Cody Tyler Schueller

DRILLING FOR THE DESERT: FROM THE GROUND TO YOUR CAN

“The desert is everywhere.”

The desert is everywhere, preserving insignificance. A desert where the miracle of the car, of ice and whisky is daily re-enacted: a marvel of easy living mixed with the fatality of the desert. A miracle of obscenity that is genuinely American: a miracle of total availability, of the transparency of all functions in space, though this latter nonetheless remains unfathomable in its vastness and can only be exorcised by speed.

Jean Baudrillard, America. London: Verso, 1988, p 8

If this is a desert, what are all these people doing here? This scalar story, written as episodic movie scenes, traces a small oil town to a the most universal global commodity through shared interest, desire and intention. If the desert truly is everywhere - The American Miracle- where can we seek freedom from commodity and absolute isolation? In the Baudrillardian desert, as we know it, we’ve consumed the entire world spoiling natural landscapes with littered soda cans. If the desert is everywhere, a real desert, the real thing¹ , we must internalize and create it, “The desert is less “nature” than a concept, a place that swallows up boundaries.”² A desert doesn’t have room for derricks or cans of Coke, it’s a boundless internal that is in fact truly everywhere, only opposite of Baudrillard’s interpretation³. But rather than “exorcising speed” to reach this desert, the absence of speed is what will bring us to this realer place. And to that point, the story of blurring and bypassing boundaries begins.

¹ Coca-Cola’s “It’s the real thing” campaign began in the 1970’s. Brand manager, Ira C Herbert was quoted stating, “responds to research which shows that young people seek the real, the original and the natural as an escape from phoniness.” Rouse, Matt. “Don’t Be A ‘Basic’... A Basic Business.” Medium, Medium, 29 Feb. 2020
² A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects, The Collected Writings, Smithson, Robert. 1968. p 110.
³ If Baudrillard’s desert everywhere is constructed through the imagery of Americana modernity, the desert opposite is liberated from that imagery and modernity.

Full text available upon request.