A Portal to the Desert and the Desert
Research Station
A CLUI Mobile Exhibit Unit has been deployed
to the Museum of Contemporary Art Geffen Contemporary, near
downtown Los Angeles. The Unit contains a display about the
Desert Research Station, recently opened by the CLUI in Hinkley,
California. The DRS and the current exhibit in the Unit were
made possible by the exhibition Flight Patterns, curated by
Connie Butler, and is on view at the Geffen Contemporary from
November 12, 2000 to February 11, 2001. There is no admission
charge to enter the CLUI Exhibit Unit, as it rests under the
awning outside the main doors of the museum.
At the opening celebration for the Flight Patterns
exhibit, which shares the cavernous Geffen Contemporary building
with a new retrospective of the artist Paul McCarthy, revelers
danced around the CLUI Mobile Exhibit Unit, bathed in colored
lighting. All the while, as a stoic counterpoint, a MoCA guard
kept a watchful eye over the Unit.
The 24-foot long portable building now at
MoCA was modified to resemble the Desert Research Station, which
is itself a manufactured structure (a "4-wide modular" with
additions). The building is part of a fleet of CLUI exhibit
and program support units, and was once used by the City of
Los Angeles to support the construction of a 30-foot diameter
sewer tunnel under the City.
After the closing of the Flight Patterns exhibit
in February, this unit will fly up to the CLUI logistics yard
in Boron, California, awaiting its next deployment. It will
probably end up at the DRS as a satellite exhibit facility,
depending on development plans there and ongoing negotiations
with the Bureau of Land Management, which controls the land
around the DRS. Though the CLUI owns the DRS building in Hinkley,
the land it sits on is owned by the BLM. The CLUI continues
to search for support to buy the land from the Government, which
is requiring a cash payment of $10,000 for the parcel.
