May 2023 – The Adventures of Mike and Cindy

This post covers our four-day trip to Palm Springs, and the surrounding area, to visit the Desert X art display. Desert X is an art exhibit that spans the Coachella Valley every odd year usually during the months of March thru May. It started in 2017 and has run every other year since. We have visited the display since 2019 and always enjoy it. This year was no exception. Of course, there is a link at the end of this post.

Day 1

On our drive to our hotel in Palm Springs, we stopped at two of the art pieces. Our first stop was at the “Sleeping Figure,” by Matt Johnson. Per the Deset X website, “Sleeping Figure might be a cubist rendition of a classical odalisque, except here the cubes are shipping containers belonging to the globalized movement of goods and trade. Conceived at the time when a Japanese-owned, Taiwanese-operated, German-managed, Panamanian-flagged and Indian- manned container behemoth found itself for six days under Egyptian jurisdiction while blocking the Suez Canal, Johnson’s figure speaks to the crumples and breaks of a supply chain economy in distress. Situated along the main artery connecting the Port of Los Angeles to the inland United States, the sculpture gains local relevance from the recently approved siting of distribution centers in the north of Palm Springs and Desert Hot Springs. Casual and laconic, it overlooks the landscape reminding us that the invisible hand of globalism now connected to its container body has come to rest in the Coachella Valley.”

All of that being said, we parked at the official parking site and had to walk almost a mile to the exhibit. On the way there, I found these signs interesting. Apparently, people can respect the art and the desert, but not the signs.

Here is what we saw as we walked toward the display.

And this is closer to the art.

Here we are with the art.

Here is a basic overview of the piece. The 1 is the head, the 2 is an arm propping the head up, the 5 is the body, the 7 is the back side hand, the 3 is a leg crossed over the other leg, and the 4 and 6 are the feet.

This one was interesting and actually made sense to us. As we walked back to our car, we realized it was the Monday after the Coachella Music Festival. Here was the traffic trying to leave the area.

Our next stop was to see “Immersion,” by Gerald Clarke. Per the Deset X website, “As an educator, Clarke understands the role that games can play in leading people to obtaining knowledge that they might have been hesitant to seek on their own. Employing the language of traditional Cahuilla basket weaving and American board games, the artist creates a monumental sculpture of a gameboard in the desert that immerses visitors in the natural and cultural history of Native Americans in the Coachella Valley. Catalyzing active learning, the maze-like structure invites visitors to walk on it and move according to instructions driving a game of cards, rewarding the player with new ways of viewing and understanding the landscape.”

Here is what we saw.

The QR codes in the art led to links of American Indian facts or music. You really did feel immersed in the Indian culture. Once again, we understood and enjoyed this piece of art.

After this stop, we got caught in a little of the traffic leaving town and ended up at Loco Charlie’s Mexican Grill. The food was very good and we recommend a stop when in the area and hungry for some good Mexican food. There is a link at the end of this post.

After our delicious lunch, we headed over to Windmill City in the downtown area. This is where you can buy Desert X gear and where I bought my t-shirt for this year.

We made it to our hotel and got checked in. We stayed at the Plaza Resort and Spa. We had a nice view of a golf course, and the hotel and room were very clean and well maintained. The staff was very friendly and helpful. We would definitely stay here again. The only issue would be there is no spa there in spite of the word spa being in the name. So if you must have a spa, this is not the place for you. Otherwise, there is a link at the end of this post.

Day 2

Our first stop of the day was to visit Armando Lerma’s “Visit us in the Shape of Clouds.” We saw this back in 2019 and enjoyed it then, so we decided to revisit it. Per the Desert X website from 2019, “…Visit Us in the Shape of Clouds, includes various images from the American Southwest and beyond such as snakes, birds, parrots, fish, monkeys, seashells, plants, flowers, and rock art. He selected these images to illustrate a story of migration and the transitory.”

Truth be told, I’m not sure that we understood the story of migration and the transitory, but we did like the monkey.

As we walked around the fence encircling the art, I found a small clay character that had clearly been left behind. It is not mentioned in any of the literature or on the website, so it must be some sort of clandestine art supplement. Because it was creepy, we did not touch it. Here it is.

Our next stop was another piece by Armando Lerma from the 2017 Desert X exhibit. We believe we saw this in 2019, but couldn’t remember for sure. Yes, it sucks getting older, but it beats the alternative. The piece is called, “La Fiesta en El Desierto,” which translates to the party in the desert. It is a mural on the exterior wall of a business.

By this time, we were hungry so we had lunch at JC’S Cafe in Palm Desert. The weather was really nice and we ate on the patio. The food was really good. I had a French dip with tater tots and Cindy had the Ortega melt with fresh fruit. If you’re interested in trying the food yourself, there is a link at the end of this post.

Our next stop was to see, “Liquid a Place,” by Torkwase Dyson. Per the Desert X website, “Liquid A Place is part of an ongoing series that started from the premise that we are the water in the room, inviting viewers to consider their bodily interconnection with rivers and oceans that surround us. After all, around 60 percent of our bodies and 70 percent of the planet is water, and these waters circulate across our bodies and the planet as they shift states from solid to liquid to gas. For this iteration of Liquid A Place, Dyson creates a monumental sculpture that is a poetic meditation connecting the memory of water in the body and the memory of the water in the desert. How do we go to the water in our bodies to harvest memory? Can this liquid memory help us reconsider scale and distance as critical forms in holding onto liberatory life practices? What kind of scalable infrastructure can our bodies resist and invent, making cities more livable? How are new geographies formed from the architecture of our bodies?”

Based on this description, we expected to find either something wet, or something blue, or clearly something water related. This is what we found.

The art piece was pretty neat, but we have no idea how it related to water of any kind. And then there were the four annoying people who talked in front of the piece the entire time we were there, preventing us from taking all of the pictures we wanted and just being annoying in general.

I have a tip for anyone visiting Desert X now or in any future odd year. Look at the art, enjoy it or not, but move away when you want to socialize. Knuckleheads.

Our next stop was at No. 1225 Chainlink by Rana Begum. Per the Desert X website, “Responding to the ubiquity of the chain-link fence as a pattern spread across the Coachella Valley — a material that is meant to protect but also carries associations of violence — Begum diffuses the material’s role as a divider through her manipulation of its form and color. We notice how light and air, sand and water, as well as people, can filter through her cloud-like pavilion, which offers paths of expansive escape rather than reductive confinement. Constantly changing with the movement of the sun and the visitors inside of it, the work emphasizes that nothing in life is static; everything, from the world outside to our emotions within, is in a continual state of flux.”

The art was yellow chain link fence set up like a maze. As you walked toward the inside of the maze, the fence was mounted higher and higher until you could easily walk around under the fence walls. It was an interesting display. Here is the art.

We returned to our room and freshened up for dinner at Lulu California Bistro in the downtown area. Cindy has wanted to eat here every time we have come to Palm Springs and this was the time for that visit.

The inside was interesting and the food was good. Good and interesting enough to earn a link at the end of this post. Here we are inside the restaurant.

And here is my drink. It was called a Meteor Shower. It had Rye Bourbon, sweet and sour, with a red wine float. It was delicious.

After dinner, we walked around the downtown area. There was some non-Desert X art in some of the public areas.

We found a piece from 2017 called ALIVE! By Jeffrey Gibson. It was basically a sail with words on it.

We also found a piece from 2021 called Finding Home in My Own Flesh by Felipe Baeza. This was a mural painted on a wall. It was more interesting than the sail with words.

After a full day, we returned to our hotel for some much-needed shut eye.

Day 3

Our first stop of the day was at the Sunnylands Center and Gardens to see “Amar A Dios En Tierra De Indios, Es Oficio Maternal,” by Paloma Contreras Lomas. Per the Desert X website, “Visitors encounter a dated car that has screeched to a halt in Sunnylands. An absurd array of tangled limbs of two mysterious characters wearing long hats sprawl out of the car and onto the site’s pristine, manicured grounds. Plush, long hands armed with soft-stuffed guns hang from the windows, barely camouflaged by the artificial overgrowth invading the sculpture. These strange characters accompany the visitor on a caricature of a western–meets–sci-fi audio-visual tour of the landscape, like a fictional tour of a seemingly familiar world outside, guided by aliens and ghosts.”

As we approached the art, Ms. Contreras Lomas was there cleaning leaves off of her art work.

She was not the least bit friendly, which made me not like her or her art. But here it is anyway.

The Sunnylands Center and Gardens itself is an amazing place to visit. We can recommend a stop here for a peaceful stroll through the gardens. There is a link at the end of this post.

Stop number two was at Namak Nazar’s “Hylozoic/Desires.” This interesting piece was a short walk away from the road. Again, from the Desert X website, “Hylozoic/Desires, or h/d, uses metaphors from outer space and the natural environment to construct imaginary cosmologies of interferences, entanglements, deep voids, debris, delays, alienation, distance and intimacy. For Desert X, they find this metaphor in salt. Inspired by the proliferation of conspiracies — UFOlogists, Scientologists, cybernetic spiritualists, Area 51, flat-earthers, lizard people and chemtrails — h/d has created a wooden pillar that branches into loudspeakers that spew an imaginary conspiracy theory about Namak Nazar, a particle of salt that spells the doom of climate change and offers redemption by looking inward. The particle appears to climb up and crystalize over the trunk of the pole, connecting the salt found in the stories from the loudspeaker to the physical desert landscape, where salt lines forecast droughts and floods to come and salt songs describe the sacred geometry of the desert before settler colonialism. Visitors are invited to join h/d in thinking through ecological loss and the loss of home, seeking shelter somewhere in the radicality of love in their immersive audio-visual environment.”

If I’m being honest, I have no idea what any of that means. Still, I liked the piece. It had music and people reading poems coming out of the loudspeakers, while you checked out the “salty pole.”

Once again, we found a few creepy art add ons at this display. And once again, we did not touch them.

Our third stop was to see “Searching for the Sky (While Maintaining Equilibrium),” by Mario García Torres. This display was another one that took a decent walk to get to. It was about 3/4 of a mile from the designated parking area. Here is what the Desert X website had to say about it. “The desert is a beautiful and attractive — yet also a dangerous and challenging — place. Searching for the Sky (While Maintaining Equilibrium) carries a reflection on “cowboy culture” that exists across both Mexican and American borders, representative of a macho, self-aggrandizing and forceful control of nature. These qualities also relate to the history of art, especially in the American West. In cowboy culture, and also in land art, there is an asserted promise to harness/control nature, which carries a pronounced risk of failure. In bull-riding, whether with a live animal or its mechanical avatar, competition with a wild beast carries an interest in and celebration of failure. The rider will fail and fall. A cowboy will become a clown. In his installation for Desert X, the artist replaced the bull component of the mechanical bull with a flat, geometric, reflective surface, slowing down the machine’s movement to reveal, little by little, what this object really is. Placed in the middle of the desert, in the formation of a herd, the work leads us to contemplate the “wild West,” and our relationship to landscape and our role within it; our condition to be both attracted and replaced by failure.”

And here is the art.

This art display was pieces of sheet metal mounted on mechanical bull apparatus that was moving like it was bucking. Visually it was interesting, but we questioned if it was worth the 3/4 of a mile walk in the sun.

We had sandwiches for lunch at The Spread, in Desert Hot Springs. The sandwiches were very good, so they earned a link. It is in the usual place.

The next art pieces for our viewing pleasure were a series of billboards along Gene Autry Trail. These have been hard to photograph in the past because there are not a lot of safe places to stop and take pictures. Cindy took these pictures while we were driving and did a pretty good job.

Our final art stop of the day was to see Tschabalala Self’s “Pioneer.” From the Desert X website, “Pioneer is a monument built in homage to the collective foremothers of contemporary America. Placed in the California desert, Pioneer exists as a figure that is simultaneously born out the historical event of America’s creation and one that has an ephemeral quality, untethered by any moment in time. The desert often references both the beginning and the end. Pioneer similarly represents the lost, expelled and forgotten Indigenous, Native and African women whose bodies and labor allowed for American expansion and growth, while also standing as a beacon of resilience for their descendants — a visual representation of their birthright and place within the American landscape. The sculpture celebrates flexibility of the divine feminine spirit and form and the fluidity of identity in contemporary America. It is a reminder that even in the desert, we are born from water. Placed within a palm oasis of the desert, Pioneer poses the question: Does it only rain on wet land?”

That description did not give us the slightest clue what to expect. And here is what we saw.

I have no idea what I saw or what it meant. That posed the question: Does art only confuse me in the desert? And there were two more of the creepy “added” statues.