One is always crossing the horizon yet it always remains distant. In this line where sky meets earth, objects cease to exist... Since the car was at all times onsome left-over horizon, one might say that the car was imprisoned in a line, a line that is in no way linear.. the distance seemed to put restrictions on all forward movement, thus bringing the car to a countless series of standstills.
- Robert Smithson

Some people like to believe in a lot of nonsense. A road is a road...
- Springrock, NM resident, Verona Watts, responding in the Salt Lake Tribune (07/30/03) to the news that, thanks to negative PR generated by the Book of Revelations, Hwy 666 linking Gallup, NM to Monticello, UT is about to be renamed Hwy 491
... is a road...

PREAMBLE (HEAD)

While I was an actor in the five-day road-trip piece documented below I played no
part either in choosing the destinations, planning the route or operating the vehicle.
the road-trip piece was composed, choreographed and directed by JB as a 'film-with-
no-film' commissioned by Afterall for the purposes of this documentation
(with gas, motel and restaurant receipts retained for reimbursement). The intent
was for JB to structure an experience framed by an itinerary linking sites that
feature in a number of his works. The piece would be orchestrated in such a
way as to expose, through mimesis, JB's working methods, focal concerns and
the 'driven' quality of his attachment both to place and to independent 16mm
filmmaking. Reeling in Utah thus reverses the road-loop-to-film-spool
sequence established in North on Evers (1991). Whereas the latter work
consists of a retracing onto film a cross-country round trip JB made in 1989
with a hand-written account of the original journey scrolling right to left at the
bottom of the frame, the present work is a written account by DH of a journey
designed by JB to encompass a circuit of (25) sites that appear in a number of
the 'landscape' or 'place portrait' films JB has been making since the early 1990s.
(Specifically North on Evers (1991), Deseret (1995), Four
Corners (1997), Utopia (1998), Sogobi (2001), and
13 Lakes (forthcoming). Sites visited are listed (a) through (z) in the
coda appended to the itinerary which forms Part One of the Travel Log Trilogy).

There was also a possibility that, if the atmospheric conditions were right, JB would
do a (10min) re-shoot at Great Salt Lake for 13 Lakes, the film he is currently
making. Always keen to proselytise on behalf of the generative power of the constrictive
rule, JB suggested at one point in the planning stage that I opt for a fly-on-the-wall
approach and volunteer to remain confined for the duration of the piece to the rear
of the vehicle, bound by a vow of silence, thus assuming the position and duplicating
the role of the rear-mounted camera trained on the windscreen over the shoulders of the
protagonists in The United States of America (JB, Betty Gordon, 1975). After some
discussion this idea was dropped on logistical grounds and we opted instead for the
cinematically more demotic 'buddy' format evidenced below.

PART ONE: TRAVELOGARITHM

This is a map that will take you somewhere but when you get there you won't
really know where you are. In a sense the non-site is the centre of the system
and the site itself is the fringe or the edge...
- Robert Smithson

DAY ONE: Saturday 07/26/03
7:30am I drive 30mi S down the 101 then 35mi E on the 126 from Carpinteria to
Val Verde, transfer my bag to the trunk of JB's car and we take off (JB at the
wheel from this point on) 3mi on back roads to the 5 S (10mi) to the 14 E
(43mi) (a) to the 138 (b) to Victorville (58mi) where we join the 15 heading NE
to Baker (110mi) then N through Vegas (90mi) (gas stop #1) 70 m NE to Mesquite
on the Nevada/Arizona border (gas stop #2) where, with the prospect of 4 nights
in Utah, I buy 2 bottles of red wine in a liquor store before we head 50mi N on
the 70, crossing into Utah W of St George before veering E 5mi N of Central
where we stop at the Mountain Meadows massacre site (c) at Dan Sill Hill
(6000ft above sea level) on the Old Spanish Trail (massacre date: 09/11/1857;
number of dead Arkansas emigrants murdered by Iron County Latter Day Saints
militiamen 115-123; path to plaques from road approx 100yds: sign advising
'moderate hike') before retracing the route back to the 70 13mi N to the 56 at
Beryl Jct then turning W 35mi to Cedar City where we rejoin the 15 N for 35mi
before heading E 22mi to the 89 and turning S 12.5mi to Panguitch (burial site
of John D Lee of Harmony, UT, sole perpetrator tried, convicted and executed
03/23/1877 by Mormon firing squad for his part in Mtn Meadows Massacre).¹ At
Panguitch we watch goat tying (d) (5 attempts, 3 successful), steer roping
(6 attempts, 3 successful), barrel racing (6) and bull riding (6 attempts, 2
qualifying) at a Pioneer Day rodeo at Panguitch fairgrounds.

Distance: 500.5mi
Dinner: fish, chips (1), spaghetti, meatballs (1) + beers
Motel: $44.00 per room
INSCRIPTION ON JOHN D LEE'S GRAVESTONE: 'KNOW
THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE'

DAY TWO: Sunday 07/27/03
7:15am Leave Panguitch heading SE 33mi on the 12 through Bryce Canyon National
Park (e) to Henrieville then 75mi NE on same road through Escalante (gas stop,
slow pump: fill rate approx 1 gallon per minute; after 9 mins JB discovers gas
spill under car due to absence of functioning cut-ov mechanism on pump); then on
through Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument (f) Box Hollow Wilderness (g)
and Anasazi Indian Village State Park to Torrey where we turn E onto the 24 and
head 52.5mi (h, i, j) through Hanksville (flag outside post office at 0.5-mast; buy
gas + 2 baseball caps and 4qt bottles of water at Hole-in-the-Rock gas station/
convenience store) then E 25mi on the Flat Tops road to Horseshoe Cyn (k, l)
(Indian pictograph site: 3.5mi hike, temp 98.F, no hike advisory but sign-in book
at head of trail and warning to carry at least 1 gallon of water per person - hike
duration: 3.75 hrs) then back to Flat Top road and 40mi N on dirt road to Green
River (m).

Distance: 229mi
Dinner: cheeseburger, fries (1), pork chops, potato (1) + beers
Motel: $24.99 per room
SIGN ON WALL OF BREAKFAST STOP DINER IN ESCALANTE:
'GOOD FOOD TAKES TIME. YOUR'S WILL BE RIGHT OUT'

DAY THREE: Monday 07/28/03
7:10am Leave Green River and head E 26mi on the 70 to Thompson Springs, then
2mi N on dirt road to Sego Canyon petroglyphs (n) then turn back to Green River
(28mi; gas stop #5) before heading 117.5mi NW on the 191/6to join the 15 S of
Provo heading N 35mi before we turn W N of Riverton 15mi to Kennecott
Corp-owned Bingham Canyon open-pit Copper Mine (o) ('1 of 2 man-made
structures.. visible from outer space... the world's largest man-made
excavation with 6 billion tons of material removed in the past 100 years over
1900 acres producing a pit more than 0.75mi in depth and 2.5mi in diameter at
the top') then back 32mi via Copperton to the 15 N (36mi) through Layton then
W 14.5mi through Syracuse (gas stop #6), thence, via the lake causeway, to
Antelope Island (p) where we stand on the shore and look towards Fremont
Island 7.5mi N and JB declines to take an alternate shot for the shot he took
in early June because the lake surface is choppy due to a slight northerly
breeze that is barely discernible on the mainland, before returning to the car
and taking a 6mi side-trip to preserved Mormon sheep farm then back to the
causeway heading W 14.5mi to the 15 N 30mi to Brigham City (q, r).

Distance: 356.5mi
Dinner: liver, bacon, fries (1), fish, potato (1), coffee (1), soda (1)
Motel: $31.92 per room
INFORMATION LEAFLET: 'KENNECOTT SYMBOL IS 5000 YEARS OLD', AVAILABLE AT THE
BINGHAM CANYON COPPER MINE VISITORS' CENTER:

The development of Kennecott's symbol, the ankh began about 5000 BC when the
Egyptians utilised a loop with a cross beneath it to signify enduring life..
the first alchemists.. us(ed) the sign for Venus.. as a symbol for copper.
From the very beginning in 1903, the original Utah Copper Company used as its
logo the Venus symbol. When Kennecott purchased the Utah Copper Company in
1936, the "K" was inserted in the Venus sign...

An interesting fact: A modern adaptation of the symbol for the planet Mercury
was issued by the 7 original astronauts: Cooper, Shepard, Carpenter, Schirra,
Glenn, Slayton and Grissom. The design, which substitutes a '7'for a 'K' in
the Kennecott ankh, signifies the Project Mercury.

DAY FOUR: Tuesday 07/29/03
7:20am Get gas, leave Brigham City and head N 5mi on the 15 then W 29mi through
Corrinne past Golden Spike National Historic Site (s) then 15.5mi S on dirt
roads to Spiral Jetty (t, u) before retracing the route to Brigham City
(49.5mi), where we turn onto the 15 heading 295mi S via pie, gas and restroom
stop in Beaver, then turning S to avoid approaching storm and driving 20mi on
the 17 to Hurricane.

Distance: 414mi
Dinner: take-out pizza (2), 1 bottle Mesquite Liquor Store wine
Motel: $39.33 per room
CAVEAT PRINTED ON PINK PAPER STAPLED TO 3 PAGE WHITE PAPER LEAFLET ENTITLED
'DETAILED DIRECTIONS TO ROBERT SMITHSON'S SPIRAL JETTY' AVAILABLE ON RACK
LOCATED OUTSIDE GOLDEN SPIKE NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE VISITORS' CENTRE:
SPIRAL JETTY IS AN UNDEVELOPED AREA..
• No facilities or potable water
• Licensed 4-wheel drive vehicles recommended
GOLDEN SPIKE NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE DOES NOT ADMINISTER THIS AREA, VISIT AT
YOUR OWN RISK
Questions: contact Dia Center at www.diacenter.org

Directions (in brief): 1. Turn W off Hwy 83 at Lampo Junction and then drive
W, another 7.7mi up E side of Promontory Pass to the GSNHS (nb. The Lampo Jctn
Sign has recently disappeared, so look for sign directing visitors to GSNHS);
2. From Visitor Center drive 5.6mi W on gravel road; 3. Take S (left) fork on
Box County Class D road; 4. Cross cattle guard #1; 5. Drive 1.3mi S; 6. Turn
right onto SW fork; 7. Go 1.7mi to cattle guard #2; 8. Continue SW 1.2mi to
cattle guard #3; 9. Drive 0.5mi to fence; 10. Continue 2.3mi SSW to a
combination fence, cattle guard #4; iron-pipe fence with RAFTER S. RANCH and
NO TRESPASSING signs. 11. At this gate the Class D road designation ends. If
you choose to continue S for another 2.3mi, and around the E side of Rozel
Point, you should see the Lake and a jetty (not the Spiral Jetty) left by oil
drilling exploration in the 1920s through the 1980s. As you approach the Lake
you should see an abandoned pink-and-white trailer (mostly white), an old
amphibious landing craft, an old Dodge truck.. and other assorted trash.
From this location, the trailer is the key to finding the road to the Spiral
Jetty. As you drive slowly past the trailer, turn immediately from the SW to
the W (right), passing on the S side of the Dodge, and onto a two-track trail
that contours above the oil-drilling debris below. This is not much of a road!
Only high-clearance vehicles should advance beyond the trailer. Go slow! The
road is narrow; brush might scratch your vehicle, and the rocks, if not
properly negotiated, could high-centre your vehicle. Don't hesitate to park
and walk. The Jetty is just around the corner...

DAY FIVE: Wednesday 07/30/03
7:30am Leave Hurricane head 25mi SE on the 59 to Colorado City (formerly Short
Creek) (v) for breakfast then 127.5mi on a loop S into Arizona on the 389 via
the Kaibab Reservation before turning N into Utah on the 89 (gas/restroom stop
at Kanab), then on through Zion National Park (w), with a detour S on dirt
roads outside Rockville to Grafton ghost town (x) then back onto the 89 once
more through Hurricane to the 15 S through Las Vegas (105mi; gas stop #10)
and Barstow (140mi) where we turn W on the 58 to Mojave (y) (60mi) via the
airplane storage facility at Four Corners then S onto the 14 (61mi) (z) to
the 5, heading 8mi N to the McBean Pkwy exit where we stop off at CalArts to
deposit camera, tripod and unused film stock in JB's office before walking
down 2 flights of stairs to the basement where JB projects a print of the shot
taken earlier in the summer from Antelope Island across Salt Lake, the cramped
airless room suddenly filling with the whirr of the projector as a small
(3ft x 2ft) brilliant rectangle of blues, grays, whites and blacks suddenly
opens up like a window in the wall in front of where I'm sitting, the water in
the lower half of the rectangle swelling and rolling beneath a sleek, unbroken
surface that both mirrors and refracts the clouds, the birds that glide out
first to the left then to the right from a point that seems to correspond to
the dead centre of Fremont Island, hence the centre of the frame, and the
low-curved outline of the Island itself suspended in the unjudgeable distance
like a saucer or a sphere resting squarely on the level horizon line that
precisely bisects the frame, the contours of the Island slightly blurred in a
thin steam of mist; the lake comporting itself for the camera, hence for us in
a singular composition in response to conditions utterly unlike those we
encountered on 07/29/03; then heading back to the car park and driving N 2mi on
the 5 to the 126 W before turning N after 1.5mi to JB's place in Val Verde
(2mi) where I transfer my bag to the trunk of my car and drive the 2mi back to
the 126, head W 25mi to the 101 then NW 30mi to Carpinteria.

Distance: 589 mi
Dinner: chips, nuts, beef jerky, candy + sodas (1),
VERONA WATTS INTERVIEWED FOR ARTICLE ENTITLED: 'SIXES NIXED ON "DEVIL'S ROAD",
SALT LAKE CITY TRIBUNE (07/30/03): 'SOME PEOPLE LIKE TO BELIEVE IN A LOT OF
NONSENSE. A ROAD IS A ROAD. BEYOND THAT THE CHANGE IS CONFUSING.' SHE ADDED,
'TOURISTS WANT TO KNOW WHY THEY CHANGED IT FROM 666.
THE PEOPLE FROM CALIFORNIA GET CONFUSED.'

Total distance: 2089mi + 20mi approx. missed turnings, looking for motels, etc.
+ 2mi desultory walking, etc = 2111mi

Time 'on road: 4 x 24 + 1 x 14 = 110hrs -
Time sleeping: 8 x 4 = 32hrs +
Time site-seeing: 4 x 5 = 20hrs +
Time eating/drinking: 3 x 5 = 15hrs +
Time watching TV in motel, etc.: 1 x 4 = 4hrs +
Time at gas stations, etc.: 10 x 8mins = 1hr 20min +
Beaver Pi-stop: = 0hr 40min +
TOTAL: = 73 hrs

Total time spent in motion: 110 - 73 = 37hrs
Avg rate of travel = 2111mi/37hrs = 57.054054054 mph

JAMES BENNING FILM LOCATIONS SIGHTED EN ROUTE:
(a) Sogobi, shot 33 (2001): Hwy 14 with San Andreas Fault exposed;
(b) Utopia (1998) (ruins of Llano, socialist community, Pear Blossom
Hwy 138);
(c) Deseret (1995) (tree adjacent to Mountain Meadows Monument);
(d) El Valley Centro, shot 14 (1999): not a location but Nora Hunt
is shown tying three goats at a rodeo in Coalinga;
(e) Deseret (mountains, Bryce Canyon);
(f) Deseret ('aeriel' shot of canyons from road, Escalante
National Monument);
(g) Deseret (aspen forest, Box Hollow Wilderness);
(h) Deseret (Capitol Dome, Capitol Reef National Park);
(i) Deseret (dirt hillocks, Hwy 24);
(j) Deseret (Factory Butte, Hwy 24);
(k) Four Corners, Part 3 (1997), (Indian pictographs (colour));
(l) Deseret (Indian pictographs (b&w));
(m) Deseret (Crystal Geyser, nr Greenriver);
(n) Deseret (petroglyphs, Sego Cyn);
(o) Deseret (earth-moving equipment, Bingham Cyn Copper mine);
(p) 13 Lakes (forthcoming; view of Fremont Island from Antelope Island,
Salt Lake);
(q) Deseret (Brigham City neon sign, Brigham City);
(r) Deseret (ShopCo supermarket, Brigham City);
(s) North on Evers (1991; actually Commercial Jetty 1/4mi S Spiral Jetty);
(t) Deseret (red Salt Lake water adjacent to Spiral Jetty, Rozel Pt);
(u) Deseret (Golden Spike Monument, Promontory Pass);
(v) Deseret (polygamists' family homes, Colorado City);
(w) Deseret (mountains, Zion National Park);
(x) Deseret (abandoned church and house, Grafton);
(y) Sogobi, shot 13: billboard 'AVAILABLE', Outdoor Systems, Inc.;
(z) Sogobi, shot 33: Hwy 14 with San Andreas Fault exposed.

PART TWO: TRAVELOGORRHEA
(recorded in-car conversation)

Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are
talking about, or whether what we are saying is true.
- Bertrand Russell

DAY ONE: Saturday 07/26/03
JB: I went out to 29 Palms a couple of years back to see the Douglas Gordon
piece. He'd built a screen out in the desert and he was projecting The
Searchers at a speed that would have taken 7 years to run right through. The
projection started at dusk. The nice thing about it is the film plays day and
night and, of course, you can't see it during the day, because it's too bright
and then, as the sun sets, the image kind of fades in like a Polaroid and
there's a marvellous point where the blue in the sky starts to blend in with
the top of the film frame so there's this moment where the top of the screen
disappears into the landscape and as it gets darker, of course, the image
asserts itself and the colours get brighter and the image gets more distinct
and recognisable. Each frame is on the screen for 7 1/2 minutes, and because
it's been digitised you don't even see any movement from one frame to the next
- it just clicks ahead to the next image and the movement is so slight that
one doesn't even register the change. So it started with a close-up of John
Wayne's face and Wayne was talking so I watched it for the first 2 hours which
gives you only a half a second of the film and during that time his mouth
moves very slightly. And after a while everybody else went off to see The
Searchers projected at normal speed at the local drive-in theatre, which was
part of the event. But I stayed around becauseI thought it was more
interesting to see this and I was out there for a couple more hours and
eventually it got completely dark and it was about 10 at night and I was
sitting there on my own and a boy of about 11 or 12 came by and he stood
around for a minute, looking up at the screen then across at me and then he
asked me: 'How long have you been watching?' And I said: 'Oh, about
4 hours.' And he said: 'Aren'tcha bored?' And I said: 'No, no. Sit down and
look at the screen. See that piece of dust up there in the top left-hand
corner? In exactly, er, 3 minutes and 15 seconds that dust is gonna disappear.'
So he sat down and he looked at the screen and as 3 minutes came I said:
'OK. Get ready', and 15 seconds later the next frame came up and the dust
disappeared. And he goes: 'Oh man! That's so cool!' And he started to watch
intently and he asked me: 'What's gonna happen next?' And I said: 'Well, they're
up for 7 and 1/2 minutes so what do you think is gonna change inside the frame?'
And we watched a frame or two and saw how John Wayne's lips curled out a little
bit more because he's talking. So after a while he started to tell me about his
life and how he was into skateboarding and what he thought of school and then
he got up and he did some shadow play with the piece. He got in front of the
projector and put his shadow on the screen and did stuff like he began picking
John Wayne's nose and after doing that for a while he came back and sat down
and we watched some more and all of a sudden he'd been there a coupla hours
and I said to him: 'Aren'tcha bored?' and he said: 'No way! This is great!'.
So the next day I saw Douglas Gordon and we were talking and I told him
this story and he said, 'So that's your role in life - to go around making
structuralists out of people'.

DAY TWO: Sunday 07/27/03
DH: So why do you go on working in 16mm when everybody else is going digital?

JB: Well the things I don't like about digital are that it doesn't project
well, you never get to handle the material. And I've been using 16mm for so
long it's become integral to the way I work. Digital doesn't have the same
kind of built-in limitations I'm used to that help me to create structure.
When you're editing on digital you can hop around and grab footage very fast
from here and there, whereas if you're working with analog and you want to get
at something that's 20 feet in you have to watch or listen to that twenty feet
first to get to that point so you get to know your footage so much better..
You have to be clear about what you're doing with 16mm - if you're indecisive
with the edit you can end up with twenty splices in a row which makes it hard
to watch. I don't have that problem so much these days because I use longer
takes...

DH: Was that why you developed a preference for long takes?

JB: Not really. I like the idea of focusing attention for a longer period on
what's happening inside the frame. Even if there's nothing happening, say,
you can't show nothing happening by looking at something for 5 seconds. It's
more convincing (with regard to nothing happening) to
see that the wind doesn't blow for 10 minutes than that it doesn't blow for 3
seconds..

DH: Since the mid-1990s you keep coming back to Utah in your films. What is it
that's so compelling for you about Utah?

JB: I came through here first in 1989 on the motorcycle trip I revisited for
North on Evers but I really became fascinated with Utah when I began
researching the history of the Mormons for Deseret which is the original
Mormon name for the State - the original working title for the film by the
way was Angry White Men - and then when I started coming up here and I left
the 15 behind and began driving the back roads I was just amazed at how
beautiful and varied the landscape is.

DH: How did you go about structuring the material for Deseret?

JB: Deseret is organised around 93 stories about Utah that appeared in The
New York Times over a 150-year period from 1852 to 1992. They're read on to
the soundtrack over shots I made during 9 trips to Utah over an 18-month
period from 1992-94. ... I didn't want to establish a one-on-one text-image
relationship, cutting the text to the scene. I'd jump from spring in the
mountains to winter in the desert, but I had this rule that I had to include
one shot that's linked directly to each story that coincides with that story
as it's narrated on the soundtrack. ... So, for instance, yesterday the still
I took of the tree in the field next to the Mountain Meadows Monument is one
of a series of different shots that appears on the screen when you hear the
report of the massacre in the film. It's the only direct visual link to the
massacre site... Another structuring rule was that the length of each shot is
determined by the length of each sentence on the soundtrack. So with the
earlier texts from the 1800s when the sentences are very elaborate with
clauses that go on and on, the shots are longer and the pace is slower. As we
come up towards the present and the language gets shorter and shorter the pace
of the shots accelerates.. So in this case, the device functions to speed up
the film.. I also had one extra shot to mark the end of each paragraph of text
and I shrink that in-between shot by 3 frames each paragraph so whereas the
first shot between paragraphs is 30 seconds long, after 90-some shots the
transitional shot lasts only about 10 seconds. It became clear as I was
working on Deseret that the film is as much about journalism and language as
it is about Utah and the landscape. It's concerned with the distance between
The New York Times and the Mormon settlers, and how that relationship changes
over time. So though the Mountain Meadows Massacre took place in September
(09/11/1857) it doesn't even get mentioned as news in The Times till November.
And of course the gap closes as communication technologies develop. In the
1850s and early 60s, when the federal government was preparing to declare war
on Utah, many of the stories were written by people who weren't living here,
just passing through. They're based on anti-Mormon prejudice. There's a story
from The Times I use for instance, about the Mormons holding slaves which is
false. Today the physical distance is still there, of course, but it doesn't
have the same effects or the same meanings... Utah today is totally integrated
into America, at least economically. In many ways it's the model corporate
capitalist state: its conservative... patriarchal... very orderly. It's prospered
from mining, the chemical industry... finance... weapons development... and in the
last 10 years or so, from nature tourism. It's got suburban sprawl all down
the 15 corridor... Deseret's structure was composed to deal with all those
historical issues and, I think, it works...

DH: I only saw Deseret once and I thought I was paying attention but I wasn't
conscious of the shot-to-sentence ratio. Does that matter?

JB: When I use a strict structure it takes people a long time to get things
that seem kind of obvious to me, not just because I was the one who made the
film and so pretty much know it inside out, but because they're not used to
thinking in those terms when they're watching a film. The main purpose in setting
up rules for me is it helps me form a structure.

DAY THREE: Monday 07/28/03
DH: When you first see [the pictographs at Horseshoe Cyn] from the trail they
look like a crowd of shadow-people lined up in front of the canyon wall.. At
first it appeared to me like they'd all been drawn around the same time,
from a single point of view.. It's only when you get closer that you see
they'vebeen drawn in completely different styles to completely different
scales... [inaudible] ...at intervals across thousands of years... So instead of
being a more-or-less flat continuous surface the canyon wall suddenly sort of
opens up... becomes almost animate... [inaudible] ...a giant teeming palimpsest...
You're aware of this vast continuity over time in terms of the sacred status
of the place itself... a line of people stretching back through the millennia...
dressed differently, maybe even different heights... from vastly different
times, and cultures... with quite separate and distinct cosmologies... all of
them drawn to this wall and to this act of making marks on the face of the
rock... and you can trace all these modulations and sudden breaks from one
epoch to the next...You're struck by the presence of all that density and depth
in time projectedon a two-dimensional surface..

JB: That's what drew me to the petroglyphs and pictographs for Deseret. The
New York Times prints all these accounts about what's happening in Utah but
there are all these other forms of writing on the land itself... abandoned
industrial landscapes... early Mormon ruins... thegiant earthwork of the
(Bingham Cyn) copper mine... All these other historiesthat are littering the
landscape and telling you things about the past. Andthey're speaking as
clearly as the wall paintings and the petroglyphs do. They're not as old, of
course, but they talk directly about the work, the process of adapting to this
land the same way the petroglyphs and pictographs talk about hunting or
trading, inventories, accounts. When I first saw these paintings it was like
catching arrested movement with the camera - 8,000 years of human history
all concentrated in one place in one frame... So, they have a kind of presence
that speaks directly to me and to the art practice I'm into today: trying to
discover (uncover?) things in my own life and I think that's what they're doing
when they're painting stuff - trying to define their own lives spiritually.

DH: So does the term 'witness' fit more closely with what you're trying to
do in this work than a term like, say, 'observe' or 'document' or 'create'
or 'experiment'?

JB: I think I'm constantly a witness. I think that's what distinguishes good
art from mediocre art - a good artist is someone who has the discipline to
look and listen and that's why last year at CalArts I decided that rather
than try to design an environment in which students get to make
their art, I'd try to teach them how to be artists and I thought the way to
do that was to start at this really basic level - teaching them how to look
and listen so they can develop the discipline to experience time differently,
so they really take time to look at things.

DH: How did you go about doing that?

JB: Well it was a lot like our trip. I took them to places I knew and most of
those places are places I've filmed in so we went to a large oil field in the
Central Valley, the top of a mountain in the Sierras, a homeless encampment in
downtown LA, the docks at San Pedro, Trona, the chemical town in the Mojave
desert. They rode local buses for a day. They rode the Metro to downtown LA.
I told them they couldn't bring tape recorders or cameras so that they
wouldn't be thinking about how to translate what they were seeing and hearing
into some other medium. So there were no assignments for them to make work.
They were simply asked to be aware of what they were seeing and hearing so
that they could have something to say about the experience to the group every
month and at the end of the semester we talked about how the course had
affected the way they looked and listened...

DH: Was it successful?

JB: ...In the past I've had students who liked what I do but I've never had
them moved by the experience because before they were always being moved by
their own experience - they'd be working out of their own concerns. But this
was redefining the whole concept of place and how they could relate to it as
individuals and as artists... [As we drive through a bend in the road] this is
the town of Helper... it's where the railroad goes up a gradient so they had to
provide extra engines to help pull the freight up through the valley...

DAY FOUR: Tuesday 07/29/03
DH: So here's the passage where Smithson describes how he came across the site
(reading aloud):

An expanse of salt flats bordered the lake, and caught in its sediments were
countless bits of wreckage ... this site gave evidence of a succession of
man-made systems mired in abandoned hopes ... About one mile north of the oil
seeps I selected my site ... Under shallow pinkish water is a
network of mud cracks supporting the jigsaw puzzle that composes the salt
flats. As I looked at the site, it reverberated out to the horizons only to
suggest an immobile cyclone while flickering light made the entire landscape
seem to quake. A dormant earthquake spread into the fluttering stillness, into
a spinning sensation without movement. This site was a rotary that enclosed
itself in an immense roundness. From that gyrating space emerged the
possibility of the Spiral Jetty. No ideas, no concepts, no systems, no
structures, no abstractions could hold themselves together in the actuality
of that evidence. My dialectics of site and non-site whirled into an
indeterminate state, where solid and liquid lost themselves in each other. It
was as if the mainland oscillated with waves and pulsations, and the lake
remained rock still. The shore of the lake became the edge of the sun, a
boiling curve, an explosion rising into a fiery prominence. Matter collapsing
into the lake mirrored in the shape of a spiral. No sense wondering about
classification and categories, there were none... ²

And here's you in North on Evers retracing the trip you made to Spiral Jetty
in 1989 (reading out loud):

The next day I decided to look for the Spiral Jetty, built in 1970 by Robert
Smithson. I remembered that it was somewhere off Rozel Point in Great Salt
Lake. Smithson described the salt flats in his writings. Caught in their
sediments were countless bits of wreckage. He said that the site gave evidence
of a succession of man-made systems mired in abandoned hopes. I went down
smallgravel roads trying to find Rozel Point, but they either turned the wrong
way or disappeared into wheat fields. After four hours I finally found a
series of private roads that led towards the lake. The last road was chained
off. I parked and walked the last three miles. The Spiral Jetty is a 1,500-foot
coil, 15 feet wide. I couldn't see it anywhere. Then I found it two feet under
water. The lake had risen since it was built. I walked the spiral to its end.
I stood there in the salt water. There was no one in any direction. Salt
crystals cut at my feet.I suppose, in a way, my trip ended there at the end
of the spiral. I stared into space. A kind of dizziness overtook my body. I
was hot and dehydrated. I had no water. I thought about the secrets of
survival that were shared by the desert life around me. For a brief moment I
thought this to be the end, that I would quietly succumb to my desolation.
I walked slowly back under a scorching sun...³

JB: Yeah. And when I got back to where I'd left my bike the starter motor was
acting up and I knew I'd never be able to get up enough speed for a running
start in all that sand. I thought I was going to die...

DH: Like us the other day in Horseshoe Canyon when we lost the trail for a
while and were almost out of water...

JB: Yeah.. except that time I didn't bring any water. I was so excited at finally
getting to see the Jetty it wasn't till I got there I could suddenly see how
hot it was. And it was under water so it took me a long time to find the
outline of the structure... and when I came back to film North on Evers it was
still under water, not exposed like it was today... When I came back I realised
straightaway it wasn't even the Spiral Jetty I'd walked along the first time
but the commercial jetty... you saw how it goes way, way out into the lake and
then kind of curves a little at the end.

DH: So you keep getting drawn back into the spiral.

JB: ...[inaudible]... the Spiral Jetty turns up three times in Deseret. When
it gets noted in 1970 in The New York Times, instead of the Jetty you see the
reddish water at Rozel Point but I've already included a shot of the jetty
earlier in the film as a kind of foreshadowing... the second part of Deseret,
which is in colour, folds back on the first (b&w) half. It sort of spirals in
on itself. And that exposes the structure of the film: the way it speeds up
as the language gets shorter like the spirals of the jetty getting shorter
and shorter as they curl in towards the centre..

DH: So is the Spiral Jetty a key to that film or is it the key to all your
films?

JB: Especially that film, but maybe it's the key to all of them.. Of course the
Spiral Smithson made isn't the Golden Spiral which is what you find
in nature - in salt crystals and sea shells - because you can't even draw that,
let alone build it as a jetty 15-feet wide because a line - any line - is too thick
which is why in physics and math a line doesn't have any thickness - you have
to think of a line as a series of points that are dimensionless. The Golden Spiral
fits into the Golden Rectangle because it's a series of quarter circles with the
radius of each quarter getting smaller and smaller. So the spiral is actually
a quarter circle that fits into a quadrant of the Rectangle.. then you fit
another circle under that, but with a smaller radius, and another under that
one, and so on, and so on to infinity, and the radius decreases by the same
percentage every time and that percentage is part of the Golden Mean. The
Golden Mean is 1.618033988749894 dot dot dot, and the radius of the spiral
reduces by point 6180339 dot dot dot, that's approximately a 62% reduction
each time as the radius gets smaller and smaller and... [end of tape].

DAY FIVE: Wednesday 07/30/03
JB: ...I think that montage cutting came out of a need to manipulate time, to
condense time yet also to extend it... but in the end what I'd like to think is it
really came from a fear of boredom. At this stage in my work, I'm more interested
in conveying what happens in a frame in a place over a particular period of time.
The shot of the tree in the fog in Sogobi (shot 16, blue oak, Temblor Range,
Los Padres National Forest), where there's no movement whatsoever, goes very
fast for me. I used to think the way you perceive time is a function of how
much movement there is in the shot but maybe it's really a function of
pleasure... It's a question of scale - a scale of time - like when we were
coming back through Horseshoe Canyon and we got so dehydrated and it was
taking so long, we couldn't judge how far away the canyon wall was, or how
far it was back to the car.

DH: I couldn't see.. the sun block was stinging my eyes so much I could barely
see my hand held out in front of me... I come all this way to see these
pictographs and I'm reeling... stumbling around like a blind man with a stick
squinting sideways through one eye up the cliff face... and then [when] I saw
them..........................................................................
..............................................................................
..............................................................................
JB: Distance is a function of time... d=rt (distance = rate time).............
..............................................................................
(PERSONAL STUFF)..............................................................
..............................................................................
.........(SILENCE)..............................(OTHER STUFF: see below)......

Other Topics Discussed in Car: childhood memories... trauma... sex... (death)...
drugs... (death)... love... Bob Dylan... Lucinda Williams... Julie Christie...
Mose Tolliver... Bill Traylor... Michael Snow... Willem Dafoe... Nancy
Holt... Goshogaoka... the Cuban revolution... (death)... diaries...
self-disclosure.
...
puzzles... proofs... the number 13... prime numbers... asymmetery... guilt...
desire... (death)... promiscuity... monogamy... polygamy... celibacy...
prison... possum hunting... the Beaver Trilogy... Antonioni... Polanski...
(death)... Ed Gein... Medgar Evers... Laurie Bembenek... Arthur Bremer...
architecture... early TV... 'adult' vs. 'senior' as categories e.g. 'adult
book store' vs. 'senior-gated community'... solipsism... solitude... housing...

PART THREE: TRAVAILOGUE

This is the town of Helper where the railroad goes up a gradient so they had
to provide extra engines to help pull the freight up through the valley. Joe
Louis had a training camp in the 30s in the mountains up there above the town.
... I photographed the old brick buildings... they were originally the homes of
hard rock miners...
- James Benning

DAY AFTER: thursday 07/31/03
watch: vt About 1200 wacchen developed from O.E waeccan keep watch, be awake-n
Before 1200 waecce a watching, vigil from waeccan to watch. The meaning of
small timepiece (1588) is related to that of a clock to wake up sleepers
(1448). (Oxford Dictionary of Etymology)

In November 2002 a three-man camera crew headed by Reinhard Wulf (camera:
Jurgen Behrens; sound: Gunter Kunze) followed JB on a road trip from Val
Verde to Utah shooting footage for an 83min 56sec documentary on his work
entitled Circling the Image. The documentary aired in January of this year on
Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR TV) in Germany (estimated number of households
reached: 100, 000). I put the video JB handed to me as I was about to leave
his place last night into the VHS machine and watch.

I watch as JB opens the door of the 68 Nova (not the vehicle I've just spent
30-some hours in) and sets off once more along many of the same roads we've
just been on (Hwys 12, 14, 24, 58, 138). Having travelled this route in the
first person (singular and plural) I now get to do it all over again, one
day later, this time in the third, although the filmic syntax unfolds without
the 'series of standstills' (Robert Smithson) - Mountain Meadows, Horseshoe
Cyn, Bingham Cyn, Copper Mine, Antelope Island, Spiral Jetty - that punctuated
(structured) the sequence traced out on our trip in Parts I and II. Then, just
S of Hanksville, the two itineraries diverge: the camera crew heads S down the
95 in the direction of Lake Powell.

JB is about to make a shot for 13 Lakes (13 X 10 = 130min; forthcoming).

On the video I watch JB looking down through railings sunk into a concrete
bulwark adjacent to a busy highway at an expanse of water as, via voice-over,
he explains that Lake Powell (with a shoreline longer than the California
coast) sits in a canyon filled with water diverted for irrigation and
electricity-generating purposes from the Colorado River. I watch him setting
up the camera on its tripod which is balanced precariously on a low spur of
rock jutting out into the lake - light dancing on its agitated surface,
mountains in the distance. JB looks through the viewfinder then strides off as
soon as the camera starts to roll to crouch on a rock about 10 feet away.
Framed in medium-long shot, he appears completely preoccupied yet utterly
present and focused on the scene, turned in upon himself with that
disconcerting inwardness blind people evince when the sighted encounter them
unexpectedly on a busy sidewalk and, mortified at the prospect of collision
with something so monstrous, step smartly aside - horrified, ashamed,
apologetic - as the blind crash forward ineluctably in a straight line
through the invisible light slashing the air in an arc left and right with
a stick. JB cups his ears in a gesture I have seen many times in the past
five days, his signature gesture every time he undertakes an audit of a site
- only this time his hands are cupped over headphones attached to the Nagra
reel-to-reel he's used on every film-shoot since 1971.

We see the finished shot. We see how, almost immediately as JB steps away
from the camera, a large white tour boat, its presence masked till now by
a dark rock outcropping on the right, suddenly powers across the shot from
right to left. The remainder of the shot documents the trauma following this
white incision along the horizon-line, as the light crashes in at all angles
past the scudding clouds, colliding with a heaving wake that appears to be
converging directly on the camera. The lapping on the soundtrack approaches
hurricane-tossed-sea proportions. We pull back to the German crew's camera
position again as JB hops from rock to rock, at times almost ankle deep in
water, as he methodically sets about averting one small disaster after the
next, orchestrating order out of chaos - lifting the boom just in time out
of the path of an impending wave with one hand, steadying the tripod with
the other. He somehow contrives to remain implausibly, implacably composed
throughout, as if he had expected this to happen... like an actor deadpanning
through some slapstick Armageddon in a silent comedy... as if Buster Keaton
were suddenly to burst out of the gate on the back of a bull at the Panguitch
rodeo and, against all odds and every law of physics, stay upright and aloft
for a full 10 minutes:

JB (voice over): I find the frame and I turn the camera on and I hope the
light is going to change within the shot... at (the optimum) rate... and that
I'll be able to capture that. I'm never quite sure what the timing will be.
And I'm not sure if a boat's going to come or if something's going to occur
or a plane's going to fly over. When you study things and really work hard
and keep working and putting your camera in certain places, eventually those
things happen. It's because of hard work not because of the fortuitous nature
of it... I think you set up situations to capture the fortuitous.⁴

The paradox of framing in advance by dint of labour, the unforeseen event lies
at the heart of what is at once most rigorous and, in a quite literal sense,
most magical about JB's practice (as if magic were not itself the very fruit
and episteme of the rigorously trained focus). I cannot, for instance, explain
how it came to pass that precisely half way through Reeling In Utah in the
late morning of our third day on the road, just as JB was explaining how
cathexis onto place can lead to a refinement of the Self (i.e. to ego loss),
as he concluded his description of a class he'd taught the previous semester
at CalArts devoted to facilitating the development of mindfulness in students,
we should, at that very moment, be driving past a town that just happens to be
named Helper.

No doubt a single word - 'uncanny' - will square away all loose ends for those
who, like myself, seem constitutionally incapable of following even the
simplest demonstration of probability theory just as citations from the
medical literature on the effects of dehydration and sunstroke could probably
explain away to the satisfaction of most readers the weird synchronicities
and sensory distortions that played back and forth between JB and me as we
walked across the sand that afternoon threading our way between the creosote
bushes and the sagebrush in the long defunct arroyo at the base of Horseshoe
Canyon the preceding day. At one point I lay on a boulder in the shadow of a
vast cathedral-like concave hollow in the rock that JB, on an earlier visit,
had, in deference to its resonant qualities, dubbed 'the Ear', holding a
conversation without raising my voice with JB who sat on a rock 100 yards
farther down the trail. And later, as I saw the painted figures moving through
the cliff face and the rock 'support' itself appeared to come to life, I felt
a sudden gust of hot moist air upon my face and remarked to JB on the return
hike that I kept thinking I could smell in the air around me human breath
(he said to him it smelled more like the breath of a cat) as we walked slowly
in the blistering stillness back up towards the mouth of the canyon.

But these fortuities hardly came from nowhere. They proceeded like the
mining/railroad town of Helper itself and the pictographs in Horseshoe
Canyon, as JB puts it, from particular histories, as the products of the
concentrated application, sustained over time, of human energy and labour,
including most immediately and most poignantly with regard to the fortuitous
effects just cited, JB's own prodigious investment in the production through
hard labour and strictly rule-bound play of intense and troubling Truth
(from OE treowth: faithful, constant), his unrelenting dedication to his
project.

The uncanniness that infuses so much of JB's work is nothing more (though
also nothing less) than the materialised by-product (the 'pay-off' one
might say) of a logically derived, meticulously crafted system operating
at optimum efficiency and to maximum effect on a thoroughly researched field,
precisely marked-out in advance. (JB: 'I don't think of the camera as an
extension of my eye. I don't have that kind of romance with the camera. I
use it as a precise tool.') the puzzles, keys, numerical convenors and other
organising devices secreted in plain view bind shot to shot and embed the
diagesis in the individual frame while securing the viewer's collaboration
in the work of composition (finding the whole within each part) through a
hermeneutics that brings divination (the associative leap) and reverse
engineering (counting/timing shots) into a complex but harmonious alignment.
(JB: 'I want the audience to be proactive, to participate in the making of
meaning.') And JB's spiritual materialism brings him into a similarly ordered
alignment with that esoteric tradition within mathematics and structuralism
that pulls figures as dissimilar as Pythagoras and Robert Smithson (and e.g.
Godel, Escher, Bach, C.S. Peirce, Saussure [the Saussure, at least, of the
acrostics and the anagrams]) into the 'gyrating space' (Smithson) where
formal logic's logic fails to hold: the primes, the 'irrational' numbers,
incompletion, what Smithson calls the 'surd', the entropic principle toward
which so much of Smithson's work, and most spectacularly Spiral Jetty, was
ostensibly directed.

Truth capitalised a second time, unmarked, hence less contentious when
positioned at the opening of a sentence (an iteration that underscores the
primacy of syntax in the ordering of things; the arranging in a sequence,
the assumption of command) circles back upon itself in the figure of the
Ouroboros;⁵ the snake devouring its own tail, another variation on the
Golden Spiral spinning ever outwards like the rapacious, neatly terraced
abyss of the Bingham Canyon Copper Mine that turns also at the same time in
the opposite direction back and down and inwards to the source), the letter
K for 'Kennecott', the astral number 7 (the marks of ownership inserted by
the self-appointed Lords of Earth and Outer Space - the copper mining
corporation... the 'original' team of US astronauts) in the circle at the
centre of the ankh, for instance.

The empty spool picks up the leader as the mechanism snaps into position
and the film snakes backwards through the gate.

JB: I chose 2 1/2 minutes as the shot length for the California Trilogy
because that's the duration of 100ft of 16mm film so the material dictated the
length of the shots. A roll is actually 2mins and 47secs and that allowed me
to slide the shots. I could either cut the tail or head, and adjust the timing
slightly. 35 shots X 2 1/2 = 87 1/2 mins. And that leaves 2 1/2mins exactly
for the credits. I was interested in seeing what activities take place in that
2 1/2mins time period... It's the time it takes a rodeo champion to tie up 3
goats, a cotton-picker to traverse half a field and an empty goods train to
pass straight through the shot.⁶

8 1/2 X 11, 11 X 14, 13 X 10, 35 X 2 1/2: ... the running of the numbers as
they pass beneath the gate, the murmur of the measure that runs back against
the this-then-this-then-this of forward-facing narrative declensions is the
unifying factor in all of JB's work. It is the signature that binds together
the early narrative experiments (e.g. 8 1/2 X 11 (1974), 11 X 14 (1976)) to
the non-fiction noirs (e.g. Landscape Suicide (1986), Used Innocence (1988))
to the masculine confessionals and auto-bio essays (e.g. American Dreams
(1984), North On Evers (1991)) to the lengthy cycle of landscape/place
portrait films (Deseret, Four Corners, Utopia, California Trilogy, 13 Lakes).

Like a journeyman carpenter, a skilled craftsman in an age of prefabricated
furniture, JB is at home when working on the road, carrying his own tools to
the site (camera, tripod, audio recorder, reading glasses, watch), building
each project 'on the plank' (as they used to say in the London furniture
trade) out of raw local timber (the travel logs): the meticulous research
squared away out of sight (the frame around the frame) in the quiet execution
of the piece.

But this analogy, of course, like all analogies, is productive only to a
point: a film, after all, is not a piece of furniture, its utility is less
immediately apparent... and the journeyman carpenter, unlike the migrant
field worker, is today a rare, archaic specimen, a residual trace left over
from another epoch. Throughout the process of production, number functions
in JB's obsessive and ceaselessly inventive time-based calculations as the
medium for a mind idling in neutral when the rest of the world is compelled
at every turn to get in gear and get straight back to work.

In the hunt for origins and early influences bearing down on JB's oeuvre,
critics and reviewers through the years have cited inter alia North American
experimental filmmakers (Brakhage, Warhol, Snow), non-US art-house filmmakers
(Antonioni, Ozu) and painters (Edward Hopper, Mondrian, Johns). One neglected
candidate for the title of Prime Mover in this regard is the drill press, the
machine JB operated when he worked for 9 months in a factory in Milwaukee in
1963 before graduating with a BSc in mathematics from the University of
Wisconsin a few years later. As with many of JB's films, I have never seen
Time and a Half (1971), but by JB's own account it is a conventional narrative
short (17 mins long) with a single actor recapitulating JB's role in the same
factory 8 years later:

What I remember of working as a drill-press operator is that it was boring and
the speed of the machine regulated you. You'd get bored and try to daydream
but the lengths of the daydreams were dictated by the machine. It's dangerous
- if you stick your hand in at the wrong time you put a drill through it. So
you have to have short thoughts and get back to work. I put that in the
film....⁷

'[S]hort thoughts', like 60 X 60 second shots (the structure of One Way Boogie
Woogie (1977), JB's more famous Milwaukee smokestack film). The length of the
shots in JB's work increases exponentially in direct ratio to his distance
from the drill-press bench. (JB: Maybe my next film will be one 24-hour shot).
'Time-and-a-half' is of course, the designation of an overtime rate: a brutal
reminder of the calculated value of a human life (with an additional 0.5
['double time'] available in some cases for those prepared to work public
holidays):

My pay was $1.66666... per hour with time-and-a-half for anything over 40
hours. Since I worked 55 hours a week, tat is 10 hours a day Monday through
Friday and five hours on Saturday, in the winter months I only saw the sun on
Saturday afternoons and Sundays.
My pay was:
40 hours @ $1.6666... = $66.66666666....
15 hours @ $2.50 = $37. 50
TOTAL = $104.1666666....

Which, rounded off to $104.67 gross pay with 20% withheld for taxes, leaves my
take-home pay for 55 hours at $83.33.⁸

Time-and-a-half = a reminder, too, that in the factory, as in the prison (see
Fifty Years To Life - 8 scripts by James Benning, Two Pants Press, 1998; and,
especially, Used Innocence), the (wandering) Mind can prove a dangerous
liability, can put a drill bit through a hand, that you are here to 'do' your
time (not 'spend' it), that every day counts (against you).

I just drifted. Running from a storm or toward some desire. Perhaps in a
desperate attempt to outdistance my anxiety or to deny the murmur of
advancing age.⁹

POST-SCRIPT: ABANDONED HOPES
(MACHINE LANGUAGE)

I spend the evening jotting down recollected scenes from/for Reeling in Utah:

SPIRAL JETTY
Arrive at SJ around 8:45 am. Jetty now fully exposed - pure-white salt-like
snow spiral in Alaska. 2 guys + 1 girl in SUV right behind us. While JB gets
camera, tripod, etc., I watch as the 2 guys strip naked & walk to end of
Jetty. Girl photographs. Tells me 1 guy is her brother & is studying Art in
NYC. They leave. JB and I take photos of each other as RS walking on Jetty
though have to switch from southern edge of outer loop to northern due to
position of sun + wind on water. Take more photos using disposable panoramic.
1hr later 2 more visitors + cameras. JB says he's always been alone at SJ
before. Dia effect? At current rate roads to SJ will be backed up to Hwy 15 in
1yr.

HURRICANE
No bars in town & no restaurant open so eat pizza + bottle of Mesquite wine in
motel rm. Watch bad TV doc on Cuba. Discuss collab. project + JB: Cuba 59 - 59
X 59sec shots of Cuba. JB says shot lgth shd. be at least 3 mins.

COLORADO CITY
C City on Utah/Arizona border: polygamyville. Big unfinished houses + piles of
kids' bikes in yards. Boys in shop-bought clothes. Girls in homemade Victorian
dresses. Sml sad zoo + biblical animals (camels etc.). Go to breakfast place.
Women 1 sde, men the other. X Files episode. Beautiful woman + no makeup, 19th
C ?oor-lgth dress serves JB: 'How man

— Dick Hebdige