- Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening
to everyone who's joined us
for this iLecture this evening
here in New York,
or it might be something else
depending where you are.
So thank you for joining us.
I'm delighted to welcome David Maisel
for tonight's i3 Lecture.
And as I recall, David,
I think our paths may well have crossed
somewhere around 2008
when you had just completed
the Library of Dust series.
Before then and certainly since,
you have built an extensive and impressive resume
and I'd like to share some of that with our audience.
So David Maisel was born in New York
and works across photography and video.
He's currently based in San Francisco.
His creative practice is primarily concerned
with the politics and aesthetics
of radically-altered landscapes.
In particular, those environments
that are human-altered
and more specifically,
those spaces that are quarantined
and hidden from view.
The projects are many years in the making
and require detailed research
and careful negotiation with different authorities.
The resulting photographs have been
exhibited widely across the globe,
including at such notable venues as
the National Museum of Natural History
in Washington, D.C.,
the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia,
and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art
in Seoul, South Korea, among others.
He is represented by several galleries,
with his most recent solo exhibitions
being presented by
the Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York
and the Haines Gallery in San Francisco.
He has also been recognized with several awards,
including being named a Guggenheim Fellow
in the Creative Arts in 2018.
For those of you in the audience
who are keen photo book collectors,
you can find his work published
by the likes of Radius Books,
Ivory Press, Nazraini Press, and Steidel.
His work is also represented
in a number of different anthologies and journals.
David's art works can also be found, unsurprisingly,
in something like 35+ museum collections,
including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
the Brooklyn Museum of Art,
Victoria and Albert Museum in London,
and the National Gallery of Art
in Washington, D.C.,
as well as the Museum of Contemporary Photography
in Chicago, and the list goes on.
So David, thank you so much
for making time to join us
for the i3 Lecture program.
It's really good to have you here.
And I shall now hand over to you.
- Thank you, Deborah.
That was a beautiful lovely introduction.
We're really living in this kind of
extraordinary moment,
this exceptional time,
globally with the pandemic,
but also
as we were just discussing
before we got started here,
environmentally, with the drought-induced
season of wildfires
that we experienced here in California
last summer and fall,
and that, no doubt,
we're actually going to be experiencing again.
In fact, we already are experiencing it.
It's very, very early in the season,
but it kind of makes for an apt backdrop
for me to be talking about my work,
which as Deborah said,
focuses on ways that we humans are
changing the environment
and affecting the earth, as well,
as now we see, ourselves.
So I'm going to touch on some early projects today,
but I want to really focus on recent work
I've been making
in the Atacama Desert in Chile,
and another project at Dugway Proving Ground,
which is a massive military installation
in our Great Salt Lake Desert in Utah,
where chemical and biological weapons
are developed and tested.
So, let's begin by looking at a few spreads
from the Proving Ground monograph.
I'll hold it up.
And this came out last year from Radius Books.
And with it,
I'll offer you a quote from
the novel Underworld by Don DeLillo.
"A photograph is a universe of dots.
The grain, the halide,
the little silver things clumped in the emulsion.
Once you get inside a dot,
you gain access to hidden information.
You slide inside the smallest event.
This is what technology does.
It peels back the shadows and makes reality come true."
So Proving Ground is this kind of
panoramic immersion into
the site of Dugway Proving Ground.
It's this kind of...
The idea of it is that it's a kind of
intensification of vision and seeing,
and also just at some point reaching the...
what I kind of feel are
the limits of perception, too.
The Tooele Army Depot.
It's an ammunition storage facility
that houses 42% of the US's
expired chemical weapons.
There were, at the time I made this photograph,
nearly 30 million pounds of aging nerve agents,
like sarin and tabun,
stored in hundreds of igloos at the incinerator.
And then the weapons are burned
and it sends this contaminated ash
over the waters of the Great Salt Lake,
which then is mined for its mineral content.
And so, you know,
this image raised all kinds of alarm bells for me.
And ultimately, it led to my working at the site,
which was the source of many of these chemical weapons.
Dugway Proving Ground,
which is a classified military installation,
one valley to the west of here.
So we'll start looking at this project now.
Proving Ground.
So learning about the transformation
of this landscape into a repository
for toxic weaponry, you know,
brought up all kinds of questions for me.
Like where did these chemical weapons come from?
How does space become militarized?
And thereby off-limits, kind of made to be invisible.
And so I started researching Dugway.
That's about 45 miles southwest of Tooele,
where that army depot is located.
Okay.
So I'll give you a little background about Dugway.
Since its inception in 1942,
during World War II,
it's been devoted to
the development and testing of chemical
and biological weapons and defense programs.
It has this extremely isolated setting
in the Great Salt Lake Desert in Utah.
And it has a scale of some 800,000 acres,
which makes it about
the size of Rhode Island;
actually larger than Rhode Island.
But it also makes it particularly suited
to working with these virulent substances
like anthrax and sarin, plague,
the botulism toxin,
and other chemical and biological agents.
Parts of Dugway are used
in military training exercises
to simulate the terrain of Afghanistan and Iraq.
So you get an idea of what it's like.
But in spite of its massive size,
Dugway remains nearly invisible.
Not only is it located, by necessity,
in this extremely remote area,
but it's also rarely discussed in the media
and almost entirely closed to civilian visitors.
On aeronautical charts
like the one I just showed you,
the militarized airspace of Dugway
is labeled "Restricted R6402A"
and pilots are cautioned
of "special military activity".
So despite these obstacles to access,
or maybe because of them,
I became captivated by the idea
of making photographs there.
But gaining access to Dugway took nearly a decade.
In 2004, a friend of mine
made an initial inquiry to the Pentagon
on my behalf.
And the answer, just a few years after 9/11
and under a George Bush Administration,
was "not now".
Well, "not now" is a lot better of a response
than I anticipated.
So periodically, we would make another inquiry.
And in 2013, under Obama's second term,
I was introduced to James Petro,
the Pentagon's Deputy Assistant Secretary
for Chemical and Biological Defense,
a remarkable human being,
a real humanist,
exactly the kind of person
you would hope would be in that position.
And he advocated on my behalf
and I'm really forever grateful for that.
So, a year later, with his support
and the support of the commander of Dugway, Colonel Fizer,
I was allowed to start to work there.
So, every site I've been permitted to photograph
at Dugway has been highly vetted
by layers of military personnel,
except, actually, this one
that I've been showing you.
But I'm generally accompanied by
at least one,
if not two or three military representatives,
even when I'm making aerial pictures.
But I've really been granted this kind of
extraordinary degree of access
to work in zones that are basically
usually restricted from civilian view.
So this structure
that I've been showing you repeatedly,
it's called the Air Force Targeting Grid Building,
and it has a very specific function.
It and its shadow are designed to be seen from above
by Air Force pilots
as they make their way
over Dugway in fighter jets at extremely high speed
en route to the Utah Test and Training Range,
which is sort of right over the hills in this image.
So basically the building and its shadow,
are a marker set into the vast desert landscape.
And that's the reason for it
having this kind of distinctive saw-toothed form.
And as the project developed,
it kind of became an investigation
into not just what happens at Dugway,
but also into some of the basic structural elements
of photography as a medium.
Things like abstraction and surreality
and sequencing and gridding and framing.
The building up of these related components,
basically interlocked formal devices
of Modernism that are also,
as you'll see, rather strangely deployed
into the terrain and build structure at Dugway
to become kind of measuring devices
for weaponry and testing systems.
And here...
and then we'll look at some of these
open air sites of weapon-testing grids
from an aerial view,
and in the center of the image
is that same building,
and you can see that kind of ziggurat profile.
And I made the decision to grid,
to sort of over-grid
each of these aerial images into nine parts,
this 3-by-3 grid.
And so this kind of overlay
of this rectilinear grid
suggests mapping and this kind of cartographic urge
for clarity and order and objectivity.
But those are conditions that I think
can be approached,
but never really fully achieved.
So it's that sort of push and pull
between those two things.
But looking down from above
shows these colossal weapons-testing sites
that are carved into the land,
these kind of nested circles and crosshatch grids
as though, the writer Geoff Manaugh suggested,
'The abstract drawings
of Agnes Martin or Sol LeWitt
have been taken to a dangerous and poisonous extreme.'
So the gridded landscape
becomes a measuring device
against which dispersal rates
and toxicity levels
and threats to the human body are measured.
So I'm printing these images...
Actually, in this instance,
I'm not making these prints myself.
I'm working with a lab.
We're printing them directly onto aluminum
in a dye-sublimation process.
So each element of the grid,
each of those squares, becomes 40-by-40 inches.
And so the overall dimensions of these prints,
these works are about 10-by-10 feet
and they're comprised of nine separate pieces.
And I wanted them, as I suggested earlier,
I wanted them to be really immersive and abstracted.
And the metallic prints
have this kind of subtly shimmering quality,
almost like a graphite drawing.
These are installation shots from a solo show,
Proving Ground,
that was mounted at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum
in fall of 2019.
And the museum, which is in the same state as Dugway,
was really, I think,
very adventurous to mount this show.
Thanks to the director
and Chief Curator Katie Lee-Koven.
The museum also became a co-publisher
of the Radius book Monograph,
and they organized some
pretty intense public programming,
including a panel with me,
the environmental writer Terry Tempest Williams,
who's kind of a personal hero of mine,
and also Vincent Liddiard, the Chief of Staff of Dugway.
So we had some pretty heated debates
about the environmental issues
that are raised by Dugway's
release of toxins into the air.
So I began this project,
Desolation Desert, in 2018
with the support of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
And here I'm bringing my focus
to the vast territory of Chile's Atacama Desert.
The Atacama is the highest and driest desert
on the planet.
It's huge.
It's something like 41,000 square miles.
Makes it about a quarter of the size
of the state of California.
And it's really quite remote.
And here we're looking at these
isolated standing rocks
that are the result of volcanic activity
from millions of years ago.
They seem like sentinels,
kind of guarding the landscape.
They're called the Monks of the Piccata,
which is the geographic area in which they're located.
But I'm kind of showing them
really to give you context
for what is the crux of Desolation Desert,
which I'm examining again,
from an aerial perspective,
these massive, massive mining operations
that are transforming this remote
and highly sensitive eco-region of the Atacama
into basically an industrialized space.
The desert is becoming this kind of
dynamically mutating arena of mineral extraction.
It's kind of like what we might think of
as an operational landscape,
or to use the term I mentioned earlier,
a synthetic landscape.
And the transformation is occurring at
this unparalleled scale and pace.
And the earth is being kind of
systematically industrialized
and commodified and infrastructuralized and
interconnected in order to serve this function.
And the function is
to extract two specific minerals,
which are critical to contemporary life.
The first being lithium.
And that's what we've been seeing here
in this image and the prior ones.
So lithium has these unique properties.
It's the lightest of all metals.
It's heat resistant.
And essentially, it can store
substantial amounts of energy in batteries
for computers and cell phones and cars,
electric cars, right?
And so it's really fueled this
kind of global rush to extract it
from hard rock minerals and brines.
And actually, soon it'll be happening
in California and Nevada as well.
But in the past decade,
there's been this surge in demand
and surge in lithium mining
in order to supply it for our iPhones
and our cars, and our Mac books.
And that was really just
imperiling the environment of the Atacama.
And so as a result of this rising demand,
lithium prices have nearly tripled
in the past three years.
And of course,
such demand will just increase
as electric cars become more common.
And so for perspective,
one version of the Tesla,
the Tesla X, runs on a battery
with 140 pounds of lithium compounds.
And that's the equivalent
of what is found in about 10,000 cell phones.
One car.
So the Atacama now contains
this kind of complicated and
sort of contradictory series of developments.
The energy supplied by lithium
is promoted as environmentally-friendly.
An environmentally-friendly alternative
to fossil fuels
and the industries that extract and refine them.
But these mining operations in the Atacama, also...
They're showing this process
of desert urbanization, right?
And we're shifting, largely shifting,
the burden of energy production
onto these kind of sacrificial landscapes
in the Southern Hemisphere.
And then this is the last image,
and then I'm going to draw to a close.
This was the final site
that I photographed in the Atacama.
And it was the most remote location
at the highest elevation.
I was really struggling to catch my breath
and to make work.
Also, there was severe turbulence in the plane,
but anyway, it's the Chuquicamata Copper Mine.
It's one of the world's
largest and most profitable copper mines.
It's also a primary source
of the Guggenheim family fortune.
And, of course,
it's the Guggenheim Foundation that...
from which I received the fellowship
that allowed me to make these pictures.
So I'm mentioning it
not to disparage the Guggenheim.
In fact, I owe them a debt
for supporting this project,
but I want to underscore the ways in which,
although I'm sort of critiquing these processes,
I'm as implicated as anyone.
I'm not outside it.
And I don't really know how I could be.
So I'm complicit.
And I think to some degree,
we all are collectively responsible
for these kinds of sites.
And I think with that idea, I'm gonna wrap it up.
Thank you.