Desert X returns to California’s Coachella Valley in a celebration of how the spirit of the open landscape meshes with human responses to both the raw elements and traditions of interaction.
After the previous evening’s unforgiving downpour, the Coachella Valley was caressed by the well-deserved desert sun during the unveiling of Desert X last Friday morning. Fresh from the dampness, the grainy soil and short brittle bushes re-emerged from the rain to provide the setting for the fifth edition’s 11 projects. Organised by New York-based curator Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas and Desert X’s artistic director Neville Wakefield, the show possesses a rhythm that is holistically harmonic and distinctively subjective. Spread across the broader southern Californian valley anchored by Palm Springs, the large-scale public sculptures by West Coast and international artists independently inhabit their own surroundings, each enveloped by a commanding spread of mountainous horizon and washes of dune sculpted by fickle winds.
American artists such as Alison Saar, Sanford Biggers, Ronald Rael and Sarah Meyohas are joined by Saudi artist Muhannad Shono, Jose Dávila from Mexico, Korean artist Kimsooja and Kapwani Kiwanga from Canada. Each site-specific commission injects a visually determined statement in which conclusions remain as boundless as the surrounding habitat. With some located in populated neighbourhoods and others out in the wilderness, the works demand attention without overruling their surroundings – yet they still ask questions on rootedness and perseverance. The show’s curators are clear about not mistaking the desert landscape for a blank canvas devoid of historical, spiritual or natural depth. “My experience of the desert has never allowed me to see it as empty,” says Garcia-Maestas, who was born and raised in New Mexico.
In Shono’s case, the vastness of the Thousand Palms desert surely goes beyond providing solely an ample landscape, with nature transforming itself into a part of the installation. In What Remains, the Riyadh-based artist has rolls of thick tarp snaking through the sand and hugging an array of low bushes. Nature conveys her own enigmatic system of flora across the dune, while the artist’s touch dresses the plants with a material associated with protection and utility. Chance is yet another collaborator in Shono’s orchestration: during its preview, the work was coated with the aftermath of the previous night’s heavy rain and wind, and the alchemy of sand and water was cemented over each tarp. “The synthetic landscaping material adheres to the soil, which calls for the idea of the earth being unable to settle upon itself,” notes Shono. He stands tall amidst the installation, with the sun’s rays giving the plants a lace-like finish through the tarp’s rough transparency. At eye level, the cuts of industrial fabric resemble the sails of a ship slicing through thick sand rather than choppy seas. “When the form rises from the earth, it becomes something of imagination and anything below the surface becomes memory, the past,” the artist adds.
Like Shono, many of the artists call for a collaboration with nature and embrace its cycle handling what they have left out in wilderness. “Most artists are in direct collaboration with nature,” says Garcia-Maestas. Take, for example, Rael’s immersive sculpture of 3D-printed bricks, which wraps a towering palm tree in central Palm Springs. Enigmatic but hospitable, Adobe Oasis absorbs the visitors in a neighbourhood busy with hotels and shops, pointing out to nature’s accent in its earthy precision. Rael’s mud bricks, which he created with a robotic programming, relied on the wind and the sun to dry – as the California-based artist bridges thousands of years of indigenous knowledge with cutting-edge engineering, imbuing traditional vernacular construction with a poetic idea of non-function.
In the backyard of the Sunnylands Center & Gardens, Agnes Denes’s mammoth pyramid sculpture, The Living Pyramid, monumentalises another form of movement – the life cycle of living beings – in the form of a triangular planter adorned by arrestingly beautiful local flora on each of its staggered steps. The Hungarian-born American artist is known globally for her wheat fields, which she has planted in various concrete jungles, including Manhattan’s Wall Street, since the 1980s. Here, she presents the pyramid form as an anecdote of social structures, seeding it with vegetation to yield a metaphor of power dynamics and a microcosm of the ways in which we live.
In the vastness of a desert landscape, chance encounters are inevitable and, indeed, expressly sought after. Saar’s stark installation, Soul Service Station, is hard to miss for the drivers of the Desert Terrace Way, where the sight of a gas station is more than commonplace. Yet the Californian artist’s station disappoints those in need of fuel, promising instead to delight them with its interactive nature. In what Garcia-Maestas calls a “warm hug on the highway”, Saar has recreated a work from 1986 in New Mexico with reclaimed discarded materials. Here, visitors can pull up the gas pipe-like phone under the titular sign on a metal speech bubble. From the speaker, they will hear verses by the Los Angeles-based poet Harryette Mullen who, for example, cites, “Random road to your destination; heading for your dream vacation; with a load of expectation”. In a further twist, Saar’s station has a female deity, named Ruby – made from salvaged materials and dressed like a sanitary worker – guarding the sculpture.
A thread of joyful resilience runs through the biennial and was palpable in the preview days’ activations in works by Meyohas and Dávila. Right on the dot at 2pm, 12 dancers from LA’s Jacob Jonas The Company started rolling on the ground in front of Meyohas’s labyrinthine sculpture, Truth Arrives in Slanted Beams, which creates light patterns that read words like “Truth.” Calm at first, the performers’ movements rapidly transformed into sharp but elegant gestures which included running over the artist’s wavy form and eventually away from it. Into the late afternoon, the crowd gathered and sought shelter from the delirious wind within Dávila’s sculpture, The act of being together. The massive marble cubes were brought here from a quarry in the Chihuahua Desert, across the US / Mexico border, and are piled in precarious but tight configurations, delivering a hefty materialisation of our equally precarious times. At sunset last Friday the gargantuan blocks echoed with the music of two Mexican cellists, who battled with the howling wind and, against all odds, made themselves audible – a message not lost on those present.
