Scenes in America Deserta

"Yes, this is the British entry. Banham is known as an architecture critic. He wrote an influential book on Las Vegas . There’s a funny thing about the Western desert – a lot of the best books on or about it are by foreigners, because Americans don’t feel it’s worthy of attention. Banham, in a way, is doing something a lot of Europeans have done. He spent a lot of time in the Mojave, mostly, and when he first went there he hadn’t really got anything to compare it to. The thing that he found closest was the heath in Norfolk [in the east of England] where he grew up, so this guy was staring at these huge open spaces and thinking of Norfolk, which I find rather charming. There are also some rather eccentric pictures of him riding a bicycle round a dry lake with a big cowboy hat on. Yes, it is. He has thematic sections. There is a chapter called “The Inscrutable”, which I think is a good way of thinking about what is odd about the desert. The more time you spend there, the more you become convinced there’s something going on below the surface, or that there is something the desert could potentially reveal to you. My theory is that this is what leads so many people into mystical and religious visions. Whether it’s UFO-based or a more religious thing, there is a sense that this vast emptiness is about to disclose something. He captures that very well. Absolutely. In some way you expand to fill the space. You can misrecognise things that are going on in your own consciousness and think these things are there in the landscape. The Romantic category of the sublime is applicable, the terror of somewhere so remote. I’ve been walking in areas of Death Valley where there aren’t even any insects, and the silence is so absolute it starts to become a physical weight on your ears. It becomes a tangible thing, especially for somebody from Europe I think. It’s simply not possible to occupy space in the same way in Europe. You can get into mountains and forests and be away from other people, but these vast vistas with no mark upon them and no life of any kind – there is nothing like that in European experience."