The first time I remember being in Los Angeles, I was six years old. My family of five piled in Mom's 1957 Plymouth and Dad drove from then rural Alta Loma to Pomona to take the train to Union Station. Leaving our 1963 tract house, carved out of former citrus groves, traversing the rapidly transforming landscape of the western edge of San Bernardino County, riding into the city on lines of steel, we ventured. I will never forget seeing a skyscraper for the first time. Such crossings of time and place, movement across an ever-evolving landscape, these snapshots of memories, random memories, chance memories, cultivated memories -- all come to mind when experiencing Doug McCulloh's provocative (art)work.

Both grand accomplishment and metaphor, the multimedia Chance Encounters explores what the artist calls the model "of the unrestrained mega city of the future" -- urban Los Angeles County. Climbing in his car, driving on the ubiquitous L.A. freeway system, McCulloh has left his home in Riverside weekend after weekend for years to document a randomly chosen section of the world's most famous suburban sprawl. Armed with his keen and sensitive eye and wide-angle camera lens, he has documented the region like perhaps no one has done before him. Yet he too selects, he too filters, and he too interprets what he sees and wants to see, and in this purposefulness within randomness, he engages almost a century's worth of other intellectuals and artists who have tried to understand the human condition in all its richness while not disturbing its sanctity.

The western practice of land surveying wherein "raw" land is sectioned off into smaller and smaller grids is here wonderfully turned upside down. McCulloh reinstalls and superimposes the grid's basic premises, not to bring order to perceived barren land or riches to real estate speculators, but to discover bits of the chaos wrought over the last one hundred fifty years of white man's rule in El Norte. With image after image, interview snippets, and his own words, McCulloh shows if not the underbelly, then at least the wide-ranging irony of human experience. Believing that chance opens up the world and helps us arrive at a "state of availability," McCulloh still serves as both historian and curator for the viewer or "experiencer" of his remarkable work. In the interactive CD I viewed, he categorized his images for us -- East, West, Profound, Violent, Trivial, Black, Latino, Anglo, Poor, Rich, etc. -- so we could choose to an extent which random experience we wanted. In this framework, he beautifully reminds us of the thousands upon thousands of small choices we make every day and how much of life we toss up to chance. In fact, being inside McCulloh's artistic world as he has refined it with the interactive CD is something like playing a postmodern version of the Game of Life, as he provides us with digital versions of little plastic cars and people and the cards which determine our fate.

It seems the artistic impulse is to view a place, or rather intricate series of places, like the 1,287 square mile L.A. basin as unregulated, "unrestrained," out-of-control -- an unstoppable octopus of unplanned growth. But this bestows on the so-called megalopolis an inappropriate, organic quality or sense of inevitability; inappropriate because it can remove a critical understanding of the role of human agency in the formation of place and space over time. Somebody wants the city and the region to be like this, somebody benefits, and always has. L.A. as place is L.A. as commodity. For, as sociologist Harvey Molotch reminds us, Los Angeles was shaped by a "growth machine" wherein cartels of powerful interest intersected with the goal of consuming land profitably -- water battles, land use maps, zoning regulations, decisions on what gets built where serve as elements of social control in partnership with industrial and post-industrial capitalism. Both the City and County of Los Angeles control budgets equal to those of many small nations elsewhere in the world. The City Council and Board of Supervisors have shaped a region so large and populated that, as urban planner and writer William Fulton pointed out in his 1997 The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles, if all of America was settled with the same density, we would fit inside the state of Missouri.

McCulloh's work inspires me to read again Carey McWilliams' 1946 classic expose of the region, Southern California Country: An Island on the Land; UCLA urban historian Eric Monkennen's work on the corporate city; and of course Mike Davis' City of Quartz. Outsider and Brit Reyner Banham wrote in his 1971 Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, that "in terms of some of the most basic and unlovely but vital drives of the urban psychology of Los Angeles, the flat plains are indeed the heartlands of the city's Id." These "Plains of Id" were the place where, as Bill Fulton wrote, "working and middle-class Angelenos had come to seek their membership in the national suburb."

Today, when nostalgia for a calmer vision of Southern California washes over folks here, probably the two most important remembrances are of acres and acres of orange groves and riding the Big Red Cars for a nickel. "It was all groves, as far the eye could see," and "you could go anywhere on the Red Cars" often flow from the lips of those born in the vast region or those who came here before, during, and just after the Second World War. What they are remembering is really the citrus belt, or at least an icon thereof. By the 1940s when this packing label was produced, the mythical landscape included automobiles, good roads, and exemplified the sense of the idyllic and the pastoral -- a landscape that was at once rural and suburban, industrial and agricultural. The landscape created by the citrus industry, which by 1930 had grossed over 100 million dollars for Southern California growers, more that year than Hollywood, than wheat, than oil, helped to set the modern stage for industrial production, class and race relations, and the growth of both cities and suburbs. As one of the earliest drivers of the "growth machine," the citrus industry's achievement, if that is what it can be called, was the relentless creation of this idyllic myth until, in literary historian Raymond Williams' words, "there [was] nothing countervailing, and selected images [stood] as themselves: not in a living but in an enamelled world."

By chipping away at the years of enamelled build-up, at the mythical archaeology of L.A., Doug McCulloh shows us the rich variety of layers in the region, layers of experience, of place, of perception, of wealth, of understanding. For years now, he has embarked on his Dada pilgrimage to Chanceville, seemingly fearless, armed with his camera and incredibly open and gentle personality, ready to observe and learn -- two acts which basin dwellers seem more and more reluctant to do. He inspires us to look both forward and backward in an attempt to understand where we exist today.

Anthea Hartig

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