WILL BOONE

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

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.