Hostile Terrain 94

and banter––evaporate and condense into numbers in boxes; his
personality is stripped to a bare scaffolding that medical examiners call
“skeletonization.” The only legal documentation he will ever receive in
this country is a record of his death. 2
Hostile Terrain 94 (fig. 1), organized by the Undocumented Migration
Project, is an installation that documents and plots the structural
violence faced by migrants crossing the US-Mexico border. While
claiming to discourage undocumented entries into the United States,
the US Border Patrol’s immigration enforcement strategy, known as
Prevention Through Deterrence, redirects migrants from urban ports
of entry and compels them to traverse the Sonoran Desert in Arizona,
where the temperature fluctuates between 50 and 120 degrees
Fahrenheit. 3 Border Patrol uses nature as an alibi and disguises migrant
deaths as unfortunate “accidents” that occur on its noble path to
suppress illegal immigration. 4 The dehumanization of these migrants,
who are treated as parasitic numbers on a federal security graph and
whose personal belongings are categorized as “trash” or blights on the
environment that consumed them, is made manifest in Hostile Terrain
94. 5 The impersonal and indifferent toe tags reflect the government’s
elision of the migrants’ personhood––their lives are defined by
identification cards that they will never receive.
Overcoat,” a likely source of inspiration for Guston’s painting, the value of
human life is absorbed by an object. 6
The clerk in Gogol’s story, Akaky Akakievich, is treated by others
according to the condition of his coat. When he wears a “rust- and
mud-colored” coat that is stained with rubbish—akin to the one painted
by Guston—he is ridiculed and overlooked. 7 Similarly, as migrants are
measured by their lack of legal status and their gritty belongings in the
desert, their erasures––sanitation by another name––seem justified.
A painting from the Anderson Collection that explores the difficulty of
surviving in a cruel and apathetic world is Philip Guston’s The Coat II
(fig. 2). The depicted coat, like the toe tags, is synecdochic: it is a proxy
that signifies and displaces the human body; its presence renders the
corporeal invisible and negligible. As in Nikolai Gogol’s short story “The
Figure 2. Philip Guston, The Coat II, 1977, oil on canvas, 69 1⁄8 x 92 1⁄8 in., Anderson
Collection at Stanford University, Gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, and Mary
Patricia Anderson Pence, 2014.1.047. © The Estate of Philip Guston, courtesy Hauser &
Wirth. Photo: M. Lee Fatheree.
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2
The “ML#” on the toe tag—the case number assigned to each migrant brought into the
medical examiner’s office—is an abbreviation for “medico-legal number” [my emphasis].
3
“Background,” Undocumented Migration Project, https://www.undocumentedmigrationproject.org/background,
[July 25, 2020], and De León, The Land of Open Graves, 75.
4
De León, The Land of Open Graves, 274.
5
Ibid., 201.
Both Hostile Terrain 94 and The Coat II document the hostility of their
respective societies. Guston considers the primary function of art as
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6
Magdalena Dabrowski, The Drawings of Philip Guston (New York: The Museum of Modern Art,
1988), 14.
7
Nikolai Gogol, The Overcoat (London: Merlin Press, 1956), 12.
12 HOSTILE TERRAIN 94 | ANDERSON COLLECTION AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY HOSTILE TERRAIN 94 | ANDERSON COLLECTION AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY 13