desert x essay
By Neville Wakfield
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 onself into the polar wilderness, and watching, as did Ernest Shackleton, the vessel of their endeavor founder in 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 peyote-paved path of the Toltec shamans, and Isabelle Eberhardt’s venture into the North African desert as the adopted male persona of Si Mahmoud Essad. 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 privy 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.