Sean J Patrick Carney on the farewell edition of the High Desert Test Sites biennial
“THE SEARCHERS” marked the ultimate iteration of Excessive Desert Check Websites’ sun-scorched biennial in Southern California’s arid Morongo Basin. Since 2002, the nonprofit has labored with over 4 hundred and fifty artists on a dozen biennials, twenty-five solo initiatives, and numerous occasions. Primarily, programming happens across the quickly rising cities of Yucca Valley, Joshua Tree, and Surprise Valley. HDTS 2015, although, absconded to Inexperienced River, Utah, and the version I participated in, HDTS 2013, stretched seven hundred miles, with sixty initiatives from Joshua Tree to Albuquerque. Visitor curator Iwona Blazwick, ex-director of London’s Whitechapel Gallery and (in an eyebrow-raising profession transfer) the newly appointed chair of an enormous public artwork initiative developed by the Saudi Arabian authorities, organized “The Searchers” round Robert Smithson’s idea of “regenerative destroy”: Blazwick chosen 9 artists, 5 from outdoors of america, who, throughout sixty baking miles, riffed on entropic processes, patterns of destroy, and imbricate timelines, each human and nonhuman.
Dineo Seshee Bopape’s Lerato le le golo (…la go hloka bo kantle), 2022, constructed from the terrain and melting again into it, represents for me an apotheosis of HDTS. On the outskirts of Surprise Valley, a number of wavy, mortarless brick buildings appeared paused, mid-undulation, within the optical warmth distortion. Bopape, who’s South African, enlisted locals to hand-shape bricks with earth culled from the mattress of Sunfair Dry Lake, situated one hour west. At Sunfair, multidisciplinary artist Gerald Clarke, who lives and works close to Anza, California, on the Cahuilla Indian Reservation the place he’s an enrolled member, put in Earth Reminiscence, 2022, an uncanny kinetic rumination on geologic time. Hypnotic winds rippled tons of of colourful fish, painted onto white pennants by native schoolchildren, over the desiccated phantom of the traditional lake.
Thirty miles east, parched breezes additionally animated Surprise Valley–primarily based artist Kate Lee Brief’s Respite, 2022. The partially sunken, octagonal wood construction featured 4 semicircular arch entryways. Descending stairs, sheltered from oppressive ultraviolet rays, you might be enveloped by silence. Then, as wind picks up, Respite turns into an understated chantry. Metal tubes embedded outdoors—woodwind embouchure analogs—transmit breathy, layered buzzing.
Approaching on foot, Respite resembles the forsaken “jackrabbit homesteader” cabins peppered all through the desert, remnants of the 1938 Small Tract Act, which supplied 5 acres of free federal land—stolen from the Serrano, Cahuilla, and Chemehuevi, amongst others—to these with means to “enhance” plots by setting up dwellings. After World Warfare II, supplies rationing ceased and homesteading boomed. Boosters boosted desert life, and widespread westerns romanticized pioneers conquering rugged landscapes. In fact, “The Searchers” shares a reputation with John Ford’s 1956 frontier epic, whereby John Wayne’s antihero hunts Comanches who kidnapped his niece from a West Texas homestead. Over Zoom in April, Blazwick, who has been visiting California’s excessive desert for many years, stated the exhibition wasn’t referencing Ford’s movie, however “the legacy of the pioneers who went [to the Morongo Basin] within the Nineteen Forties.” Coincidentally, cinematic and literary depictions of the Southwest impressed these (largely white) postwar settlers to look out journey—and belongings.
Loads of ex-urbanites couldn’t lower it, and deserted shack. In scenic Pipes Canyon, British blue-chipper Rachel Whiteread forged two of those ditched dwellings in shades of gentrification-gray. Titled Shack I, 2014, and Shack II, 2016, the concrete negatives are architectural dirges for desert populations in perpetual flux. Having by no means seen a Whiteread in-person earlier than, I used to be skeptical of what appeared to me like formal schtick. Take into account me transformed. But they felt dissonant inside HDTS’s scrappier canon. Positive, they’re site-specific—completely so—however they had been commissioned years ago by a collector on personal land.
Outdoors famed dive The Palms Restaurant, Jack Pierson’s The Finish of the World, 2012, risked related incongruity—the Instagram-ready Hollywood signal satire debuted at an eponymous 2013 solo exhibition at Regen Initiatives in Los Angeles. Pierson although has important historical past with the area, as a part-time resident and participant in a number of early HDTS applications, giving The Finish’s everlasting set up a eulogistic weight. Bearing point out: Pierson’s desert redux recalled, aesthetically, Tlingit and Unangax̂ artist Nicholas Galanin’s much-discussed Never Forget, 2021, which learn “INDIAN LAND,” from final yr’s geographically adjoining Desert X Biennial. The resemblance was purely coincidental—deliberate for 2020, “The Searchers” was delayed by Covid—however, as with HDTS 2022’s title, coincidences might be significant. Sure populations have already survived an apocalypse.
Throughout Amboy Highway sat one other work loud sufficient for the flashier Desert X. German artist Paloma Varga Weisz’s monumental Overseas Physique, 2022, a towering lady impaled by a phallic department, appeared extra scale than substance. Plant-becoming makes for provocative bizarre fiction, however Varga Weisz’s hybrid was an anodyne learn.
Excessive Desert Check Websites coalesced in 2002 as a collaboration between artists Andrea Zittel and Lisa Anne Auerbach, gallerist Shaun Caley Regen, curator John Connelly, and collector Andy Stillpass. Zittel, who had relocated to Joshua Tree from New York in 2000, drafted an approachable mission assertion—later printed in a 2004 Artforum essay—outlining eight tenets for creating “a ‘middle’ outdoors of any preexisting facilities” and discovering “widespread floor between up to date artwork and localized artwork points.” As is customary with manifestos, some facets appear parochial twenty years later: overlooking, for instance, outcomes of creative-class colonization, or socioeconomic realities that make “stucco housing tracts and massive field retail facilities” sensible for a lot of. Nonetheless, Zittel’s bold textual content stays instructive for up to date artist-run organizations.
Tenet 4 is evergreen: To provoke an organism in its personal proper—one that’s greater and richer than the imaginative and prescient of any single artist, architect, designer, or curator.
HDTS has concerned, along with its cofounders, myriad skills. Notably, curator and researcher Aurora Tang, of the Heart for Land Use Interpretation, was managing director of HDTS from 2011 to 2015 and integral in securing the org’s nonprofit standing. Nonetheless, HDTS has been synonymous with Zittel, who invited artists, writers, and musicians to her storied Joshua Tree live-work compound, A-Z West, and who’d cast relationships with regional artists, bar house owners, contractors, pilots, sign-makers, horse trainers, and veterans. So it was large information final yr when Zittel revealed she was stepping down as director, entrusting the grand desert experiment to artists Vanesa Zendejas and Elena Yu, each of whom have labored for years between A-Z West and HDTS. In reality, it was introduced that the 2 entities could be merging, such that the previous’s studio, tour, and lodging income would make the latter’s applications sustainable. Immediately, Zendejas and Yu are reinterpreting Zittel’s mission for a panorama experiencing dizzying environmental, cultural, and financial change.
Owing to these adjustments, “The Searchers” confronted a paradoxical project: HDTS asks viewers to wander into the Mojave, to get dusty, sunburned, even misplaced—briefly, to have an Genuine Expertise. On the identical time, desert experiences (suppose style shoots at Joshua Tree Nationwide Park, hundreds renting Airbnbs throughout Coachella, poolside selfies on the Ace Resort Palm Springs) have develop into a multimillion-dollar trade, driving runaway regional gentrification. (HDTS’s—and by extension Zittel’s—function in that gentrification isn’t as figuring out as Donald Judd’s in Marfa, nevertheless it isn’t inconsequential, both.) In the course of the two years that Covid delayed “The Searchers,” wealth inequality ballooned; hundreds relocated to the Morongo Basin; droughts and fires grew legion; and long-overdue reckonings rocked complacent establishments. Biennials purport to supply zeitgeisty cultural snapshots, however in an period of compounding, breakneck crises, it’s develop into more and more apparent that their episodic, jet-set mannequin precludes actionable engagements with stated crises.
Native organizations, nonetheless, can pursue community-responsive programming. To this finish, Zendejas and Yu have secured a bodily area: the 1,200 square-foot Firehouse Outpost at Copper Mountain Mesa Group Heart. They’ve already held native live shows, smaller artwork occasions, and an auto care clinic with artist and mechanic Sarah Lyon—one thing of significant utility within the far-flung desert. The Firehouse can even host HDTS’s domestically curated, multimedia Desert Research Library. Amongst present acquisition subjects: queer desert romance, Chemehuevi mythology, mining, psychological well being, and earth structure. Outdoors the Firehouse, they’ve put in a display screen for open-air film nights. On Saturdays, the long-running HDTS HQ at Yucca Valley’s Sky Village Swap Meet will proceed connecting regional and visiting artists with excessive desert residents by actions like quilting, herb clinics, and performances. Zendejas and Yu are additionally designing an immersive, yearlong HDTS residency program throughout components of which, because of the merger with A-Z West, invited artists and curators can stay on-site. This mannequin helps deep, open-ended interactions with the panorama, its individuals, and extant HDTS applications. In lieu of large-scale biennials, every year ought to yield, Zendejas advised me over e mail, one intimate native exhibition or occasion.
After two years of delays, and amid main group transitions, “The Searchers” performed a reliable swan tune for the HDTS biennial, flirting with spectacle however gritty sufficient to stay distinct from its trust-funder youthful cousin, Desert X. (Along with three iterations within the Coachella Valley, Desert X has occurred twice in AlUla, Saudi Arabia, the identical desert area the place Blazwick is now tasked with creating a brand new “Valley of the Arts” with an inaugural lineup of monumental earthworks by Manal Al Dowayan, Michael Heizer, James Turrell, Agnes Denes, and Ahmed Mater). In retiring the biennial, Zendejas and Yu take a special tack—slowing Excessive Desert Check Websites down, redrawing Zittel’s nimble schematic, and embarking on their very own seek for solutions to a fancy query: What do their desert neighbors need from a cultural establishment?
Sean J Patrick Carney is a author in Berkeley, California.
