Almost seven years ago, 24 graduate students from different University of California campuses took a deep dive into the desert. They explored its natural and social ecologies, from the relatively lush low desert to barren Wonder Valley, and responded with poignant, site-specific art installations that depicted jarring complexity.
There was Tamarisk Field, a sculptural indictment of the nefarious plant species that spills its salt-encrusted foliage onto the soil and slowly kills the life around it. In Trace: Resonance Field, two artists placed earth-toned, abstractly shaped ceramic plates atop square wooden frames concealing a device that received seismic data and reacted with unsettling pings of varying intensity. At the site of a collapsed homestead shack, a U.S. flag snapped in the wind while, off to the side and behind a makeshift juice stand, an artist told passersby about the 1950s land hucksters who tied fruit to Joshua trees and photographed them to help sell the properties. The daylong exhibition offered one smart work of art after another.
But fewer than 150 people, mostly friends of the artists, saw it.
Artists tend to explore the desert with a high degree of curiosity, as if they’ve landed on Mars: They mine the raw terrain for ideas and proceed gingerly. Their work often comes to life in unorthodox fashion, in events like those staged by the sprawling High Desert Test Sites, the more intimate Joshua Treenial, the larger-than-life Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival (aka “Coachella”), and any number of pop-ups and interventions.
The newest event of this nature is Desert X, a free-to-the-public exhibition of site-specific art installations opening across the Coachella Valley region Feb. 25, 2017.
Masha Lifshin created the installation and performance work Joshua Tree Fruit for Dry Immersion 3: Desert Projects in 2010.
In the year or so since the nonprofit event’s board of directors announced Neville Wakefield as its curator, Desert X has been stirring interest and has become the most anticipated art event of this season. That’s in no small part due to the 15 artists Wakefield has selected to participate, including his famous friends Matthew Barney and Richard Prince, as well as Palm Desert-based Phillip K. Smith III, revered near and far for his large-scale, architectural light installations such as Lucid Stead, an LED-illuminated mirrored shack near Joshua Tree that went viral in 2013, as well as Reflection Field and Portals, which he created for the Coachella festival in 2014 and 2016, respectively.
“I was looking for [artists] who have a curiosity as to how their art can exist in this sort of expanded field,” says Wakefield, the Englishman who lives in New York and organized a similar type of exhibition in the mountains of Gstaad, Switzerland, in 2014. “We take away the controlled environment of the gallery, all the things that are reassuring like climate and lighting — all the things that deify the art. There’s a bravery to turn yourself onto this environment.”
Wakefield is something of a gypsy curator, having lent his self-taught talent to Frieze Projects, a program of artists’ commissions affiliated with Frieze Art Fair in London, and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, the affiliate of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The weeklong Gstaad exhibition, Elevation 1049: Between Heaven and Hell, was in many ways a precursor to Desert X. “The conceit of this show was that we exchange the white cubes for the white mountains, the white landscape,” he says. “There was a certain kind of blankness that became the backdrop. That’s also true of the desert. It has been referred to as a blank canvas. How blank it is is another question.
“Conceptually, [the desert] is incredibly rich. There’s a long history of artists kind of invoking the challenge of the desert, especially in land art, when you think of [Robert] Smithson, [Michael] Heizer, and [Walter] De Maria. What’s interesting is that seemed like it was men in bulldozers, it seemed to be about the desert as blank canvas, and I think that zeitgeist has changed. And there’s the whole tradition of the desert as a place of metaphysical wandering. Whether you think in terms of religion, from John the Baptist being cast out, to Burning Man. It’s a place you go without necessarily knowing what you are looking for or going to find. You go to understand the experience you left behind. So in a very base sense of this being a place of realization and self-discovery, [that’s]what makes it immensely attractive to artists and also writers. It’s a backdrop for the imagination.
“I’m particularly interested in the way the landscape in the most general sense — the social, historical, and economic — can effectively become the curator of a show,” Wakefield says. “I’m as much a catalyst for things to happen as the person who says this goes here and this kind of encounter has to speak to that one.”
Phillip K. Smith III, selected for Desert X, gained international attention for his Lucid Stead installation in 2013.
“We take away the controlled environment of the gallery, all the things that are reassuring like climate and lighting — all the things that deify the art. There’s a bravery to turn yourself onto this environment.”
All of the artists Wakefield selected for Desert X have experienced the desert. They include many Los Angeles-based artists, including Lita Albuquerque, Glenn Kaino, and Sherin Guirguis. Rob Pruitt, a part-time Palm Springs resident, is also confirmed, as well as New York-based Jeffrey Gibson and Brazilian Cinthia Marcelle.
What exactly they create will be a surprise. Wakefield concedes Desert X “allows for a different kind of encounter for nonart lovers to encounter the art and not realize it’s even art, but in some way it will speak to them because it’s in an environment they know, it’s part of their landscape. Without being banged over the head with the idea.”
The installations will be placed at sites throughout the Coachella Valley through April 30. And you can bet more than 150 people will see them.
Visit www.desertx.org for more information.