Sean J Patrick Carney on the farewell edition of the High Desert Test Sites biennial

“THE SEARCHERS” marked the final iteration of High Desert Exam Sites’ sun-scorched biennial in Southern California’s arid Morongo Basin. Because 2002, the nonprofit has labored with above 4 hundred and fifty artists on a dozen biennials, twenty-five solo projects, and countless occasions. Principally, programming takes place all around the speedily growing towns of Yucca Valley, Joshua Tree, and Ponder Valley. HDTS 2015, although, absconded to Environmentally friendly River, Utah, and the version I participated in, HDTS 2013, stretched 7 hundred miles, with sixty projects from Joshua Tree to Albuquerque. Visitor curator Iwona Blazwick, ex-director of London’s Whitechapel Gallery and (in an eyebrow-elevating occupation shift) the freshly appointed chair of a large public art initiative designed by the Saudi Arabian government, organized “The Searchers” about Robert Smithson’s strategy of “regenerative ruin”: Blazwick selected 9 artists, 5 from exterior of the United States, who, throughout sixty baking miles, riffed on entropic procedures, patterns of ruin, and imbricate timelines, both of those human and nonhuman.

Dineo Seshee Bopape’s Lerato le le golo (…la go hloka bo kantle), 2022, created from the terrain and melting back into it, represents for me an apotheosis of HDTS. On the outskirts of Ponder Valley, a number of wavy, mortarless brick constructions appeared paused, mid-undulation, in the optical warmth distortion. Bopape, who is South African, enlisted locals to hand-form bricks with earth culled from the bed of Sunfair Dry Lake, situated a single hour west. At Sunfair, multidisciplinary artist Gerald Clarke, who lives and operates close to Anza, California, on the Cahuilla Indian Reservation wherever he is an enrolled member, put in Earth Memory, 2022, an uncanny kinetic rumination on geologic time. Hypnotic winds rippled hundreds of colourful fish, painted onto white pennants by regional schoolchildren, above the desiccated phantom of the ancient lake. 

30 miles east, parched breezes also animated Wonder Valley–based artist Kate Lee Short’s Respite, 2022. The partly sunken, octagonal wooden framework highlighted four semicircular arch entryways. Descending stairs, sheltered from oppressive ultraviolet rays, you are enveloped by silence. Then, as wind picks up, Respite gets an understated chantry. Metal tubes embedded outside—woodwind embouchure analogs—transmit breathy, layered humming.

Approaching on foot, Respite resembles the forsaken “jackrabbit homesteader” cabins peppered all over the desert, remnants of the 1938 Tiny Tract Act, which provided five acres of free of charge federal land—stolen from the Serrano, Cahuilla, and Chemehuevi, amid others—to all those with usually means to “improve” plots by setting up dwellings. Soon after Planet War II, supplies rationing ceased and homesteading boomed. Boosters boosted desert life, and well-known westerns romanticized pioneers conquering rugged landscapes. Of system, “The Searchers” shares a name with John Ford’s 1956 frontier epic, wherein John Wayne’s antihero hunts Comanches who kidnapped his niece from a West Texas homestead. Around Zoom in April, Blazwick, who has been viewing California’s higher desert for many years, said the exhibition wasn’t referencing Ford’s film, but “the legacy of the pioneers who went [to the Morongo Basin] in the 1940s.” Coincidentally, cinematic and literary depictions of the Southwest impressed individuals (largely white) postwar settlers to lookup out adventure—and belongings.

A lot of ex-urbanites couldn’t lower it, and deserted shack. In scenic Pipes Canyon, British blue-chipper Rachel Whiteread cast two of these 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. Obtaining hardly ever seen a Whiteread in-individual ahead of, I was skeptical of what appeared to me like formal schtick. Think about me transformed. Nonetheless they felt dissonant within HDTS’s scrappier canon. Confident, they’re internet site-specific—permanently so—but they have been commissioned many years in the past by a collector on private land.

Exterior famed dive The Palms Restaurant, Jack Pierson’s The Conclude of the Planet, 2012, risked very similar incongruity—the Instagram-all set Hollywood indication satire debuted at an eponymous 2013 solo exhibition at Regen Tasks in Los Angeles. Pierson although has substantial history with the area, as a element-time resident and participant in various early HDTS programs, supplying The Conclusion’s permanent set up a eulogistic excess weight. Bearing point out: Pierson’s desert redux recalled, aesthetically, Tlingit and Unangax̂ artist Nicholas Galanin’s substantially-talked over Under no circumstances Forget about, 2021, which study “INDIAN LAND,” from final year’s geographically adjacent Desert X Biennial. The resemblance was purely coincidental—planned for 2020, “The Searchers” was delayed by Covid—but, as with HDTS 2022’s title, coincidences can be meaningful. Sure populations have currently survived an apocalypse.

Throughout Amboy Road sat yet another do the job loud more than enough for the flashier Desert X. German artist Paloma Varga Weisz’s monumental Foreign Physique, 2022, a towering girl impaled by a phallic department, seemed much more scale than substance. Plant-becoming helps make for provocative weird fiction, but Varga Weisz’s hybrid was an anodyne study.

Substantial Desert Exam Web sites coalesced in 2002 as a collaboration amongst 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 statement—later printed in a 2004 Artforum essay—outlining eight tenets for building “a ‘center’ exterior of any preexisting centers” and discovering “common ground concerning present-day artwork and localized art troubles.” As is customary with manifestos, some features appear parochial two many years later on: overlooking, for instance, outcomes of imaginative-course colonization, or socioeconomic realities that make “stucco housing tracts and significant box retail centers” practical for several. Still, Zittel’s formidable text continues to be instructive for modern day artist-run businesses.

Tenet four is evergreen: To initiate an organism in its very own right—one that is more substantial and richer than the eyesight of any single artist, architect, designer, or curator.

HDTS has concerned, in addition to its cofounders, myriad skills. Notably, curator and researcher Aurora Tang, of the Heart for Land Use Interpretation, was handling director of HDTS from 2011 to 2015 and integral in securing the org’s nonprofit status. Nonetheless, HDTS has been synonymous with Zittel, who invited artists, writers, and musicians to her storied Joshua Tree live-operate compound, A-Z West, and who’d solid interactions with regional artists, bar homeowners, contractors, pilots, indication-makers, horse trainers, and veterans. So it was large news previous year when Zittel discovered she was stepping down as director, entrusting the grand desert experiment to artists Vanesa Zendejas and Elena Yu, each of whom have labored for yrs amongst A-Z West and HDTS. In point, it was introduced that the two entities would be merging, this kind of that the former’s studio, tour, and lodging income would make the latter’s packages sustainable. Now, Zendejas and Yu are reinterpreting Zittel’s mission for a landscape encountering dizzying environmental, cultural, and financial change.

Owing to all those alterations, “The Searchers” faced a paradoxical assignment: HDTS asks viewers to wander into the Mojave, to get dusty, sunburned, even lost—in brief, to have an Reliable Experience. At the exact time, desert encounters (consider trend shoots at Joshua Tree Countrywide Park, countless numbers renting Airbnbs through Coachella, poolside selfies at the Ace Resort Palm Springs) have grow to be a multimillion-dollar field, driving runaway regional gentrification. (HDTS’s—and by extension Zittel’s—role in that gentrification is not as figuring out as Donald Judd’s in Marfa, but it is not inconsequential, possibly.) All through the two many years that Covid delayed “The Searchers,” wealth inequality ballooned thousands relocated to the Morongo Basin droughts and fires grew legion and prolonged-overdue reckonings rocked complacent institutions. Biennials purport to supply zeitgeisty cultural snapshots, but in an period of compounding, breakneck crises, it is turn out to be increasingly evident that their episodic, jet-set design precludes actionable engagements with stated crises.

Community corporations, nonetheless, can go after local community-responsive programming. To this finish, Zendejas and Yu have secured a physical space: the 1,200 sq.-foot Firehouse Outpost at Copper Mountain Mesa Local community Middle. They’ve now held community concerts, scaled-down artwork occasions, and an auto care clinic with artist and mechanic Sarah Lyon—something of crucial utility in the much-flung desert. The Firehouse will also host HDTS’s regionally curated, multimedia Desert Investigation Library. Between present-day acquisition matters: queer desert romance, Chemehuevi mythology, mining, psychological well being, and earth architecture. Outside the house the Firehouse, they’ve installed a monitor for open-air film evenings. On Saturdays, the very long-functioning HDTS HQ at Yucca Valley’s Sky Village Swap Fulfill will go on connecting regional and checking out artists with substantial desert people as a result of actions like quilting, herb clinics, and performances. Zendejas and Yu are also planning an immersive, yearlong HDTS residency application during areas of which, thanks to the merger with A-Z West, invited artists and curators can live on-internet site. This design supports deep, open-ended interactions with the landscape, its people, and extant HDTS programs. In lieu of substantial-scale biennials, every year must produce, Zendejas instructed me about e mail, one intimate area exhibition or occasion.

Soon after two a long time of delays, and amid significant group transitions, “The Searchers” performed a knowledgeable swan song for the HDTS biennial, flirting with spectacle but gritty ample to keep on being unique from its belief-funder more youthful cousin, Desert X. (In addition to three iterations in the Coachella Valley, Desert X has happened twice in AlUla, Saudi Arabia, the exact same desert location where by Blazwick is now tasked with building a 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 get a various tack—slowing Substantial Desert Examination Internet sites down, redrawing Zittel’s nimble schematic, and embarking on their individual research for answers to a sophisticated issue: What do their desert neighbors want from a cultural institution?

Sean J Patrick Carney is a writer in Berkeley, California.