MICHAEL LUNDGREN Transfigurations
MICHAEL LUNDGREN Transfigurations
RADIUS BOOKS, SANTA FE
DESERT MUSIC Rebecca Solnit
The “music of the spheres” could not be heard or played on instruments or sung. This phrase described the proportions and movements of the heavenly bodies, which seemed to have a harmony akin to music, a beautiful idea even if it was part of the pre-Copernican scheme of distinct spheres of celestial orbit in an earth-centered universe. Still, there was a kind of silent music in the heavens above for the old European stargazers. And another, less silent kind below for the peoples of the deep desert. For them the land was always music. That the Australian aboriginal peoples had songlines—stories that described the terrain, terrain that gave mnemotic pattern to the ancient tales—is well known. Not so well known is that the Chemehuevi and Southern Paiute of the deep deserts now called Sonoran, Mojave and Great Basin had songs that were maps as well, maps in which the landscape was told as myth, in which culture was irrevocably rooted in place. To know a place was to know who you are, to have a music, and they were
survival maps too, because the people of the desert and the arctic must navigate their unforgiving terrain
rhythms of light and darkness, the uneventful hum of a hot afternoon interrupted by the sudden motion of
by remembrance of subtle variations, small landmarks and signs. The most important song, the Salt Song
an unanticipated animal—these counterpoints of sameness with difference, of pattern with rupture, unfold
about the birds, was sung during the hours of darkness, all night. A woman who married into the
for the traveler.
Chemehuevi recalled that to ask “How does that song go?” means “What is the route it travels?”
You learn to listen: to the newcomer or outsider, at first the desert looks like a place where nothing
The beauty of this place too lies in proportion, harmony and rhythm, a quiet music the traveler learns to
happens, but then you realize that in all the stillness is evidence of every kind of movement from the epic
hear through the eyes and through the years of waiting and seeing and mapping. There is a music to be
slowness of geology to the hot drum of the sun rising and setting and the lengthening shadows that
found here in the rhythms and scales, the long journey through a terrain that seems to be made out of
eventually blanket the land in cool reprieve from the heat; that though you may see mostly evidence of
refrains and repetitions—mile after mile of saguaros on gravelly ground, successions of spiky peaks and
what has died it is only a trace of what grew before it dried out, what lived before it was hunted and
flat expanses—until suddenly the plateau becomes a cliff edge dropping down to a river or a spring creates
devoured and then decayed back into the land or dried up and blew away—here where much comes to life
a tiny, lush garden in the midst of a hundred miles of dryness. Sameness and suddenness, flow and
and motion out in the open and only in the darkness, where rain brings brief carpets of brilliant flowers in
punctuation, both in what’s there and how it’s seen, the long gaze across broad expanses, the closeup, the
expanses that are otherwise almost colorless.
For the peoples of the desert, there was music and story in the terrain itself. And if you give your life to the
The stars are only seen in the darkness that surrounds them, music only heard against a background of
desert, it will give you stories of your own to navigate by. With time you learn to see what is absent: the
silence. The austerity of the desert is also uncountable wealth, a hoard to be sifted through made out of a
spring in the winter, the mountain lion in the devoured stag, the flows of water that carved the dry land, the
particular dust devil, the arc a swallow cut across the sky, the way a shadow pours down over a creosote
bygone feet that walked the path into being, the living in the dead, the movement in the stones. Only with
bush, the sound of small stones underfoot, a morning quiet enough to hear faint breezes across brush, a
time. If you come here seeking something particular you may find only it. Or find nothing. But if you come
night quiet enough to hear your heart, the sudden temperature change from light to shade, the way spilled
seeking the desert it will be given to you in time, if you take care not to get so irrevocably lost that you too
water vanishes instantly, the smells the rain brings out, the constant shift from overwhelming vastness to
become bones out here, but lost enough to find what you did not know you were looking for. It will be
the detail at your feet, the harsh beauty of the terrain unrolling into the distance, the eons recorded in the
given to you as story and music. Ants build an anthill out of gravel sorted for size, and sifted down to the
stones, an endless, ongoing, unfinished list, a wealth so uncountable it takes the world to hold it.
graceful angle of repose, a pile that is to each minute community something of what the Great Pyramid was to Egyptians, a monument of hard work hauling stone, also an accretion, a library of gestures, a music of time in this place of becomings.
TITLE William Jenkins
The picture seeks to seize and immobilize within its own configurations, what it never owned. Cormac McCarthy
Not long ago Mike Lundgren, two others and I were camping in one of the most beautiful Sonoran desert landscapes I have ever encountered. The location was within the Barry M. Goldwater Bombing Range, which contains some of the most pristine desert landscape left in the Southwest. Paradoxically, the presence of the Air Force has protected huge swaths of desert from the ravages of humans. In order to visit, one must watch a video and sign a sheaf of papers absolving the Bureau of Land Management and the Air Force of any responsibility for one’s safety. The video warns, among other things, of the dangers of encountering live ordnance. It also points out repeatedly that there are no rangers, that the dirt roads and two-tracks are not maintained and that visitors are on their own. What it doesn’t reveal is that one may also find deer, antelope, bighorn sheep, desert tortoises, bobcats, mountain lions and a discomforting number of venomous snakes.
On the trip we also found something none of us had ever encountered in the desert before: gnats. We
If these pictures look modernist or even romantic to you, I will not be surprised. Despite the best efforts of
attributed their presence to an unusual May rain, but where they came from remained a mystery. They
theorists, such pictures have never really gone away, except perhaps for a short time, from certain venues.
were relentless. Mike’s solution was to soak a black T-shirt (his dark cloth) in the ice chest and wrap it
But whatever it is modernism has become in this century, it ain’t what it used to be. Edward Weston claimed
about his head, leaving only a slit for his eyes. He resembled a terrorist or a ninja—mythic figures, both. I
that subject matter mattered not. Whether vegetable, rock, landscape or nude it was all just Form. He would
marveled at the convergence of threats: Mike looking dangerous, the desert actually being dangerous, the
not, could not, realize that the nude was a nude woman, that the landscape was a physical, geographical
Air Force whose business is war and, of course, the profound threat to the desert posed by humans.
place. Naturally this was attributable to history, that old foil for assumptions. And Lundgren is subject to
The postmodernists would have had it that this convergence is altogether political, residing solely within ideology. Clearly, there’s a case to be made. But that case fails to account for the uneasy sleep I had several months ago after finding fresh lion scat within 100 yards of camp. Data will tell that well-fed mountain
history as well. He was my student during the zenith of postmodernism when he spoke and wrote incisively in response to Roland Barthes and his offspring. But Mike’s work has grown out of an alternate and littleknown voice in the world of criticism and theory—the early seventies written work of Hollis Frampton:
lions won’t attack humans, and judging from the bighorns I had seen earlier, prey was plentiful. But fear
“It is obvious that historic time, though quite well suited to the needs of matter, is a terrain too sparse to
resides in a different place than reason, even when suppressed by data. The time-worn but still viable word
afford the mind any lasting amusement or sustenance. So we must clear out, stand aside, and enter if we
sublime adheres.
can, the alternate and authentic temporality of ecstasy. I assume that everybody knows what that is.”
Mike, of course, is not one to clear out and stand aside. He knows, as well as anyone I know, that history
which such images affect us. We imagine the fox landing in the water, struggling to swim and, finding no
matters. He knows that the ecstatic—the sublime—cannot exist outside of history. Géricault’s Raft of the
way out, drowning.
Medusa would have little power to move us had the Medusa not been a slave ship.
The meaning of the word image is the same as that of imagination. We do not reach sublimity—or beauty
One fall my son Will, Mike and I were rummaging around an old cowboy camp that’s only used in the
for that matter—by just looking at a picture or listening to music. We get there in our heads. These
spring when the forage is good. The windmill was pumping water to no one, keeping the tanks full. One of
bilaterally symmetrical heads contain, in one hemisphere, history as we imagine it to exist and, in the other,
the tanks had a ladder beside it and Mike climbed to look inside, where he found some animal in the
Frampton’s ecstasy or sublimity or whatever one chooses to call it.
water. Will and Mike rigged up a noose out of fence wire and hauled out a fox, covered with algae. Its skin had peeled back from the teeth—a grotesque visage. But withal, the animal was brilliant emerald green, dazzling in the desert sunlight. While Will dug a grave and Mike hauled out his 4 × 5 (yes, he also works in color), we speculated as to how the fox might have arrived there. Chased by a larger predator? Desperate for a drink and falling? Certainly it wasn’t casual. Mike photographed it because it was dead, because it was grotesque and because it was beautiful. More importantly, he made pictures because of the way in
Examine one of several Lundgren pictures involving deer. This one has been killed by a not especially hungry mountain lion. The lion only ate the middle, juicy, soft parts of the deer. The deer looks at the camera and, by extension, us, with one piercing eye. We are certain that the deer is dead. We infer with good reason that it has been killed by a lion. Yet we feel that the deer is somehow implicating us in this scenario. “You’re next.”
Lundgren’s photographs show a desert defined by absence, specifically the absence of water. The plant and
There are two photographs of the sun and only the sun centered in the frame, one from a very short
animal life, as well as the topography, is determined by minimal rainfall. Traces of past events, which
exposure, one from a very long exposure. In my mind, at the edge of photography’s limitations, these
would be obliterated by vegetation in wetter climates, remain (though often mysteriously) in the desert.
pictures serve to define the boundaries of desert experience. One is either humiliated by the sun’s relentless
The matter of scale is ambiguous. A small arroyo bears a remarkable resemblance to a large canyon if seen
pounding or surrounded by total darkness. Death is everywhere. A tree is done in by the parasitic
from the right perspective. The trail of white marks on the desert floor is a trace of something, but what?
mistletoe. Life is everywhere too, and one is astounded to observe that it persists. An image of a lush
The locations—the Sonoran desert and the Pinacate region of Mexico—are unimaginably hot in summer
Sonoran landscape recedes into the distance while a dead ocotillo activates the foreground. The sequence
and surprisingly cold at night in winter. By day the sun is blinding and oppressive; moonless nights are
in this book begins with a stark, volcanic cinder cone and ends with a similar formation, an anthill.
black. Cormac McCarthy writes of “skylighting,” a scheme by which the viewer lies low and sees simply
Bookends.
by virtue of the starlit sky being slightly less black than non-sky. Lundgren’s pictures reduce the world to the bare essentials with, as he says, “a little push of silver.” A black-on-black picture defines a low hill and a saguaro cactus hovering at the edge of sensitivity. In another, the dying embers of a campfire echo the starlit sky. After all, these are pictures, not places.
UNTITLED (WATER), 2002
CINDER CONE, 2004
UNTITLED, 2004
SUN, 2003
UNTITLED, 2005
UNTITLED, 2003
A DARKENING, 2002
PALO VERDE, 2006
BURN, 2007
TRANSFIGURATION, 2003
UNTITLED (BROKEN), 2004
RIVER BOTTOM, 2004
DUST, 2001
UNTITLED, 2002
UNTITLED (AERIAL), 2002
JUNIPER, 2003
DRAINAGE, 2003
UNTITLED, 2001
BASIN, 2005
DUSK, 2005
DYING EMBERS, 2002
AWAITING ITS PLACE IN THE SKY, 2001
NEST, 2004
ZACATERA, 2005
UNTITLED, 2004
PATH OF WATER, 2003
SIERRA BLANCA, 2004
TRACKING VENUS, 2004
LA CUEVA, 2004
DAWN, 2004
LION’S KILL, 2004
RIVER VALLEY, 2003
TWILIGHT, 2003
UNTITLED, 2003
A POSITIVE HOLE, 2003
LAVA TUBE, 2003
ELK, 2004
PATH OF A STONE, 2003
UNTITLED (MOON), 2002
UNTITLED (ARCHITECTURE), 2002
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