It is a blank slate, and the writing on it is temporal, or temporary, graffiti. Here is the outlet for Europe, for Andre Gide's Cap d'Asie, and what went before is a complete mystery. Our history somehow began in the Nile Valley and reached up through the Mediterranean into northern Europe. On the West Coast, one looks out to sea toward Asia again, with one's back to the rest of the country and to Europe so far away. The coast of California is amazingly long and amazingly narrow, already broken off from the mainland.
History is no less missing here.
Even more so, it is a land of make believe. Even old is new. So there is the sky in Crotty's work, rising from the mildly jagged line of silhouettes along the horizon. Everything is in the sky, and Crotty records it all from his outpost in the Malibu hills. Staying up through the night, he records in notations the movements of stars and planets, the Milky Way, the Hale Bopp comet.