Travelogue: Noah Purifoy Desert Art Museum
Anne and Martine visit the Noah Purifoy Desert Art Museum near Los Angeles. These are Martine's notes.
Noah Purifoy's Outdoor Desert Art Museum
Today we visited this particular park, a slice of the desert near Joshua Tree National Park, where artist Noah Purifoy has gone out of his way to build wacky installations composed of anything and everything. The place is very much akin to other places where artists in remote locations spend years working on huge installations: think Michael Heiser's City and James Turrell's Roden Crater, as well as Anselm Kiefer's studio complex in Provence. But unlike these lonely, sacred and perhaps megalomaniacal monuments, this is a very human place.
Social change
Throughout his career, Purifoy made a strong case for social change, especially regarding the position of black Americans. His earliest work was made with fragments of the Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles, an uprising in August 1965, following the violent arrest of two black men in the Watts neighbourhood. Besides large sculptures featuring old computers, prams and carpentered crosses, he also built small theatres and studios and even a White House constructed from toilet bowls. His 1999 Earth Piece consists of a kind of open mining complex, with bridges and gates and two trees made of plaster and steel. Again, this is a humanised form of art in the landscape.
Man and landscape
Purifoy does not offer a solitary, temple-like experience, but references to how humans both live through and use the landscape for resources, energy and living. The artwork fits seamlessly into its surroundings, where the desert plain is speckled with low, often self-built houses with patches of land where car wrecks, dilapidated sheds and scrap metal gather.
