CLUI Hosts Visiting
Austrians
Two Day Tour Highlights Art in the Desert and Tests CLUI's
FM Transmitter
Students and professors of
the University of Linz Department of Experimental Visual Design
participated in a two day CLUI led tour of sites in Southern
California desert. Each year a class from this highly conceptual
art department spends a year in America visiting culturally
significant sights and attending lectures by artists, theorists
and architects.
Artist Noah Porifoy leads the group
on a tour through his scuplture garden.
CLUI photo
Day one of the tour featured
a visit with artist Noah Porifoy, who led a tour of his
outdoor studio/sculpture garden located outside of Twentynine
Palms. Porifoy uses objects scavenged and donated to create
large mixed-media sculptures. The harsh sun and strong winds
of the desert complete the works, adding a weathered patina
to the bowling balls, toilets, clothes, scrap metal, and
wood that make up Porifoy's palate.
Other sites examined by
the group on day one included the Giant Rock at Landers
(former residence of an alleged German spy, and later the
test pilot/UFO proponent George Van Tassel), where the Californian
urbanized desert recreational environment performed well
for the guests: dirt bikers buzzed about like bees, and
gun shots echoed around the shell casing-littered ground.
Artist Leonard Knight leads the
group up his Salvation Mountain.
CLUI photo
Leonard Knight, the creator of Salvation
Mountain, led visitors up the face of his enormous adobe
and paint monument at Slab City. Despite the duties of recent
notoriety, including hosting an increase in visitors, and
the occasional trip to a museum or gallery where his work
is featured, Leonard still finds time to work on the mountain
(especially at night, under a bright moon) and has recently
built a small, enclosed chapel out of adobe and hay bales.
Architect Donald Wexler's prototype
steel house.
CLUI photo
After a glamorous evening in El Centro
and more stops along the Salton Sea, the two-day journey
concluded with an architectural tour of Palm Springs, a
city that contains a number of interesting modernist buildings
that blend into the desert landscape in inspiring and beautiful
ways. Richard Neutra's Kaufmann house (designed for the
same family that commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling
Water), for example, has been recently restored to museum
quality, though it is still a private residence (owned by
a grocery store chain executive). It sits next door to an
Albert Frey house, built for the industrial designer Raymond
Loewy. And across town is a block-long set of steel prototype
houses designed by Donald Wexler for U.S. Steel.
The newly restored Kaufmann House.
CLUI photo
The CLUI used the tour to test a new
low-power FM radio transmitter to broadcast live tour information,
directions, and selections of music to the cars following
behind the lead vehicle. The CLUI hopes to use this technology
both for tours and for stationary interpretive transmissions,
inspired by the AM transmitters operated by municipalities
around the country that broadcast traffic, airport conditions,
and tourist information.
CLUI vehicle, equipped wtih
FM transmitter, leads car caravan.
