925,000 Campsites The Commodification of the American Experience

There is a satisfying immediacy about the prospect of establishing an encampment for the night—clearing the site, erecting the tent, chopping wood, building a fire and cooking over the live flame—that in turn suggests a meaningful connection to landscape, place, and the rugged life of backwoods adventurers. At its essence camping is an act of faith and survival, a way to buttress an isolated human settlement against the forces of nature. Situated “somewhere between challenging new circumstances and the safe reassurances of familiarity,” the camp is a temporary substitute for the home—a place to dwell, to sleep, to interact socially, to prepare and eat food.2 Stripped of any but the most vital conveniences, the camp is literally and figuratively open to the stimuli of its natural surroundings. 

Each summer millions of Americans take to the open road in search of this powerful experience of nature. Campgrounds all across the country commodify the locus of this singular experience into multiple sites. That parcel of land upon which most elect to park their car, trailer, camper, or RV is thus not only an imagined ideal: as the exhibit title suggests, there are nearly 1 million campsites across the country, dispersed across an estimated 14,000 campgrounds.3 In 2010, Kampgrounds of America—KOA, familiarly—alone reported a total consumption of over five million campsite-nights, as well as 1.5 million hits monthly on its website.4  Demand for sites remains so high that would-be campers reportedly turn to Craigslist to purchase campsite usage at popular destinations like Yosemite National Park during busy holiday weekends, and this at three or four times their original price.5 Further, the record sales reported by sporting utility stores like REI and EMS owe largely to successful retailing efforts to associate their equipment with the out-of-doors and the prospect of healthy living. For many urbanites, high-performance gear like hiking boots and mountaineering vests have even become staples of everyday casual chic. 

Modern campgrounds are replete with delightful irony. Each “lone” campsite functions as a stage upon which cultural fantasies can be performed in full view of an audience of fellow campers interested in much the same “wilderness” experience. For artist Robert Smithson, whose sensitivities to site and site-making were informed by the childhood family camping trips he helped organize, the campsite was where one could reenact the making of a place.6 Who in the camping community has not experienced a degree of gear envy at the sight, at a neighboring campsite, of a brand new Primus Gravity II EasyFuel stove (with piezo ignition), a Sierra Designs tent, or a Marmot sleeping bag? KOA even leases some permanently parked Airstream trailers, so that campers can spend the night in a cultural icon;7 this experiment allows prospective visitors to show up without any personal equipment, just as they would at a roadside motel. No wonder that the daily repetition of chores once associated with survival has now been so fully recast as a series of almost spiritual rituals intended to reconnect the camper with what has been largely lost; for by now most of the old necessities—hiking to and clearing the site, hunting for game, collecting water and firewood—have given way to such less arduous activities as parking the car, pitching cable-free pop tents, buying cold cuts at the campground store, hooking up electrical and sewerage conduits, setting up patio chairs, etc. Serviced by networks of infrastructure and populated with trailers and $300,000 RVs, campgrounds celebrate a unique form of American ingenuity in which intersecting narratives and desires (wilderness, individuality, access, speed, comfort, nostalgia, profit) have become strangely and powerfully hybridized.  

To tell the story of the commodification of camping is not to tell the story of any one site or even any one campground, but rather to examine how this cultural ideal of rugged American character came to be appropriated and transformed into widely replicated templates and generic spatial protocols. It is to talk not only about campers but also about the crucial role of motor vehicles in shaping this narrative, which begins rather innocuously with early twentieth-century roadside bivouacs and culminates in today’s tightly organized loops of dedicated plots. Tracing the historical arc that connects late nineteenth century recreational campers to the Adirondacks with overnighting RVers in a Walmart parking lot, this exhibit puts forth four key themes (1. Campsite: functions as the standard the unit of management of any campground; 2. Geography: examines camping destinations ranging from Yosemite National Park to the KOA on the Las Vegas Strip; 3. Services: the wide array of utilities that service modern campgrounds; 4. Operation: the organization of campgrounds into national systems) that are key to measuring the radical physical and cultural transformations of the campground in the past century. Taken together, these form a coherent basis to this fascinating temporal narrative.  

Photo Caption: Photo from part of 925,000 Campsites The Commodification of the American Experience Installation