I spent the weekend in Joshua Tree at High Desert Test Sites, then Paul and Daniel and I decided to splinter off on our own and explore the desert. To call it intense is an understatement, The Salton Sea, Salvation Mountain and Slab City- we felt a million miles away from the artists and Marnie Webber Bienial crowd we had left the night before. Don't fuck with the desert, the desert forgets nothing and turns everything to rust.
Seriously, it was like breathing ghosts in and pushing their spirits down into your soul, their lives get caught in your throat, abandoned honeymoon suites, sea side bars, and 1950's vacation motels, rusted air line steamer campers with pink stoves and vintage tins of folgers coffee, blowing and clattering inside their bullet shaped tombs, meanwhile all the poverty and decay that's sprung up in its forgotten cracks stares wide-eyed as you peer through dusted windows and crawl under boarded off doorways. Dead fish, dying pelicans and salt, meth addicts and ford pickups that never get traded in but just get repaired.
We also hit Noah Purifoys sculpture garden in the desert and that was breathtaking and surreal.
