DESERT CANTOS by Richard Misrach 1991

Richard Misrach: Desert Cantos 

what man calls civilization

always results in deserts

– from “what the ants are saying”
by Donald Robert Perry Marquis

Traditionally, the desert has served as a proving ground of faith.  For zealous anchorites of early Christianity, it provided ideal conditions for a life of extreme privation that was intended to draw them closer to God.  Following the lead of St. Anthony, they repudiated the seductive comforts of the civilized world to suffer their way toward sanctity in the fierce isolation of unyielding deserts.

The present-day deserts of the American southwest, so exquisitely reflected in Richard Misrach’s color photographs, are strikingly different from those St. Anthony knew, but they nevertheless present abundant contemporary visions of heaven and hell.  We have, in the words of the Book of Isaiah, made straight in the desert a highway for our God, but in late 20th century America, the name of that God is Progress, a.k.a. Technology, Profit, and Self-Indulgence.  This is a land of dune buggies, landing strips, fast food franchises, swimming pools, gas stations, and hazardous waste, a place where a vast and drowning lake arises from an irrigation project run amok and fires burn out of control, consuming the land in sheets of gorgeous flame.  All the elements are here: earth, air, water, and fire in their proverbial splendor as well as in forms that are trivial, ironic, and debased.

This book includes work from four of the cantos that Misrach has so far identified; the current total is close to 20.  Each canto contains several photographs that concentrate on a particular aspect of the desert.  The first canto of the book, “The Terrain,” opens with some stunning scenery that proclaims the vastness and the rugged character of the land, yet from the start we encounter the highways and railroads that have been the means of its domestication, and which have, in fact, made the photographs possible.  (The photographer always intrudes to some degree; the photograph that is presumed to show a place untouched by human presence is its own contradiction of that idea.)  “The Event,” weakest of the four cantos, describes an immense dry lake bed that has been marked off with lines, furnished with dumpsters and portable toilets, and bordered by recreational vehicles whose owners have gathered to watch the landing of a space shuttle.  “The Flood” presents the surreal serenity of abandoned remnants of civilization half submerged in the Salton Sea, an expansive pond, created by mistake, that shimmers like a mirage in the California desert.  The final canto, “The Fires,” crackles like a Hollywood disaster movie, blazes with color effects reminiscent of paintings by Turner, and offers apocalyptic glimpses of an inferno through which Dante and Virgil might have wended their astonished way.

Some of the later cantos in Misrach’s continuing work from the desert have become more pointed than those we find here. Instead of these relatively gentle revelations of our encroachments upon the desert, some of Misrach’s more recent pictures indict us for more flagrant and murderous violations.  His newer work emphasizes the terrible more than the beautiful, as it reveals that we ourselves are the rough beast prophesied by Yeats, slouching toward self-destruction. We see vast stretches of land that has been laid waste by weapons testing and littered with live munitions.  Another canto confronts us with a Guernica of livestock, animals heaped in mass graves, still appearing to be in flight from death.  (They are believed to be the victims of radiation from nuclear testing, although the government has been at pains to deny this charge ever since it realized the potential repercussions of honest disclosure.)

Forty years before Operation Desert Storm, Adlai Stevenson, referring to the potential for using the power of the atom, noted that we can “make the world a desert or make the deserts bloom.”  We have discovered since then how easy it is to do the former and how difficult, costly, and ultimately unwise it may be to attempt the latter.

We may be drawn to Richard Misrach’s photographs initially, as we are drawn to deserts themselves, by their astonishing beauty and intimations of the divine; we may even echo Byron’s romantic cry, “Oh! that the desert were my dwelling place.”  But we may find greater value, ultimately, in the sobering reality with which these pictures confront us as they burn away the fog of our fantasies about pristine nature and benign civilization.  Ascetic monks and hermits have always sought in the desert the sharp, transcendent truth of their faith.  Now, in Richard Misrach’s photographs, we may discover some of the harsh realities of who we really are, and what our future holds.

Sean Wilkinson
March 1991