DESERT X 2019
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
A refraction of much that we look for and some that we find within the diverse landscape of the Coachella valley DesertX 2019 echoes in more or less subtle ways follows Bruce Nauman’s famous graphic statement, ‘Pay Attention Motherfucker’. It asks that we pay attention to the histories of a land that was never ours to claim, to listen to the fault lines that run through the landscape and the social contract. Politics that have been written into the checker board flats are here projected onto the surrounding mountains. Nor are narratives confined to the exterior landscape. Beneath the surface fossil forms tell the story of an ancient ocean floor where the abundance of life has over millions of years been commuted into the zero sum game of mineral extraction, of non- renenwal energy and climate change. In the skies above, the atmospheric tests of the nearby Nevada Proving grounds are invoked in the marches of the sixties, of the women’s protest to the hubris of men playing god, a theme echoed in the triumphal demise of manifest’s destiny’s momuments to Western civilization. A monolith radiates an obdurate intelligence born of Kubrick and McCraken while other vessels propose the active exploration of terminal conditions. Elsewhere the invitation to a different point of view takes physical form, the writing this time not projected on the rock wall but inscribed in Spanish steps. They ask that we pay attention to the histories of growth and cultivation, of nature interrupted. They demand that we pay equal attention to the minutai of desertion as we do to its seimic shock.
