JEFFREY GIBSON

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. 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 experi- enced 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.