurd.
Loose earth matter
Unknown levels of contamination due to billions of years of mechanical and organic decomposition.
Great for backfill, planters, or building dioramas.
If you are looking to add to the dirt you already have, this resplendent stuff would make a fine addition.
Figure 1. Free Dirt (a scene or vista of unusual natural beauty). Video by Erin Eleniak, 2022.
Los Angeles, CA.
The piece is a wry critique of Nature Man’s rapacious desire to touch “untouched wilderness”
and the act of objectifying, and colonizing, nature through landscaping (fig. 1). It also asks us to
question the transmutation of earth into property, and property into “dirt”, an abject material
synonymous with waste, filth, shit.
76
76. Whitley, Junk, 24, 31. “Bric-a-brac, cast-offs, crap, crud, detritus, discards, dross, dregs,
garbage, junk, lumber, mongo, ordure, trammel, refuse, residue, riffraff, rot, rubbish, rubble,
25
Like Lucy Lippard’s gravel pits,
77
excavated mounds of dirt signal the apocalyptic
fruition of Manifest Destiny, Western civilization’s most expansive earthwork. As a nascent
tremor in the late 1960s, land art disrupted the contemporary art market by attempting to
dematerialize artistic production with its monumental landscape interventions.
78
Situated in the
liminal “zone between the Old and the New Wests,”
79
the genre’s early canon was largely
comprised of site-specific works by white male practitioners like Robert Smithson, Michael
Heizer, and James Turrell, “sporting cowboy boots and ten gallon hats,”
80
seemingly the rule to
which Nancy Holt is a welcome exception. Smithson’s Spiral Jetty,
81
located at Utah’s Great Salt
Lake, is an example of land artists’ fascination with the western landscape, and the desire to
make one’s mark in geologic time (fig. 2). Its complete composition only visible from the air,
Spiral Jetty exists as a massive landscaping project that attempts to touch the scale of westward
expansion; its construction required the use of heavy earth-moving machinery and truckloads of
gravel imported from a quarry in New Jersey. Smithson’s ideas about the landscape reflected the
belief that such undeveloped expanses were void of history—terra nullius—and though site-
schlock, scrannel, scrap, spam, tat, waste.”; “Artworks, such as assemblages, which present and
re-present found or pre-formed objects—whether fragments or complete—invoke the kinds of
questions which Appadurai raised about the ‘social life of things’ and commodity fetishism.
Found objects might be considered as relics, repositories, signs and texts.”
77. Lippard, Undermining.
78. Lippard, Undermining, 81-93.
79. Lippard, 81.
80. Lippard, 81.
81. Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970, earthwork, Great Salt Lake, Holt/Smithson Foundation
and Dia Art Foundation.
26
specific, it exists outside the context of its place, without concern for the health of the natural
environment or regard for the people of its surrounding communities. Spiral Jetty—and similarly
aggressive works that represent the movement within popular culture’s conception of land art
works as tourist attractions—echo the colonialist imperative to bend nature into a cultural object,
essentially by landscaping it.
Figure 2. Spiral Jetty. Earthwork by Robert Smithson, 1970. Holt/Smithson Foundation and Dia
Art Foundation, Great Salt Lake, UT.
Land art, for all its environmental and cultural pitfalls, did open the door to later
generations of artists working with the land in a myriad of ways. Nancy Holt, though a founding
member of the movement, has been successful in making works that collaborate with the natural
environment, Sun Tunnels being a well-known example.
82
Situated in northwestern Utah’s Great
Basin Desert, Sun Tunnels evokes humanity’s presence within geologic time rather than
82. Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels, 1973-76, concrete, Great Basin Desert, Holt/Smithson Foundation
and Dia Art Foundation.
27
assuming control over it. Four industrial-scale concrete cylinders, each incised with a specific
composition of circular holes, are “arranged in an open cross format and aligned to frame the sun
on the horizon during the summer and winter solstices.”
83
The concrete cylinders, eighteen feet
in length and nine in diameter, recall the kind of monster plumbing used in civic infrastructure;
storm drains and sewer tunnels are called to mind (fig. 3)—yet their placement within, rather
than their incision into, the desert landscape, and reliance upon the cosmos for activation,
recognized the agency of, and an awareness of humanity’s position within, universal nature that
is not seen in more masculinist earth alterations like Spiral Jetty.
Figure 3. Sun Tunnels. Concrete and earthwork by Nancy Holt, 1973–76. Holt/Smithson
Foundation and Dia Art Foundation, Great Basin Desert, UT.
83. Dia Art Foundation, “Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels,” accessed January 14, 2022,
https://www.diaart.org/visit/visit-our-locations-sites/nancy-holt-sun-tunnels.
28
Still, land art was less about identifying with the land than it was about using it, or
locating it within the context of art; both Sun Tunnels and Spiral Jetty ask the viewer to see the
land as a backdrop for the works, as the landscape in which the work exists and from which it
derives much of its power.
84
While land art represented a monumental shift in the contemporary
art discourse—resisting commodification through impermanence, site specificity, and concern
with materiality—
85
it reified patriarchal and colonial assumptions about nature as separate and
passive. As an inheritor of land art’s legacy, Ana Mendieta made work that also challenged
modernist conventions, blurring the lines between sculpture, photography, and performance,
86
but rather than objectify, her work anthropomorphizes the land by identifying it with her own
colonized body (fig. 4). Her Siluetas series, imbued with themes of violence, displacement,
death, and rebirth,
87
…were unmistakably human: they breathed fire and smoke, dripped blood, grew, disintegrated, and were
reborn. In a 1977 interview, Mendieta said that "men artists working with nature have imposed themselves
on it. Definitely my work has that feminine sensibility. I can't think of many men who would use a heart
image in a serious way." To anthropomorphize the earth is to endow it with sentience, desire, and identity;
it is to think of earth as more than merely a sculptural material.
84. Lippard, Undermining, 82, 88-89.
85. Lippard, Six Years, page number; Blocker, Where is Ana Mendieta? 10.
86. Jane Blocker, Where is Ana Mendieta?: Identity, Performativity, and Exile, (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1999), 17.
87. Blocker, Where is Ana Mendieta?, 18.
29
Figure 4. Untitled (Silueta series), Color photographs documenting Earth/body work executed in
Iowa by Ana Mendieta, 1977. Estate of Ana Mendieta and Galerie Lelong, New York, NY.
Mendieta’s use and representation of her own body—viscerally connected to the earth—was a
deviation that unsettled some critics, who saw the artist as engaging in “narcissistic intercourse
with Mother Earth [rather than having] sexual intercourse with a man.”
88
An infuriating misread
of the Siluetas series pondered that the work symbolized a recapture of innocence—purifying the
88. Blocker, Where is Ana Mendieta?, 14. Kuspit psychoanalyzes Mendieta through her works,
presuming to see in them a traumatic first sexual experience, a dysfunctional mother/daughter
relationship, and, ultimately, a desire for the father. He follows the most cliched protocols of
psychotherapy, first by recognizing symptoms, then by pronouncing a diagnosis. "Mendieta," he
writes, "clearly had a troubled sense of self, as her very self-centered art-in which there are not
only no men, but no other women - suggests. Her trouble had to do with her relationship with her
mother and various mother surrogates." The solipsism of which he accuses Mendieta is gender
specific. Moreover, it bespeaks a profound sense of threat: "Mendieta preferred to have
narcissistic intercourse with Mother Earth than sexual intercourse with man." Despite his
professed sympathy for Mendieta's victimization as a woman and for her desire to escape male
sexual domination, Kuspit pathologizes Mendieta's sexuality as narcissistic and geophilic. Kuspit
concludes in a footnote that "Mendieta was not as liberated or enlightened-feminist-as she may
have thought she was."
30
body through a holified communion with nature, returning her to a state of virginal
untouchability. Such gag-worthy analyses are buzzing with the same ideology that normalizes
colonial, heteronormative conceptions of nature as terra nullius. Alaimo writes, “sexualizing
conquest and colonialism naturalizes those processes while depicting women, the land, and
indigenous peoples as mysterious zones that invite their own violation. Indeed, the very
glorification of ‘nature’ as a quintessentially American ideal is complicit with a conquest
mentality.”
89
Mendieta’s work clearly restates a connection between earthly and feminine
bodies,
90
but does so in a subversive manner that foregrounds the volatilities of each, inverting
conventional associations of “nature” with “woman,” while asserting their agencies.
Rafa Esparza’s 2017 exhibition, Tierra. Sangre. Oro. asserts the agency of earth and
colonized bodies by “browning” the white cube.
91
The collaborative process began in 2014 with
a performance on the site of Michael Parker’s The Unfinished,
92
a work which unearthed the
land’s history by digging an obelisk into an asphalt pad near the Los Angeles River. Esparza’s
experience at the site made him “think about the history of the land, and of laborers who have
historically been exploited while working on building projects.”
93
These entrenched politics
informed his use of adobe bricks to construct his 2017 work in Marfa—a historically segregated
89. Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground, 13.
90. Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground, 133.
91. Rafa Esparza, Tierra. Sangre. Oro.
92. Kate Green, “Rafa Esparza Talks About Tierra. Sangre. Oro. at Ballroom Marfa,”
Interviews, Artforum, November 21, 2017, https://www.artforum.com/interviews/rafa-esparza-
talks-about-tierra-sangre-oro-at-ballroom-marfa-72422.
93. Rafa Esparza, interviewed by Kate Green, “Rafa Esparza.”
31
border town in Texas where privately owned land makes up 95 percent of its area and attracts
throngs of white art tourists—which provided a foundation for “building conflicting histories.”
Participating artists used the earthen material as a tool to think with; to think about the land,
labor, and collectivity. Among others, Esparza worked with Beatriz Cortez, an L.A.-based artist
who’d never used adobe, to build an arched “portal” inspired by Mayan architecture (fig. 5).
For Beatriz, it is important to think of such structures, and the indigenous people they represent, as
belonging not only in the past, but also in the present and future. For me, the structure and its material work
against the way we essentialize people, particularly those who are indigenous and brown. This portal was
the last thing we made for the show, yet it serves as its entrance: we placed it outside Marfa Ballroom and
used it to reorient the way visitors enter the white-turned-brown cube, now facing south.
Figure 5. Portal Sur (from Tierra. Sangre. Oro.) Adobe archway by Rafa Esparza and Beatriz
Cortez 2017. Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX. Photo by Alex Marks.
Tierra. Sangre. Oro. transmutes a colonized earth into a foundation for reclaiming land and
labor, while delivering a pointed critique of the very institution in which it exists. Like Mendieta,
Esparza’s earth work upends the genre’s colonizing impulses, interrogating conceptions of
32
othered bodies as inert and available for conquest through the embodied experience of land as a
sentient, sensual collaborator.
When the human is situated within “nature”, as an inextricable element of this active
assemblage,
94
cracks begin to appear in the foundation of this national identity. When its heroic
origin story starts to fall away, the Great White Tower of the West is revealed to be a chimera; a
cyborgean beast fed by the consumption of its own mythologies.
95
How can we situate our
human selves within our more-than-human world,
96
when that world is a maze of cul-de-sacs
built at the site of perpetual erasure?
Excavating Feminist Futures at the End of the Cul-de-sac
I was six years old in June of 1989, when my parents, my sister, and I moved into a
brand-new house, in a brand-new housing tract, in a brand-new development at the west end of
Simi Valley. For the first six months, we were the only family in our neighborhood, with some of
the two-story mission-revival-adjacent houses still under construction. Perched on my bicycle at
94. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 110-113.
95. Donna J. Haraway and Cary Wolfe, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in Manifestly Haraway,
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016) 3-90. I use the term “Great White
Tower of the West” to refer to the lofty mythical space occupied by the United States as a
symbol. It is constructed from an amalgam of myths based upon narratives written from the
colonizer’s perspective. Ideas like, “progress,” “development,” “morality,” and “freedom” live
there, along with Corporate Personhood. Donna Haraway’s conception of “cyborg” is full of
posthuman possibility.
96. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2016). Haraway uses the phrase “more-than-human” as a way to describe
living and non-living species not categorized as “human” without the pejorative connotation that
“inhuman” or “nonhuman” alludes to.
33
the bulbous end of our street, I could see dust rising in the distance as earth-movers scraped and
pushed and dug the space into existence. It seemed there was no place to ride to, and no one to
ride with, so I retreated to the backyard, not more than a large uninterrupted parcel of fine,
golden dust, yet unadorned. My eyes shifted between the razed land and the house’s stuccoed
exterior and back again, and I felt a twinge of disappointment that it was all so new, because new
houses wouldn’t have ghosts, and new land wouldn’t have history. There were no signs of life,
only the expectation that eventually, the neighborhood would evolve into a population. This is
the weirdness that haunts the suburban landscape—its existence relies upon the leveling of its
topography, the banishing of its former inhabitants—no matter how it presents itself, it is always
the specter of another body’s displacement.
Since I moved away, I’ve noticed that the mention of Simi Valley elicits one of two
associations—the courthouse where Rodney King’s assailants were acquitted, or the Ronald
Reagan presidential library.
97
Of lesser renown, just over the hill from the Old West ruins at
Corriganville, the Santa Susana Field Lab looms invisibly over the Valleys. Having hosted the
nation’s very first nuclear meltdown,
98
the aerospace and nuclear energy facility also occupies
land that is culturally important for Tongva, Chumash, and Tataviam (Fernandeño) people.
99
The
site’s designation as a National Historic Site does little more than protect it from development,
and the fact of its location within the facility’s property boundaries represents the firm grip of
97. Laura Pulido, Laura Barraclough, Wendy Cheng, “The San Fernando Valley and North Los
Angeles County,” A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press) 240-1.
98. Pulido, “The San Fernando Valley,” 238-40.
99. Nicola Ulibarri, Cameron L. Tracy, Ryan J. McArty, “Cleanup and Complexity,”
Environmental Management, last modified December 11, 2019, 263.
34
colonial conquest on the region’s indigenous lands. The area’s “complex geological setting,”
with SSFL’s legacy of secrecy and unclear burden of responsibility, stand at odds with ongoing
efforts to clean up the heavily contaminated land.
100
The ablution of history makes fertile ground for sowing the seeds that yield tall tales, but
the land and its allies reemerge to tell their stories in a collision that collapses time, place, truth,
and fiction. Great White Father is a forty-seven second video essay on that collapse,
101
as I know
it; as a white, cis, woman of middle-class privilege who grew up in Simi Valley. The video is an
assemblage of appropriated footage, cut from the following sources: 1. home video circa 1994
titled “frog creek,”
102
2. Santa Susana Field Laboratory (nuclear weapons test site) promotional
video, 3. Warren Olney special report on the SSFL, and 4. Cattle Queen of Montana. The piece
opens with a clip from a home video my dad took of my sister Sara and me, hiking through
wetland brush along a creek near our house; the shaky footage pans over some tall reeds, and
zooms in as my childhood self comes into frame. In this moment, I am an enthusiastic
adventurer—serenely focused on my environment. At the ten-second mark, we hear the only
100. Joel Grover and Josh Davis, “Radioactive Waste Fell on Some LA-Area Neighborhoods
During 2018 Woolsey Fire, New Study Shows,” NBC Los Angeles Online. Last modified
October 15, 2021. https://www.nbclosangeles.com/investigations/radioactive-waste-woolsey-
fire-wildfires-simi-valley-santa-susana-field-lab/2714652/. “High levels of radioactive particles
landed in neighborhoods from Thousand Oaks to Simi Valley during the massive 2018 Woolsey
fire, which started at the contaminated Santa Susana Field Lab, according to a peer-reviewed
study just published by a team of scientists known for studying environmental disasters.
What's stunning about the findings is that they run contrary to what California's Department of
Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) said to calm public fears in the hours after the Woolsey Fire,
"We do not believe the fire has caused any releases of hazardous materials… associated with
contamination at the [SSFL] site." (see note 43)
101. Erin Eleniak, Great White Father, 2021, digital video, 00:47.
102. Erin Eleniak, “Frog Creek,” 1994, VHS, 38:41.
35
audio in the entire piece—a voice whispers, “Do you remember when we were young and
impressionable and taught to believe everything the Great White Father told us?”
103
My own
father’s camera drops and pans right again, abstracting the foliage into a haze of vertical green
lines; the piece cuts to a scene from Cattle Queen, in which Ronald Reagan’s character
demonstrates his prowess with a pistol. The shot is tight, framing only the match held between a
man’s thumb and forefinger, and it ignites as the bullet strikes the matchhead, exploding into
flame as if it were a firework. This action leads to the next image, an explosion at the SSFL; the
iconic western film landscape backgrounds a small structure engulfed in ceaseless flames and
rolling black smoke (fig. 6).
Figure 6. Great White Father. Digital video with sound by Erin Eleniak, 2021. Los Angeles, CA.
103. Julie Ruin, “I Wanna Know What Love Is,” track 8 on Julie Ruin, released August 1997 in
Olympia, WA, Kill Rock Stars, compact disc. Julie Ruin was the name of Kathleen Hannah’s
first solo recording project after Bikini Kill, the riot grrrl band she fronted, disbanded.
36
The video cuts again, this time to footage taken from a segment of the promotional film that
focused on the picturesque beauty of its surrounding environment—a hawk circles overhead, a
coyote trots through a meadow, and a family of deer graze under the canopy of an oak tree.
Great White Father closes with a shot of Reagan’s Ferrell as he twirls his revolver right into his
holster.
The video essay collapses the reflection on my own experience of being a kid in the
1980s and 1990s, unaware of the world outside my place of privilege, and taking for granted on a
daily basis that the history lessons I received in private school were objectively true. The line,
“Do you remember when we were young and impressionable, and taught to believe everything
the Great White Father told us?”
104
is from a 1997 Julie Ruin track in which the artist rages at
institutionalized violence against, and oppression of women. I came to riot grrrl late in the game
and was devastated to discover that my new favorite band, Bikini Kill, had broken up before I’d
ever heard their music. Until the last couple years of high school, my best friend and I were the
only girls we knew who were into riot grrrl, and since this was 1997 or so, we didn’t have the
kind of access to information or community that is now available through the internet. So riot
grrrl was my first—if limited—introduction to feminism, as well as it was to punk rock.
105
At the
time, I couldn’t directly relate to a lot of what the lyrics talked about—rape, incest, physical
violence—but I related to the anger at being diminished and shamed, and felt the presence of an
oppressive power I could not define. Listening to Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, The Red Aunts, and
Sleater-Kinney was a refuge because it felt like they were speaking to me and letting me know
104. Julie Ruin, “I Wanna Know.”
105. Lisa Darms and Johanna Fateman, “Introduction to the Collection,” The Riot Grrrl
Collection, ed. Lisa Darms (New York: NY, 2016) 7-12.
37
that I didn’t need to be a part of whatever everyone else was doing and I didn’t need to take any
shit for it either. The song that the title, Great White Father, is taken from, shifts from a guttural
shout-singing of unadorned lyrics (The killers and the cops give us special advice, like cross your
legs and act fucking nice”), to a parodic, cooing vocalization of the appropriated one-line chorus,
“I wanna know what love is. I want you to show me.” This kind of dual expression resonated
with me, as a girl who raged internally but acquiesced to the pressure of my own insecurity when
it came to outward communication. I use the opening line from this song to reframe appropriated
visuals that reference the mythologies that are foundational to the maintenance of American
national identity.
Riot grrrl was a mode of questioning cultural norms and sharing stories of trauma,
isolation, but also pleasure, without the fear of being shamed.
106
The short-lived movement
advocated for the girls, the queers, the misfits, and the weirdos, challenging mainstream culture
and even questioning the state of liberation within the punk movement at large. Where riot grrrl
fell short, however, was in the failure to expand its constituency beyond the middle-class white
girl majority, and by the time I was in my teens, the movement had mostly fizzled.
107
But can’t
we call up the spirit of riot grrrl—its community, its openness, its solidarity, its no-bullshit-
ness—to more wholly address the continued oppression of classed, gendered and racialized
groups by a patriarchal and colonial power disguised as American identity? We begin by
unmasking the Great White Father, as we have done here. In doing so, we revealed him to be a
106. Darms, “Introduction to the Collection,” 11-12.
107. Darms, “Introduction to the Collection,” 12. “By about 1994, the “secret” was out, and most
of the women who had started the movement no longer identified as riot grrrls. Some had simply
outgrown it; for some others, the inability of the movement to address privilege in a nuanced and
effective way rendered it useless as a model for activism.”
38
mythological beast, built from the bones of colonial fantasies that reinforce hierarchies of
domination and control.
108
We have located one stronghold within the suburbs of Los Angeles,
the source of globally exported cultural imperialism.
109
Finally, we have discussed artists and
works that trouble the boundaries constructed between human and more-than-human bodies. We
vow to always question the tales we are told by those in power. We vow to use our outside
voices, to talk to strangers, and to surrender the floor to those who need to be heard.
The things that always bothered me about the punk scene in my suburban town had a lot
to do with this preoccupation with “authenticity,” as if there was always some dude questioning
whether a person was actually punk rock, or if they were—gasp!—a poseur in punk’s clothing.
No one stopped to think about the fact that we were all a bunch of anti-everything kids who were
competing over who had the most patches on their jacket, or who wore the most pyramid belts,
or the tightest bondage pants.
110
We, the supposedly anarchist youth, were ideological fashion
victims—good little capitalists, despite our claims against it. The lyrics spoke truth, but there
were no real conversations between my friends and I. No conversations about the fact that we
were all beneficiaries of white privilege, heirs to Reagan’s America. There were no
conversations about race, and there really weren’t conversations about feminism, either, unless
they were peppered with homophobic “dyke” jokes or other popular misconceptions
(stereotypes) about women who considered themselves feminist.
111
The boy-men I was
108. Barthes, “Myth Today,” in Mythology.
109. Tongson, Relocations, 12-13.
110. I won’t even get into hair dye (Manic Panic®) or shoes (Converse®, Doc Martens®,
creepers). We saved up to buy those things; consumption became a remedy for ostracization.
111. This was the late 1990s to early 2000s.
39
surrounded by in high school did not understand what feminism actually meant, but I can’t say
that I did either. I’m not sure that my Women’s Studies class in my first semester of college even
did much to remedy that fact, so when I read Joan Morgan’s When Chickenheads Come Home to
Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks it Down, I appreciated her account of the feminism she
encountered at her college. In a chapter titled, “The F-Word,” Morgan writes,
112
I did not know that feminism is what you called it when black warrior women moved mountains and
walked on water. Growing up in their company, I considered these things ordinary.
The spirits of these women were nowhere to be found in the feminism I discovered in college. Feminists on
our New England campus came in two flavas—both variations of vanilla. The most visible were the
braless, butch-cut, anti-babes, who seemed to think the solution to sexism was reviling all things male
(except, oddly enough, their clothing and mannerisms) and sleeping with each other. They used made up
words like “womyn,” “feminysts,” and threw mad shade if you asked them directions to the “Ladies’
Room.” The others—straight and more femme—were all for the liberation of women as long as it did not
infringe on their sense of entitlement… The were the spiritual descendants of the early suffragettes and
absolutely not to be trusted… feminism definitely felt like white women’s shit.
As a black woman, Morgan found feminism alienating. Her Women’s Studies class was also a
disappointment, having included fewer women of color in their bibliographies than her African
Studies class. Her feminism would have to be something that is real to her, something that draws
breath from the spirits of her foremothers, a manifesto that promises to blaspheme feminism in
the most loving way.
113
More than any other generation before us, we need a feminism committed to “keeping it real.” We need a
voice like our music—one that samples and layers many voices, injects its sensibilities into the old and
flips it into something new, provocative, and powerful. And one whose occasional hypocrisy,
contradictions, and trifleness guarantee us at least a few trips to the terror-dome, guaranteeing us to finally
confront what we’d all rather hide from.
112. Joan Morgan, “The F-Word,” in When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop
Feminist Breaks it Down, New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 1999, 35-6.
113. Morgan, 62; Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 1. “Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is
about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension
of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true., Irony is
about humor and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would
like to see more honored within socialist-feminism.”
40
We need a feminism that possesses the same fundamental understanding held by any true student of hip-
hop. Truth can’t be found in the voice of any one rapper but in the juxtaposition of many. The keys that
unlock the riches of contemporary black female identity lie not in choosing Latifah over Lil’ Kim, or even
Foxy Brown over Salt-N-Pepa. They lie at the magical intersection where those contrary voices meet—the
juncture where “truth” is no longer black and white but subtle, intriguing shades of grey.
This is what all our feminisms need, cyborgean critters that we are.
114
It’s not about
whether we like Gravy Train!!!! over The Gossip, it’s about the undercommons.
115
The
undercommons, not the subculture, is where we have to find our feminisms. We are as
interwoven as an endless web, a squirming muddle that requires the work of living and dying
together. Our human bodies may be temporary assemblages of matter that,
116
like the land we are
in, is susceptible to entropy, and death. One day, our bodies will rejoin the primordial soup of
life and death, manifesting our destinies as heaping, fecund piles of compost matter, rendering all
other destinies invalid, as we become the dirt that comprises the land we see all around us.
114. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 1-8.
115. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, “1. Politics Surrounded,” in The Undercommons: Fugitive
Planning and Black Study, (New York: 2013), 14-20.
116. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 94-109.
41
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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
As global ecologies stand in a state of apocalyptic collapse, Journey to the End of the Cul-de-sac: Mythology and Place in Suburbia seeks to trouble the perceived stability of suburban idealism in the communities surrounding Los Angeles. A discussion of contemporary and historical American photographic representations of the land opens the paper, introducing the concept of “landscaping” in the context of Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis.” I then introduce the relationship between landscaping, suburban idealism, and the American Dream. Throughout the paper, I argue that landscaping is an inherently gendered act that invokes an exploitative gaze to excuse settler-colonial atrocities and the ongoing injustices against women, indigenous, and people of color. I go on to examine historical and contemporary art practices that have addressed the land and related issues including ownership, purity, and violence. Finally, I close with a critical look back at my own past to imagine possibilities for the future. Using the cul-de-sac as a conceptual framework, this paper suggests that an unmaking of suburban idealism begins by exposing the flaws in its design.
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Eleniak, Erin Marie
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Core Title
Journey to the end of the cul-de-sac: mythology and place in suburbia
School
Roski School of Art and Design
Degree
Master of Fine Arts
Degree Program
Fine Arts
Degree Conferral Date
2022-05
Publication Date
04/13/2022
Defense Date
04/13/2022
Publisher
University of Southern California
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Tag
cul-de-sac,frontier thesis,gender,Land,landscaping,Los Angeles,Myth,OAI-PMH Harvest,purity,Simi Valley,Suburb,western heritage
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eleniak@usc.edu,erin.eleniak@gmail.com
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