Art Doctor: Honoring Matthew Coolidge and the Center for Land Use Interpretation

At the University of Southern California and in institutions of higher education in America, there is a long-standing tradition of granting honorary degrees to worthy individuals. According to James Freedman, president emeritus of the University of Iowa and Dartmouth College, “In bestowing an honorary degree, a university makes an explicit statement to its students and the world about the qualities of character and attainment it admires most, [celebrating] distinguished and sublime achievement.” At USC, such degrees are awarded to “honor individuals who have distinguished themselves through extraordinary achievements… [and] outstanding contributions to the welfare and development” of their communities. This week, as commencement ceremonies approach I put forth a nominee for an honorary doctoral degree in fine arts at the University of Southern California, my home institution.

The founder and director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), Matthew Coolidge is one of the most prominent figures of contemporary art in America. Since 1994, the CLUI has been active in various regions in the country, examining the use and misuse of the landscape, while forming and maintaining a record that speaks to both our society and the changing environment. According to the official website, “the Center employs a variety of methods to pursue its mission, engaging in research, classification, extrapolation, and exhibition.” Past projects and exhibits range from Emergency States, an examination of small-scale towns made to train police and fire fighters for times of disaster, to The Best Dead Mall in America (pictured below), a photographic survey of an abandoned 800,000 square foot mall in Harvey, Illinois, to Antarctic 1 (pictured above), a look at the infrastructure of Antarctica’s first highway, and Proximity Issue, a series of digital photographs of the barricades that encircle the landmarks of the nation’s capitol after September 11, 2001. For more than a decade, the CLUI has been gathering and distributing vital and often overlooked information regarding humanity’s relationship to its environment. “People don't have all the facts, because how you get those facts is very much under the control of a limited number of people,” explains Coolidge in a 1998 interview. “What ‘The Center’ is doing is about information…. And so, in some ways we are trying to address the issue of the amount of information we are given, and the imbalance and control of information.”

In 1991, Coolidge received his bachelor degree in environmental, film, and contemporary art studies at Boston University. His diversified educational background has allowed him an artistic practice that is informed and unique, defying the boundaries between art, science, publishing and curating. This multidisciplinary quality is one that has been highly celebrated by the USC Roski School of Fine Arts in the past years. In fact, according to the USC Strategic Plan, the university as a whole boasts of its "strong reputation for interdisciplinary research and scholarship." The university's Renaissance Scholars Program, for example, has been honoring bright students,"whose majors and minors are from widely separated fields of study," since May 2000, awarding more than $90,000 each year. In the case of the School of Fine Arts, the most recent additions to the fulltime faculty include Adrea Zittel, whose work combines notions of art, architecture, design and sustainable living, as well as Charlie White and Sharon Lockhart, who move across boundaries of production, film and photography. Coolidge fits perfectly amongst them.

Of course, skeptics may argue that Coolidge’s efforts at the CLUI, which include those of a project director, curator, writer and photographer, cannot be defined as an artistic practice, particularly since the Center, in Coolidge's words, “exists within the institutional realm, [and works] to maintain an apparent neutrality and institutional objectivity.” In contemporary art, however, interdisciplinary boundaries undergo such constant and drastic changes that it becomes difficult and somewhat futile to give much thought to what is and is not art. Despite the institutional feel of Matthew Coolidge’s work, he is indeed a recognized figure in the world of fine arts. Under his direction, the Center has received numerous grants including support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Annenberg Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. Coolidge was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2004 and a media arts fellowship in 2005 from the Rockefeller Foundation and National Media Resources. In 2006, he was awarded the Lucelia Artist Award by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, an honor that has been shared by only five other artists, which include USC’s own Andrea Zittel. In describing him, Smithsonian director Elizabeth Broun states, “Matthew Coolidge represents the qualities that the Lucelia Artist Award seeks to reward–creative innovation and work that dares to address issues relevant in contemporary society.” In granting an honorary degree, USC, too, looks to pay tribute to these qualities.

Indeed, the work of this Los Angeles-based artist is not only exceptional, but of special relevance to the current human condition. Coolidge describes his efforts by noting, “we are really just working with the medium of landscape to explore social, societal, and philosophical issues.” The fundamental goal of the Center is to "increase and diffuse knowledge about how the nation's lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived." It is this unwavering commitment to society and the spread of information across geopolitical barriers that make Matthew Coolidge the perfect candidate to be honored by the University of Southern California. And whom better to pass knowledge and unwavering passion onto than graduating students? I believe that Coolidge's speech will be not only inspiring, but of universal appeal, merging art and science, the unknown and the mundane. It will be an important accomplishment for the University of Southern California to acknowledge Coolidge's distinguished artistic efforts in addressing, saving and honoring our environment. Afterall, a main purpose of the honorary degree is to "elevate the university in the eyes of the world by honoring individuals who are highly regarded for achievements in their respective fields of endeavor."

Art Home and Away: A look at the Past and Present of my Artistic Development

This week, inspired by National Public Radio’s This I Believe program, I will be writing a more personal post, focusing on the core values and beliefs that guide my daily life as well as my chosen profession.

Some years ago, a friend asked me why I was not seeking financial security and going into the family business. “And what business would that be,” I asked laughingly, “that of the Town Sage?” My father was, indeed, the Sage of his town. I remember walking with him in the streets. He had such presence that everyone who passed him could not help but turn around for a second look. We would walk to the baker’s and an old man or a young doctor or a new father would hold his hand and ask him to converse awhile, to hear their troubles. He always did, and always knew what to say, how to ease people’s pain, how to give them hope, how to jolt them out of their paralysis. I remember once he took me to visit a man who had just lost his young son. The grieving father, surrounded by friends and family, wept as though he was determined to weep for as long as he lived. In fact, he had not stopped since the news of his son’s passing. When he looked into my father’s eyes, the pain of the world was in his own two black circles. My father sat before him and began to speak. As the man sobbed, the sage spoke of his own life, of all that he knew, all that he believed. He spoke and spoke until his voice was no longer drowned by the poor man’s sobs. When he finished, there wasn’t a tear amongst us all.

My father believed in the power of self-expression. And this I, too, believe. Though I spent most of my life without him, I was always aware that he was a revolutionary, a man who had sacrificed much of his life for the political well-being of his people. Watching him, I learned that the power to effectively express one’s beliefs and experience is the power to bring about change, to be active in a world marked with passivity. As Pablo Picasso explains, “art is an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy.”

As a child of immigration, my artistic practice is, for me, the ultimate attempt at taking an active role in a life whose direction throughout my early youth was largely decided by states and politicians. In turning to the visual arts, I was in search of an underlying, common language to relay my own experience, while touching on specific facets of the contemporary human condition. As such, my work expresses a deep interest in the investigation and comprehension of space, both literal and metaphoric. In reality, it deals not only with space, but the spaces in between (created by everything from physical barriers to history and national borders,), thereby examining agents responsible for the formation and maintenance of a modern condition. I am drawn to themes concerning the earth in relation to humanity, and more specifically, humanity’s perceived conquest and division of the earth. In the past, I have explored these themes as a macrocosmic view of individual and state endeavors, often adopting specific political and societal practices as foundations for the creation of a body of work.

Each piece often carries with it a strong sense of local and global history, placing my use of the ephemeral in a larger context of time. In a recent exhibition (pictured here), for example, where 3000 lbs of salt recreate, on the gallery floor, a pseudo-topographical map of the continents inspired by satellite images of the Earth at night, the overwhelming spread of light, as well as its absence in select areas of the planet, are indicators of the patterns of human history. Similarly, the history of salt, while enmeshed with the Earth, is a history of civilizations. In its productive form (salt as currency, food and preservation), it is linked to notions of creation and rising nations, while in its destructive form (“salting the land”), it is a cruel force of destruction.

In my practice, I deal with issues such as migration, division and displacement not only on the level of global power structures (creating photographs that manipulate national borders or draw walls through imaginary landscapes) but also on a personal and sensual level (installations that deal with sense memory, nostalgia and movement). After all, as artist/choreographer Yvonne Rainer exclaims in reaction to the horror of media images of the Vietnam War in 1968, it is “the body that remains the enduring reality.” Politics enter my work in the same way that visual aesthetics do; they do so only when detrimental to the experience. I do not look for them. They are both natural derivatives of a particular personal relationship with the world. My aesthetic choices, I have found, are often fueled by my own cultural experience and draw on forms and images that have become moving to one people while enigmatic to others. I strive to present each specific issue as both an insider and an outsider, while conveying a bridge between the two. Each piece, then, functions, at once, esoterically, subconsciously, and exoterically and self-consciously. In that, my works are places for me both to speak and to search.