https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/21/travel/escapes/art-blooms-in-the-california-desert.html
Art Blooms in the California Desert
By JULIA CHAPLIN
APRIL 21, 2006
A FEW squat concrete buildings and a whole lot of dust. That’s what you’re likely to notice first while driving through Joshua Tree, at the foothills of the Mojave Desert in Southern California. The scorched land still feels like a rugged frontier with nonstop wind and king-cab pickup trucks hauling rusted washing machines and groceries.
There’s nothing remotely charming or quaint about it. But hidden among the cactus, creosote and tract housing is a full-fledged art scene, with striking works by contemporary artists like Andrea Zittel, Jason Rhoades and Jack Pierson. (Mr. Pierson likes to put the old roadside sign letters he collects for his artwork out in the soil behind his house to get that vintage sun-baked, weathered look.)
Set roughly 125 miles east of Los Angeles and 35 northeast of Palm Springs, the high-desert towns off Route 62, including Pioneertown, Twentynine Palms and Wonder Valley as well as Joshua Tree, have long been a haven for rock climbers who pilgrimage for the weirdly shaped boulders at Joshua Tree National Park. But over the last few years established artists, architects and musicians in search of lower mortgage payments and wide open space have been trickling out and setting up studios in old ranch houses, shipping containers and geodesic domes left over from the 1970’s.
Now it has become a weekend destination for cultural foragers, whose idea of a fun getaway is exploring outdoor sculpture gardens, artists’ studios and experimental architecture — like an igloo made of sandbags.
“Joshua Tree is like the art world’s Palm Springs,” said Lisa Overduin, the director of Regen Projects, the Los Angeles gallery that represents Ms. Zittel and Mr. Pierson. “It’s funny to see collectors in spiked Manolo’s teetering around the desert looking for art.”
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Ms. Zittel’s “High Desert Test Sites,” an annual art happening (this year on May 6 and 7), is the best opportunity to experience Joshua Tree’s contemporary-art scene. Ms. Zittel, the conceptual artist who helped kick-start the Joshua Tree migration when she expanded her studio here from Brooklyn six years ago, invites artists to trek out to the desert and install large-scale site-specific works among the boulders, caves and cactus. (Some of this year’s participants include Katie Grinnan, Amy Yao and Ryan McGinley.) Onlookers and revelers are given booklets with maps so they can track the whimsical creations in a sort of zany scavenger hunt that includes extracurricular activities like stopping for hamburgers at local cafes and dancing the electric slide at Pappy & Harriet’s, a local honky tonk.
The artist Ed Ruscha, the musicians Eric Burdon and Victoria Williams, the performance artist Ann Magnuson and a cross section of Los Angeles screenwriters and set designers have all bought homes in Joshua Tree in recent years, perhaps drawn by its openness — both in attitude and in space. With its sweeping plateaus, car-chase roads and big wandering skies, it’s sort of like that other desert art outpost, Marfa, Tex., where the elemental landscape and slow-motion pace are themselves like a surreal artwork.
“It’s like there aren’t any rules here, just survival,” said Thom Merrick, an artist who moved from New York several years ago because he was feeling “compressed” in the city. “I go hiking every day up on the hill,” he said. “And if I need to think I rake rocks.”
The towns themselves have an authentic, survivalist quality refreshingly devoid of slick, trendy accouterment. Many of the artists furnish their homes from the dusty thrift shops along the highway. (Oversize kitschy lamps and coyote-howling-in-the-moon paintings are hot items.) In the evening, artists gather at sleepy bars like the Palms, with it’s scratched pool tables and country-western jukebox. At the Beatnik Café, local youth with piercings and black-dyed hair mingle under a sci-fi sculpture of an H. R. Geiger-esque deer spirit with tree roots. Banks of computers against the wall have intentionally snarled cords that add to the desert “Blade Runner” effect.
LOCALS like to say that Joshua Tree has always been a haven for “entrepreneurs.” The area was originally a stopover for gold prospectors in the 1870’s who camped by the Oasis of Mara in Twentynine Palms. In 1938 the government passed the so-called Baby Homestead Act in an attempt to populate the barren federal lands, offering a free five-acre parcel to anyone willing to slap up a small structure. The homesteaders who showed up were a motley cross section of desperadoes willing to start anew in the middle of nowhere, which over the years included a good number of artists, outcasts and U.F.O. enthusiasts.
Many of the original homestead cabins are still standing. Some have been renovated by new owners, like Mr. Pierson and Ms. Zittel, who painted hers a minimalist art-gallery white, furnished it with foam rocks and brought in two shipping containers to create an experimental live-work compound she calls A-Z West. To complete the modern pioneer idea, Ms. Zittel built dozens of “Wagon Stations,” small steel capsules inspired by station wagons strewn about the rocky hillside and containing single sleeping mats. She had her artist friends customize them with designs like hot-rod flames. (Several of the wagons are on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria in New York City until June 18.) Other homesteader cabins lie abandoned and are spooky looking, with their flapping shreds of wallpaper and old bedsprings.
“The great thing about the desert is we can all project our fantasies on it,” Ms. Zittel said. “I came here looking for a part of myself, a connection to who I would have been if I hadn’t been an artist.”
The earth artists from the 60’s and 70’s like Michael Heizer and James Turrell also headed to the desert, but to remote parts in Nevada and Arizona. Their projects, like Mr. Turrell’s “Roden Crater,” required big budgets and grand-scale land manipulation. The artists and architects who are colonizing Joshua Tree seem more interested in creating do-it-yourself mini-utopias. That’s very much part of the pervasive Wild West spirit here that lets neighbors, rugged enough to settle in the desert and brave the elements, do as they please. This is also a town where military personnel (the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center is nearby), Roswell-minded conspiracy theorists, hippies and bikers all seem to coexist.
“Joshua Tree is the perfect place to be visionary and experimental,” said Linda Taalman of Taalman Koch, a Los Angeles architecture firm. “There’s a sense of remoteness and anything goes.”
The apocalyptic sculpture garden of one prominent artist, Noah Purifoy, suggests just that. Mr. Purifoy, an installation artist and co-founder of the Watts Towers Art Center in the 1960’s, moved to the desert in 1989 and spent the last 15 years of his life blanketing the two-and-a-half-acre tract of parched land with sculptures made from recycled junk like pastel plastic lunch trays, outdated computers, toilets and — my favorite — a train track with trains made of old bicycle wheels, VCR’s and beer kegs.
Progressive architects, who like to play with utopic philosophy, have also set their sights on Joshua Tree as a promised land where aesthetic building regulations are few and neighbors don’t complain. This fall visitors will be able to visit the iT House, a prefabricated aluminum and glass structure being built by Taalman Koch Architecture. The firm is collaborating with artists like Sarah Morris and Liam Gillick to create graphic strips of wallpaperlike vinyl that will surround the house for changing views and filtering sun.
Another firm, Ecoshack, operates a design lab near Joshua Tree where environment-minded guests can test experimental temporary dwellings like thermal-wing tents and cocoon sleeping capsules.
George Van Tassel, a self-proclaimed U.F.O. abductee, built a dome in the 1950’s that he named the Integratron. It was bought by Nancy and Joanne Karl, two sisters from New York, a few years ago, and now it’s open to the public.
If you time it right, you can attend a U.F.O. convention and concerts featuring local bands like Concrete Blond and Bauhaus (for some reason there’s a large concentration of 1980’s Los Angeles bands living out in Joshua Tree). It’s also a sort of shrine for everyone from didgeridoo players to the singer Robert Plant to a professor who, according to Joanne Karl, showed up with a herd of sheep and goats.
Consider spending $10 on a “sound bath.” You go upstairs in the dome, crash out on a mat, close your eyes and zone out for a half hour while one of the sisters creates a surround sound symphony using several crystal bowls. (It’s a bit like a Pink Floyd laser show without the lasers and Pink Floyd.)
Pioneertown, developed as a movie set in 1946 by Roy Rogers and other Hollywood investors, is also in many ways a living art installation. It’s where classic Westerns including “The Cisco Kid” and “Annie Oakley” were filmed, but now it’s a semifunctioning town that feels more like a David Lynch set. Off the dusty main street with its fake jail and general store are a functioning bowling alley, houses to rent and most important, Pappy & Harriet’s, an Old West-style saloon with antlers and pool tables that is the hub, along with the Palms in Wonder Valley, of the local music scene.
Run by the ex-New Yorkers Linda Krantz and Robyn Celia, Pappy & Harriet’s is a must stop for musicians like Lucinda Williams, PJ Harvey and Leon Russell. Sunday afternoons are when the local desert rock bands come out, among them Gram Rabbit, Angel Thrift and Queens of the Stone Age. On a recent Thursday afternoon, Jessica Von Rabbit, the lead singer of Gram Rabbit, was drinking a mug of beer at the end of a long wooden bar, outfitted in a fur-lined coat and big red sunglasses.
In any other small desert town her midday vampy-rock star appearance might have caused hostile stares. But in Joshua Tree, she was just another local.
FIELD TRIP Galleries and Honky-Tonks
WHERE TO FIND THE ART
High Desert Test Sites, 310-276-5424; www.highdeserttestsites.com; May 6 and 7. Andrea Zittel’s annual art invitational where a collection of artists descend on Joshua Tree and install works in the desert.
Integratron, 2477 Belfield Boulevard, Landers; 760-364-3126; www.integratron.com. A dome built in the 1950’s by a self-professed U.F.O. abductee. Tours, by appointment, are $15.
Noah Purifoy museum, Blair Lane, Joshua Tree; 213-382-7516, www.noahpurifoy.com. An outdoor sculpture park filled with strange creations made from junk by Noah Purifoy.
Ecoshack, Joshua Tree, 323-646-5375; www.ecoshack.com. An architectural design lab where prototypes like a thermal wing tent that looks like a giant moth are demonstrated by appointment.
iT House, Joshua Tree; 213-380-1060; www.tkarchitecture.com. Taalman Koch Architecture, the Los Angeles firm behind the Dia: Beacon art museum in Dutchess County, N.Y., is building a prefabricated glass house that will be open for tours and rentals in the fall.
Desert Art Studio, Twentynine Palms; 760-361-2305; www.desertartstudio.com. The muralist and painter Chuck Caplinger runs a gallery exhibiting his semi-psychedelic desert paintings and ephemera. By appointment.
Beauty Bubble Salon & Museum, Wonder Valley; 760-361-5617. This salon is in a private home so call for an appointment and directions. Jeff Hafler, a Los Angeles hairdresser who owns the homestead house/salon, also operates an awe-inspiring hair museum with treasures like a 1970’s mod Ken doll and an 1880’s kerosene-heated curling iron.
WHERE TO STAY
29 Palms Inn, 73950 Inn Avenue, Twentynine Palms; 760-367-3505; www.29palmsinn.com. This classic desert inn with abode-style bungalows was built in 1928. The rooms don’t have telephones, but several have fireplaces and private patios. Double bungalows start at $100.
Spin and Margie’s Desert Hideaway, 6920-6923 Sunkist Road Joshua Tree, 760-366-9124. www.deserthideaway.com. A hacienda-style inn with four suites that come tricked out with quirky Wild West ephemera, bright Mexican textiles, beaded curtains and lots of spots to laze among the cactuses. Suites start at $115.
WHERE TO EAT AND DRINK
Crossroads Cafe & Tavern, 61715 Route 62, Joshua Tree; 760-366-5414. Fine cuisine may not be Joshua Tree’s strong point, but the no-frills Crossroads Cafe serves up hearty sandwiches, soups and salads. Breakfast is a must with full-all-day plates of eggs and home fries and extra-strength coffee. Dinner for two with wine is $25.
The Palms, 83131 Amboy Road, Wonder Valley; 760- 361-2810. An Old West dive bar, The Palms has a great pool table, an outdoor patio and a local music scene that features the Sibleys.
Pappy & Harriet’s, 53688 Pioneertown Road, Pioneertown; 760-363 5956; www.pappyandharriets.com; closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Built as a Western movie set in the 1940’s, Pappy & Harriet’s is the catalyst of the desert music scene, with local bands and the likes of Robert Plant taking the stage for wailing beer-fueled sets in front of long wooden picnic tables. JULIA CHAPLIN