The Center for Land Use Interpretation Boldly Seeks the Essence of the American Landscape

It seems America’s landscape can’t sit still for a portrait.

Featured image credit: The Center for Land Use Interpretation

The next time someone tells you they’d “rather watch grass grow”, you’ll know just the place. A bit up the street from the Bhagavad-gita Museum and nestled inconspicuously beside the Museum of Jurassic Technology, you’ll find a non-profit that defies categorization. It’s sort of a museum. Kind of a research facility. Something of an educational institute. And it could fit the definition of an art installation with room to spare. It’s the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI). And as its name suggests, it’s illuminating new ways for people to view the American landscape. 

Reading the Poetry of the American Landscape

Natural environments across the country are maintained and regulated by federal, state, county, and city regulations, framing them in unique contexts. In some ways, the CLUI asks us to take these distinctly American landscapes as they’re presented. But in other ways, they challenge us to scrutinize these scenes in search of an even deeper understanding. There’s a certain poetry to landscapes, both naturally occurring and manmade, that CLUI obsesses over. When we look through their lens, we sometimes discover beauty, sometimes horror, but always something interesting in these landscapes that we so often take for granted. 

Perhaps writer and curator Lucy Lippard summed up CLUI best when she described the non-profit as “a tantalizing liminal space (that) has opened up between disciplines, between the arts, geography, history, archeology, sociology.” This broad framing allows space for our human influence on these landscapes from industrial development to topographical mapping; oil drilling to realty. 

The Expansive Vision of the CLUI

The CLUI was founded in 1994 with the broad mission to “increase and diffuse knowledge about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived.” While Los Angeles can’t fully claim the organization, CLUI’s main office is situated in Culver City and presents regularly updated displays that are open for public viewing and education. 

Other offices and facilities pepper the United States, offering the best opportunity to fully examine the challenges the country’s landscapes face. For example, a compound in Wendover, Utah that was once a military facility served from 1996 until 2016 as the CLUI’s artist residency program. A Desert Research Station in Hinkley, California, just about 150 miles north of Los Angeles, is still operational. 

The latter is part of an ambitious multi-organizational project dubbed the American Land Museum. A collaborative effort to create a multi-faceted portrait of the American landscape, the American Land Museum counts the CLUI as its chief organizer and biggest contributor. This ever-evolving project uses facilities, including museums, across the country to highlight America’s diverse, ever-shifting terrains. 

The CLUI’s Diverse Services

Part of what makes the CLUI so hard to pin down is the wide range of services it offers in order to aid us in better understanding the American landscape. For example, sometimes the non-profit hosts field trips to the docks of San Francisco Bay, a rock quarry, or even a seemingly random suburb. Other times, CLUI hosts art exhibits, like when they placed a recording of the sound of waves in the middle of a dry lake bed or hosted an exhibition of real estate listings from the 1980s. The organization even stays busy with printed material, the most consistent being its annual newsletter, The Lay of the Land. 

But arguably CLUI’s most notable work thus far is its online archive and database, collecting photographs and writings focused on sites around the country submitted by CLUI members. The database’s objective is to present a clearer understanding of man’s interaction with the American landscape. However, the organization places a marked emphasis on “unusual and exemplary” land use. 

You can also find the Morgan Cowles Archive, a collection of over 100,000 themed photos submitted to the CLUI site by a wide range of participants. Morgan Cowles was an accomplished skier who notably died in an avalanche in 2008. Through an endowment from the family and friends of Cowles, the CLUI is able to host this comprehensive digital archive in his memory. 

Plan Your Visit

If you’re curious about the American landscape or just curious as to how one becomes curious about the American landscape, plan your visit to the Culver City CLUI headquarters. The facility at 9331 Venice Blvd is open from noon until 5 pm every Friday through Sunday. It’s housed in a rather inconspicuous brick building, opting fittingly enough to blend into the urban landscape rather than advertise its existence with clear signage. It’s hard to explain what you should expect. But not as hard as painting a portrait of the American landscape when it won’t sit still.