Text for: The Magic Hour: The Convergence of Art and Las Vegas
Edited by Alex Farquharson, 2001
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In Las Vegas, I love to walk on the Strip. I first came to the desert in 1967 to paint the landscape: searching for mystical visions. Inside the tree I was painting, I saw a smaller tree, and then another inside that, and then yet another, going on to infinity. Dark bushes glowed on the side of a desolate hill. The tree by the shack where I lived, I imagined, was covered with fruit like the Tree of Good and Evil and, as I continued to paint, it burst into flames like the Tree of Knowledge. But on the Strip there's no need to search, the neon signs, turning matter to color, are enormous visionary apparitions built for everyone to see. And there’s none of the desert’s former isolation. It’s easy to talk to other visitors in the porte-cochere while waiting for the valet to get my car. The guy in the tuxedo asks if I've seen any shows. A tourist in a bright shirt and shorts suggests “O” by Cirque de Soleil. Equals, they talk of gambling. Who’s going to have a lucky night?
Walking along the Strip at dusk, the man-made and natural colors can't be told apart. The pinks, mauves, turquoises and powder-blues of the sunset often seem more garish, more exotic, than the neon signs and artificial lights. In the desert I painted such sunsets, trying to be aware of myself on the surface of the Earth and even feel myself revolving with the Earth until I reached the zone of transition between the light and dark sides of the planet. At that moment, when the sun was just disappearing around the edge of the planet, I tried to capture the light; the light that had crossed over the horizon and was bent by the atmosphere; sunlight that had come to me across the greatest possible distance. Overexcited, my hands were often covered with paint and colored light as I looked for the last flashes of green extending in great bands over the dome of the darkening sky. I see, on the Strip, that my hands are covered with similar hues and I feel that I'm not walking, but swimming through endlessly changing color.
Driving through the desert to find a place to paint, I was fascinated with the mirages of pooled water just ahead on the blacktop highway. Watching the pools vanish as my car approached, I enjoyed that confusion between what was real and what wasn't. When driving in the desert, the distances are so huge, one has time to see movement and illusion interact. Illusion is part of the psychology of the desert. Before filming exterior scenes in Las Vegas the streets and sidewalks are usually hosed down with water. Called the "wash down," this increases reflections on the ground. There are seldom thunderstorms in Las Vegas and this trick is very wasteful, but one doesn't notice the artifice in a movie. The reflections on the street seem so natural. In a movie, the "wash down" causes a kind of reverse mirage. One doesn’t see what is there. Then, this reverse mirage causes a technological mirage. I’m sure that when I walk on the Strip I see more reflections, perhaps when they aren’t there, because of what I’ve seen in movies.
I often imagine one of the limousines in Liberace's museum, the one covered with mirrored mosaic tiles, speeding down the Strip at dusk or streaking along a desert highway blasted by the midday sun, flashing the lights and color of the environment all around. Who is that inside driving? I can't quite see. Is the car empty? Am I inside?
In Las Vegas movies there are always scenes, looking in through the windshield, of the lead characters driving. The emotions on their faces are visible behind the glass which is alive with moving reflected lights. These scenes show us that character itself can change in such a place. The mysticism of the desert erodes individual psychology - and in Las Vegas individual psychology is secondary to illusion. The whole interiors of some porte-cocheres are lined with mirrors causing infinite reflections. Reflecting surfaces are everywhere. It's impossible to tell where certain reflections are coming from. Where did that color come from? Who can tell. Sometimes, churning through these colors, I think that I've lost the boundaries of my body and no longer know who I am. "There really is something beautiful about all of these lights," one detective says to another in Crime Story, Michael Mann's TV series, "It's dangerous," says the other, "makes you change your rhythm." Is this what happened to pilgrims coming to Rome and going from bright daylight into dark churches lit with candles, filled with incense and music?
In John Ford's movie Fort Apache, Henry Fonda plays a new commanding officer from the East. When warned about the Apaches, he says that he was not impressed by the Indians he saw from the stagecoach on his way to the fort. John Wayne, the Westerner, knows that what's important in the desert is what's unknown, what can't be seen. And he knows that you'd better understand this or you're in for trouble. "If you saw them," Wayne says to Fonda, "they weren't Apaches."