A consideration of sprawl in art and art-writing

Only from a self-consciously denaturalized position can we see how the appearance of naturalness is itself constituted.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

INDULGENCE
Every beginning I wrote about Noah Purifoy’s art was critiqued as being too personal and not telling what the art work did. My job was already understood as distanced critic. Yet I have spent hours pondering the charisma of his work. Yes, I know that I already have a penchant for ruin and decay, but I felt deeply that Noah’s work was more than just a road warrior aesthetic, despite its indulgences. I can agree with artist Alexander Knox that Noah’s work spells it out a little too clearly at times, that his work seems to be endlessly illustrating the same idea, that he contradicts his apparent “touch the earth lightly” tenet by letting works fall to pieces and blow away. But what is his popular appeal? Critics (Abby Wasserman, Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins, Colette Chattopadhyay, Judith Hoffberg, Kathy Bryant, Christopher Knight) basically all agree that he is under acknowledged as “an influential figure in both the development of contemporary African-American assemblage and in the early 1960’s evolution of contemporary art on the the West Coast.” Artists such as John Outterbridge, David Hammons, Alison Saar, Mildred Howard and Adrien Piper claim him as a mentor. Huell Howser showcases him for California Gold (see # 939 in his series). Ed Ruscha tells John Connolly that Noah should be included in the recent High Desert Test Sites inaugural opening, which included contemporary hipsters such as Jim Drain/Forcefield.
We take visceral pleasure from Noah’s indulgences. He fits into people’s romanticization of life in the desert. Somehow he has subversively slipped into the mainstream, while retaining his marginalized position – it’s almost like the public and attention tracked him down to find a outsider hero. Despite the “outsider art” feel, Purifoy has two Master’s degrees, co-founded the Watts Tower Arts Center and served on the California Arts Council for eleven years. Maybe it’s the trash, the fact that he will use anything for materials. Maybe it’s the space: his works are situated outside on 2 1/2 acres of desert, recently increased to 7 1/2 acres. His work and his presence keep expanding. Perhaps he is so accessible because while he is involved with formal issues, some of his pieces lack ambiguity.
And in any case, I take it as an advantage that I know Noah personally and that I like his work. Something about drinking red wine with a toothless 80-year old artist gives me permission to write about him the way I please. Something about Noah’s work gives me permission within my own practice.

“… representation communicates with power via the medium of possession (use, enjoyment). thus we can identify the motives of art history, as least insofar as it is practiced as a humanistic discipline: a desire for property, which conveys man’s sense of his “power over things”; a desire for propriety, a standard of decorum based upon respect for property relations; a desire for the proper name, which designates the specific person who is invariably identified as the subject of the work of art; finally, a desire for appropriation.”
Craig Owens
Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture

Nobody wants to go on vacation to a garbage dump.
Robert Smithson, “Cultural Confinement”

KING OF THE HEAP
The strength of Noah’s work is also its greatest weakness. Building environmental assemblage sculptures out of trash is both predictable and an unexpected visual pleasure. We love Noah’s work because it is HERE. His works have grown right out of desert ground and they look as if they belong, because they do. Shelter (2000) is case in point. This single structure can contain and catalyze any and all the ideas, feelings and reactions his work brings to bear. This piece reflects the aspect of Noah’s art that is the most elusive,  the most accessible, the most pleasurable, the most discursive. Shelter becomes the representative for the entire body of work. It is both part of the environment, culturally and physically and also distanced from it, as its eerie reflection.
Noah came to the desert seeking more room, more space to build. The desert provides that kind of space through low cost of living and cheap arid land. People become desert rats by simply staying put and accumulating year after year.  The elements degrade material objects so quickly that trash is produced in prodigious quantities. This causes a devaluation of material goods, which makes it suddenly possible for desert rats to own lots of stuff. However, not even the most obsessive can keep up with the way things fall apart in the desert sun. The sandy desert neighborhoods out here have as characteristic a look as a well-groomed grassy suburban neighborhood in Palos Verdes: bits of newspaper caught in the chain link fence, plastic bags twisted around the creosote, rusting car humps, shot-up ovens with their doors swinging open. Junk piles grow almost of their own accord in the desert. Houses take on the appearance of makeshift fortresses. Everybody here deals with trash and builds with junk it would seem.
It feels as though Noah’s presence is everywhere in this town, as if he had a franchise in the area. He has themed himself, and his property could read as a movie set; a ghost town or a settlement of the desert scavengers from The Hills Have Eyes (1977). Obviously he wasn’t the first to build with trash, but his works are so large, they demand so much attention, that Noah has in effect become the silver-backed gorilla of the desert rats.
I often walk over to Noah Purifoy’s property from my friend’s house. From a distance I anticipate my first peek at the carnival junk land Purifoy has created in his 13 year desert residency. Tips of umbrellas, white geometric edges, the upper definition of a multicolored carousel house, garish totem poles, bowling balls atop fluted columns; it almost looks like any other desert rat’s  prized collection of accumulated goods, but here there is much more than just organization or sheer volume. It is our own version of a Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, but sprawling and morphing; a city has been created, an outdoor art-viewing space, a reflection of us. I usually come with a dog on a leash and friends in tow. The group is easily dispersed among the 7 1/2 acres of Purifoy’s assemblage sculptures, and it is easy to feel alone wandering around these monumental pieces silently degrading in the sun.
I sit inside my favorite all of Noah’s pieces: Shelter. It is a large structure; a fortress, a dwelling, the size of a desert shanty. Everything is built from a Waterworld post-apocalyptic aesthetic; one where crudeness and roughness are privileged and building materials are reused. The walls and ceiling are made of recycled, charred timber and some of the walls are taken in large sections from preexisting structures. Everywhere within is fluttering with strips of nylon fabric, shredded by the wind, faded all to the same dingy shade of brown-green. The insulated pipe hanging from the ceiling leads nowhere on either end. A crumbling bird’s nest sits on top. There is a sunken corridor leading from one end of the house to the the other; on each side of the walkway, there is a banister of plywood and chicken wire holding back trash four feet deep. Dusty dark green pants and shirts are strung along a wire with clothespins, and one must pass under them to get through. The single bed is covered with a quilt. On closer inspection, there is no quilt, just patches of crusty black felt sections sewn in strips across an old tablecloth. The pillow is an old sofa cushion and there are no sheets on this stained and splattered old mattress. Frayed white curtains ripple above the bed.
He is a magnanimous king who allows anybody to walk among his sculptures. Who wouldn’t like the king who allows anybody without reservation to walk throughout his palace? Noah straddles the gallery world and the next-door neighbor. Some of these works would be ridiculously expensive to move and function more as installations, and furthermore would look as forlorn and silly in a gallery as an elephant in your living room (even with sand on the ground, as the California Afro-American Museum did in 1998 for his retrospective). One feels that these pieces were created for the per chance visitor. Oddly enough, some of the pieces were created specifically for galleries, and on  the website for Noah Purifoy Foundation one can find a price list.
Within the context of the town of Joshua Tree, Noah reigns as junk builder extraodinaire, and it brings to mind something Edward Kienholz once remarked, “Who is really wealthier, a Roland Thurman with a store full of perfectly good serviceable worthless junk that satisfied his sense and need for possessions, (he was a man who owned things) or you and I with a modest bank account and a life full of different kinds of stuff and possessions? I guess it’s all relative.”

I think that I can say that I yield more often when it’s large.
Helen Frankenthaler, Interview with David Sylvester

A CONSIDERATION OF SPRAWL
Something about the open space in the desert untethers one’s tendency to accumulate possessions, the same way a white page taunts me to unleash my words. It must be a natural process, this accumulation, just the same way a pier support gathers barnacles, and the way the barnacles themselves collect even smaller crustaceans. One source of energy attracts other sources of energy. As I move across the page and use my strength to pin one idea down, others are attracted to the ripples. This is the tendency to materialize something from nothing. Sprawl however, has to do with the outer edges of this motion. The edges are frayed and creep outwards. I envy Noah’s sprawl. While Robert Rauschenberg says, “Now you can put an awful lot into a picture if you keep in mind that this painting could actually be a little larger but it isn’t, so that the edge of the canvas is just a stopping, a termination of activity that’s been going on – which is something that anyone can see.” Noah doesn’t have to worry about the edge of his canvas yet. When he reached the edge of his 2 1/2 acres, providence gave him 5 more. There is room to play and explore. Noah has space within a physical landscape of even greater space, while I have to shoehorn my thoughts into 15 pages.
Besides which, Noah gives room for any and all of his ideas to materialize with voluminous creation. Every time I go to his property there is a new structure growing. He works everyday, morning to night. Even though he checked himself into a nursing home over a year ago, works are still going up – and the hand is unmistakably Noah’s. He is large with his time. Time is escaped or compressed. I am in the decomposing remains of a post apocalyptic home. I am in a frontier settler’s impoverished and bare residence. I am intruding on the scant personal belongings of the homeless.
Space is opened up at the edges of his property, where the boundaries of his property become unclear. We can feel Noah’s presence creeping towards the road.

This multiplicity is the result of bringing into the zone of art all kinds of objects and images that originated outside the painting by other people for different purposes than the artist’s use.”
Lawrence Alloway, “Rauschenberg’s Development”

DIGRESSION
Tiny shacks were erected in the late 1930’s when the government, in a ruse to build a San Bernardino county tax base, offered 10 acres of pristine desert land to anybody who could beautify the land and last a year living there. In sum, built a house barely bigger than an outhouse, no water or electricity, and live in it for a year, and the glorious 365 degree view was all yours. What the settlers hadn’t accounted for: the never-ending process of desiccation, the daily battle against dehydration for yourself and the plants you threw down for shade, the wind storms, and the damn infernal blazing sun everyday. Yes, they owned their own land and their own house, but when they gave up and moved away, or died like dried up lizards in their beds, nobody came to claim the house, the land or even the contents of the house. Drive far enough out and you will come across garages with cars still inside, roof caved in and dust motes floating in beams of sunshine. Abandoned houses in all directions, dreams burnt up by the endless sun. What dream can withstand the interrogation of a glaring light?
The next wave of people came old and seeking heat for creaky bones, and rent prices social security could afford.
Today, it is still the low rent that shapes the community. You can buy a house for a mortgage of $250/ month. You can still live for under a $1000 / month, you just pay in other ways. Desert Hot Springs falls just within the 100-mile radius of Los Angeles county, which circumscribes the allowed living distance of parolees. The desert homes of today are intermingled with the abandoned shacks. Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between the two.
Sometimes the poignancy of the abandoned and vandalized houses have stronger presence than anything Noah could produce. As artist Eliza Hutchison said, she explored one destroyed shack and felt really terrified to think of what might have gone on in there.

SITE-RELATED
Most things have to be seen in context, and within the art world for all the hype we make about site, we seem to value those objects that can speak from within many contexts ie, the art works that can be purchased and displayed in home or some kind of gallery or museum. (Smithson says: All is reduced to visual fodder and transportable merchandise. ) When we encounter a site-related piece there has already been some struggle previous to the encounter. The viewer has already traveled to the work; the work has planted roots within its own context. To take a work from its designated site is tantamount to pulling a plant up by its roots and displaying its dead dry corpse in the gallery. The plant is seen in its object wholeness, but not in its entirety, which must include its surroundings.
In the desert your guard is up in certain ways, and loosened up in others. It is up against nonchalant racism, where somebody can titter and ask me if Chinese women really have pussies that open sideways, and it gets loosened up in a way that you are not surprised to see anything out here. The desert (anywhere that gets 10 inches or less of fertile rain a year)  becomes the ultimate backdrop, where the landscape and weather are so extreme that extreme human behavior is de-dramatized, even tolerated. Among Fundamental Christians, white supremacy, where Wal*mart really is the most happening shopping, and my friends make delicious tuna casseroles with cans of Campell’s Mushroom Soup, there exists the America I know: Comfort America. (I, like Andy Warhol, consider Campbell’s soup as comfort food). And anyway, I am not the only one who likes to brag: Yesterday I pulled up behind a white pickup truck that had WHITE TRASH emblazoned across the rear window.
Noah’s assemblage sculptures, installations and structures are subject to unrelenting sunlight at temperatures hovering above 100 degrees all summer long. As the seasons pass, the temperature  changes, the sunlight, however, does not. Sun, at this extreme, degrades everything. Linoleum in front of the sliding glass door will scorch and turn black. Fruit doesn’t rot, but instead  oranges, lemons and limes harden into orange, yellow and green golf balls. Native plants are brown and crackly for most of the year, I mean most years.

WHAT DOES HIS WORK DO?
1. It sits and degrades.
2. It feels spooky.
3. It uses garbage and doesn’t create more trash.
4. It is accessible to those who want access.
5. It insists on being seen on site.
6. It has a road warrior aesthetic
7. It spreads all over the place and floats away.
8. It peters out around the edges.
9. It belongs there.
10. It doesn’t tear down Joshua Trees.
11. It blurs ownership.
12. It includes mistakes and works that I don’t like.
13. The sun and wind finish the pieces.
14. Chance is allowed and enjoyed.
15. It is digressive and associative.

A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF CONCEPTUAL RIGOR
Noah‘s art lacks a certain amount of conceptual rigor. That was a hard sentence to write, because it feels like I am condemning work that I truly enjoy.  Eliza thought that Noah’s work would show poorly in comparison to the purity of  Robert Smithson’s ideas. I can agree, because while I find Noah’s notion “that creativity is a gift everyone has;” endearing, it rings a little too close to the idea that “everybody is an artist”. Yet, in the way that Noah exposes his own creative process and problem solving, the way he exhibits such a prolific and unedited body of work, his idealistic message does come across: one really does feel that everybody could be an artist. His sprawl does allow for my own sprawl.

Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits
Robert Smithson, “Cultural Confinement”

“exhibitions are a form of representation, an interpretive ‘likeness’ of a body of work. No more than any other representation of a complex reality can such a compound image claim to be the unmediated record of the artist’s intention or achievement, much less a definitive one. Certainly not in the case of the retrospective of someone whose production is large and shot through with internal conflicts and contradictions.”
Robert Storr, Letter to the Editor in ArtForum

CULTURAL CONFINEMENT
Noah, by Smithson’s standards is not culturally confined. Noah becomes his own curator and allows for the same haphazard, accidental atmosphere in his works to imbue the placement of the works on the property. Noah, as founder of Watts Towers Arts Center, appointed by then governor Jerry Brown as one of the founding members of California Arts Council, where he served for 11 years, is not unaware of gallery politics. One reason to like him is that he has created his own context. His Quancy Hut (2000) is a hilarious reflection of the gallery system.
The Quancy Hut is ostensibly a proper indoor gallery space, constructed   with drywall inside of a huge aluminum arched military storage unit (hence the name). Noah’s works are hung, paintings and “combine-paintings”, sculptures on plinths, and the viewer can meander through the rooms pretending to be in LA. Turn the corner at the far end, however, and the gallery suddenly becomes a raunchy gratified bathroom.

MASS GRAVES
What is the effect of building long corridors and filling them with garbage and allowing them to be exposed to the elements? Melancholy, verging on depression.
Is this an abandoned settlement? Are we peeping into the private interiority of  a war vet? What is this place and why do I get shivers when I pass through? There is something uncanny. The space feels familiar because it functions ostensibly as a home – there are  apparently all the accouterments of a living space, but on closer inspection, nothing is functioning now, there was never anything functional here. The tattered strips of cloth function as proverbial cobwebs. Their flimsy torn appearance testify to the passage of time.
I recognize the trash. That is not to say that it is my trash, although it could be, because God knows I have brought my own tons of discards here. It is human trash and it looks the way all trash eventually looks. Drive along the dirt roads to their ends, and you will find piles of disintegrating trash melting into the ground and blowing around. This house is built with my discards, with your waste, with his rejected. The phantom I imagine sleeping on that bed, lives on the fringes of a consumer society – he consumes also, but only what has been already consumed, he consumes and he is a glutton. Is that phantom me or is it Noah?
It could be my trash, and in that way I become strangely complicit in the ownership of the piece. When I walk in to the sleeping space, I feel as though I might be the one who lives here. And if its not my trash, and it’s not Noah’s than to whom does this work belong? It belongs to the community surrounding it, who grew it. Trash used this way as building materials, does not have so much the connotation of being rejected as much as communal abandonment: decayed ruins.
“In the process of accumulation, it becomes an interpretative observation of society — the way a society conducts its affairs and how it attends (or more often, fails to attend to the social and psychological welfare of its members”
Kienholz: “I really begin to understand any society by going through its junk stores and flea markets. It is a form of education and historical orientation for me. I can see the results of ideas in what is thrown away by a culture.”
While Kienholz deals with reused materials, the original identity of the object generally holds more significance in his work. Further, “ordinary objects are given extraordinary meaning … the Kienholz trademark – used in the creation of a  seemingly faithful-to-appearances social  environment, they bear a specific relationship to the piece.” Kienholz is famous for recreating existing environments, like Sollie 17, 1979-80 (for which his wife Nancy Reddin Kienholz is also given credit).

What is exciting and interesting is the transition from excitement to interest, when a writer can seize the monster as it rushes out of the cave and identify before it becomes, in the open air, no more than a bag of slimy skin with strange tusks and odd-colored strands of hair
Richard Howard, ArtForum

The most stirring sense of beauty comes from order found, not order given, as if its permanent harmony existed precariously in a transient and unpredictable world.
Joshua Taylor, Foreword from Robert Rauschenberg
DECONTROL
There is a curious mixture of intentional and chance here, but much more intentional than one might first realize. The reason why such a concerted force of feeling can come out of a work, is because Purifoy constructs unified intent. When I saw him with an apprentice once, I was astonished to see him hand her a several sheets of wallpaper and construction paper. Her first assignment: to place different colored squares and rectangles on a single sheet of paper.
Noah’s professed influence is that of the Dadaists, who elevated notions of nonsense, delight and in general, “admired ‘nature,’ in the sense of being natural, and they opposed all formulas imposed by man,” which amounted to “an insurrection against all that was pompous, conventional, or even boring in the arts.”  The highlight of the shelter piece is the bleached, spiky cat skeleton on the roof. Shortly after the piece was completed, Noah discovered the dead cat on the roof, with no indication of how it had died. He left it and the viewers have had the opportunity to watch the carcass change the roof view month after month.
“The sculptures form their own open-air community. The desert has adopted them. Birds build their nests in them and jack rabbits make them home. Erected in open space, they are open to the elements of wind, sun, and rain and they are wide-open to interpretation; they reveal the craft of their construction as the materials display their previous lives as usable objects. They suggest the inner space of Purifoy’s intellect, which creates structures of intricate revelation and concealment”

I AM AN ENTROPY FREAK
One grows old in ways you cannot predict. Noah’s work is marked not only by his hand, but also the hand of the sun, wind and rain. All the pieces have a unifying patina of weathered age. I like the way it looks and I like how I am called to sprawl.

Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble, (Routledge: New York, 1999)  p. 140.
Chattopadhyay, Colette, “Improvisation & Assemblage,” Sculpture (July/August 1997).
Owens, Craig, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture,  Eds. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock. (University of California Press: Berkeley. 1980)  p. 95-6.
Kienholz, Edward and Nancy Reddin, “Kienholz in Context,”  from Kienholz in Context, (Cheney Cowles Memorial Museum Eastern Washington State Historical Society and Touchstone Center for the Visual Arts, Spokane, Washington, May 4- June 3, 1984).
Alloway, Lawrence, “Rauschenberg’s Development” from Robert Rauschenberg, p. 5.
Smithson, Robert, “Cultural Confinement,” in Collected Writings ed. Jack Flan. (University of California Press: Berkeley, 1996)  p. 154.
Storr, Robert, Letter to the Editor in Art Forum (November 2002)  p. 24-28.
Glowen, Ron, Prologue from Kienholz in Context,  (Cheney Cowles Memorial Museum Eastern Washington State Historical Society and Touchstone Center for the Visual Arts, Spokane, Washington: May 4- June 3, 1984.)
Howard, Richard, “Trip To Bountiful,” Art Forum, (September 2002), p. 47.
Taylor, Joshua C., Foreword from Robert Rauschenberg, (National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, City of Washington: 1976), p. ix.
Chipp, Herschel B., Theories of Modern Art (University of California Press: Berkeley, 1968) p. 367.
Wasserman, Abby, “Noah Purifoy,” (The Museum of California Magazine, Summer 1998).

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