As my body hurtled across the desert plane on a south by southeast heading, the open road and open landscape allowing for a respectable 80 mph velocity, the fragile bodies of the painted ladies were on the move heading north. Hundreds of thousands of these little paperthin miracles, these gorgeous butterflies with their understated coloration, tossed to and fro by the slightest of breezes, were advancing across major territory, lured north by the cheeseweed and hollyhock blooms sprouting on the desert floor of the Coachella Valley at the end of an unusually wet winter. Many in their company were set by fate on a collision course with my vehicle.
The first impact, strangely silent, exploded its alien yellow guts on my windshield. The next made a noise, like the tapping of a pencil on the head of a writer with writer’s block. The frequency picked up after the fifth impact, the taps a percussive symphony of exploding bodies, painted ladies painting my Jetta with their iridescent insides.
As I pulled off the road, there through my windshield was seen an augmented reality to be sure: the desert landscape, rugged and vast, seen through a compressed, virtual field of luminous yellow slime and broken butterfly wings. Through this veil of chromatically acute carnage, all seemed impermanent, unreal, with questionable spatial fixity. For me, ontology in the desert is always different than it is in the city: being in the midst of so much nothingness and nothingness in the face of so much being. As I looked at one scene (the desert) through the lens of another (the abstract shapes of migrating butterflies smashed onto my windshield), the actual field and the virtual field collapsed into my one visual field. This phenomenon would recur throughout my visit to, and through, Desert X.
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Desert X is a site-specific biennial exhibition that runs in the California desert, this year centered in the Coachella Valley, near Palm Springs. The organizers—artistic director Neville Wakefield and co-curators Matthew Schum and Amanda Hunt—have put together a sprawling show throughout the valley, situating works in such diverse locations as a derelict roadside gas station, a forgotten beach along the edge of the Salton Sea, and a vacant lot between two suburban homes. To experience this show is like hunting for easter eggs in a backyard that is 55 miles across.
While the pieces in this exhibition tell many stories spread across nineteen participating artists and collectives, let us focus our gaze out my butterfly-encrusted windshield toward three specific projects, all of which embody the strange nature of presence and absence—being and nothingness—found in the desert.
Sterling Ruby’s Specter is a perfect object: its high-gloss surface is without blemish; its coloration is an undifferentiated shade of bright orange (when God spoke, “Let there be orange,” this was the orange—ORANGE in all caps); its rational geometry is precise (when Euclid spoke, “Let there be cube,” or, more accurately, “Let there be rectangular cuboid,” this was the rectangular cuboid). Though Specter is shiny and reflective, it does not disappear into the landscape like Doug Aitken’s mirror-clad house, Mirage, featured in Desert X 2017. Specter does the opposite of disappear. Its glossy surface absorbs the desert light and transmutes it into something alien, something extraterrestrial. I don’t mean extraterrestrial by way of Steven Spielberg (e.g., from another planetary terrene), but extraterrestrial as in more than terrestrial or perhaps outside the very notion of terrestrial physicality.
Specter is a digital body sited within our analog world. The desert landscape seen beyond the perfect edges of this perfect object—the landscape that surrounds and outscales it—is unable to snuff it out. True to its title, Ruby’s piece seems to haunt the landscape, but not in the ghost-story sense. Less an intruder than a visual glitch, Specter causes our digitally bathed minds to rethink the analog authenticity of this most analog and authentic of landscapes. As when a glitch interrupts our viewing of a digital video or digital photograph, redirecting our attention to the image’s underlying 1s and 0s, Ruby’s glitch starts to do something to our viewing of this landscape, spooking us into perhaps rethinking its ontological terms.
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John Gerrard’s Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas), sited on a dry desert plane just outside Palm Springs, is a large-scale, long-duration, single-channel video installation, on a screen that is roughly thirty by thirty feet. The video presents a flag pole standing in a simulated, barren landscape. Emanating from the upper portion of the pole (where the flag would be when flying at full staff) are streams of thick, black smoke that wave and move on the wind, forming the shape of an endlessly evanescent flag. The landscape in which this ominous black flag waves is a hyper-detailed and real-time (night and day cycles are synced with local time) simulation of Spindletop Dome, Beaumont, Texas, which in 1901 was tapped as the (then) biggest oil strike in the world. It was subsequently mined for sulfur after, in the late 1930s, its significant oil bounty was depleted, and it is now a spent and exhausted parcel of earth, empty of its resources. Gerrard’s video presents a convincingly realistic simulation.
The piece offers a powerful set of signifiers that cause the viewer to think about a whole host of things: the various black flags one has historically encountered (the name and branding of the hardcore punk rock band, ISIS, POW/MIA, etc.); what this surreal and ominous black “flag” of smoke might mean; what it is to see land as a “resource” for human exploitation; the ways that that erroneous “resource” thinking is precisely why we are on the very brink of climate catastrophe; and so on.
However, with my mind running through these many interconnected ideas, I realized that all of this was underwritten by a far stranger situation: As I stood before this hyperreal simulation of a specific, contested and complicated landscape, while being firmly sited in another specific, contested, complicated (and fully real) landscape—the Coachella Valley—stretching beyond the edges of the giant video screen, my mind toggled back and forth between the presence and persistence of the fake landscape and the absence and passivity of the real landscape. There I was, delighting in this piece’s ability to transport me to exactly nowhere, a nowhere that sure felt like somewhere.
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Nancy Baker Cahill’s Margin of Error is an augmented reality “sculpture” that churns, spins, and even seems to reflect and absorb the sun’s light, as it hovers above the surface of the Salton Sea. It can only be seen through a smartphone camera powered by Cahill’s customized app. Margin of Error evokes a kind of post-explosion cloud, the aftermath of a cataclysmic event. But due to its light and silvery coloration, this cataclysm seems more generative than destructive, more big bang than nuclear annihilation, more the beginning of a strange new thing still forming than the end of an old thing now destroyed.
There is a liquid quality to Margin of Error’s hovering, churning form which creates a perfect and intriguing connection to the strange body of water—the Salton Sea—that is this piece’s frame. As one stands on the ghostly, bleached-sand beach of this uncanny and shrinking inland sea, born of human error and smelling of decaying fish, it becomes increasingly difficult to recognize how “real” the real landscape is. Cahill’s work engages with this situation by adding to it—by augmenting it. When an entire landscape seems unreal, because it is, augmenting it pushes it to an even greater level of unreality.
I learned in 5th grade that there is a fundamental relationship between a body of liquid water and a water vapor cloud, a relationship based on reciprocal exchange. In Cahill’s piece a very strange hovering cloud floats above a very strange body of liquid in what I can only guess is a reciprocal exchange of some common element. Which one of those two—the sea or the cloud—is real, and which is unreal? I cannot decide. I am afraid this Desert X visitor seems to have lost track of how to figure out that kind of thing—a consequence, perhaps, of being haunted by art in the desert.
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Desert X runs through April 21. For artist information and the GPS coordinates necessary for navigating the show, visitors should download the Desert X app, as well as Nancy Baker Cahill’s 4th Wall app, before leaving home. This post has been revised.
[Photograph by Dan Callis]
