GABRIEL KURI

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

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?