LOS ANGELES — The Autry Museum of the American West is often tinted in washed out hues of gold, brown, and sage, painting a romantic image of the Wild West. Out of Site: Survey Science and the Hidden West, however, trades these colors for silver and black, conjuring a dark atmosphere that illustrates the sinister undertones of the art.
This exhibition, part of Getty PST: Art + Science Collide, focuses on the scientific tools that have been used to map the West’s resource-rich landscape, and grapples with how those technologies have been turned into forces of destruction. The terrain that became actor Gene Autry’s jubilant Hollywood playground bears the scars of genocide, extraction, and ecological damage from military testing.
The exhibition immediately puts visitors in an uncomfortable position by projecting their image, captured via an infrared camera mounted to a perforated metal sculpture of a drone, right onto the entrance wall. This establishes the show’s through line, a linkage of the words “survey” and “surveillance,” which share the same French root word, “sur,” meaning over. Yet Out of Site is more concerned with what’s under — natural gas in the ground, uranium hidden in mountains, and the people below those faceless military drones buzzing through the skies.
Many historic works incidentally depict the resources that made the West ripe for plunder. Thomas Moran’s gold-framed “Hot Springs of the Yellowstone” (1872) is a warm field study of the landscape’s geothermal pools. In the painting’s background, a rainbow emerges from a cloudy sky, heralding the promise and potential of the newfound territory. But the natural gas that made these pools so beautiful to paint is also why the land was forcibly wrested from Indigenous people, then plundered to generate energy in an industrializing country. As a sharp contrast to Moran’s painting, Julie Shafer’s silver gelatin pinhole negative, “Conquest of the Vertical: 300 Miles to Eureka! (no. 3)” (2013), is a black and white image of a mining site. The color inversion of the negative transforms the objects into ghostly forms, making the small pool of water appear eerie and unsettling. Shafer’s decision to use a developing process that incorporates silver salts is notable, as they were among the elements extracted from the West.
In addition to mining, the US government’s misconception that the West was empty of human life made it a military testing ground. Perhaps the most famous example of this is nuclear testing, which was most active between the 1950s and ’60s. Most nuclear weapon studies in the Southwest took place after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The military did not know the full health impacts of these weapons, yet still dropped them on Native lands for decades.
Significant documentation of the bombs dropped in Nevada and New Mexico exists, and Yulia Pinkusevich rendered these explosions in otherworldly charcoal drawings in her Nuclear Sun series (2010). Nine drawings depict the mushroom clouds from an unusual, fisheye perspective, making them appear like tumors caught in an ultrasound. Pinkusevich’s drawings refer to images captured by Harold E. Edgerton’s “Mirror Sphere” (1954), a silvery ball that made it easier to photograph the explosions from a 180 degree view; it is on display next to the drawings.
The military also used the West as a place to test surveillance technology. In “Calibration Mark AF49 with Satellites” (2015), from Julie Anand and Damon Sauer’s Ground Truth photography series, four trapezoidal concrete tiles form a sort of starburst pattern. They look like land art, but are in fact calibration markers for surveillance satellites that were active in the Cold War. The artists added crisscrossing white lines to the sky, which trace the routes of the satellites. In modern times, it is drones that fly overhead, mostly tracking people crossing borders so that law enforcement can apprehend them.
Out of Site is a surprisingly bleak exhibition for an art institution that usually dwells on associations between the West and popular entertainment, but it’s important that the Autry Museum confronts the darker histories lurking beneath the buttes, arches, and canyons of the stolen frontier.
Out of Site: Survey Science and the Hidden West continues at the Autry Museum of the American West (4700 Western Heritage Way, Griffith Park, Los Angeles) through January 5, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Amy Scott.
