DESERT X 2017

D T

S X 2017

That’s what the sign written on the back of a cardboard box at a gas station said. My dad saw it first, driving our Plymouth up a grade at the top of a hill entering the Mojave Desert. We were kids on a vacation heading for L.A. Dad was outraged and got real angry when he read that sign. So much so that he kept on driving past it and into the desert (hot radiator be damned). The very idea of having to pay anything at all for what we call water! We got past that incident and settled back into a kind of pure solitude. All was quiet and everything kissed with a coating of varnish, the kind that only comes from the desert and the kind of varnish I’d never seen before, and yes, the heat, and yes, the repetition.

Arrow straight dirt roads would go off the highway at right angles and disappear ten, twenty miles later over some hill to nowhere. Never-ending clumps of creosote bush (world’s oldest living plant) lined the highway and points beyond. We could see that the desert was much like the ocean with dunes that roll like waves. At more or less regular intervals we would pass concrete culverts going under the highway that divert great rushes of rainfall we could never imagine occurring. Lack of rainfall is an easy and accurate way to describe the desert. But if and when it decides to unload, it does so with fury followed by happy plants and animals. It is rainless…until it rains. The aromas from rain produce an unforgettable elixir of resins that only these plants (and the soil) can produce. Otherwise it’s a place for glorious but dried out things. Hey, is that an oasis or is that a mirage?

As you move on you begin to realize that you can make the desert as mystical, as majestic and as forbidden as you want and that the solitude it produces is yours to play with. Here, multitudes of plants and creatures survive in a seemingly defeated system. Legends with the desert create the fragrance of glory stories of past times: Lost gold mines. Wooden plank roads. Phantom stagecoaches and mule teams. Death Valley Scotty. Pegleg Smith. Willie Boy. Cabot Yerxa. Noah Purifoy. Driftwood Charlie. Indian Nations. Bill Keys. George Van Tassel. Antone Martin. Health Seekers. Cattle Rustlers. The Button Brothers. Desert Steve Ragsdale. Devils This. Devils That. Rattlesnake Bites. Scorpions. Roadrunners, coyotes and more and more mirages.

This is a rough and tough geologists’ heaven. Formations galore. Rolling dunes. Canyons. Ridges. Mesas. Plateaus. Craggy volcanic drop-offs. Escarpments of ancient origins. Billions upon billons of years all in slow motion. My friend Robert Smithson once remarked something to the effect that “one pebble in the desert moving one foot in two million years is enough action to keep me really excited.”

I was looking for something to describe the passage of time, and I found it at an air-conditioned stop-off in Lucerne Valley. I went to the cold box and there it was: Fiji Water $5.00.

It would be a mistake to think that there is nothing here. A mistake not just because of the evidence to the contrary—the accretions of social and natural history from the First People to the last visitors—but because the search for nothing is itself a paradoxical quest. We seek emptiness knowing that it is an ever-receding horizon. A mirage, at the unreachable border between the known and the unknown, equally lures explorers of mind and space

At various times their quest has taken various forms. Like explorers of other realms, artists understand this. They understand the allure of casting oneself into the polar wilderness and watching, as did Ernest Shackleton, the vessel of their endeavor founder on the frozen tundra. They understand Joseph Kittinger’s uncertain leap of faith and the compulsion to discover whether the weak gravitational pull of the troposphere would be sufficient to draw a falling body thirty-one kilometers back to earth. They understand Carlos Castaneda’s urge to seek the rim of consciousness on the peyotepaved path of the Toltec shamans, and Isabelle Eberhardt’s venture into the North African desert as the adopted male persona of Si Mahmoud Essadi. Artists understand the religious, physical, spiritual, and psychotropic quests to assert the self in places devoid of social convention and the props of humanity. They understand that it is to the world’s edge not center that human curiosity gravitates, and it is within the sites of utmost desertion that can be found the greatest existential bounty. Where angels fear to tread, fools and artists rush in.

Site of scarcity, stark contrasts, crude survival, mystery and transformation—the desert’s inhospitality towards life, it could be argued, has made it receptive to new forms. But it may also be something else, something to do with the fact that it embodies the tension between our need for borders and the dream of a borderless world. There is, after all, the dream of the golf-course oasis in an affluent desert development. This was the dream of the Annenbergs, who, in 1963, bought a large tract of scrublands in Rancho Mirage and, in just five years, irrigated it into an haute-modern Shangri-La. Sunnylands, as it is called now, is surrounded by a grid of roads whose

names read as a guest-list of those who helped transform the harsh desert into manicured greens.

But the dream of creating value by imposing borders is not confined to golf. Modernism has done to culture what golf did to landscape. With the white cube, it created the ideal of a sequestered space, an ultimate enclave where art, like golf strokes, could be tallied according to rules of its own making. Both are declarations of independence from origins. Each proposes its own form of cultural confinement.

Art, as it transitions from the studio to the white-walled custody of the market, is separated from the process and condition of its birth. The modernist cube excludes the clues to an artwork’s origin that are present in the artist’s studio. Only when art is truly site-specific, when the landscape itself becomes the studio, can the privilege of the few become the access of the many. Too often curators create of the artist’s wilderness a mowed lawn of flattened ideas. Instead of a map of the unknown, they offer a prospectus of the familiar; in place of the journey, the guided tour.

Cartography is a science of borders, but deserts by their very nature resist mapping. Land Art, as it first appeared in the late 1960s and early 70s, exemplified this. Its excursions into the American West were motivated in large part by artists’ desire to break the confines of the marketplace and reinvent art within what later became known as the “expanded field.” Land art, both anti-institutional and anti-material, was made by artists who sought the remote to escape the curatorial forces compacting their work into something more like golf and less like art. In doing so, they lost an audience, but gained a following.

Site-specificity put demands on the viewer—demands familiar to those who have journeyed to the Great Basin Desert in northwestern Utah; to Pie Town, New Mexico; to Rozel Point in the Great Salt Lake or the Mormon Mesa, northwest of Nevada, to pay tribute to the great works of that period. The journey is integral to the experience of the works. And, like any pilgrimage, the process of arriving at these pantheistic shrines is one in which the structures of the world are progressively left behind. Checkpoints are passed, baggage shed and cell reception lost.

For the faithful, these experiences are unlike anything else. Anyone who has felt the physical fact of vast open space, watched the ceramic blues of the desert sky disappear under the curtain of night or imagined the press

of prehistoric oceans on the shape of what now lies underfoot, will likely be receptive to the artistic intentions that brought them there. But these pilgrims are still few. In exchanging the cloistered gallery for the boundless expanse, the closed mind for the open space, Land Artists democratized their work’s setting, even as its insistent inaccessibility preserved the rarefied elitism they sought to challenge.

In many ways, Desert X was born of contradictions such as these. Its territory was the desert, its audience all those who have abandoned gallery confinement for the art of the unconfined space and mind. But this was not the desert of the few or the far. The swath of land that forms the Coachella Valley runs from the spectacular northern gateway—where serried ranks of wind turbines dramatize the march of technology against ancient tradition— through the gated sanctuaries of Palm Springs to the terminal dereliction of the Salton Sea. Along the way can be found not just variations of terrain that confound all notions of uniform vacancy, but equally varied social ecologies. Desert X is a uniquely populist site-specific show that explores the diversity of conditions encountered there.

That this landscape in its most general sense—ecological, social, historical, economic, architectural—would give rise to a new kind of visibility was clear. What form that would take, less so. While the low desert of the Coachella Valley holds within it the idea of the remote, it is in fact anything but. Here, the normally arduous rituals of distancing oneself from the known can be compressed into a matter of a few hours’ drive. And where isolated and solitary works of land art offer isolated and solitary experiences, Desert X presented an opportunity to do something more than simply fill in the apparent nothingness—quite literally the no-thing-ness of the desert—with the experience of art.

And so the art itself became a kind of map. It asked us to go where we might otherwise not. It cast the audience as explorer in a landscape equally actual and ideational. It asked us to pay attention to the ways in which art had come to flourish in the sunshine of absolute neglect and conditions of utmost nurture. Some works drew us into the unknown. Others staked out the familiar in an unfamiliar context. Collectively, they suggested a desert road trip, an open-ended journey for which the works announced themselves as landmarks for a landscape in constant revision.

As a paradigm, Desert X broke with the traditional narratives of enclosure. With no point of entry or egress and no prescribed order or sequence, it

demanded that viewers be participants. As much as it asked us to find individual artworks, it also asked that we get lost. The works provided compass, but it was interstitial time and space that constituted the show. The voice of the desert could be heard, reminding us that we find ourselves only in a plausible void. And so it was that the journey through the show was led not by theme or curatorial decree, but by landscape itself; a territory marked by sixteen stations of the desert X.

THE DESERT LOST AND FOUND

WILLIAM L. FOX

Humans have always wandered into deserts, at least according to the archaeological record, which has people walking across the deserts of Africa some three hundred thousand years ago. As early as eighty thousand years ago, people crossed the ocean into Australia (the world’s lowest, hottest, and driest continent outside of the Antarctic), and as recently as last summer still others attempted to cross Death Valley on foot without carrying so much as a water bottle. Humans do this because we’re running away from a threat, seeking land to inhabit, or testing the boundaries of our understanding or endurance.

Geographers commonly define deserts as regions that see less than ten inches of precipitation a year. In the Sonoran, in the American Southwest, it can rain up to sixteen inches, but evapotranspiration of water from plants occurs under low humidity at such a high rate that the results are the same. Deserts—think of the cognate “deserted”—occur in broad belts north and south of the equator where wind and temperature conspire to prevent storms from alleviating the condition, so that to move freely about the planet you simply have to cross them. This is too bad for humans, as our species grew up in forests, woodlands, and savannas where our perception of the environment adapted to a scale we could understand. There are, as a result, instances of catastrophic failure in all deserts and at all scales, from the personal to the societal. A classic, if possibly apocryphal, example from 525 BC is that of an army of fifty thousand Persian soldiers marching into western Egypt, where they were swallowed by an epic sandstorm, if Herodotus is to be believed.

When you come to a place you’ve never been—for example, driving over a highway pass into a valley—you automatically compare your scale with the landscape’s to assess your survival potential. Neurophysiology requires you to compare the length of your limbs with that of the tendrils of any vegetation. And you unconsciously calculate the shift in the color of the landscape as it shades progressively blue the farther it gets away from you. In part that’s a survival mechanism: You need to know how far away things are in order to cross the intervening spaces. All that works fine in temperate climes where

green vegetation blankets the ground. But in a place with few if any plants, where they are often very subdued in color, and where the atmosphere holds little moisture, those measuring devices don’t help. There are no trees, for example, and the blue shift occurs in much slower fashion. As a result, your mind reads things as being closer than they really are. Hence people walking into the Death Valley dunes without water.

Deserts can be highly isotropic environments—places where things look the same in all directions. People not raised in the desert lack navigational clues, and they don’t know how to gauge subtleties such as the arrangement of sand by wind at certain times of the day or year. When our natural abilities fail us, humans deploy culture to help, which in the case of surviving deserts includes creating maps, surveying with transits, imposing architectural geometry—and making art, one of the oldest tools of all.

Since prehistory, floor plans make use of two basic shapes: square and circle. The history of the square is particularly interesting, as squares were used as early as nine thousand years ago in the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük in Anatolia. The town, inhabited from 7500 to 5700 BC, was laid out in a rectilinear grid, the houses occupying squares that allowed for the equitable taxation of its citizens. In turn, that meant the town could develop shared resources, in essence a public workforce for platting out even more ground. The archaeological evidence comprises, in part, squares set out but not yet built out.

That system of equal squares thrived throughout Mesopotamia, crossed into Egypt, was adopted by the Greeks and Romans, and ended up in cities such as Las Vegas and Phoenix, which plat out subdivisions even before any funding for construction is secured. It’s a metastasizing based on the belief that ruling lines on a map corresponds to overruling conditions on the ground. While the map is not the territory, it is a habit we have a hard time breaking, especially when presented with flat isotropic space. We “conquer” the desert by applying a grid, when in fact we tend universally, from Cairo to Lima, to overestimate available water.

There are alternative ways of functioning in deserts that are superbly adapted to arid lands, the now almost vanished traditional culture of nomadic Aboriginal Australians among them. When early Homo sapiens came across from Papua New Guinea to Australia, they created works of song, dance, and body, amassing what has been called the most successful non-technological system of knowledge in the world. It was a way of encoding hard-won environmental knowledge into ritual and play—into what westerners call

the stories of Dreamtime, the Songlines, and all the way into contemporary dot paintings that started in 1970. Sand patterned by the dancers’ bare feet matched with their movements portraying stories of ancestral beings, stories that relayed from generation to generation what was safe to eat, what to do in a drought, where to find water. Those marks in the sand informed the body decorations that were translated into rock art, which made their way onto bark paintings, and eventually onto canvases that now sell on the international art market. The tradition had allowed a modest population of nomads to survive for fifty thousand years in the harshest habitable continent. The rock art of the Aboriginal peoples is one of the oldest surviving traditions that we at the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art call “art that walks in the world.”

Europeans encountering deserts used more technological devices to labor toward parity with the indigenous peoples of arid lands. As explorers from Portugal and Spain, then the Netherlands and England, encountered deserts in Africa and elsewhere, they mapped, sketched, painted, and photographed the landscapes. The sketches and lithographs of Scottish artist David Roberts (1796-1864) of Egypt and the Holy Land, and the watercolors of German painter Ludwig Becker (1808-1861) of the Strzelecki Desert of Australia are examples of attempts to make the flat desert isotropy comprehensible to the public. Almost invariably the artist inserted a figure to create a sense of how difficult it was to obtain scale. Roberts used the squared-off monuments of ancient Egypt and Persia, Becker a line of camels marching toward him out of the mirage of the “mud desert.” The desert remained a site for artistic exploration through painting and photography during the first half of the twentieth century, but during the ’60s, a profound revolution took place on two fronts amongst artists working in arid lands.

The first front was the photographic representation of deserts, which shifted from empty wastelands to sites that increasingly manifested the spread of the human footprint across the planet, including its most hostile environments. For example, images by the New Topographers documented suburbs proliferating along the grid in places such as Phoenix and Reno. While more conventional photographers such as Philip Hyde, working for Arizona Highways, continued in the Ansel Adams tradition of construing deserts as nature devoid of human presence, Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz insisted on confronting the collision.

The second front was the development of works in the desert, as a group of artists left the sanctioned spaces of New York museums and galleries

for the deserts of the American Southwest. Michael Heizer, who had grown up accompanying his father to archaeological sites in Nevada, brought out Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, and Walter De Maria to use readily available open space for building large-scale Land Art projects. Their renowned artworks, such as Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, De Maria’s The Lightning Field, and Heizer’s Double Negative and City, pioneered a practice and vocabulary that would be adopted by subsequent artists, as did the naked-eye observatories Roden Crater by James Turrell and Star Axis by Charles Ross. The large works were, paradoxically, often best seen by air, but best experienced on the ground.

These works paved the way for Desert X, an exhibition of site-specific installations that opens up current and future trajectories for art in deserts. The Mojave has long served as a locus for art production in an extreme landscape. Local prehistoric Native Americans created petroglyphs and pictographs—images incised in and painted on rocks, respectively—as well as intaglios, or geoglyphs, created by rearranging the surface of the ground. These were tools for the stewardship of environmental knowledge, familial lineage, and tribal beliefs, among other things, across generations. From the 1920s, white Americans took to driving across the Mojave en route to the promised land of California. In subsequent decades they reversed course and headed to Las Vegas to tempt, against the odds, yet another losing record. Those migrations have given the Mojave a modern and contemporary art history as well, with Agnes Pelton (1881-1961) living in and painting the desert since the early ’30s, and Noah Purifoy (1917-2004) creating one of the country’s finest found-object environments in Joshua Tree. A renowned current denizen is Andrea Zittel, an artist and designer whose practice involves creating custom furniture, clothing, and other objects in the desert to investigate ways of living that are modest, efficient, and meaningful. Since 2002 she and colleagues have organized High Desert Test Sites, experimental art sites along a tour of the Mojave’s higher reaches.

Some of the Desert X projects show how the desert provokes experiments in human perception. Phillip K. Smith III has been producing works in the Mojave for years, most notably a partially mirrored cabin titled Lucid Stead in 2013. The house appeared to levitate off the desert floor and to move in and out of your focal plane. The mirrored architectural intervention received widespread praise in the art world. For Desert X, Smith arranged three hundred mirrored posts, each angled at 10 degrees in order to reflect the land when viewed from outside the circle and, when viewed inside it, the sky. As with the cabin, reality and its reflection alternate, but this time with posts

creating interwoven shadows and streaks of light on the ground, as if the earth were also reflecting the work. This complexity made The Circle of Land and Sky engaging to enter and almost ceremonial to contemplate.

The work that received the most press attention was an empty ranch house by Doug Aitken, mirrored inside and out. Set on a hillside several hundred feet above the desert floor, during the hours it was open, hundreds of people wandered through the minimalist funhouse, pondering the modest visual paradoxes and snapping selfies. Perhaps the most interesting part of Mirage was its location within Desert Palisades, an elevated luxury development at the edge of Palm Springs. In this setting, Mirage reflected dreams of the desert made manifest as much as it did the landscape itself.

Jennifer Bolande created a different kind of reflection, posting large landscape photographs on six billboards along Gene Autry Trail, three each facing south and north. The public encountered them while moving at sixty miles per hour. The trick was that from six vantage points along the highway, each photomural exactly aligned with the landscape behind it. A view of faraway mountains was reproduced close to you. Each of the photographs differed from your view, however, even when the two lined up exactly, as time of day, month, and season varied. Image and reality, even lined up perfectly, couldn’t be the same. The results startled the viewer once again into reconsidering the surroundings actively.

A clear connection between geoglyphs and Land Art was drawn in Tavares Strachan’s earthwork I am, which consisted of more than two hundred small excavations in various geometrical shapes, holes around fourteen inches deep and lined with white neon tubes inside the perimeter. It was as if the Michael Heizer of 1968 had been resurrected to make a new version of Nine Nevada Depressions, but the parts, rather than spread out over more than five hundred miles of desert, were concentrated into a plot the size of two football fields. That gesture alone was striking, but in drone footage shot at night, the work looked as if a meteor had hit the desert and left molten language strewn there.

We have much to learn from art in deserts. Drylands—lands on the arid side but mostly arable—take up about 40 percent of Earth’s land mass, and play host to more than two billion people. Desertification, the process by which those lands lose arable soil and approach the status of desert, is at work in almost 20 percent of all drylands. Desertification due to natural causes has always happened, but now it is accelerating. Formerly a cycle, it is now a

one-way trend. The fault lies with humans, for overgrazing, mining, clearcutting, and overpopulating these areas drastically. At the same time, for lack of other available land, people increasingly live in drylands. Like it or not, more and more of us must live with and within deserts.

In cultivating a better understanding of deserts, we grow more resilient in them. That means being able to navigate them metaphorically as well as literally so as not to get lost, whether in our immediate surroundings or out of them, in the rest of the world. The ancient desert architectures of Mesopotamia and Peru, the photographic catalogues of Timothy O’Sullivan (1840-1882), the earthworks of artists in the American West, and now the work of Zittel and the artists of Desert X—all of them contribute to a vocabulary that underlies what is at once warning, admonition, and salvation as well as a survival guide.

SOME MYTHS OF THE DESERT IN TEN WORDS, A NAME, AND FOUR DISSOLVES

HOLLY WILLIS

Let us begin with turmoil, confusion, storm, and rage. Let us begin with the color red. With a monster: part man, part animal. Let us begin to ruminate on myths of the desert.

Set :: god of the desert

First there is the Egyptian myth of Set, whose name is translated as “instigator of confusion” and “destroyer.” He is an ancient god, born to Geb (earth) and Nut (sky) after the creation of the world. He boasts many guises. He is the black boar who swallows the moon month by month. He is the inhabitant of the Great Bear, the constellation in the northern sky. He is the resistance to the compelling gaze of the snake Apophis, who hypnotizes the sun god, Ra; Set’s intervention ensures the rise of the sun each day. So goes one version of the myth. Set appears in many stories, the hero of some, the demon in others. His character shifts and slides, aligning to suit those who tell his story. Blacking the sun with eclipses and shaking the world with earthquakes, Set kills and is described as a friend to the dead. For our purposes, however, this is Set’s most significant role: he represents the desert. While his brother Osiris (afterlife) more companionably champions fertility and growth, Set personifies drought and sterility. The dry. The parched. The desolate. The impoverished. He is the ever elusive. Should we be surprised that all of these qualities find their expression in the desert? No myth of the desert stands still for long.

grainy dissolve :: Zabriskie Point

A man and a woman roll, wrestling, kissing, tousling hair, touching, their tawny bodies the same color as the sand. Other bodies appear, and as the camera lifts up and away from the land to view the scene like God, we see that the broad landscape is dotted with twisting bodies, an entire desert of writhing, dusty sexual energy.1 So the myth of a generation is given form, the desert

1 Zabriskie Point, dir. by Michelangelo Antonioni (Los Angeles, CA: MGM, 1970).

welcoming and extending the liberation impossible within the city. This is a counter-landscape embracing a counterculture.

tabula rasa :: blank slate

When Moroccan actors know a Hollywood production is coming, they grow their beards long, knowing they will be more easily cast as the terrorists and assassins that populate American films. And whether the film is set in Syria, Iraq, Iran, or Saudi Arabia, no problem. To Americans, foreign actors look the same, and foreign deserts blur in a haze: a collection of picturesque if desolate dunes, a desert emptied of history, void of specificity, a blank slate ready for the prosaic imagination of Hollywood. This myth of the desert is both moribund and mendacious. The deserts of Earth are specific! Some are seas of sand, and others are covered by boulders and gravel. The Kalahari Desert boasts gentle dunes; the Gobi Desert is, some say, more pebbly, with shrubs and thorn bushes; the Namib Desert is very dry but features coastal fog; and the deserts that cover parts of the United States—the Great Basin Desert, the Mojave, the Sonoran, the Chihuahuan—together defy easy categorization, so varied are they in their characteristics. So we ask, What is a desert?

heterotopia :: place of otherness

Is not the desert a heterotopia? Is it not a space that disrupts conventional ideas about what a space can be, that defies easy designation, that counters our notion of utopia?2 The desert offers the possibility of reimagining order. It is home to outlaws and exiles, those who opt out of traditional culture. The desert is hybrid and mixed, refusing clarity and calculation. The desert is ghost towns and abandoned mines, dry wells, empty streambeds, ancient valleys, vast plains, deep ravines, tight spaces between giant rocks. The desert is a place of otherness.

heat :: a flailing heat

The desert challenges, questions, alienates. Well into The Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family—worn, dirty, exhausted—has left the dustbowls of Oklahoma, and each of them longs for California, heartily anticipating the lush land of orange orchards and peach blossoms. They are not prepared for California’s desert, however. First they climb through the mountains, “through the broken, rotten rock,” moving through what the narrator describes as “dead country, burned white and gray and no hint of life on it.” They reach a summit and then descend to the desert floor in their rickety truck, driving through the desert at night. “The dusk passed into dark and the desert stars came out in

2 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” trans. Jay Miskowiec in Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring, 1986). 22-27.

the soft sky, stars stabbing and sharp, with few points and rays to them, and the sky was velvet. And the heat changed. While the sun was up, it was a beating, flailing heat, but now the heat came from below, from the earth itself, and the heat was thick and muffling.”3 This is the myth of the desert as death and desolation, its omnipotent heat flaunting its power through both nuance and intensity. The desert—dead, arid, hot—is so demanding and terrible that death will claim one member of the Joad family before they reach Barstow.

anchorite :: one who retreats from society for religious reasons

Paul of Thebes and Saint Anthony. Anna and Theodora; Melania, both the Elder and the Younger: these are among the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the Christian ascetics of the third century AD who traveled into the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. Paul is commonly named the first of these hermits, and he reputedly lived for nearly one hundred years in a cave in the desert. His days were devout and simple, his diet plain, and the desert offered him a sense of order and clarity not possible amid the corruption of the city. Saint Anthony, hearing stories of Paul, followed him, foregoing the quotidian pleasures around him in order to find succor for the soul. Anchorites, these self-made hermits gave away their homes and their money, and they entered the desert seeking its purity and to reckon with themselves through God.4

ascetic :: practicing rigorous self-denial

The ascetics use the desert to test their faith. The desert’s harshness requires a kind of temerity and commitment not so easily roused in the city. But in addition to afflicting the body physically, the desert works metaphorically, fostering an attention to the Word or logos of Christianity. Indeed, there are many ways to characterize the Word. Visionaries and mystics employed rich and beautiful imagery. The desert, however, points in a different direction. The desert comes to represent not simply the physical isolation of the monk but also the inner retreat necessary for a full encounter with the divine. “To listen to the Word one had to be prepared to enter into an inner landscape of such stillness, such encompassing silence that it was like a kind of desert.” 5 While the stories of the ascetics Saint Paul and Saint Antony tell of a literal retreat to the desert, spiritual egress is also metaphorical, an internal retreat to a quietude that engages with the Divine. For the ascetic, with his rigorous self-denial, the desert opens a way to feel and sense at once the simplicity and the enormity of the Word.

3 John Steinbeck, The Portable Steinbeck (New York: Penguin Classics), 369.

4 “The theme of utopian paradise is a frequent one in early monastic texts and in all desert literature, and the order sought in the desert is a reconfiguration of the disorder of the

fallen world of the cities,” writes David Jasper in Sacred Desert: Religion, Literature, Art, and Culture (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), 28.

5 Douglas E. Christie, The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

grainy dissolve :: Twentynine Palms

A man and a woman drive through the desert in a Hummer. They walk through the desert, they fight in the desert, they have sex in the desert. He is beaten and raped in the desert. She is murdered in the desert. Life is utterly reduced to bare existence in the desert. All around them, the desert landscape seems to breathe, rumble, and pulse. This myth? The desert is alive. It is not the inert and hostile backdrop to our stories but an active player in a punishing world.6

outside :: the desert is outside

Another hiker went missing this weekend in the boulder-filled desert of Joshua Tree National Park, one of among fifty or so that disappear each year into the park’s twelve hundred square miles of hills, caves, and ravines. “Every landscape reveals more of itself as you search it,” explains writer Geoff Manaugh, who says that desert searchers now deploy lost-person behavior algorithms. These computational tools track the actions of previous hikers and use that information to predict where visitors might go next in the desert. The algorithms do not always work. And so, long after the official searches end, teams of amateur sleuths continue to hunt for the lost. “The intensity that many of these investigators bring to their work suggests a fundamental discomfort with the very idea of disappearance in the twenty-first century,” Manaugh explains. “People should not be able to disappear, not in this day and age.”7 What does it mean to vanish outside? What myth is that? What philosophy accounts for such absence, such loss, such mystery?

Philosopher Maurice Blanchot writes of the mysterious unknowability of the desert and its hold on our imagination related to loss. “The desert is still not time, or space, but a space without place and a time without production. There one can only wander, and the time that passes leaves nothing behind; it is a time without past, without present, time of a promise that is real only in the emptiness of the sky and the sterility of a bare land where man is never there but always outside.”8

grainy dissolve :: Teorema

A man stands in a crowded station, bereft. He undresses. He is naked. He walks, stepping from the tiled floor to the sands of a desert. The wind blows,

6 Twentynine Palms, dir. by Bruno Dumont (Paris, France: 3B Productions, 2003).

7 Geoff Manaugh, “Dark Zones,” New York Times, March 22, 2018.

8 Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003), 80.

gritty dunes loom, and the man is now tiny, staggering, framed at not the center but the bottom of the image. Then he is a small speck lurching in silhouette across the crest of a hill before zigzagging and collapsing, toppling, careening on his knees nearly out of the frame, gone, and reappearing in a cloud of dust, a negligible force. He approaches slowly, still staggering. Close-up: the man wails horrifically, not at us, but turned away, howling into the implacable desert.9

ecomysticism :: five senses + the world

To be sure, the desert is a screen for all kinds of mythical projections, good and bad. But it is also tourmaline and malachite, creosote bushes and Joshua trees, wolf spiders and red racer snakes. How do we reconcile the aching divide between the idealized desert and its flabbergasting material reality?

“I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.”10 So writes Edward Abbey, working to bring the two concepts together, the mystic’s desire for something beyond and the materialist’s appreciation for the enchantment of mere matter. This is an endeavor taken up under the mantle of “ecomysticism,” defined as “a state of consciousness brought about via the five senses interacting with the rest of the material world.”11 Can we allow this interaction? Can we set aside the myth of the human as a separate being comprehending an external world and instead begin to imagine consciousness as coextensive with the world? “Mind arises, and dwells, between the body and the earth,” says David Abrams.12 Let us dwell with the desert. Is not the desert perhaps the best place for this challenging rendezvous?

grainy dissolve :: Beau Travail

The camera circles the men at shoulder height. They raise their arms. They hold their hands to form circles. Their skin is smooth. Their profiles are sharp. The landscape is soft behind them, holding them, carrying them, merging with them. Body, gesture, land, and space come together as the men move in syncopation and discipline on the edge of the desert, twentieth-century anchorites. “You don’t forget a landscape like that,” the director will later say. 13

9 Teorema, dir. by Pier Paolo Pasolini (Rome, Italy: Aetos Produzioni Cinematografiche, 1968).

10 Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (originally published by McGraw-Hill, 1968; citation taken from New York: Touchstone, 1990), 6.

11 David Tagnani, “New Materialism, Ecomysticism, and the Resolution of Paradox in Edward Abbey,” Western American Literature, vol. 50 no. 4, 2016, pp. 317-346: 319.

12 David Abrams, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 111.

13 Beau Travail, Claire Denis, 1999. The quotation is Claire Denis, from Jonathan Romney, “Who Wants to Be a Legionnaire?” The Guardian, June 27, 2000.

liminal :: of or pertaining to a threshold

The Israelites wandered in the desert for forty years. Jesus fasted in the desert for forty days and forty nights. The Bible’s desert is paradoxical, shifting in status as the account moves from Genesis to Exodus, from Numbers to the Book of Matthew and beyond. The desert is a place of exile; it is a place of danger; it is also a place of revelation and renewal, of contact with God. Could it be a liminal place, a threshold? Is this liminality not also a step along the Hero’s journey, a passage from the familiar into the unfamiliar?

arid :: dry, parched

Standing in the bustling city or the lush forest, we tend to characterize the desert by what it lacks, primarily moisture. The desert’s aridity is one of its defining features, one that you feel as you breathe, as you move. Rebecca Solnit knows it well, this aridity. “On a hot day, water is sucked straight out of your skin, and you can feel how fast dying of thirst could be, but the aridity is what makes the air so clear, what opens up those fifty-mile views.” She goes on to echo the third-century ascetics, noting that this austerity is a welcome respite from the business of the rest of the world.14 The desert again as a paradox, giving yet taking.

landscape :: myths that shape the land

Is the desert a landscape? Which is to say, is the desert a myth, devised to explain the inexplicable? But how so? Landscape is managed nature, the wild places organized, domesticated, tidied up. And myth? A story told to explain, to assuage, to channel. Our landscapes tell us about our relationship to the world. Landscapes suggest the myths we tell ourselves about nature and culture. We call the desert a landscape as a form of control. But what do we control of the desert? And what do we control of its many myths?

Let us end with a caveat, a warning. Twilight and then silence. Heed it well.

“I know what they tell you about the desert, but you mustn’t believe them.”15

14 Rebecca Solnit, “Diary,” London Review of Books, October 9, 2003, no page.

15 Barry Holstun Lopez, “Desert Notes,” in Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of the Raven (Kansas City: Andrew McMeel Publishing, LLC).

He will go on to describe the richness of the desert, but I like this idea: myths of the desert dissolve like sand.

D U O

MIRAGE K E N G

DESERT PALISADES PALM SPRINGS

In the tradition of Land Art as a reflection of the dreams and aspirations projected onto the American West, Mirage presents a continually changing encounter in which subject and object, inside and outside, remain in flux. The ranch-style structure suggests a latter-day, architectural vision of manifest destiny. Mirage is a primary structure, rendered by the artist without function, service, or texture. With every available surface clad in mirror, it absorbs and reflects the surrounding landscape so that the exterior seemingly disappears just as the interior draws the viewer into a kaleidoscope of light and its reflection. As Mirage pulls in the landscape and reflects it back out, the classic, one-story suburban house becomes a frame as well as a perceptual echo chamber, endlessly bouncing around the dream of nature as a pure, uninhabited state and the pursuit of its conquest.

neville wakefield: Let’s start with two interlinked ideas: the American West and how it has been constituted in recent art, and how Land Art has influenced your own relationship to that landscape.

doug aitken: When we look at the movement to the West, when we look at the development of the West, we often see patterns and repetitions. Within that you see the dwelling, the house, as something that becomes serial, repetitious, grids of homes. I’m very interested in this idea that you begin to not see the landscape around you because you’ve seen it so many times; it has numbed your senses and made your perception blunt in a way. I felt it was important to use the vernacular of a suburban house and distill its sculptural form.

How important is the encounter with the object? A lot of Land Art—at least, a lot of Land Art from the 1960s and ’70s—was about shaping and framing the encounter.

When you look at the period when Land Art was in its development, you often find remote locations, and oftentimes the artist would use the aesthetic language of abstract geometry. In a lot of ways, that goes back to earlier forms of Land Art such as the pyramids of the Mayans, or the pyramids of Egypt, or the Nazca Lines, which all have an abstract symmetry. I became interested in something quite different. I have a fascination with working outside the urban space, outside architecture such as the gallery or museum, but it’s also important for me not to ignore the idea of civilization. I wanted a location that looked down onto the sprawling Cartesian grid of electricity, the city, and I wanted to site the project so it was almost a one-point perspective of this grid.

That tension between isolation and oneness, for me, was key.

In a way I saw Mirage as an inversion of Sleepwalkers, which you’ve projected onto buildings. Rather than projecting onto architecture you were cinematizing the structure itself, turning it into a screen.

A lot of that goes into the idea of the artwork existing as a system, not only as a finished piece. The work itself becomes different continuously. In a sense, maybe the Sonic Pavilion in Inhotim, Brazil, was a precursor to a piece like Mirage. With that work from 2009, you would go to Brazil and walk up this hillside, but inside the pavilion there’s not an artwork; there’s a hole. It goes seven hundred feet into the earth, and at the bottom of that hole there’s a series of live sounds, pushing up almost like a sonic geyser, of the earth’s shifting tectonic plates. The project was my first step in the direction of creating a living artwork.

There’s a paradox to it: You made the architecture disappear in order to make one aware of its presence.

Exactly. That loops back to the idea of what we don’t see, what’s along the drive that we forget. We have a capacity to experience and remember, but that capacity in some ways is very limited. It’s almost like the [Jorge Luis] Borges short story when he talks about a man who has a condition where he is suddenly aware of absolutely everything around him, and it’s debilitating, paralyzing.

In that way, Mirage is a system constantly in flux. Whether viewers drive there to experience it or see it randomly, they can step up, be shocked into awareness, and have a realization of what’s around them.

Is the experiential, or living, artwork at odds with the way it was recorded, which was largely through images on social media? How did you feel about that?

The way we see and the way we document evolve. One of the interesting things about Mirage was that viewers often would own the experience; they’d author the experience, kind of write their own narrative. I love that each and every person has a unique take on it. They bring something to it, but they take away an experience, an encounter, a moment in time, and a sense of a destination that’s ephemeral. That’s how I had hoped the work would function: It would go beyond the artist’s authorship, and instead be the viewers’ ownership.

Were you surprised by its popularity?

I thought very few people would make it out to the work. I thought it might be people who follow contemporary art or had a desire to see land art in some form. It did take me by surprise how the work became this destination. There was a diverse range of people, from someone who’s a curator or a critic to someone who’s driving down the highway in a pickup truck at dusk and sees this reflective object and moves toward it. I really liked and I value this democratic viewership. I think it’s great.

In some ways it was one of the first truly populist works of land art.

Yeah. I had been working on the idea of Mirage for some time, and it had different iterations. The development of the project came out of a series of sculptures where I was looking at the idea of the moving image. I had certain ideas that the moving image couldn’t quite achieve. What I mean by that is: something that’s filmed is already authored.

Whether it’s a landscape or a character-driven work, or a narrative work, it has to convince you, or seduce you, for you to fall into the world it has created. I started thinking about the idea of the viewer becoming the subject. The viewer is actually seen inside the work.

In 2004 I did a show in Paris. We created a labyrinth of moving mirrors, and they had silent motors. Almost like the wind, they would follow the viewers and distort them into this living abstraction.

That was the first large-scale work where I employed reflectivity, and I had been searching for a way to bring the viewer into the work and bring them into a deep space, a compression-contraction. [For Mirage] I wanted to completely break out of interior architecture. I felt this could be a system that’s outside, in the wild, so to speak. It would act differently. It would no longer be purely about the viewer backed by a white wall of the museum, or a closed environment.

That led me to merging the idea of the viewer becoming the narrative and subject and what form it would take.

It was interesting that Mirage was sited in a place with architectural presences, but that were uninhabited, curiously empty—a modeling of possibility.

That goes back to our conversation about the last section of the film Zabriskie Point, where you find suburban developments on the fringes, on the horizon. The dust has settled, and there’s a settlement and a road. I’ve always been interested in the

outskirts, the twilight space between the natural environment and civilization.

When you live on the West Coast, you become so aware of that because you find it often and everywhere.

We had a sense of how Mirage needed to be activated, but you don’t sculpt the location; you have to discover it. That process of discovery helped develop the work. It became stronger, more fully formed, because of the struggle that we had in searching for a location that could speak the language it needed to.

In a way, Mirage inhabited a twilight area between architecture and film.

The work was made from the tension of elements: a boulder-strewn hillside with huge rocks frozen in time, and roads with no homes. There’s emptiness, but at the same time you look down and you see a suburban sprawl.

The idea that you can be so close yet so far was incredibly important. That was an important difference from the land art in the 1960s and ’70s, when it often looked for the most remote places, and this journey that you would take to spend time in silence and reflection. Mirage speaks more to the twenty-first century. It’s kaleidoscopic, it’s mapped with movement, and it’s incredibly familiar. It takes a form that’s so commonplace you feel no reservation about stepping inside. There’s no door, and there are no windows. It welcomes you in an absolutely neutral way that is almost subconscious.

L L T I A B U U Q

hEARTH confronts the viewer with a sound and sculptural installation that extends into performance. The encounter consists in a blue female figure at the center of a field of white sand, one ear to the ground, listening. The sculpture participates in a dialogue not only with the Sunnylands Center & Gardens collection of art, which includes the Alberto Giacometti Bust of Diego on Stele III, but also with its pristine architecture and beautiful grounds, which allow for another level of contemplation. The sculpture—a life-size, full-body cast of the artist’s dancer and choreographer daughter, Jasmine, in plaster covered with ultramarine blue pigment, installed in a circle of white—permits for the projection of a massive landscape and for hearing on a large scale. Albuquerque posits that we must reconsider the importance of listening. On two occasions during Desert X, singers and dancers animated the Great Lawn of Sunnylands with a performance created by Albuquerque in collaboration with Kristen Toedtman of the Los Angeles Master Chorale and with Jasmine.

neville wakefield: A lot of your work is about the swirling energies of the cosmos and how we constitute ourselves within that. The desert is an elemental and cosmic place, and you’ve been to many deserts. What draws you to the desert and, specifically, to the Coachella Valley desert?

lita albuquerque : I just came back from a trip to Tunisia in North Africa, which is where I grew up. I took my son there, and I took him to Djerba. I kept telling him—I said, “It’s a desert island,” and he said, “What do you mean, a desert island? Islands are islands. It’s not desert.” And I said, “No, no. It’s a desert island.” I hadn’t been back to Tunisia since 2011, so for about seven years, and there was such an impact of how much—I mean, I knew this— how much the landscape there influenced me, and how much it opens up some kind of a poetic space in me.

The desert in the Coachella Valley, especially the places that are inaccessible or less accessible, certainly has that feeling of the sublime, or that feeling of getting lost.

Traditionally the sublime has been constituted in terms of boundlessness—the absence of borders and the confusion of the self—which features strongly in your work.

Yes. Very much. It isn’t just the desert, it’s the relationship; it’s about internalizing space. It’s about experiencing, inside and outside.

In the sense of there being no boundary dividing the internal and the external?

That’s a good way of putting it. It may not have boundaries, but on the other hand, it’s a space that holds you. It’s like, it’s not totally boundary-less; in fact, it takes you in. It envelops you. The self and nature become one, but you’re being held by that nature. It’s a “you’re not alone” kind of experience.

It’s interesting for your Desert X piece, then, which in a way was at the least deserted site.

I wanted to go out and, in fact, I had chosen the site, but then it turned out we couldn’t have that site. What intrigued me about the non-desert desert of Sunnylands was, it’s a site of political power. I strove to bring another kind of voice inside that place of power, which was also created as an oasis.

It has a peacemaking agenda.

Exactly. It’s where decisions were made, or well, discussed. [hEARTH] was putting my voice within that context. I took the distillation of my experience of being in those spaces when I was researching all the places I wanted to do works in, and what came out of that was that idea of silence. So I created this performance that was around the idea of silence.

How did silence manifest within the choreography?

There was a combination of choreography, movement, and singing, and we worked together. I wrote the libretto, but we worked with the composer and the choreographer to have moments of complete silence. There were moments during silence when there was a lot of movement, and vice versa. It shifted back and forth.

Between stillness and silence.

Exactly. At first I questioned whether to have any words whatsoever, but I decided to talk about silence and also about listening, because the figure was listening to the earth.

The figure was ultramarine blue, with her ear pressed to the ground. Was that an invitation for all of us to pay attention to the sounds that we don’t hear?

Very much, and in fact, the choreography of the piece, in a way, was kind of violent. There were the

three dancers, and two of them kept listening and then throwing themselves on the ground. They did that with the singers as well. They threw themselves on the ground as well, so that they could listen with their ears to the ground.

But it’s very much an invitation to listen, a listening within.

Was it about the act of listening, or was there something the piece was messaging to people that they should be listening for?

It was more about questioning what we should listen to.

She, the sculpture, was the one carrying the entire message in her being. And the singing was about, “Why have you come here? What are you listening to?” And meaning, therefore, “What should we listen to?”

It actually reminded me of a moment in Michael Moore’s film Bowling for Columbine when he asks Marilyn Manson what he would tell the children of Columbine, and Manson says this incredible thing, “I wouldn’t tell them anything. I’d listen to what they had to say. And that’s what no one did.”

That’s good. Yes. Yes.

The attention that this listening asks of us, is it to the cosmic or to the political? It’s a political site, but it’s a cosmic act.

They’re intertwined, and so through listening to the cosmic, you get a different sense of the political. It was very much about, “I’ve got to, got to, got to, got to listen.”

I thought this was the most political piece I had done. The figure represented this not-ofEarth being, but also, she is listening to the earth, and listening to the earth is also listening to what’s happening on the earth, not just in the earth.

J N E N B O L A

VISIBLE DISTANCE / SECOND SIGHT

33°50'54.7"N 116°30'20.9"W

GENE AUTRY TRAIL BETWEEN VIA ESCUELA AND I-10 PALM SPRINGS

F N D E E R

In a cinematic experience animated by driving along Gene Autry Trail, viewers encountered a series of billboards featuring photographs of the mountains toward which they were driving. Each photograph of Visible Distance / Second Sight was unique to its position along this route, and at a certain point, as one approached each billboard, perfect alignment with the horizon occurred, thus reconnecting the space that the rectangle of the billboard had interrupted. In the language of billboard advertising, this kind of reading is referred to as a BurmaShave, after the shaving-cream company that used sequential placement to create messaging to be read from a moving vehicle. Within the desert empire of roadside signs, Jennifer Bolande chose to advertise the thing so often overlooked. Looking up at the billboards, our attention was drawn back to the landscape itself, pictured here as a stuttering kinesthetic of real and artificial horizons.

neville wakefield: To the extent that Desert X was a cartographic endeavor, it was identified with these nodal artistic experiences, but for me at least, the exhibition was also about interstitial spaces, the spaces in between, and the experience of the desert they offered. You were alone in choosing to actually operate in that space in between. Was that a conscious decision?

jennifer bolande: Yes. I have an abiding interest in things that are in transition or on the periphery of attention. This project draws attention to the transition between the built and natural environments, between direct and mediated experiences, between here and there, expectation and memory. Almost all of my work has to do with liminal spaces and works in the spaces between photography, sculpture, and cinema.

The project was sited in a transitional zone between wilderness, to the north, and civilization, the city of Palm Springs, to the south. Gene Autry Drive is a rather flat stretch of road that cuts across the Coachella Valley on a north-south axis and is a main artery from the freeway to the airport to points beyond. It’s heavily trafficked, yet in this mile-long stretch there is not much to see: no plants, no buildings, no pedestrians—just the road, a lot of billboards, and movement toward a destination.

The road to somewhere as opposed to the road to nowhere?

Maybe it is a road to nowhere! There’s movement toward a horizon that is continually receding. Moving through the desert ignites a desire to close the gap between here and there. It can be hard to know when you’ve arrived. The piece has

something to do with that desire to see what is just out of reach, or not quite visible.

I was interested in the kinesthetic aspect of the work. In England, we call the windshield a windscreen. You experience a lot of the desert through this moving aperture.

I like that you use the word “kinesthetic” because, through my work, I want to make the experience of seeing almost palpable. Kinesthetics has to do with the bodily senses of movement and place. My piece for Desert X carries you through positions in space and through a set of experiential transitions from screen to frame to actual.

Approaching, you might be attentive to the GPS screen, or the landscape framed by the windscreen, as you call it, and then to the mountain pictures framed on billboards, then correlating the framed and unframed mountains, and finally viewing the mountains unframed, changing in relation to one’s own body and movement through space.

Coming to the desert, one has the sensation of leaving the frame or the usual set of frames and heading into the open, and yet the expanse of the desert creates a desire for framing.

It’s a Russian doll of framing, and so much of the filmic literature of the desert is about that—the framing of vanishing points. The same experience occurs at an individualized level, in the car, and it was important that people didn’t stop, right?

The distances in the desert are so great that it is really enjoyable to experience by car. I wanted to use the car to animate a movie composed of billboard frames. The alignment of the horizons occurs only for an instant, at fifty miles per hour, and then it’s gone; you have to let it go.

Were you aware of sequential advertising before the process?

Yes, but I think the idea came from the many times I’d driven on that road aware of the rhythm of the billboards and the anticipation it produced. You can’t help but look at each of them and look to see what comes next, even if the ad images were always disappointing.

After you invited me to consider the project and I drove around the Coachella Valley just looking, and finally when I had given up for the day and was driving home along that road, I noticed how I was always compelled to look at each billboard with expectation but immediately wished I hadn’t because they just seemed wrong. You observe the

preponderance of images of platters of shrimp on desert billboards—so incongruous and grotesque! In a flash, I realized what I would rather see on that array of billboards.

It’s interesting that the billboards were advertising nothing but the landscape. It was as if there was this moment of transparency. You had an equal surrealism, that overlay of landscape onto landscape, and that seemed important.

The photographs momentarily erase the billboards, reconnecting the space that the ads and the rectangle of the billboard interrupted.

In surrealism there’s often a kind of perceptual slippage; something moves from its usual position and becomes somehow other. I have always been a big fan of the double take—being asked to look again with disbelief or heightened attention.

I love the oscillation of perception between the pictured and the actual landscape that occurs in this piece.

There was spatial alignment, but there was also temporal alignment, because there was a time of the day that matched up as well.

The movement between images was as important to me as the images themselves.

Most of the photographs were taken early in the morning to get raking light from the east because I wanted the mountains to appear volumetric. Standing for an hour with my camera, I watched the light dramatically change the way the mountains looked. Of course the photographs could never look the same as the actual, even if it was at the exact same time of day. As you see the pictures on the billboards in relation to the landscape, it may trigger a memory of the way the mountains looked in the past, or an awareness of the continually changing conditions and appearances of things.

I think people want to go to the desert, but they don’t know how to orient themselves within it. The show was sort of a map that allowed for a kind of personal inquiry.

I think a lot about orientation in my work—how you situate your body in relationship to a given object or experience or image in order to understand. An interesting part of the project for me was the site-specific aspect of taking the photographs It was a bit of a process, figuring out how and where to position myself to take the pictures, and quite different from the usual aesthetic and compositional choices that go into making a picture. It was as if the billboards themselves told me where I had to stand

and how I had to frame each picture.

Mountains and other landforms look quite different from different perspectives. This is why people get lost in the desert all the time. I somehow hadn’t really understood this in a very deep way, and was maybe regarding landscape as fixed and framed, like a picture.

That is the disorientation of the desert and what makes one visually chase these horizons.

Were you surprised by people’s reaction to it?

I was quite surprised that people wanted to stop and to take a picture capturing the decisive moment of alignment. For some, this created a desire to recapture that moment. That the images of alignment went viral was a surprise to me as well. I think the documentation must have transmitted a virtual experience of the desires that desert travel elicits. That was different from the drive-by experience of the piece, but maybe close to my intention in another way.

I loved this comment that a friend sent me: “Laughed to watch a ‘movie’ by moving past a stationary image which was both a ‘western’ and a literal ‘road picture.’ A drive-by drive-in.”

W L I B O O

33°49'01.18"N 116°25'19.24"W

RAMON ROAD & BOB HOPE DRIVE RANCHO MIRAGE

Like the myths surrounding Elvis, Jesus, or UFOs, the figure of JFK is, in this piece, lightning in the ground, bunkered in the very same Atlas Survival Shelter that the president had in case of nuclear attack. Inside Monument, the painted bronze figure is based on that of a hobby kit, scaled up to Hellenistic proportions. It might be equal parts Catholic reliquary and secretive roadside shrine, one of those found in the nearby deserts of Mexico, dedicated to the narco-saint Jesús Malverde. Either way, it speaks not only to all those things that have been driven underground since the extinguished optimism of the 1960s, but also to that decade’s fears—invasion and nuclear attack—that have been so vividly resurrected in recent times.

neville wakefield: I thought we’d start with where you come from, Texas, which isn’t exactly desert but isn’t exactly not desert either. It’s a place with an oversized mythology.

will boone: On my mom’s side of the family, I’m an eighth-generation Texan. They’re from South Texas. The nearest town is a place called Cotulla. I grew up spending a lot of time down there. That part of Texas is very close to desert. It’s very dry, hard country. Hot. I was taught, especially by my grandmother, that a huge part of who I am is the place where I come from. It’s interesting, because out of all my cousins and my sister and me, none of us lives in Texas now. Everyone left.

My grandmother moved from Cotulla, and my mother grew up in Dallas. They were there when the JFK assassination happened. My mom was at school, and they got let out early. My grandmother was at the parade, farther down from Dealey Plaza, waiting to see the president. I recently read a great book called God Save Texas by Lawrence Wright. He was talking about how the assassination shifted the perception of Texas. Beforehand, it was this thing from Western films, a place of adventure, wide-open spaces, cowboys, and fortune—a place where fortune favors the brave, and a rugged land full of opportunity and risk. [The assassination] shifted the perception to a place of violence: maniacs, drifters, Texas chainsaw massacres, religious cults, and militia groups. All this stuff was invisible to me, until I finally left the state.

In terms of the kind of myth the work embodied, obviously JFK was there, but you also talked about UFOs and about this idea that you could go to the desert to disappear, to be sequestered or bunkered away from mainstream society.

It’s always interesting to me, this idea of thinking someone, usually a hero, is dead, and they’re really

not. Their death is a hoax, and they’re really hiding, whether it’s Tupac or Elvis, or whoever. I guess it goes all the way back to Jesus. There’s something about the desert where it feels like a void. It’s kind of like the ocean, where it seems possible for something to be there, and for no one ever to find it. Because of that endlessness, it’s the perfect setting for weird shit to happen: nuclear weapons, aliens, secret hideouts.

The bomb shelter is its own separate, loaded thing. I was driving down the freeway and saw the place that made these things. I pulled over. As an artist, I’ll have ideas, but then sometimes ideas present themselves.

You weren’t setting out to find a bomb shelter?

No. I went to the bomb-shelter place and looked around. They had a bunch of them lined up in this airplane hangar. They looked really great above ground, like if you combined a mobile home and a satellite. The third or fourth time, I talked to a guy who owned the company. I explained what I wanted to do. And he said, “Well, this is JFK’s bomb shelter from Florida. I got the blueprints. I modified them, but it’s based on this bomb shelter that the Army Corps of Engineers designed for Kennedy.”

At that point, I knew I needed to make this a real thing. I would lie awake at night, thinking about it. I felt like the closer it became to completion, the farther I moved away from ownership, and the more it actually felt like a monument.

But it touched a raw nerve in a lot of people, not just because of the invocation of the desert as this site of nuclear testing, those public spectacles that took place, but also because we were in the early days of the Trump Administration.

The meaning of the artwork moved a little. It started conversations. For example, I had to hire a guy to come weld the hydraulic lift on the inside of the hatch. It was the very last thing to do. He was the only guy I could find. He drives all the way out there from San Bernardino, and I notice that his car has Trump stickers on it. He said, “I’ve done some of these before, but it’s not for me, man. I’ll melt the barrel off of my rifle before I go out like a gopher down in the goddamn hole.” All of a sudden I was standing out there in the desert, talking with a complete stranger about what we were going to do at the end of the world.

Other stuff went on in the bomb shelter. Kids used it to hotbox, and they kept cutting off the lock. We’d replace the locks, and eventually they asserted squatter’s rights and put on their

own lock, which was another great contention at the site.

At first, it seemed like something more nefarious was going on. I thought maybe someone was going to go in there with an angle grinder to hack up the sculpture to steal the metal. I began to feel like, This is what happens when you try to do something in the desert. It’s a hostile place, and it doesn’t want you there. I was watching all these movies that take place in the desert. The moral of most of them is simple: Don’t go into the desert. Don’t fuck with the desert.

So I was speeding around those roads, trying to find a locksmith before they closed, imagining some evil tweaker waiting until the middle of the night to go steal the bronze statue. I was imagining how he would have to dismember it. But then I realized, there is a high school about a quarter mile away. It ends up being teenagers, and it’s not that big a deal. I went to the locksmith in Cathedral City to try to get some advice or help, and they already knew about the whole thing. Word had spread that something was going on. There had been people watching us dig the hole and bury the shelter. It was weird and kind of exciting.

Talk a bit about the bronze figure, why it was important, and how the form came together.

I’d been collecting model kits, the kind you glue together and paint. Most of the time they’re cars or military vehicles, but some are figurative. I had some when I was younger, but I never got super into it. It was always too hard, and I never finished them. I started looking at these things, and I’d find them at swap meets here in LA. There’s a whole subculture.

Then I went to see a show of Hellenistic bronzes at the Getty. It was incredible. I had spent all this time the day before with the models, looking at pieces, remnants, because sometimes they get broken. I was organizing them, isolating them, and photographing them in my studio. And they were kind of the same thing as the bronzes. Same archetypes: heroes, politicians, monsters, and athletes.

It became interesting to think about the potential and the power of plastic toys. I wanted to see them at the same scale and with the same material as the statues. What would happen if, in, say, two thousand years, after we’re all dead, someone finds a Frankenstein or a JFK?

After seeing the bomb-shelter place, I began making miniature subterranean environments, like dioramas, and putting JFK inside them.

It invokes that part of counterculture that was pushed underground. The experience was much

like visiting an archeological site, or even a tomb. You talked about roadside shrines you find that are dedicated to narco-saints. Was there a religious subtext?

It felt like a tomb. It was dark and quiet, and it was cool inside. You go inside, and Kennedy is in there, and he is the only Catholic president, so it kind of reminded me of visiting Rome, where every Catholic church has a dead guy stuffed somewhere in there. JFK is thought of as a saint. He was radical and was killed. I was interested in those narco-saint shrines, but I’ve only read about them. Jesús Malverde is the big one.

To me it felt like a bootleg monument, like an independently constructed public work. You visit the statue like you do the Lincoln Monument in Washington, D.C., but it’s painted by hand with a brush, and it’s down in this hole in the desert.

There’s a guy who made a Graceland Two in his house. His whole house was like a shrine to Elvis. You could go there twenty-four hours a day, ring his doorbell, and you would pay him to let you in. I think he shot a guy on his porch, and they shut it down.

Were you surprised by the response that Monument provoked?

Every now and then someone would send me a picture, and there was a line of people standing in the desert. It seemed absurd, but, at the same time, it made sense. It was an opportunity to experience something weird, and it was free. It made me feel very emotional. People from the surrounding communities were coming out of curiosity. It wasn’t about art. They had seen it on Snapchat. It was something to do and bring the kids to see. It didn’t really matter who I was or why I did it. That was really exciting.

C A L U C O M

CURVES AND ZIGZAGS

33°42'23.9"N 116°23'55.5"W

HOMME-ADAMS PARK PALM

Curves and Zigzags is the third work in an ongoing series of freestanding walls. Claudia Comte’s practice embraces all media with equal ferocity, and she uses this series to examine what happens when two-dimensional painting is superimposed on a three-dimensional structure. Unlike the walls where graffiti artists paint, Comte builds her walls specifically for the work. Curves and Zigzags starts with a stringent geometric composition that gradually morphs into a more organic wavelike pattern reminiscent of Bridget Riley op-art paintings or the gardens of Roberto Burle Marx. Playing on a constant exchange between dualities—nature and culture, order and chaos, geometric and organic form—Comte’s wall suggests a walk through the shifting sands of abstraction, to a place where beauty and contemplation sit side by side.

neville wakefield: The idea of a wall became a hot political topic in the period leading up to Desert X and after it, but you’ve been making painted walls for quite a while. Curves and Zigzags was the third in a series.

claudia comte: Right. The first wall I ever made was 128 Squares and their Demonstration for a sculpture park in the south of France (Domaine du Muy). I was interested in doing a wall painting, but as there were no structures with suitable surfaces, I came up with the idea of building my own support. The result is a structure that straddles painting and sculpture. As a freestanding wall, it doesn’t work as a wall should. It doesn’t effectively demarcate space. It’s a false partition: you can access both sides, loop around it. It’s the illusion of a wall, amplified by the distortion of the shape-shifting pattern.

The pattern for the wall installed in the French sculpture park is a mathematical equation; it takes a square half the size of the wall and divides it twice over. As such, you have a kind of Russian doll scenario, with the smaller squares fitting inside the larger squares. This is where the title 128 Squares and their Demonstration comes from: one side demonstrates what is painted on its reverse, and both sides must be viewed in order to complete the formula. The green of the inset is a deep forest color that reflects the surrounding foliage, but its flatness provides a constant—whereas the tones of the leaves will fluctuate seasonally. The work is still standing there, and the relationship between the wall and the environment will continue to evolve over time. The pattern also has a relationship to the spiral arrangement of leaves, meaning that its rendering isn’t entirely manufactured. We might say that artifice and nature are more entwined than we realize.

Was

the interplay of the rendering and reality intentional?

Yes, it’s something I play around with in all my work. Concepts are digitally rendered and diagrammed, as all of the measurements have to be precisely worked out. The seed of an idea begins in my head, but the rendering process is really where I grapple with an idea. I’ve long been interested in the fabrication process made possible by computation. The fabricated object will closely represent the rendering, and yet there’s always a discrepancy between the design and how it is experienced three-dimensionally.

I’m a great fan of the technical process, as often it means taking things back and forth, and finding a common register between different approaches to materiality and form. Recently, I worked with the computer science department at the University of Freiburg in Germany to produce some 4-D animations for When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth at König Galerie in Berlin. The sculptures for the show were first scanned and then animated. The subsequent animations showed the sculptures liquefying, colliding, and morphing into other shapes. The process created something I couldn’t do in the material world.

Do you distance yourself from the graffiti or mural type of wall painting?

The question is not even if it’s graffiti or not. The typology is different, and it’s important that I work directly on the wall by hand, with the aid of vinyl or tape. I like the group effort, with people creating a skin on a wall, which is also a sculpture. It gives the work energy; it’s not something that was machineprinted and applied as a transfer. I like the human fallibility of reproducing a pattern using paint.

Was the work that you created for Desert X— Curves and Zigzags—the first wall where the geometry of the structure directly corresponded to the geometry of the painting?

Yes, it was, although it was part of an evolving process. The idea for Curves and Zigzags developed out of previous wall works. The geometry of 128 Squares and their Demonstration used black and green inlay, while the second wall, 128 Triangles and their Demonstration, installed at Miami Beach, featured black triangles with blue inlay. These two works are very similar; they have the same size and number of shapes on either side. Like the effect of the green, I enjoyed how the azure tone reproduced a postcard sea blue.

Curves and Zigzags differed in that the shape of the wall wasn’t dictated by the pattern, but

actually augmented the morphing condition of the zigzags and curved lines. The effect produced a kind of structural mirage, in which the structure and geometry worked in tandem to produce tension.

The installation was sited near a trailhead in Palm Desert. The wall was really a line set out in this space that echoed another line between habitation and nature.

The site was perfect. There was a symmetrical placement to Curves and Zigzags: the desert on one side of the wall, and the city on the other. The wall was parallel to the road, with the mountains in the background; it straddled all of these elements. I was interested in the visual disjuncture the work creates. Curves and Zigzags was so incongruous with the environment—the monochrome makes it pop. But at the same time, it shared a direct relationship to the Southwestern vernacular of desert cities such as Las Vegas, not far away. That’s the point. It’s a wall without structural conceit—it operates more like a surface, transforming before your eyes. I have the feeling people appreciated the surroundings more with the wall there, as it provided a footing in the landscape. In this sense, it wasn’t so much what the work was, but how it interacted with everything around it.

There’s something immediately engaging and cartoonlike about this transition from the geometric to curvilinear. It’s as if psychedelic content had been added to minimalism.

For me there’s a comedic aspect, possibly even slapstick. It’s rather like reaching out for a ledge to stabilize yourself and falling right over. It’s also about joy; there’s something pleasing about the shape’s transition from hard to soft. I’m looking to communicate a feeling or energy: how the work might relax or energize its viewers, communicate joy and humor—that’s what I task myself with.

It gave permission for a different kind of engagement. People did all sorts of things. It activated the landscape, but it also became a backdrop for other activities. You had some break-dancers, and people enacting their own dramas.

Exactly, and that’s what I love to hear. So much of my work is about interaction and opening up ways of experiencing artworks. Even with structured formats—for example, I often build games into my work—it’s a jumping-off point for activity.

For Curves and Zigzags, I invited four break-dancers from the larger LA and Palm Springs

area to interact with the wall. Their response completely expanded our sense of what the work could do. The top narrow band was wide enough that they were able to use it as a platform to walk and dance on. The dancers’ interactions created a third layer, in which they were responding to the wall as a space, but also to the pattern as a contouring tool. I was really pleased to see choreography develop out of Curves and Zigzags. We documented the performance and developed a new video work with an electronic score by my great friend and collaborator Egon Elliut.

As you approached the piece, it looked like a straight, flat wall. As you got closer, you realized it was actually bending with the pattern. Was that optical illusion important?

Yes, that’s important. It seemed flat when you stood in front of it, but if you stood to the side, it was completely different. It shifted your perspective— not only of the wall, but of the environment it was embedded in.

Were you surprised by the way people reacted to it?

Absolutely. Interest began during production. People would come up and talk to us all the time; they would ask about the concept and check in to see how things were progressing. It became a backdrop for hikers, runners, dog walkers, Coachella-goers, and art enthusiasts who would pose in front of the work and roam around it, mesmerized. It was a destination, something people would travel to, document, and use. In the end, the turnout far exceeded our expectations.

J F E F G I B

ALIVE! is a found object, a ready-made sculpture altered with paint and text that reads, I AM ALIVE! YOU ARE ALIVE! THEY ARE ALIVE! WE ARE LIVING! “I chose to work with a wind-turbine blade because of how it alters one’s perceptions when they look out across the desert landscape,” Jeffery Gibson says. “The blades are enormous, and when viewing one up close you get a sense of the expansiveness of the landscape that they occupy. They are also really beautiful in form, and their shape reminds me of something like a wing, a fin, or a bone from a massive whale. The text references the people who lived in Palm Springs, the indigenous people who occupied this land and their belief that the landscape is living.”

neville wakefield: When we first started exploring the area, you were immediately drawn to the most imposing and monumental of man-made presences within the valley: the wind turbines. What was it about them that attracted you?

jeffrey gibson: I have a love-hate relationship with romantic attractions to places, and the desert offers a lot of fraught opportunities for disengaged romanticism. There’s that New-Age vibe out there that I have a negative reaction to and really resist, in particular when it comes to anything regarding Indigenous people in this particular landscape.

The turbines are something that many people like to disregard or ignore, or treat as if they mar the landscape, and that’s probably why I like them. It’s because they never let me fully dissolve into a romantic relationship with the landscape.

And there’s a duality to them. That part of the valley is perhaps the most elemental. You’re acutely aware of the wind, heat, and aridity and, with them, one’s own biological frailty. But then you have these apparently timeless and sort of alien structures.

Also, they carry with them a sense of idealistic environmental intention, right? At the same time, they really are representative of capitalism and consumer culture in the desert.

They represent the market of harnessing the impact of nature. It speaks to a future, and it also speaks to a present, and even, arguably, a past, in terms of our relationship to nature. Many artists have chosen to disregard the material or the object in their work, while I have fallen deeper and deeper in love with objects and material. I am always considering what we consider to be artifacts of earlier times and what will become future artifacts. What do they say about our time? Those turbines will become artifacts in time. They speak about our concern for the present but also our fear of the future.

Do they also make us remember that man has been harnessing natural resources—wind, water—since the beginning of time?

Yes, in a completely unavoidable way. You have to literally choose to look the other way and not see them. It’s impossible. The impressive thing is their engineering and design, which is actually quite beautiful and has very much to do with nature and the structure of a feather, or of a fin on a fish. There’s something incredibly beautiful about human inventions based on nature.

When you think about Palm Springs in terms of architecture, you think about midcentury modernism and form following function, but the city really doesn’t realize that ambition in terms of architecture. It’s the turbine blades that find the truest expression of that principle.

Right, the aesthetic choices are very narrow because of their design for function.

I remember standing there and looking through this contemporary technology and out onto sacred mountains. Did that sense of scale, in terms of time and space, affect you?

Yes. I use found materials and objects in my work regularly, but they tend to be things like beads, textiles, and small objects. It was fantastic to consider the turbine blade as a found object. The sacred mountains represent a very specific Indigenous perspective. Trying to combine that history with the use of a found object was the challenge and the risk for me.

I chose to place the blade at the base of the mountain to act as a sort of border marker between developed, downtown Palm Springs and the mountains. The belief systems of these two contexts seem contrary, and they frame each other. I saw the turbines as a sentinel marker between these two spaces.

The text shifts in meaning depending on who is reading it. There were viewers who felt celebrated by the fact that the blade is a human achievement, but there was no awareness of any Indigenous perspective. Like I was celebrating this human intervention and industry and commerce. When I wrote the text, I was thinking in terms of the Indigenous history of the mountains being alive and whom I was speaking to.

The text’s pronoun inclusiveness also included the landscape in some way. Was that the thinking?

Increasingly the text has become almost the subject of the work. When I choose text, it is to invoke and animate objects and environments whose “voice” may not be recognized. From an Indigenous perspective, you would never disregard the land that you’re standing on. If I am doing something with a site-specific intention, then I will always try to address the land where the work is located, not just the institutional space.

It was interesting, in a general political sense, that there was an us-versus-them mentality, which we’re seeing in the politics of the time.

Yeah. Oh god, yes.

Were you surprised at people’s reaction to it?

No, I was not surprised. I thought about ALIVE! like a two-dimensional image because I wasn’t sure how people would encounter the piece, either as an image of the work or in person. Oftentimes, people don’t even know what it is. So there are a few connections that have to be made. One that it’s a blade, one that the abstraction has any sort of Indigenous roots, and then the text begins to take on some meaning. I think the most impactful reaction I got was how people engaged with the “I,” “you,” and “we.” And then also the scale experienced when people saw the piece in person. We’re trying to move ALIVE! to a sculpture park in New York. It will be set on a field in the Hudson Valley. The decision has been made to have it in a field where it’s literally just standing alone. I’m interested to see it there because visually, there is no kind of additional manmade comparison around it. It’s just this odd object in the field, and I think it will take on a different meaning. We’ll see.

For Desert X, it ended up in front of the most acculturated site possible, the Palm Springs Art Museum. What was your reasoning behind that?

[Executive Director] Liz Armstrong and I had started speaking about doing something when she was still in Minneapolis. I really felt like I needed to have some institutional support, because many of the materials I work with wouldn’t fare well in the middle of a desert. I like to decontextualize objects as a means of both altering and heightening their meanings. In this case, we’re taking something from the field of the desert and placing it into the space of the institution.

S E H R

One I Call is a site-specific sculpture that reflects on the complex web of narratives surrounding deserts and desert communities. The piece is modeled after the traditional pigeon towers found throughout the desert villages of Egypt. The practice of homing pigeons spans multiple traditions, illustrating a narrative of migration across space and time. The piece stands at once as a beacon, a sanctuary, and a memorial for the people and communities of the desert whose histories are often dismissed or marginalized. The piece address concerns of cultural agency, environmental protection, and displacement at stake in the Coachella Valley and many similar desert communities across the world.

neville wakefield: How did growing up in Egypt influence your work, and, more specifically, how did that different experience in the desert feed into your work in Southern California?

sherin guirguis: I grew up in Luxor and Cairo, and they are cities that I love deeply—the culture, the people, the living history—yet, as part of a minority, the official history of the country doesn’t include me, and despite my wildest childhood dreams, moving to California did not provide that either!

I found that the biggest challenge of my migrant experience is the sense of displacement from both my original country and culture and my newly adopted one. This constant state of in-betweenness—with its questions of place, identity, and authenticity—is at the core of my work.

Meaning you’re kind of not at home anywhere.

Precisely. Like other immigrants living in the diaspora, I continue to occupy a liminal, in-between space. There isn’t a history book I can pick up and recognize, Oh, here’s my lineage. In an attempt to understand that position, my work points to overlooked sites and forgotten texts and histories.

One of the few places in Egypt where I do always feel at home is Luxor. I was born there, lived there until I was three, and continued to visit often. Built into the ruins of ancient Egyptian culture, Luxor is very much rooted in desert culture and ritual. It was my inspiration for One I Call.

Even within the California desert, there’s enormous diversity. When we started thinking about potential sites for your project, we were looking at the Salton Sea, a terminal lake which in a way is the most dystopian part of that area, but then ended up in Whitewater, a nature preserve to the north that has an almost Edenic quality. In many ways, the difference could not have been more extreme.

Yes, that was quite a shift, although I found both sites to be equally stunning despite their differences. Both sites are home to a wide variety of wildlife, much of which is endangered. Both sites were far off the beaten path, and the pilgrimage out to them is very much a part of the experience. Both sites teetered on the cusp of environmental disaster and heroics at one point or another. These places speak to the resilience and adaptability of small desert communities.

The Whitewater Preserve, as I came to learn, was a private fish hatchery, its waters polluted by the cattle ranches surrounding it. Ten years ago, five environmentalists under the umbrella of the Wildlands Conservancy restored it to its natural state and opened it to the public. My conversations with Jack [Thompson, the Preserve’s director] around art, ecology, and activism made it clear that this collaboration would be fruitful and that this would be the right site for the piece.

The complex histories that exist here in the Valley—of migration, displacement, environmental issues, deeply rooted traditions, rituals, and cultures—have all been marginalized and made almost invisible over time. It was clear that the project had to embrace that complexity and become a platform for these stories.

Yours was one of the pieces that took the longest to build. Visiting it during the process, it was striking how this small group of earth builders quickly created a community of work around the process of its construction and how that process became a social bond as well as an architectural one.

Yes. There was a team of seven builders—Don Worley, Tracy Polkownikow, Wade Lucas, Nathan Wright, Nisu and Aker—led by the earth architect Hooman Fazly. They had all studied under Hooman at Cal Earth Institute when Nader Khalili, its founder, was still alive, and they now travel the world building and teaching. It was an honor to be adopted by them into the culture of earth building, to learn about Khalili and the Superadobe process, which, as you point out, goes far beyond a construction method. Superadobe as Khalili developed it is a culture in and of itself, with its own rituals, politics, and even poetry. Oftentimes, the build felt like a spiritual experience.

I mean, how many construction sites do you encounter where Rumi is recited regularly, where every builder is an environmentalist, where empathy is the common language? And not a single piece of heavy equipment is in sight!

The way that it was created mimicked the formation of the rocks behind it—an echo of the geological strata that were its backdrop.

That’s the nature of working with adobe. It is a living material that changes with time and responds to its environment. The earth we used was from Whitewater, so the structure weathered in exactly the same way as the cliff behind it, just more rapidly. As the rains and winds hit, the smooth, finished surface began eroding, exposing the rocks and crystals within. When we were taking it down, we kept finding nests. Birds were living in it, and mice were living in it, mushrooms were growing, people had left things tucked in the burlap. And as I had hoped, it weathered its way back to the earth, and the site was left as we had found it.

This idea of homing pigeons and their function as early communicators relates to the original form.

Yes, one of the things I was most interested in with the pigeon tower as a model was the idea of invisible text and invisible ways of communicating as a means of activism. I was thinking about the anonymity of the web and social media, their use as tools to organize. The structure was also at the center of a historical incident in Egypt when, in 1906, British soldiers arrived at the small village of Denshawai and began shooting the pigeons as target practice. The villagers attempted to stop the soldiers, and a series of shootings and deaths ensued. The courts under British control sentenced the villagers to death by hanging. The outrage over this incident is thought to be one of the pivotal moments that led to the end of British occupation. For me, the pigeon tower became a symbol of independence, revolution, and anti-colonialism.

I remember one of the most magical moments, when Sean Milanovich, one of the tribal Bird Singers, came with his wife and child and effectively blessed the structure with the performance of a bird song. It seemed to speak to both localism and resistance.

When I met Sean, I had a lot of questions about the Coachella Valley and its history from the point of view of the tribes that have lived there for so long. He shared many histories about that particular canyon and the Whitewater area in general, and it was almost like a triangle of connections through time and place: me and my memories from Egypt, Sean and the history of the First People of the Coachella Valley, and Jack and his work at the Whitewater Preserve.

I was hoping to find a way to incorporate these unlikely relationships and narratives. I was thrilled and honored when Sean agreed to sing two bird songs that were about the history of the valley. We arrived early the day of the opening, and he preformed a ritual blessing of the site and of the

structure before it was open to the public. Once people had gathered, he began to sing. It was one of the most moving moments for me as well.

Your piece literally returned to the earth.

That was my original intention: this idea that the structure rises from the earth and then slowly disappears back into it. I can tell you that when it came time to take the piece down, it was much more difficult that I had anticipated!

This is the first piece that you’ve created at an architectural scale and where you’ve invited the audience to participate. Has that resonated in your work?

Many of my sculptures do invite the audience’s participation in some way. The kinetic pieces from the Cairo Trilogy series use that as a subtle call to action. I also think that my paintings do that as well.

One I Call, however, was my first site-specific piece, and the first at that scale. I think it has resonated mostly in my approach to my artistic practice. It makes physical what normally happens with, say, a painting. A painting, to my mind, is not complete until somebody steps up to it and has a reaction.

And it exists in conversation. That was the second strand of narratives that underpinned the work. What anecdotal, interesting encounters or conversations did it provoke among people?

There were many conversations about earth building, Rumi, activism, meditation, the environment, personal histories, and rediscovering lost places. One I Call drew people to a place where personal stories and experiences were exchanged—a common ground.

This experience was very much about shifting one’s expectations of value. We all zoom across the 10 Freeway and exit at our expected destinations missing all the hidden things in between. To me, naturally, the in-between spaces are the most interesting. Whitewater is a perfect example.

I love that you drive off the freeway, and little by little the city disappears.

Leaving civilization behind.

Your phone stops working. Your Google Maps stops working. You freak out. You just have to go with it.

As each of those layers comes off, you slow down as well. And you start to pay attention.

By the time you reach the work, you’re ready to just sit there. Sit there and just be there.

N R O J E A

SHYBOT

AREA BORDERED BY GENE AUTRY TRAIL (TO THE WEST), RIO VISTA DR (TO THE EAST), E VISTA CHINO (TO THE SOUTH), AND I-10 (TO THE NORTH) PALM SPRINGS / CATHEDRAL CITY M

Since biblical times, the allure of the desert has resided in the fact that we go there not knowing what we are looking for or what we may find. It’s a place where imagination and skepticism cohabit, where UFOs and endangered bighorn sheep are sighted with almost equal frequency. Drawing on the connection between the ancient and the modern, the silica desert and Silicon Valley, Norma Jeane, in conjunction with San Francisco-based CODAME Art + Tech, created ShyBot, an autonomous robotic vehicle programmed to roam the desert while avoiding human contact. Like many things of the desert, it is both everywhere and nowhere, a form of artificial intelligence programmed not to serve but to avoid. Like the first settlers who encountered these harsh conditions, its primary motivation is survival, driven by fear and discovery. An elusive creature, the timid robot represents the part of us that we are all seeking but cannot find.

neville wakefield: Can we talk a little bit about the origin myth of your moniker, Norma Jeane?

norma jeane: The reason I use this nickname is because in the art system, biographies give an artist a sort of extra value. Conceptual works are often collaborations; every participant offers something different. Norma Jeane is a kind of collective name. As an artist, I’m always dealing with everyday subjects: conflict and class and what gives spice to relationships. Norma Jeane, the real person behind Marilyn Monroe, was a perfect example of that—a public life that’s glitter and glamour and, at the same time, a private life that’s very complicated and dark. I opt for the dark side of public culture. That’s the meaning of Norma Jeane.

Are all your explorations on the dark side of pop culture?

Yes. The world is tricky. We perceive the world as the ambiance, the environment, in which we move. We take it for granted, but it’s very complicated and unpredictable. Life, to me, is composed of many faces. A very important one is the face that does not appear immediately.

The initial impetus for ShyBot was to bring together two ideas, one of technology and Silicon Valley, and the other of sand, of literal silica, and the desert.

Yes, absolutely. We consider technology as something that depends on humanity, on the work of technologists and scientists and technicians. I thought that technology, of course, has humanity. I mean any object has some sort of identity. I wasn’t

sure if a consciousness was required to have an identity. We tend to make technology as similar to humanity as possible, but that’s not the nature of technology at all.

So I thought, what would happen if technology confronted such an environment, the environment that is the harshest for humanity—the desert, where there are no facilities, no water, super-difficult conditions? And I gave a character to this piece of technology.

When you walk into a desert, you feel really strange. You feel your body a lot, because it is actually the only body around. We humans can decide that we don’t like humanity. But a machine that doesn’t like humanity, that doesn’t want to be bothered, that wants to be left alone—fragile and abandoned in very harsh conditions? What effect would that have on viewers, on people’s perception?

ShyBot was perhaps the most anthropomorphized of all the projects. For me, as a viewer, the work was about the quest to find it, and for ShyBot, it was a quest not to be found. There was always this tension between those two desires, to discover and not be discovered.

We want to be individuals. We tend to produce predictable strategies to maintain some sort of individual identity. It’s the same for ShyBot. Are we to appreciate the unpredictable in technology or just have an efficient, affordable, and stable infrastructure that serves us? That was one question. The other one: Can there be a moment of tender feeling for a machine that can push you to do something weird and unpredictable?

It was a very emotional moment when ShyBot was released into the desert. What were you feeling?

I wasn’t by myself. There were a few people there. I had the feeling there was a little son or daughter going on its way for the very first time for a long trip, and maybe not coming back.

I was kind of worried, a little bit sad, because of the separation. At the same time, super excited, because I was actually projecting my will, my wish for adventure, onto ShyBot: a big adventure in the big desert for this small machine.

I assumed you would program ShyBot to be fugitive, running away from human contact, but you wanted it to be more delicate, more shy than fugitive. Why did you want this level of curiosity when curiosity was also danger?

I wanted to craft the relationship between people

and the machine, so you need to allow people to get close or at least to have the desire to get close. I didn’t want the machine to have strong feelings, because that’s not the point. The point was to have a kind of superhuman relation between something that is now human and what we presume to be human, but we’re not sure.

For sixteen months, ShyBot went missing. There was a billboard campaign, “Wanted, batteries dead or alive,” with a reward, along with a great deal of speculation as to what might have happened—a bot kidnapping, a pilgrimage to Mecca, et cetera. But, as with many things ShyBot, what exactly happened during that time period we may never truly know.

No, we’re not 100 percent sure. When I say “we,” I mean the team that was working with me. ShyBot was connected to a GPS, so we knew where it was. Actually, that was transformed into a dynamic image on a website connected to Google Earth. People could see in which position on the desert ShyBot was, but they didn’t know the coordinates. That made it impossible to understand where it really was, but we were recording data, so when ShyBot disappeared, we began to analyze it. It emerged that in the last moments before its disappearance, ShyBot had very weird behavior. It was very dynamic, like skating, and then it was stuck. Then it went regularly in one direction, and then it disappeared. Our idea was that somebody found a way to track it through the GPS and then went into the desert chasing it. Eventually that turned out to be wrong.

In late July of 2018, we were contacted by Kyle Gomez, a local maintenance worker who had chanced upon ShyBot while off-roading near Cathedral City. For those of us who had assumed that it was gone forever, this was a revelation.

ShyBot was already in the news, in newspapers, on TV, et cetera, and people cared enough about this idea for it to get around that ShyBot was alone. So the fact that it suddenly disappeared was a perfect occasion to let people know, to let people experience, this kind of sad moment. Or just to share the worry that we also had. The fact of making that public was something you could just laugh at; it was funny. But it was also serious.

When Kyle let us know that ShyBot was actually still in the desert, and in quite good condition, we felt really astonished and unbelievably happy. Almost as if a friend had made an unexpected return.

ShyBot always represented the idea that there is something out there—whether in religion

or in horror, something compels us to keep searching. After so many days and nights in the wilderness, there was an almost Biblical aspect to its return—a resurrection of sorts. What happens now?

ShyBot’s more than one-year stay in the desert invites us to give it another chance to accomplish the goal of getting lost somewhere out there. Like the temptation of Christ described in the Gospels, the quest to transcend the bot’s roots in human technology can produce new, additional symbolic layers that we are not aware of yet.

Ultimately, that little robot reveals new perspectives in which we can reflect ourselves. Like in a mirror, the opposite appears to be identical.

G E L K A I

Hollow Earth is a sculpture made from glass and wood that creates the illusion of a tunnel descending deep into Earth. Once inside the darkened shed that contains the work, viewers become uneasy as they peer into a brightly lit hole that appears to drop into infinite darkness. Glenn Kaino’s installation was a contemplative gesture exploring the complicated and diverse history of tunnel making, from the secret tunnels between Egypt and the Gaza Strip to the common childhood (and Orientalist) fantasy of digging a hole to China. The title, invoking numerous legends of subterranean lands, elicits an idea that the world is inside out—a reference to the crisis of our time. Paradoxically, as the viewer stares down at the piece, wondering about the depth of the tunnel, they are actually staring at themselves as seen through a series of mirrors. With irony, art directly reflects (their) life and the meaning, value, and power that they assign to it.

neville wakefield: Sand often featured in your past work. What does sand mean to you, and how does it relate to your experience of the desert?

glenn kaino: I have a long relationship with sand as a material, both from an environmental standpoint as well as in sculptural works. I grew up in Los Angeles and spent time in the desert and on the beach—very different sands, but also very similar in their granularity. I’ve made hourglasses, spinning hourglasses in which time is suspended as well as others. Probably the most important project I made was for the 2004 Whitney Biennial—a large sand sculpture that evokes the visual presence of a large architectural formation, in that case the Emerald City, based on the Emerald City of Oz, sitting within a floor frame inspired by those mini, executive-desk Zen gardens. It was imposing in its size but so ephemeral and fleeting in its condition, because at any moment it was very fragile.

My studio team—there were four of us—spent three days in my gallery at the time, called the Project, up in Harlem, working with sand. That’s when I learned to craft using that textural material. I remember we were covered with sand, and we finished and we went down to Dallas BBQ in Midtown. There was a door, a little entryway, and as we walked in from the wind, it blew shut behind us, and bam, we were all in the restaurant, with the sand we’d brought with us on our clothes. We looked up at the TV screen, and President Bush was announcing the sandstorm had abided. We were about to go to war.

An extremely auspicious moment.

It was an auspicious moment, and an emotional

moment, because we had just created a five-ton, three-cubic yard sand monument to the ephemerality of institutions and government, or self-organizing structures. It was a crazy thing.

Initially, I actually studied with the Guinness World Record-holder Todd Vander Pluym, who taught me how to make sand sculpture. He explained that “the enemies of sand sculptures” are vandals and weather. Because when you tamp the sand down during its creation—and this goes directly into the piece I conceived for Cairo [Kaino represented the United States at the 13th Cairo Biennale]—you’re organizing it into vertical columns. That’s how it stands up. And so for that project, I had envisioned this connectivity of the different deserts.

How would I realize the dream of this dialogue poetically, using local materials? For Cairo, the idea was to create a drawing of a city out of wind. I had a thought that the conversation we are having now might travel out the window, jump on a jet stream, and end in another place. With this artwork, when you walked into the exhibition space, you felt the wind on your face, but you couldn’t see anything. And then every hour, on the hour, a thin sheet of sand would fall from the ceiling, be pushed by the wind, and create the shape of the drawing for less than thirty seconds—a fleeting moment.

Hollow Earth was about what lies beneath the sand.

This exploration spoke to that same notion of dreams, of connectivity. What lies under, and what connects us.

In England, we say, you drill a hole through the Earth and you’ll end up in Australia. Here, you end up in China, right?

It was obviously a Western-Orientalist fantasy. And as an Asian American growing up in a relatively diverse but still Eurocentric environment, it was always a little irritating to hear “dig a hole to China.” Japan was probably too small to hit accurately.

It also invokes a kind of political tunneling—from the narco tunnels of the nearby border to the tunnels of the Gaza Strip.

In cartography, mapmaking is a subjective science. The fact that there are invisible tunnels underneath invisible borders was a pretty great thing to think about.

Having grown up here and being aware of border policies definitely had some influence.

The way we designed the artwork was influenced by the brickwork in some smuggling tunnels

as well as in the narco tunnels, but also with a light that not only improved the resolution, but also made it feel like a missile silo. You know, it really gave your mind an opportunity to wander to all those different areas when confronted with the piece.

The housing of the piece added to that. It couldn’t have been a more innocuous frame through which you entered, and then it opened up. One thing that struck me was the effectiveness of the illusion. We had some kids who didn’t want to step inside for fear of falling. I also remember a couple cops coming in and holding onto the edge of the doorway to peer down.

Well, the funny thing about that story was, when the cops came in, they thought that someone might be smuggling something in a shed, because they had a report. You and I were standing there, and the cops rolled up, like out of a movie, saying they had a report that people were going in and out of a shed that had just appeared in the middle of the desert. After the cops came in, holding onto the walls so they wouldn’t fall down, I think you said, “Well, we weren’t hiding or smuggling anything, but what a great place to smuggle and hide something: underneath the illusion of a tunnel.”

G B A R K U

Donation Box, a large-scale installation, takes the form of an indoor landscape, a domesticated desert. In an empty commercial space, the vast expanse of sand, dotted with cigarette butts, served also as a receptacle for small change. The audience was invited to leave a monetary contribution on the surface of the artwork, adding to the texture of this rather surreal, scaled-down, and boxed-in version of what otherwise lies right outside the retail space, beyond the parking lot. Inspired by the stark contrasts between naked desert and developed land that are typical of the Coachella Valley, Donation Box is a commentary on the desire to control and profit from the indomitable. Through its basic and somehow exchangeable elements (land, currency, waste) and its somewhat absurd participatory nature, Donation Box invited the spectator to share in its reflection on the nature of speculation and its mark on the environment.

neville wakefield: Your piece, Donation Box, raises the question of borders, particularly because of how its own borders looked. It brought the outside in, so it also had an internal border. Talk about those lines of demarcation.

gabriel kuri: In a place like Palm Springs, it’s very clear where the unforgiving and barren landscape ends and the domestication of it, or the attempts to domesticate it, starts. In other kinds of terrain where you would have a natural ease or facility in settling, I think this line would be much blurrier. When it comes to the desert, anything that is habitable has to be completely implanted. So often it’s a spot in the middle of nowhere. This is the case of Palm Springs, which starts very suddenly. Lines of demarcation are very important in my conception of this work.

Although cartographic motifs and maps have appeared in your earlier work, Donation Box seems more like a map in and of itself. It was as if it invoked that Borgesian idea of the map becoming the territory.

That’s a very good observation. I think that you can see the greater picture in just a small fragment of reality. That’s what the creation of art is about: being able to imagine, with a piece of evidence, something that’s greater than what’s immediate or what meets the eye.

Of course, when it comes to a landscape and something that envelops us, it is kind of inevitable to think that way. On the other hand, what’s very large by my standards is very small next to the size of the desert.

Still, when you went in, something happened to your sense of proportion.

Donation Box was sited in an empty space in a strip mall. The desert that you created was littered with coins and cigarette butts. Was that an implicit critique of the commercialization of that landscape?

You can think of it that way, yes. Although my style has never been straightforward critique, I cannot escape the fact that, of course, cigarette butts are a recognizable and universally repugnant form of littering. The coins imply there’s money and wealth, but also, small change is an almost negligible fragment of wealth. So the idea of it being like a wishing well again is an operation of scale.

The other interesting thing to me about those two elements that you included in it was, they’re both extremely personal. The cigarette butts have been touched, literally kissed by the people who smoked them, and the coins have been touched, and they’re about that physical transfer. There’s strong and poetic human presence within the landscape you created.

Exactly, yes. Another thing we must not ignore is how smokers have been ghettoized in many parts of the world already. California feels like it’s obsessed with perfection. Smoking has become almost like a form of perversion.

And strange enough, it wasn’t easy to gather that quantity of cigarette butts.

Yes, it was harder than we thought because of the amount [we needed].

There was also a process aspect to the piece. There were a lot of people involved in its creation. It took not just a good amount of material, but also a good amount of time.

Yes.

Was the labor a big part of it?

Yes, it took time to find the site, negotiate with the owners. Then came the more practical planning and logistics that involved bringing in the sand. There were a lot of aspects that had to be looked after and manned by different people with different skills. And that was truly something important. Very often I do work that I can do by myself, but in this case I was dealing with the desert, so somehow I thought this involved, or should involve, something larger than myself. So the fact that it became a larger operation was very much ingrained here. The last stage before the opening was a group of people

doing the mindless job of sticking these cigarette butts in an otherwise very clean expanse of sand.

Well, it was mindless, but they were also creating these little anthropological communities and cities. Where there’s a landscape. That had its own humor and presence to it.

Exactly. Yes.

How did the idea for Donation Box come about?

This was a new iteration of a piece I had made before, and in that case it was easy because I wanted to make a piece for the entrance of a museum, and it had a Plexiglas donation box, so that is somewhat what triggered it. In this new iteration, the fact that it’s somewhat like a dystopian wishing well did not steer away from the fact that there are economic aspects to the existence of a Palm Springs. Having attracted a cultural event to somehow invest in its tourism, it’s very hard to look away from the economic aspect of pretty much anything we conceive.

Some would peer in through the window, which I think was also interesting, and not actually enter the space. Others would go in and be pretty baffled at first. But then slowly start to identify these aspects. Were there any reactions that were particularly meaningful to you?

I cannot really think of any extraordinary comments. I would have had to remain there for the whole length of time. I guess there was, as you say, a certain success in the fact that there were these thresholds that became evident to the viewer. One of them was, of course, that the strip mall is on the edge of town. So that was one threshold. Then they probably stood at the window, and there was another line. And sometimes they made it in, so I think in that sense I did get a good reaction.

The final line to be crossed was the traditional taboo against touching the artwork, or, here, throwing something into it.

Yeah. There was a very small amount of silliness or vandalism and many more occasions in which people kind of made more intelligent remarks about the boundaries of touching and not touching art, and some people did throw in a coin or stub a cigarette.

But that was part of the invitation of the piece, right?

Yes. I did not want to make the participation too open because then, I think, very wild things can happen. Especially when the space is not supervised in the same manner as a museum is.

A M R A L E R

In 2011, Armando Lerma (formerly of the Date Farmers collaborative) started the Coachella Walls mural project in downtown Coachella’s historic Pueblo Viejo District. It has since become an essential, ongoing arts-driven revitalization project, celebrating and exalting the city’s marginalized, low-income community. In addition to stimulating foot traffic, Coachella Walls, dedicated “to the anonymous farmworker,” raises awareness about the eastern Coachella Valley. For Desert X, Lerma created La Fiesta en el Desierto on the side of a candy and piñata store, El Tepeyac.

neville wakefield: What was it like growing up in Coachella?

armando lerma: My family came here like in the late ’50s. They came as migrant workers and then ended up staying out here. I have a huge family. There are ten uncles and aunts on both sides. Most of them live here in Coachella, so I was always around family. There wasn’t much out here during that time. It was mostly desert and, you know, no TV. Hot summers. But it was fun. We were always messing around, playing in the desert, just exploring. We were always outside. We were always playing with other kids in the neighborhood. I had a really good time.

And then I went to a Christian school, so we would be studying the Bible, and the Bible would always be talking about the desert. So it’s kind of weird. I felt like I lived in a Bible kind of world.

In terms of the idea of the wilderness and being cast into it?

Yeah, it was real. I identified with it.

You were self-taught, right? You didn’t have any formal art training.

Well, I did go to school, and I studied art, but I was at Northridge after the earthquake. There was nothing really to the art department. I remember teaching myself, taking studio time, and just painting on my own.

When you came back after that period, had Coachella changed a lot? How has it evolved in the time that you’ve been there?

It’s looking a lot better. It has evolved a lot in the last three years, especially downtown, close to my studio. Before this it was really neglected. There was nothing happening. It was like a time capsule. And that’s why it’s cool to see the new park, and they’re opening up a new library.

What’s driving that?

I think it’s time, you know? People are seeing an opportunity to make things better because there was a void. And the Coachella festival has brought attention to the city in a weird way.

There’s a strange relationship between Coachella the festival and Coachella the town because the festival is actually in Indio.

Yeah. And what’s crazy is that before the festival if you were to bring up Coachella, it was like derogatory. It kind of had an edge to it, or like a criminal element because it used to be kind of crazy back in the day. Now it’s not. It’s pretty calm.

Tell me a little bit about the Coachella Walls mural project you started.

I was always interested in murals. That’s one thing that I wanted to get into or that inspired me, but I never really did it. I had been living away from Coachella, and then around 2014 I came back and I started that project because I met other muralists and knew the city council members and the mayor, and I just thought it would be a good time to do it.

As a way of giving back to the city?

I see the murals as a teaching tool for the young people, something to give them inspiration. You can go up to those murals and look at them, and you can figure them out or you can see how they did them.

It’s an ongoing program?

Yeah. We’re still working on it, and the city has been really good, giving us some money to get the murals done, and they want to continue with it.

Tell me about the mural that you did for Desert X and the adjacent mural that was already on the wall.

That wall, it’s been a problem. Even the city was kind of mad because they weren’t happy without the [adjacent] chicken mural. I was like, “Well, I’m going to do the whole wall,” but I knew I had to do just half first and see if I could get the [store owner] to be cool with it, and then she wasn’t.

If I’d been able to use the whole wall, it would have been a lot more impressive. It would have felt like one unit. Instead, it looks like half some random mural and then half La Fiesta. I recognize that as a problem, but that [store owner] was tough. She’s still tough.

But in a way it speaks to the reality of these things. There’s always a negotiation, and so for this one you had to negotiate with the owner of the piñata store and the chicken mural.

Yeah, I recognize the symbolism in all of this. I’m going to have to do something. I’m even thinking [the other muralist] could come cover my part up so at least it’s just one thing, because [the store owner] likes the chicken stuff because it’s like a piñata for the kids. She thought mine was a little too dark.

Yeah, but you made some concessions. You gave her some chickens, right?

Yeah, which is crazy for me. Artists aren’t supposed to be putting up with this kind of stuff. But here I am negotiating chickens. But it’s not too bad. I had to take it in stride.

It was nice to see people come out. They came out, and they went inside and bought an ice cream. They bought a piñata. They bought something. So the mural worked because it got people in.

We had talked about identifying with the clown figures. Is that part of the artistic identification?

I’ve been painting clowns for a while and didn’t realize what I was doing, or really didn’t understand what the clown was, but that’s how I understand it now: I’m making fun of them, and they’re laughing at me. It’s like an exchange, and it’s all in good fun.

Apart from the owner of the piñata store, how have people received it?

People have been cool with it. Everybody has been positive. And people were excited that it was part of Desert X because it brought attention to the other [Coachella Walls] murals and the town.

In a general sense, Desert X provided a map for people who didn’t know how to approach the desert and gave them a reason to explore it, and I think the mural project does the same thing for downtown Coachella.

Definitely, it’s a diplomatic approach. It opens it up. It’s a reason to come out here and check it out.

Can you tell me about the dedication?

Coachella Walls is dedicated to the anonymous farmworker.

The first phase of our project was dedicated to farmworkers. That’s the world of my parents. They

came here as farm workers, and I think almost everybody here is connected to the agricultural industry in some way. So it was a way to give back and recognize that work.

R C I H P R I

Richard Prince describes Third Place as “the house where my family used to live and is now having a reunion.” Strip mining American cultural life, Prince’s work often exposes dark subcurrents of sexual and familial tension as they expose themselves through humor and other symptoms of psychological dysfunction. Third Place is, as the title suggests, the third in a series of structures, which adopt a vernacular architectural form as the housing for material that speaks to the interior life of its recently departed occupant. Like other houses, this is a place where, as one observer put it, “The circuitry of human relationship was completely shorted out and charred.” Run-down and a little saddle-sore, the house in Desert Hot Springs suggests a cowboy’s retreat. Plastered with “family tweets” and an odd rendering of the artist himself, Third Place reveals itself as a three-dimensional portrait, a state of mind as much as a state of place.

neville wakefield: The title of your Desert X piece, Third Place, begs the question of the first two places. What attracts you to using residences to exhibit your art?

richard prince: It has to do with the fact that it’s not a gallery, and it’s not a museum. I’m not installing after another show closes, and there’s not another show after mine. I’m not bullied into a space. It’s my space; it’s my house. I wanted to be in a house simply because it’s kind of casual, like my studio.

I remember being impressed with Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Michael Heizer, and Robert Smithson. I thought that approach to working was very different from what was going on before them. It seemed more inclusive, more spontaneous—anywhere, anytime, under any circumstance. I like that idea of that kind of site-specific work. It’s sort of like the mobility that a musician has—not being tied down to making work in a studio. The emphasis was more on the conceptual, thinking side; the means weren’t as important as the end.

The house is like one of my books. I get to do in three dimensions what I do in a book, when I put all my photographs side by side into a book. It’s my arrangement, not like a gallery where you install your work with a dealer.

First House was actually the inaugural event for Regen Projects in West Hollywood.

Right, in 1993, and it was like my studio: drop cloths on the floor, the walls stripped to plaster, flood lamps in the corners. The space was intimate…and available.

And you created Second House in 2007 in a run-down tract house in upstate New York that was purchased by the Guggenheim.

It was a single, ranch-style tract house with tall grass around it and a 1973 Plymouth Barracuda in the yard. It was a stripped-down structure, an exhibition space for the Hoods [car sculptures] and my photographs of magazines.

It all represents a kind of freedom, being unencumbered by obligations to conform or aspire to a certain kind of existence. For Third Place , in Desert X, you installed movie poster-size and sexually charged “family tweets,” some of them with raunchy pictures, printed on vinyl and canvas. They covered the interior and exterior doors, windows, walls, and even some of the floor.

The house is an appropriate context to explore relationships between the sexes. I see a lot of things in terms of sex, but it’s only one ingredient in the work. It might be more important than, say, space or flatness, but they are also ingredients. I’ve been thinking about sex since I was a child, about what images do to me.

When a viewer came onto the property they would encounter these Instagram posts, which were kind of at the mercy of the elements, and at the mercy of the viewers, too, as well as some small, 3D-printed figures that were placed on top of some of the images and on the mantle.

Within about a week of the opening, collectors or vandals stole prints and the 3D-printed sculptures, and we had to close the installation.

Right. First House was bulldozed, and Second House was struck by lightning and destroyed by fire. So I was not surprised when this happened. When it comes to my “family tweets,” anything goes.

It was entropic from the start—the artwork is about the ruin of a family and needed to achieve that state of ruin.

Right.

R B O P R U

ROB PRUITT’S FLEA MARKET

PALM SPRINGS ART MUSEUM

PALM SPRINGS

Rob Pruitt’s Flea Market, a nomadic event that has taken place all over the world, featured, in this iteration, vintage experts, design collectors, and visual artists from Palm Springs, Joshua Tree and the High Desert, and the eastern Coachella Valley. Inspired by the region’s robust mix of vintage, modern, and handcrafted goods, this traditional-style flea market made desert tastemakers’ wares available for sale. Here, orphaned and discarded objects were momentarily elevated atop the pedestal of the Palm Springs Art Museum.

neville wakefield: You and your partner, Jonathan, moved to Palm Springs a few years ago. What drew you to this part of the world?

rob pruitt: I was an East-Coast person my entire life. As I was approaching fifty, I sort of woke up feeling like I needed some change, changes in basic things like the light and space and climate. I was interested in the extreme weather conditions of Palm Springs. I really like it in the summer when it’s 110 and 120 degrees. It seems like another planet. I enjoy having my thought process altered. The extreme temperature is hallucinogenic. I like that aspect of it.

I landed in Palm Springs, and it was the middle of the mortgage crisis, 2009, and it seemed like every fourth house was for sale—the bank-owned or foreclosure type of sale—so we found this nice house from the 1930s next to a beautiful restored house that had been Busby Berkeley’s house. But the house that was for sale was ramshackle. It was beautiful, a Spanish Colonial revival with a center courtyard and a horseshoe shape. We had no intention of buying a house, but Jonathan suggested placing a lowball offer: “If they call us back accepting it, then that will be like winning the lottery, and we don’t have to think about it otherwise.” Two weeks later, we were back in New York and, sure enough, they did accept our offer, which was like less than half of what they had been asking, and we took it on as an adventure.

It’s interesting that your arrival in Palm Springs should be rooted in foreclosure, as the objects that you put in the flea market were also foreclosed objects. They tell us as much about what we don’t want as about what we do want.

It is about rediscovering abandoned things and looking at them in a new way, and, in the contemporary sense, recycling, too. This house, in the 1930s, was probably a weekend home for a glamorous film-industry person. Fashions changed, people moved on to other areas. Airline travel opened up countless other weekend and vacation possibilities. In the interim, the house and the neighborhood

languished and, in a way, were just waiting to be rediscovered. I think, either you’re attracted to orphaned objects or you’re not, and I think that artists, for the most part, are. It is similar to the current influx of creative types moving to Joshua Tree now. Finding land or space that no one else has an interest in, or is affordable, and then making it yours. That’s the lure of the desert.

This is the idea of the secondhand versus the new, the secondhand being the narrative inscription of objects. The flea markets exposed the history and narrative of these abandoned objects.

It is cultural anthropology. When we moved out there, our budget allowed us to buy the house, and that was about it. Fixing and furnishing it, we relied on flea markets and vintage shops and, in doing so, met so many creative, talented people who owned and ran those vintage shops. A lot of them had come to the desert as part of a reinvention process of their own. I became friends with many, and their scope of knowledge—about contemporary art and furniture design and architecture and the region— was just so broad.

Is junk a key part of the desert aesthetic?

I think it’s a tradition of the desert. I remember a few years ago visiting my friend Jack Pierson in Twentynine Palms, walking around his property and admiring one part of a cactus garden filled with food cans and car parts that had rusted. He told me he was engaging in a tradition. People for years, decades, have been creating those “rust gardens” on their properties in the middle of nowhere, out in the desert.

Was it significant that you staged this flea market in the Palm Springs Art Museum, thereby placing the disaffected object on the pedestal of high art?

It was important to do it there for a couple of reasons. I love when high rubs up against low. I feel that there is truth in that mix. I was also awed by the creativity of the people I was buying from and getting to be friends with. They were some of the most gifted, talented people. So, I thought that it made sense to put their creative gestures within the walls of the museum, right next to the museum’s outstanding collection of desert landscape paintings.

The flea markets happened in the atrium right next to where the museum displays its collection of desert landscape paintings, like John Hilton and

James Swinnerton. I just thought, if I put these scavenged, beautifully curated objects up against these paintings of the desert, it’ll feel just right. I knew that they’d make incredible displays, towering junk gardens reflective of desert life.

I remember going to your first flea market at Gavin Brown’s in the late ’90s and being baffled by it. How did the flea markets evolve over almost two decades since then?

I wouldn’t deny that there must be a common thread, but each one is unique. Gavin had asked me to curate a summer group show, and so I retreated into my studio and thought long and hard about what type of group show I could do really well, having never curated one before. Being true to myself, I thought, it’s not going to be too heavy. I want to include my friends, I want to include the makers of things that I really love, and I want to give them complete freedom. I think that each one is a reflection of the community.

What were the highlights of the flea market that you created for Desert X?

I liked drawing portraits of people, like hosting my own little sidewalk portrait studio. It was nice to sit and converse with people that were paying their respects to me, wanting me to draw them. I dedicated myself to being there 100 percent of the time, so at the end of the two-week period we’d grown to be like a family. It was like a traveling caravan, only we didn’t travel to the next location.

I like to think that it brought people into the museum who ordinarily might not feel free to just walk on in and spend their lunch hour there—like a public park, open and embracing the community.

J L U S A R M

COMETA

33°48'25.7"N 116°32'47.0"W

DESERT LODGE 1177 S PALM CANYON DR PALM SPRINGS

Best known for his paintings, Julião Sarmento recreated the intimacy and sexual tension of that body of work in Cometa, a piece first performed in 2009. He designed the performance, which takes place in a seedy hotel room, for one person to witness at a time. Set to original music specially composed by Portuguese musician Paulo Furtado, also known as The Legendary Tigerman, it is a study of the longing, desire, and discomfort that attend the close encounter of strangers.

neville wakefield: When most artists think about the desert, they think about it in terms of scale and boundless space. You took the opposite approach and sought a social intimacy within that landscape.

julião sarmento: One cannot exist without the other. It’s maybe a reaction to the first one. I mean, it’s because of the vastness and the emptiness and the infinite horizon in front of you that you kind of try to find a way to be in order not to feel totally lost. My work has always been about human relationships. In order to be able to interact with someone, you need a confined space where you can speak, that you can control, or where you can live or create.

There are several types of desert. Most of them I really don’t know. The work I did for Desert X is about the Palm Springs desert. For me, it’s about loneliness. It’s about heat, and it’s about despair. These three things each lead one to suicide.

Loneliness, heat, and despair: They’re not an encouraging trio.

No, but it’s very interesting for me. They’re three things I’m very interested in. To fight them, rather than to embrace them. Or, by embracing them, to win against them.

Those threads run through your paintings.

Absolutely. Everywhere. My work is very lonely work. I’ve been asked several times by producers in Portugal to make films. I’ve never wanted to do it, because it’s teamwork to make a film. I need to work as one person in my own loneliness. So my work is about that. It’s about being lonely and trying to figure things out by myself, within my own private sphere.

Does that tie in with the desert mythology of going there and being cast into the wilderness to have this existential experience?

Absolutely. I’m a casualty of the ’60s. I’d never been to the desert in the ’60s, but that’s what I think people did at the time, and it’s what people sought at the time. You have this desert, and you have

this incredible situation where you are alone in the world, and you have to deal with everything.

Tell me about the architecture that frames the performance, which was staged at the Desert Lodge motel.

I looked for the seediest place I could find. I didn’t want a fancy hotel; I wanted something that had to do with the people who live there. When you drive down this empty route for kilometers and kilometers. Never ending. Suddenly you find one place by the road. It’s not going to be a Hilton. It’s going to be one of these places, and that’s exactly what I wanted: one of these places where you’re actually afraid to go in. I would have preferred if that lodge had been more isolated. But having said that, I think it was perfect for what I wanted.

Is there something nostalgic about these last vestiges of motel culture, as everything is becoming sort of uniform?

It’s despairing, because every city everyplace is losing its personality. Everything is the same. You have the same Starbucks, the same what have you. So it’s important to look for the specific places that only exist there and nowhere else. I like to preserve that, if possible. If it’s not going to be possible, then at least I have a record. That’s important to me.

The performance was framed within this bit of architecture, but it also had a particular choreography. Only one person at a time could see it. You prohibited all photography. And even the way you entered the space was choreographed. Talk about the creation of this experience.

I think this is a performance where it’s an attack on the viewer. Every spectator is a coward and a traitor. I wanted to use that in a very obvious way. The spectator of the performance becomes an intruder on the innocent scene of the people out there. I want the spectator to feel that in his own skin, and I don’t want it to be a nice or agreeable experience. I want it to be a violent experience for the spectator. I want the spectator to feel awkward and uneasy. That’s why it’s one at a time. If you allow two at a time, immediately you create an empathy with the other person, and the fear divides by two.

What is the fear of?

The fear of ridicule, the fear of interfering. Nobody is looking at you, and you’re looking at something else. Then you’re looking at someone, you have that connection, but those people look at you as well,

and they know that you were there looking at them. It becomes awkward. What are you going to do? Are you going to interact, or are you going to just stand there looking like an idiot and feeling awkward, not being able to go back?

Did anyone try to leave?

A couple of people left. At least two that I recall. Of course, I was not there all the time. You know, some weird things happened, like there was a guy who started to dance with them. All this was allowed as long as the performers allowed it. The performers were in charge.

What were the instructions that you gave them?

I gave them very open instructions. One of them was sitting down and the other was standing. Maybe twenty seconds after the spectator enters the room, the person who’s standing goes to the machine and puts the music on and starts dancing by himself, or herself. After another twenty seconds or so, the other one stands up and dances with her or with him. That’s it.

It’s an embrace.

It’s an embraced dance. Being in an embraced dance, you do whatever you want. I never told them to do that. I kind of like that freedom of the performer, and also, as you know, the gender element. I had boy and boy, girl and girl, girl and boy. So all possibilities. It was just by sheer chance. I didn’t say, It has to be a boy and a girl, or a girl and a girl.

Was the chemistry between the dancers, or the more awkward chemistry between the spectator and the performance, important to your casting?

You could see the intimacies between the dancers, but I don’t know about the intimacy between the spectator and the dancers because I was never there. What is funny about this is, I’ve never seen a performance. I’m not a witness to it. So for me it’s always a mystery.

Each experience is unique.

Each experience was unique, and I don’t know them.

Was that an important factor?

Absolutely: to create a unique experience for each one of the performances in my not knowing about it.

The song that triggered the performance was by the Legendary Tigerman. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

When I was thinking about this performance, I needed a very specific song for it. You know, I don’t write songs, but I have this cool old friend, the Legendary Tigerman. I told him what I wanted to do, and I asked him, “Will you write music for this?” He was very excited. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll do it.” So the music was actually created for this. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him, he’s kind of a rock ’n’ roll bluesy musician who spends most of his time in America.

I told him what the performance was about, what I was expecting of the performance. I wanted the music to create a certain kind of sleazy, sexual atmosphere, because it was important. That’s about it. He did the music, and I was very excited about it.

One of the interesting things to me was that it felt familiar, like films where the intimacy of strangers is enacted within these anonymous desert motel environments. Even though you were very conscious about not having it filmed, about it not being recorded, it seemed to draw on a filmic space, even as it refused to entirely embrace it.

I wanted it to be a unique experience with no memory. There’s no memory of it except the memory of you as a spectator, if you were there, and if you viewed it. Otherwise, there’s no way of doing it, because it becomes a different thing. I do have a film for my archives, which will never be seen; it’s just to keep documentation. You see, this is the type of experience in this performance; it’s felt by the spectator, the viewer.

It’s different every time. Then it’s a voyeuristic experience. You’re watching what the other guy’s watching, but for me this voyeuristic experience, in this case, is not interesting. What I really wanted was the experience of the viewer there at the moment, and that happens once. There’s a memory of it, the memory that he has of it and the dancers have of it.

Did the experience of staging this piece change your attitude toward the desert?

Oh, probably, because I know the desert better. By driving around and trying to discover things, you discover a lot of things in fact. It really did, because it made me look at the desert in a different way.

P I H L K.

The Circle of Land and Sky defines a reflective space within the desert composed entirely of the environment’s two most prominent physical characteristics: land and sky. Formed by three hundred geometric reflectors angled at 10 degrees, the artwork directly engages with the Sonoran surrounding and the endless heavens. As the light shifts and the viewer moves through the installation, land and sky are separated, merged, and displaced, subverting one’s assumed relationship with the desert horizon. At times, the sky is pulled down to the land or the land lifted up to the sky, while the colors of the west may merge with the colors of the east. It is a constantly changing installation that can never be seen the same way twice.

neville wakefield: You grew up in this part of the world, attuned to the light, the phenomenology, the variances in season and time, and all of those then seem to become embedded in your work. What was it like growing up in that environment?

phillip k smith iii: Certainly, as a teenager, there are entirely different priorities in your life than to be staring at the shadow moving across the valley floor. A large part of my love for the desert came as a result of being part of the hiking club at my small high school.

Four years in a row, between Christmastime and New Year’s Eve, we would spend about a week in Death Valley. We’d camp at the same spot, and it was always a tradition on New Year’s Eve at the stroke of midnight to be standing on the salt flats about as far out as we were willing to walk. You just can’t deny the kind of power of those kinds of experiences of total immersion in that environment and light at that young of an age, and you can’t really understand at the time how that is going to affect your life.

I think that moving to the East Coast made me highly aware of the environment that I came from. I finally had some contrasts, so I came back with my eyes fully open. Perhaps fully for the first time. That was in 2000, so it’s been eighteen years of exploration and learning and kind of relearning about this place.

How was that experience reflected in the artwork that you were making at the time?

At the time I was mostly doing drawings, and I was still focused on architecture. I knew my real passion was art, but I did not yet understand what my voice or vision was. I remember that every day for three months I drove out to Salton Sea, and I would hike

out in the middle of nowhere. I think it was then that I started really focusing and thinking about the environment. But my moneymaking opportunities at that time were via architecture, and it wasn’t until 2004, about four years later, that I had the funds to start thinking about creating sculpture and expanding my thoughts about who I was as an artist.

What was the first material expression of that, when you began using artificial light?

It was in 2004 when I made some of my first light and shadow pieces. That came from watching those mountain ranges shift from monochromatic silhouette to a highly textured three-dimensional surface. I was interested in light and the interaction of sunlight and how a work could shift and change over the course of the day.

That guided me for almost the first six years, and it wasn’t until 2010, when I was artist-inresidence at the Palm Springs Art Museum, that I did my first LED piece, which eventually gave rise to Lucid Stead in 2013, Reflection Field in ’14, and then Portals in 2016.

That combination—Aperture at the museum and working on my lifework pieces combined with Lucid Stead—is really what got the creative engine kicking for me.

Before we come full circle, there was 1/4 Mile Arc, which was installed at Laguna Beach and was a very different piece with a different interaction: it drew this boundary line between ocean and shore. How did that piece come about?

It’s an incredibly daunting reality of, a, how do you create something that can take on this scale, and, b, how do you create something that is more present and somehow even close to as beautiful as that meeting of the sky and water? It’s why millions of people head to the beach and islands every summer and just sit and look at the water for hours on end.

But I thought that there was something there, to somehow use the material as my graphite for this drawing—the general atmosphere of Laguna, and the sky and the sunsets and the noontime light. That’s when the idea for the reflectors came about, that the line could be extruded to become this more three-dimensional, present element.

The piece made that light and that beauty and atmosphere present. In fact, the Coast Guard were joking with me on the last night, when seven thousand people were out there on the beach, and there’s this gorgeous sunset, and everybody has their backs turned to the sunset because they’re looking at the reflection of the sunset in the work.

Probably the second most powerful moment was Monday around sunset, after we had taken the piece down. Another thousand people came out, not knowing that the piece wouldn’t be there. All of a sudden you have a thousand people sitting on the beach, and the only thing they were doing was looking at the sky. Looking at the water. It was an ephemeral piece, but it opened people’s eyes to that beauty that exists. Everybody is aware of it, but somehow the piece became a tool for viewing the environment.

One of the beauties for me was when it reformed as a total circle rather than a partial arc. In the desert it continued to speak to the connection between the ocean and the oceanic, and this other environment, which was itself at one point ocean.

I conceived of the circle based on what makes the desert a desert. It’s surrounded by these mountains that hold the weather back. The desert itself is almost a bowl already, so the thought was of creating this circular space within what is already kind of a circular space formed by the mountains to the east, west, north, and south.

There were three distinct differences between what happened in Laguna and what happened in the desert. One, it was a circle. Another is that the reflectors were angled at 10 degrees to have this distinct separation through movement between the land and the sky, reflecting just the land as you’re approaching it from the outside, and reflecting just the sky when you’re in the center.

The other was that, at Laguna, the poles of the reflectors follow the topography of the beach. I wanted to have an ultra precision associated with the circle. We went through a lot of labor to ensure that the tops of all the reflectors were level. For me, that undulating line at the beach rocked me out of the experience and sort of allowed it to still be this highly human-made thing. You could really just view the environment through it and not be jostled out of it by some kind of aberration in the purity of the form.

The precision of the circles also reinforces the temple aspect. It was also functioning as a record of the passage of time.

I really appreciate that thought of the temple, and even as we’re saying it’s a circle, there was an opening within it. It was facing toward the southwest. That was definitely purposeful. Some people used that as an entrance. Others didn’t, but I think it was important for it to not feel like it was a full

enclosure. That there was a kind of way for the piece and the space to breathe freely in and out.

And an invitation as well.

Absolutely.

The other thing that was interesting to me was that the approach was carefully staged. One went through a series of thresholds, getting out of cars, and then walking on pavement, and then walking on the boardwalk that you created, and then entering that space. Why did you stage the approach in this particular way?

That was very, very conscious, in fact: all of the dimensions of that boardwalk and what the rhythm was of the wood that was laid out, and where it stopped and how long you had to walk on the sand to get to the edge or to the center of the circle.

It took a couple of minutes for somebody to get out of their car and walk out to the center of the circle. Within that short period of time, it begins to slow down people’s state of mind.

Somehow the boardwalk allowed people to be conscious of their stride and their footstep because you could hear yourself walking, but you also saw yourself walking on top of the desert. During that moment you became aware of the creosote, aware of the sand, but you hadn’t yet touched any of that. Until you got to the end of the boardwalk, which was exactly halfway from the street to the center of the circle.

For the last three hundred feet, you had to walk along the sand, and that first step off the boardwalk, with that foot crunching into the sand, was a very powerful moment for people. They’re recognizing, “I’m three hundred feet out into the middle of the desert. I probably have never been here before. I’m highly aware of my pace, having to slow down walking through soft sand.”

As they walk across, I think the eyes begin to lift and see the mirrored piece. You’d see the land reflected that you’ve just been walking through, and then passing through that threshold again, now highly aware of the spatial experience. From there, then, it’s all opened up.

T V A A

S T R A

I am explored the relationship between human beings and their environment. Borrowing from Vedic philosophy, the phrase “I am” denotes an identification with the universe, or with some ultimate reality. There is a rich history of human beings exploring the desert as a place to disconnect and reconnect with questions about who they might be. “As someone born on an island, surrounded by what may be considered a beautiful but potentially hostile ocean, I have understood these vast landscapes as opportunities to recenter and dislocate one’s imagination all at the same time,” Tavares Strachan has said. With the help of a skilled team, he dug 290 craters over one hundred thousand square feet—the size of two American football fields—and lined each of them with brightly lit neon tubes. The viewer interacted with what seemed like an abstract, glowing crevasse of light. When viewed from the sky, it read as an exploded phrase, “I am.”

neville wakefield: You’ve been drawn to extreme places: the North Pole, space, and now the desert. In a way, all of them are deserted places, marked by the absence rather than the presence of humanity. What’s your attraction to these barren landscapes?

tavares strachan: The reality is, there’s something that is terrifying about the human condition, especially at this particular moment in time. A huge part of it, specifically for me, is to try and escape some of that. It might come off as a little bit of cowardice, but some of it is self-preservation.

Escape from the human condition or from humans, or both?

Escape from humans. What I mean by that, more specifically, is dogma. Current society, to me at least, is driven by a bipolar nature, especially when you spend a lot of time in America. You get that sense of one side versus the other. That’s a part of society that is really troubling.

You grew up in the Bahamas, surrounded by the sea, which is also a kind of desert. Did that influence your perception of the Coachella Valley landscape?

A lot of what I was experiencing at that juncture had to do with a sense of isolation. It’s easy to feel that sense of isolation when you grow up on an island. That isolation is physical, and it’s also conceptual and psychological.

You created something like a meteorite landing in the desert, like a debris field that covered

this vast amount of terrain. Each piece fractured out into its own island. Were you conscious of creating archipelagos in this dark and potentially hostile space?

It wasn’t something that I was immediately conscious of. It was difficult to understand the scale of the work while working on it and making the drawings for it. Flying over the site for drone photography and video is part of the piece. There’s a mismatch between the expectation of the work and the reality of it. Walking through it at night, for example, it distorts your audio and visual perception of what you’re looking at. You can never really take it all in.

It distorts perceptions of scale as well. At times the piece seemed quite intimate, and with the drone photography, you see it in the context of, say, other archipelagos of light from other cities. It’s intensely vast; the scale completely changes.

There’s a certain avoidance of documentation that has been a condition of my practice. Because the art world lives in the past, I think avoiding documentation is a crucial element in managing this system that is constantly trying to engulf images and put them in an archive.

Is that to say that you didn’t want people to make sense of the piece? Or you wanted a disconnect between these two points of view, the ground-level one and the view from above?

You can never have both experiences simultaneously. You couldn’t sit in the work on the ground level and be in the sky at the same time. In this day and age, everybody has their phones out, and when someone photographs it, what are they really photographing? You’re trying to photograph the experience, which is really difficult to do.

If one looks at the history of Land Artists, it’s been about resisting that decisive moment of photography, trying to grapple with something whose scale can’t be reduced to a single image.

Yeah, it is about the individual versus the group. Are we parts of a shared consciousness, and how does the individual fit into that? I think it’s a poetic and moving philosophy.

How did you choose to explode the phrase, to fracture it into almost three hundred different parts? Was that also about legibility?

Yeah, it really was about legibility. I love misunderstanding as a concept, because learning happens

through misunderstanding. So when I talk about the avoidance of historicizing the work through photography, I also think that misunderstanding what you might be looking at, where you might be, and why it’s happening is super critical, because now more than ever, there’s a need for more attention to the things that we don’t understand more than to the things that we do.

Part of that is about denying the viewer a singular position within this cosmology. There was no entry or exit point. There was no right way to address the sculpture.

We’re living in an era where people want everybody else to make meaning for them. That’s where we are at right now: you go to absorb any bit of content, and there’s the other person explaining it away.

Like all great artworks, it’s a question, not a statement or an answer. I’m wondering whether that’s true of the experience.

Yeah, I think it is the simplicity of the phrase itself that allows it to be read as so complex. That this is the misunderstanding is, I think, beautiful, as in a lot of spiritual practice, where it functions at a profound level. That kind of misunderstanding and complexity has been a part of the human experience for quite some time.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book celebrates the contributions of the artists who took part in Desert X 2017, but there are also countless others who made our inaugural exhibition a reality.

Desert X brought together the Coachella Valley—its nine cities and disparate populations—as people enjoyed magnificent journeys traveling to the artists’ installations. At a time when social media and virtual meet-ups often supplant engaged, one-on-one encounters, visitors to Desert X engaged with the art, the landscape, and each other.

This community of explorers came from near and far to share moments and surprises, and to see the beautiful Coachella Valley through the lens of contemporary art. The valley was no small player in this narrative. In addition to an extraordinary environment that remains the home of Native Americans who have lived on this land for generations, the valley has a rich history and is currently home to a vibrant, diverse, and socially complex citizenry.

The exhibition, which received international acclaim and gave rise to an amazing dialogue about contemporary art, depended on each of its many prescient heroes.

First among them were the members of the Desert X board. Without their support, encouragement, and serious commitment, Desert X would have remained just a good idea. From the earliest meetings around Mary Sweeney’s dining-room table to the enthusiastic and visionary support of Ken Kuchin, their excitement and energy were vital to this project.

Our very generous founding benefactors—Donna MacMillan, Harold Matzner, Helene Galen, Brent Harris, Beth DeWoody, Paul Tollett and Skip Paige—ensured that we could move forward and bring challenging, wonderful art to the desert. I want to recognize the enormous in-kind support of Ed Freeman, Frank Jones, and Jeremiah Joseph.

Our wide-ranging group of 100 Founding Members provided vital financial support and pure enthusiasm to create a living, breathing project that went on to touch hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.

Along the way, we were joined by additional donors—several Coachella Valley cities, organizations, businesses, and cultural institutions—to make possible the glorious exhibition organized by Artistic Director Neville Wakefield with assistance from Executive Director Elizabeta Betinski and a tiny but resolute team.

It is impossible not to recognize all those who have made this book possible. Chief among them is Loren Lipson (1944–2018), who generously provided the funding. The board’s publications committee, chaired by Steven Nash, has guided us, and our current Executive Director, Jenny Gil, has led the effort.

Desert X will forever honor all these generous adventurers. Each one of them has a special place in my heart.

SUSAN L. DAVIS FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT DESERT X

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

William L. Fox is the founding director of The Center for Art + Environment at Nevada Museum of Art, supporting the practice, study, and awareness of creative interactions between people and their natural, virtual, and built environments.

Holly Willis is a research professor in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, where she also serves as the chair of the Division of Media Arts + Practice. She writes for diverse publications about experimental film, video, and new media and also explores experimental nonfiction and poetry. Her work has appeared in Film Comment, Afterimage, ArtWeek, KCET's Artbound, Variety and carte blanche.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

Doug Aitken is an artist and filmmaker known for site-specific installations that intervene on the landscape and illuminate how we experience the world. The Geffen Contemporary at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art recently mounted Doug Aitken: Electric Earth, the first North American museum survey of his twenty-year career. The exhibition took its name from a 1999 video installation by the artist, which earned him the International Prize that year at the 48th Venice Biennale. In 2017, Aitken became the inaugural recipient of the Frontier Art Prize, an award that supports an artist in the pursuit of bold projects that challenge the boundaries of knowledge and experience to reimagine the future of humanity.

Since the early 1970s, Lita Albuquerque has created an expansive body of sculpture, poetry, painting, multimedia performances, and site-specific projects. Often associated with the Land Art and Light and Space movements, her practice is unique in its vision and scope. She was the US representative and winner of the top prize at the 6th Cairo Biennale in 1996. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Getty Trust; Whitney Museum of American Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and others.

Jennifer Bolande, who lives and works in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, came of age as an artist in the early 1980s, advancing the ideas of the Pictures Generation artists. Her brand of conceptualism has explored emotional, linguistic, and physical relations to the world through photography, sculpture, assemblage, film, and installation. Landmarks, her thirty-year survey, originated at the Institute of Visual Arts in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania and Luckman Gallery at California State University, Los Angeles.

Based in Los Angeles, Will Boone was the subject of the recent solo exhibition, Paradise, at Miami’s Rubell Family Collection, where he built an installation with boxing-gym equipment. He has also had solo exhibitions at Jonathan Viner Gallery in London and Karma in New York, and he has participated in group shows at Gagosian in Rome, Peres Projects in Berlin, and Venus Over Manhattan and Gladstone Gallery in New York.

The Berlin-based artist Claudia Comte made her US

debut in 2015 at New York’s Gladstone Gallery with an exhibition of architecturally inspired sculptures rendered in different varieties of wood. She has described her practice as a combination of “stringent yet playful geometric abstraction with the emotional punch of large-scale raw materials.” The objects at Gladstone, displayed on her signature, op art-style striped walls and pedestals, recall works by Jean Arp, Constantin Brâncus ‚ i, and Henry Moore. In the past two years, Comte has mounted solo exhibitions in Bern, Lausanne, and Zurich, Switzerland; Toulouse and Rennes, France; London; and New York.

Part Choctaw and part Cherokee, Jeffrey Gibson explores his Native American heritage using a visual vocabulary that permeates his painting, sculpture, installation, video, and performance works. His last solo show at Marc Straus in New York featured colorfully embroidered and beaded punching bags with the Everlast label alongside tribal designs, as well as powerful abstract expressionist paintings on rawhide and canvas. Gibson’s mid-career retrospective exhibition opens at Denver Art Museum in 2018.

Sherin Guirguis, who lives and works in Los Angeles, investigates the relationships and frictions between the contemporary and the traditional. Her work often juxtaposes the Western language of minimalism with Middle Eastern ornamentation and explores the relationship between decoration and social structures, cultural identity, and women’s agency. Guirguis recently mounted a solo exhibition, El Biet El Kabeer, at The Third Line Gallery in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Shulamit Nazarian Gallery in Venice, California. She was included in the group shows Islamic Art Now Part 2: Contemporary Art of the Middle East and L.A. Exuberance: New Gifts by Artists, both at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and We Must Risk Delight at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.

Born on the night Marilyn Monroe died, the Italian artist Luca Forcolini has worked under the name Norma Jeane for almost twenty years. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions worldwide including at MoMA PS1, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Helmhaus, Zurich; Frieze Projects, London; Schirn Hunsthalle, Frankfurt; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Biennale de Lyon; and the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011.

Glenn Kaino, based in Los Angeles, creates largescale installations and site- or situation-specific sculptural works inspired by sociopolitical conditions.

He draws from his diverse background in sculpture, computer science, music, and animation. He has mounted solo exhibitions at Honor Fraser and LAXART in Los Angeles, Creative Time in New York, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. He represented the United States at the 13th International Cairo Biennale in 2012.

Los Angeles-based Gabriel Kuri combines organic materials with mass-produced objects and industrial detritus ranging from insulation foam to cigarette butts. He fashions them into sculptural assemblages and installations that assert a conceptual approach to social commentary. Kuri’s solo and group exhibitions span almost thirty years, scores of galleries and museums, and top shows such as the Venice Biennale, where he exhibited in 2003 and 2011. In 2014, he was selected for the Hammer Museum’s acclaimed Made in L.A.

Armando Lerma creates paintings, constructions, and installations reflecting the lives and traditions of the Mexican farmworker community in his hometown of Coachella. He founded the Coachella Walls project in 2011. His work asserts a Chicano pop-art aesthetic with a distinctive iconography and graphic style.

Based in New York, Richard Prince uses mass-media images going back to the 1970s to tweak the ideas of ownership and authorship. He created Nurse, first exhibited in 2003, by scanning the covers of pulp paperbacks, transferring them to canvas, and painting over the prints. An avid collector of American subcultures, Prince has probed the role of racism, sexism, and psychosis in mainstream humor as well as the mythical status of cowboys, bikers, customized cars, and celebrities. He has mounted solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Haus der Kunst / Süddeutsche Zeitung in Munich; MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Vienna; Rubell Family Collection in Miami; Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris; and Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria.

Rob Pruitt makes intensely personal and biographical art, primarily in painting, sculpture, and installation, with no prevailing style or default medium. His first Flea Market unfolded in the 1999 Gavin Brown summer show. He invited artist friends to set up tables and sell whatever they wanted, be it their own artwork or junk from their apartment. The gallery

became a place to socialize with the artist, creating a feeling of community between makers and sellers. Pruitt has exhibited extensively in New York and internationally. For his conceptual work Art Awards (2009 and 2010), Pruitt presented awards at the Guggenheim Museum in the manner of the Academy Awards. He mounted a mid-career retrospective in 2013 at the Aspen Art Museum.

Julião Sarmento, who studied painting and architecture at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts, works across a variety of media, including installation art, and has exhibited extensively since 1979, including at two Documentas (1982 and 1987) and three Venice Biennales (1979, 1997, and 2001). His paintings, sculpture, films, and mixed-media works follow his effort to find his place, and to define himself, in a dramatically changed and unstable world.

After growing up in Southern California’s Coachella Valley, Phillip K. Smith III received his Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. From his Palm Desert, CA studio, he creates light-based work that draws upon ideas of space, form, color, light + shadow, environment, and change. Featured in hundreds of online and print publications, Smith is known for creating large-scale temporary installations such as Lucid Stead in Joshua Tree, Reflection Field and Portals at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival, ¼ Mile Arc in Laguna Beach, and The Circle of Land and Sky at the inaugural 2017 Desert X exhibition. All these installations are featured in his latest catalog, Five Installations, published by Grand Central Press. His public artworks are sited in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Kansas City, Nashville, Oklahoma City, and beyond. The artist was recently commissioned to create permanent, light-based works for the cities of West Hollywood, CA and Bellevue, WA. The artist’s work is also included in the forthcoming exhibition and catalog Unsettled, organized by the Nevada Museum of Art and artist Ed Ruscha.

Tavares Strachan, who lives in New York City, is interested in themes of exploration, displacement, possibility versus impossibility, and the idea of pushing the body’s physical extremes. He has mounted solo exhibitions at MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Grand Arts in Kansas City, Missouri; the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania; and the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. In 2013, he represented the Bahamas in the nation’s inaugural pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale.

CREDITS

DESERT X BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Susan L. Davis President

Steven Nash Vice President

Mary Sweeney Vice President

Elizabeth K. Sorensen Secretary

Diane Allen

Steven Biller

Paul Clemente

Beth Rudin DeWoody

Vicki Hood

Jamie Kabler

Margaret Keung

Ken Kuchin

Yael Lipschutz

Zoe Lukov

Tristan Milanovich

Ed Ruscha

Linda Usher

Lyn Winter

Ed Doran Treasurer

Jenny Gill Executive Director

Carol Nash

Chair, Education Committee

ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Ximena Caminos

Brad Dunning

Nohra Haime

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Eric Shiner

Franklin Sirmans

Doug Smith

Josie Smith

Angela Westwater

DESERT X 2017 TEAM

Neville Wakefield

Artistic Director

Elizabeta Betinski

Executive Director

Matthew Davis Assistant to the President

Marianne Falk

Managing Director

Ben Hartley

Development Consultant

Mara McKevitt

Exhibition Manager

Marnie Navarro

Administrative Assistant

Kamil Beski, Alexandra Moran

Production Management

INTERNS

Lourenca Alencar

Annie Burton

Darby Caso

Rachel Jones

VOLUNTEERS

Barbara Bauer & Spelman Downer

Darcy Carozza

Jacques Caussin

Joe Garcia

Madeleine Haas

Barbara Kaplan

Ken Kauppi

Aubrey Leahy

Pia Rose

Anna Sonser & Kim Bryson

Brenda Weinstock

David Winton

Tom Yanni

DESERT X 2017 DONORS

Desert X is proud to be supported by its Founding Benefactors and Members, a special group of collectors, philanthropists, and culturally curious individuals who are an integral part of the inaugural program and will be recognized in perpetuity for their leadership and commitment to the Desert X mission and curatorial vision.

Founding Benefactors

Diane Allen

Annette Bloch

Beth Rudin DeWoody

Tad Freese

Helene Galen

Susan Hancock

Brent R. & Lisa K. Harris

Elizabeth Harris

Jamie Kabler

Bruce Karatz

Ken Kuchin & Tyler Morgan

Harold Matzner

Donna MacMillan

JoAnn McGrath

May and Samuel Rudin Foundation

Elizabeth K. Sorensen

Founding Members

Susan Hancock, Chair

Leisa Austin

Sarah & Brian Banks

Jennifer Bellah & Stephen Maguire

Steven Biller

Stephanie & Peter Blake

Susan & Fenton Booth

Linda Brown

April & Glenn Bucksbaum

Ximena Caminos

Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo

Terri Childs

Kevin Comer

Richard Crisman & Jeff Brock

Ina & Rick Davis

Nevin Dolcefino

Marcy & Leo Edelstein

Steve Eglash

Nicholas Fahey

Elisabeth Familian & Max Ramberg

Fine Art Dealers Association

Georgia & Jerry Fogelson

Bryan Fox

Honor Fraser

Matthew French

Vicki French & Steve Lippman

Gagosian Gallery

Joan & Gary Gand

Christina & Louis Gantz

Lani Garfield

Jim Gaudineer & Tony Padilla

Aileen Getty

Homeira Goldstein

Susan Goodman & Rodney Lubeznik

Karen & Chris Haines

Kerry Hamilton & Lucius Lamar

Steven Harris

Richard Heller

Sandy Hill

Douglas Hoerr

Vicki & Bill Hood

Lenora Hume

Ikon Ltd. Fine Art

Mary James

Linda Janger

Jamye & Ken Jesser

Anne Keating

Robert D. Kleinschmidt

Jamie Konker

Paul Kopeikin

Sally Kovler

David Knight

Jeffrey Kubinec

L.A. Louver

Pamela Ann Lange

Elizabeth Leach

Tiffiny Lendrum

Paul Lester

Bruce C. Lindstrom

Michael Maloney

Yvonne & Steve Maloney

Keith Markovitz & Dave Locke

Grisella Martinez

Laura & James Maslon

Cheryl McArthur

Charlie McBrearty

Annette Michelson & Errol Ginsberg

Melissa Milanovich

Carol & Steven Nash

Alexandra Nazari

Shulamit Nazarian

Leila Nematzadeh

Thao Nguyen & Andreas Krainer

DeeAnn & Larry Nichols

Randy Polumbo

Carolina Portage

Wendy Posner

Dallas Price & Bob Van Breda

Rosi Reidl

Diane Rosenstein

Diane Rubin & Lenny Eber

Michael Ruvo

Christi Salamone

Cathy Sarkowsky

Faye Sarkowsky

Christine Scott

Susan Seelig

Brenda Sexton

Ann Sheffer

Abby Sher

Linda Shirvanian

Jane Siegal

Roswitha Smale

Iris & Thom Smotrich

Deborah Snyder

William Turner

Linda Usher & Malcolm Lambe

David Vogel & Larry Fulton

Hugh Raymond Wakeham

Diane & David Waldman

Annabelle Weston Shulman

Lily White

Orna & Keenan Wolens

Molly & Dennis Yares

Laurie Ziegler

DESERT X 2017 SPONSORS

Desert X is proud to recognize the generous support of the following companies and organizations:

Lead Sponsor future archives

Major Sponsors

Desert Palisades

Desert X Founding Members

Media Sponsor

Palm Springs Life

Supporting Sponsors

Avalon Hotel Palm Springs

City of Indio

City of Palm Desert

City of Palm Springs

City of Rancho Mirage

Deep Eddy

Enterprise Rent-A-Car

F10 Creative

Gem & Bolt

Greater Palm Springs Convention and Visitors Bureau

Hot Purple Energy

JW Marriott Desert Springs Resort

Lyn Winter Inc.

Parker Palm Springs

PS Resorts

The 500

Renaissance Indian Wells Resort & Spa

Renaissance Palm Springs

Rosetta Getty

Saguaro Palm Springs

Sibling Rivalry Studio

Tesla Motors

Triada Palm Springs, an Autograph Collection Hotel

Whitewater Rock and Supply

Wintec Energy

Cultural Partner

Ace Hotel & Swim Club

Program Partners

Art LA Contemporary

Art Palm Springs

Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival

Festival

DIGICOM

Hammer Museum

Modernism Week

Palm Springs Art Museum

Sunnylands Center & Gardens

The Wildlands Conservancy

SPECIAL THANKS

Elizabeth Armstrong

Marc Breslin

CODAME

Daniell Cornell

Kirby Crone

Mary Dean

Carlton DeWoody

Bob Dornberger

Hooman Fazly

Veronica Fernandez

Max Finneran

Ed Freeman

Mara Gladstone

Deborah Glickman

Michael Hellman

Michael Hinkle

Les Johnson

Frank Jones

Jeremiah Joseph

KCET Artbound

David Knaus

Tara Lazar and Marco Rossetti

Sarah Ledesma

Los Angeles Review of Books

Conner MacPhee

Leo Marmol

MC Landscape Service

Tyler Morgan

Holly Noble

Rick Royale

Steve Sessa

The Stealth Crew

Jeff Swanson

Erica Thompson

Jack Thompson

Anthony Valdez

David Vogel

Gideon Webster

Malin Wong

DESERT X 2017 CATALOGUE

Editors

Andrew Roth & Neville Wakefield

Editorial Coordinator

Steven Biller

Text Editing

Jacqueline Feldman

Susan Bell (introduction)

Texts

Susan L. Davis

William L. Fox

Ed Ruscha

Neville Wakefield

Holly Willis

Interviews

Neville Wakefield

Design

Garrick Gott

Typefaces

Lineto Circular

Colophon Reader

Paper

135 gsm Lingnan Illustrated

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the generous support of Dr. Loren G. Lipson, who passed away before it was completed. Loren was a champion of indigenous and underrepresented artists, and a donor and friend to museums and nonprofits across the United States.

Special Thanks to Desert X 2017 Artists

Doug Aitken

Lita Albuquerque

Will Boone

Jennifer Bolande

Claudia Comte

Jeffrey Gibson

Sherin Guirguis

Norma Jeane

Glenn Kaino

Gabriel Kuri

Armando Lerma

Richard Prince

Rob Pruitt

Julião Sarmento

Phillip K. Smith III

Tavares Strachan

Published by PPP Editions, New York

Available at desertx.org

© 2019 the artists, the authors, and Desert X Photos by Lance Gerber © Desert X © David Blank courtesy of Desert X

Printed in China

ISBN 978-0-692-14898-3

PO Box 4050

Palm Springs, CA 92263 United States