Making Sense of Desert Wind
Lewis Fry Richardson, the meteorologist who invented a numerical method for weather prediction, also spent much of his life studying environmental conditions conducive to quarrels, rebellions and wars. That he would be equally interested in both weather and human behavior is not surprising. Most of us can relate. If we didn’t have the constant sense that weather means something, that the way the wind blows could potentially alter the direction of our lives, we wouldn’t be anywhere near as obsessed with meteorological numbers, trends, and statistics.
In her novel Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion describes the catastrophic early autumn winds that sweep through Southern California: “the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.” Didion goes on to describe the antsy behavior, quarrelsomeness, and, worst, the deadly fires that usually accompany the Santa Anas Her account seems at once extreme and believable. We often implicitly sense the collective mood change that accompanies a wild shift in the weather, but can winds make the inhabitants of an entire city acutely aware of their mortality?
Didion’s quote, along with a similarly ominous passage from a Raymond Chandler story about the Santa Anas, prefaces the press release for Red Wind, a meteorologically minded exhibition at Blum and Poe Gallery in L.A.’s Culver City. Artists have visually responded to the fast, arid Southern California gusts, using objects to get closer to the intangibility of violent weather.
Red Wind is a clumsy exhibition, not the seamlessly curated sort of show that looks like it could be the work of one artist. But clumsiness seems fitting. Since the work reacts to ruthless winds, it is allowed to look like it just blew in from the Great Basin. The two gallery spaces contain wind chimes, resin wheels, aluminum tubing, sheepskin, tinsel, and Ficus trees, a fitting array for a show about windiness. The fact that the artists—Jedediah Caesar, Peter Coffin, Anya Gallaccio, Thomas Helbig, Liz Larner, Jennifer Nocon, Cristina Lei Rodriguez, Markus Selg, Anna Sew Hoy, Katja Strunz, Mungo Thomson, and Mark Wyse—have chosen to respond to the Santa Anas with recognizable, tangible objects rather than ephemeral installations dictates the exhibition. The work has more to do with the effect of the weather on personal lives and possessions than with the wind itself.
Artists have been obsessed with the tumultuousness of natural phenomena for ages, probably since before ice age visionaries painted the Chauvet Cave. But over the past few decades, western art’s relation to nature has changed from representational and reactionary to interactive. When sculptors Robert Smithson and Denis Oppenheim began making earthworks in the 1960s, they focused on ideas of entropy and impermanence, pouring asphalt down a cliff or shoveling rings out of the snow on either side the U.S.-Canada border. Smithson’s famous Spiral Jetty, built into the Great Salt Lake using earth and bulldozers, was supposed to sink over time, a fleeting monument to the western landscape. Smithson glorified his onsite practice as “an art of uncertainty.” Still, he didn’t dismiss the gallery’s potential to similarly deal with impermanence. “Actually everything that’s of any importance takes place outside the room,” Smithson explained. “But the room reminds us of the limits of our condition.”
Red Wind revisits uncertainty’s relationship to natural phenomena but does so within the confines of two rooms. The participating artists are predominately interested in the familiar, kitchen sink dramas that surround the winds, using the limited condition of the gallery space to intensify the exhibition’s off-kilter, windblown pandemonium.
Mungo Thomson’s Black Chime series hangs from the ceiling of Blum and Poe’s first gallery space. A trite start to an otherwise idiosyncratic show, the black chimes, sculpted out of birch, aluminum and monofilament, seem too literal to even warrant explanation—what do these conventional, overused objects tell us about the Santa Ana wind that we couldn’t get from the safety of our front steps? They don’t tell much, but they play one crucial role: after seeing the chimes, no viewer will expect an esoteric commentary on the atmosphere.
Below the chimes, Jedediah Caesar’s resin discs lean against the wall. They look like what might have happened had Smithson’s Spiral Jetty been condensed into a coffee tabletop, earthy and coarse but so accessible that they become ominously decorative. In the corner of the room, Peter Coffin’s Untitled (EarthResonates), a dust covered amplifier, lightly buzzes, while Liz Larner’s silver and blue sculpture high-strength wilts like a stagnate tumbleweed made up of storm-ridden tubing, steel and chrome.
Larner’s sculpture is a bodily casing for stalled energy, as is Anya Gallaccio’s slug-like cast lead crystal, an ambiguously globular form lying dormant on a pedestal. Anna Sew Hoy, on the other hand, removes all trace of movement from her quippy installation. The film noir version of the Santa Ana saga, Hoy’s setting includes a sheepskin rug, a pile of magazines—including Life’s desert issue—and collection of ceramic pots, a cozy scene that has been abandoned by its actors who have perhaps run off to avoid a pending storm or an approaching fire.
For White Fly I, White Fly II, Christina Lei Rodriguez drowned ficus trees in plastic, epoxy and foam, adorning them with rhinestones and tinsel—the desert equivalent of a Christmas tree thrown out while still half decorated. The blending of costume jewelry and brush pays homage to the wind’s nonsensical upending and rephrasing of material life.
Larner’s Plash, the exhibition’s endnote, is valiantly minimal and pithy. A disembodied cast pewter hand “plashes” down on a whimsically stained print and the gesture is as assertive as it is useless. It can’t change the weather, but at least it plays a small part in the activity.
Interpreting nature through the man-made materials they know best, the artists in Red Wind mix familiar, domestic trappings with earthy, natural forms. None of the work tries too hard to capture the essence of the Santa Anas, trying instead to interact with just one intimate nuance of the phenomenon. The diverse explorations ultimately reveal how little we understand our environment, even if we technically know where the winds come from.
When Didion explains the Santa Anas, she speaks vaguely. “The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period,” she writes, “and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf.” The peacocks and the olive trees are the only tangible images in this account; everything else exists in an imperceptible haze. Red Wind does it’s best to escape such haziness, replacing peacocks and olive trees with slugs, metal tumbleweeds and ficus trees. But still, the Santa Anas remain portentous.
The most accurate symbols we have for explaining our environment are the things that surround us. In using capturing idiosyncratic sculptures and images to capture the wind’s affect on our live, Red Wind marries earth and object, giving an intangible experience the most tangible form possible.
>Written by d/visible contributor Catherine Wagley.
