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

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.