Iván Argote : A POINT OF VIEW
A Point of View is an interactive sculpture installed at an elevation above the Salton Sea, the manmade body of water that has been California’s largest lake for the past century. The arrayed concrete scales sited near the sea’s North Shore project the viewer into the landscape. Messages set in concrete appear in Spanish and English on each step. From the platforms the audience may communicate with each other or turn to the landscape. The Greater Coachella Valley lit in its changing hourly aspects reveals a civilization scattered across the bed of an ancient ocean. A Point of View registers diurnal, geologic, and mechanized time in this section of the ever-progressing San Andreas Fault. It also addresses the long arch of memory contained in Argote’s blend of pre- Columbian and brutalist architecture. The assembled sculptures function as sundials representing time in fragmentation. Like the engraved words on the steps, the singular and the collective coalesce across the menhir-like structures, aimed in different directions. These temporal and verbal fragments stand before the Salton Sink as it exists in its 21st-century incarnation, protruding amid the sur-rounding agricultural land and industrial water. The temporary sculptures sit in a basin where the ancient Lake Cahuilla once engulfed a Paleolithic horizon before its final recession into the desert floor in the 1600s. Seashells and imprints of marine life centuries-old can still be detected in the immediate vicinity of A Point of View, bringing Argote’s many reflections on time and scale full circle.
