another test

By Rubén Martínez This article was originally published in Boom: A Journal of California. Late one winter morning, I drive off the asphalt and onto the loamy, rutted earth at the outer reaches of the village of Joshua Tree in Southern California's Mojave Desert. I am on a pilgrimage to see the work of assemblage artist Noah Purifoy, who in 1989 abandoned his longtime home in Los Angeles and remained in the desert until his death in 2004. On a ten-acre parcel near the perimeter of the Marine Corps Air and Ground Combat Center (half a million acres of chocolate mountains and sand dunes that serve as a simulacrum of the Middle East), Purifoy, one of the founders of the Watts Towers Art Center that rose from the ashes of the 1965 riots, spent the final years of his life creating the monumental "Outdoor Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Sculpture" made from tons of discarded materials. The "Environment" (the nickname a few critics and Purifoy himself sometimes used) is an astonishing feat of the imagination as much as it is a physical one. In the desert, Noah Purifoy assembled a searing experience of life and loss that rises from sand and stone. I've been here several times, but I am never quite prepared for the sight of the Environment suddenly emerging from the Mojave. Innumerable manufactured objects of every material you can imagine -- metal, wood, glass, plastic, porcelain, concrete, paper, cotton -- are fastened to one another to create shapes alien and familiar, sublime and frightful. With its colossal scale, it is a veritable art-city whose overwhelming physicality has a profound resonance with my emotional geography. Outdoor Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Sculpture | Photo: Juan Devis. Outdoor Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Sculpture | Photo: Juan Devis. Outdoor Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Sculpture | Photo: Juan Devis. Outdoor Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Sculpture | Photo: Juan Devis. I lived nearby on and off from the late 1990s to the mid-aughts. I was drawn by the light and space of the California desert -- and by the fact that I was broke, broken, and needed a cheap place to live while I pulled my life back together. My story was not unlike that of many of my neighbors in the Mojave. People have been making healing journeys to the desert for a long time. There is something in Purifoy's art that sums up why I came to the desert and why I keep coming back, even as it stands for larger narratives that tell of a people and a time: us, now. Long known as the gateway to Joshua Tree National Park, and with something of a reputation for skinheads and meth labs (ironic, given that so many of us came out here to get "clean"), the village has undergone a radical transformation in recent years. Art, real estate, and media have combined to produce the gentrified desert. What was once a modest, largely hidden outpost of outsider artists is now home to a thriving music and visual art scene. Concurrent with the growth of the art colony, Joshua Tree also became a destination for increasing numbers of "amenity migrants," the upper middle class seeking the authenticity of a rehabbed homestead shack and the greatest amenity of all -- nature, the desert itself. This was certainly not the desert Noah Purifoy came to in 1989, thanks to his longtime artist friend Debby Brewer, who offered him her property to create new work. There were no galleries or haute eateries then. There were lots of people who'd fled life "down below" (as the old-time residents of the high desert referred to Los Angeles and its endless suburbs) and had come seeking physical or spiritual renewal -- like me. What Purifoy saw was a fantastic space to make art, without any of the limitations associated with the urban studio. As usual, I am the only visitor when I arrive. There is no attendant to charge an entrance fee or hand me a map, no pedantic docent. The Noah Purifoy Foundation, which oversees the property, takes appointments online, but promotion is modest. Even so, some 2,500 art seekers make the trip annually. A dry storm is passing through, a stiff wind rapidly driving swatches of dark cumulus across the sky. The property sits on a plateau with a view both of the park and the Marine base, which, geologically speaking, look exactly alike -- it's all Mojave. Today, there are no training exercises underway; when there are, detonations tear the air and make the earth shudder, coils of oily smoke rise over the mountains, convoys kick up dust on the dunes. Then, there is a great contradiction in the Mojave, between the military's desert and the one preserved by the California Desert Wilderness Protection Act, which created the national park. "Shipwrecked" (detail); in background, Carousel. | Photograph by Noah Garcia-Brown.