Every other year, Desert X turns land in the Coachella Valley into a giant art gallery.
The fifth edition is taking place through May 11, and includes pieces called “The Living Pyramid,” “The act of being together,” and “Soul Service Station.” The artists come from all over the world, but Cannupa Hanska Luger, an artist based in New Mexico, hails from closer-by.
Luger's piece is called "G.H.O.S.T. Ride." G.H.O.S.T., which stands for "Generative Habitation Operating System Technology," is a van surrounded by a red net.
Luger joined The Show to discuss exactly what people who go to check out his piece will see.
Full conversation
CANNUPA HANSKA LUGER: The audience will experience a van that is a part of a future ancestral technologies project that I have been doing over the last 10 years or so or something like that. It will be a van that is like a nomadic future in which we gently create habitation as we navigate a future landscape.
MARK BRODIE: So is this a van like, will people be able to go inside of it? Do they just look at it from the outside? How will people interact with this piece?
LUGER: The piece is going to be all locked up, so it's as though you're entering into somebody else's camp. So there isn't access to the interior of the vehicle, but the exterior of the vehicle is a mirrored surface, so the audience can imagine themselves quite literally projected onto the vehicle itself.
BRODIE: Is there something about this particular art exhibition that makes this kind of piece appealing to you or was there some thought about, “this isn't going into an art gallery or museum, this is going to Desert X. This is maybe the right thing for that.”
LUGER: Yeah, this van project really I have done other iterations of this vehicle in the future ancestral technologies kind of scope. And for Desert X, this was the first instance where I got to present the van as a mobile vehicle, whereas in a museum, it has to be drained of fluids and made ready to be exhibited in a museum.
So in this instance, we're going to move this vehicle to three locations throughout the duration of Desert X, and the advantage of that was really kind of in response to some of the critiques that I've seen about Desert X as far as the environmental impact on the desert. I thought this way I could limit the impact of audience entering into a site.
So by moving it, I hope that it makes it a bit more accessible to a wider range of audience, and also it's not gonna have a 10-week impact on any one location.
BRODIE: Is there something that is appealing to you about being a part of this particular show?
LUGER: I think the thing that's interesting to me is really on any exhibition at this point in history, it's important for Indigenous representation in a time of deep-rooted xenophobia and concerns about our future existence on the planet.
I believe Indigenous knowledge is paramount to the survival of our societies, and learning how to look at the land with reverence rather than resource is a component that I'm interested in sharing with as many people as possible.
So working with Desert X gives me the opportunity to reach an entire demographic that's experienced the impacts of environmental collapse, and I don't even want to say collapse, the impact of all of the signs of global warming and threats to the impact of our systems on the earth right now.
I think it's important to present this work here in California in a place that's in close proximity to these varieties of cityscapes and places where water is being recognized as a quite valuable resource. The van itself is designed to harvest water from the air, so it is a fog drip or cloud drip mechanism that's a part of this imagined future culture.
So that for me is a way to present alternatives to our future, and really just to encourage audiences to imagine something different, because I think we are inundated with choices, but these choices are limiting the possibilities of what our future can be, and I encourage people that this is not a representation of the future, but a future.
BRODIE: Yeah, I was gonna ask you if you had something in mind that you hope that viewers of your piece sort of would think about the future. It sounds like you don't, it's more like you just want them to think about the future, whatever that might look like to each individual.
LUGER: Well, I would agree with that. I think it's important that we remember that our complexity and our diversity is primarily land-based. So how does culture evolve to adapt to the regions in which it's presented?
So this is definitely a desert kind of landscape, and the culture that I'm representing navigates that desert landscape with an emphasis on environmental resilience.
BRODIE: What do you think is the role of art in maybe forcing people or encouraging people to think about stuff like that, especially in a place like you referenced in California, a place like Arizona, where it is very hot, and water is a scarce resource, and there are other sort of environmental challenges. What role does art play in all that, do you think?
LUGER: Well, I think art has greatly been underutilized as a way to make comprehensible, nearly incomprehensible things. So the advantage of art is that it speaks in a visual language versus a written language. So I think as long as art remains within the scope of a commodity, it's really undermining its true power and its true potential. Art is communication.
BRODIE: How much do you find that artists are thinking about the future, as opposed to depicting either the past or sort of their present?
LUGER: You know, art is a time machine, right? Like as we operate with it right now, every artist who's alive today, every contemporary artist, no matter where they're from or what their reach is, are generating work that is a deep time relationship to their ancestors.
So like any skill sets that I apply in the present were tips on failing from generations before, like, “this is what I've learned, this works, this doesn't work.” It's my responsibility in the present to push the edge of that, to make mistakes, but also to generate solutions to problems I didn't even know I had.
Now, I make that work in the present, but far into the future, long after I am gone, there will be more people who will experience the object that I generate in the present, and so the physical object of an art piece or some sort of ecstatic expression or a presentation of idea or comprehension of unimaginable data sets, all of these things can be applied in a physical object that actually moves through the space-time continuum.
And so the art object for any artist is a time machine, and it is drawing from the past, built in the present to communicate to our future.
