Outdoor sculpture at The Bullfrog Biennial
Geovany Uranda, This is Fine, 2021, Acrylic on Plywood. Photograph D.K. Sole
D.K. Sole on the 2021 The 2nd Bullfrog Biennial, Goldwell Open Air Museum & Red Barn Art Center, October 29 - 31, 2021
The Bullfrog Biennial was more compact this time around. None of the outdoor artists had decided to locate their work in the distant Beatty shooting range with its berms and Quonset hut. Maps did not direct us to the tussocks by the railway station in the upper hillside of the Rhyolite ghost town where Mikayla Whitmore and Quindo Miller’s red mound stood and sang at us in 2019. This year all of the desert sculptures were below Rhyolite, down near the Red Barn Art Center or on the path to the patch of land where the Goldwell Open Air Museum’s permanent collection (Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya’s Portone, Albert Szukalski’s ghosts, Sofie Siegmann’s decorated bench) stands around the museum building.
Why is the Bullfrog important? The desert doesn’t need an art festival. It didn’t ask for the permanent Goldwell sculptures and it didn’t ask for the temporary additions that the Bullfrog artists have created. * This vastness of creosote bushes dominates whatever you can put in it. The clouds fly overhead. Anyone who makes anything here is contending with these facts. Nature flows around them. What can the artists do? They were invited to join the program and now they’ve committed themselves. They had to do something. Where do you begin? Artists know that challenge and the desert exacerbates it. I try to imagine myself making work in the desert. “Why start anywhere at all?” it asks me. “What do you think is going to happen?”
Geovany Uranda approached the problem by orienting his piece around the wreckage of a collapsed building. Among the splinters and the smashed glass he set up a series of cartoon flames, painted on pieces of wood and propped upright. It’s KC Green’s “This is fine” meme without the table, the chair, the mug, or the talking dog. Through this smart decision the meme was acknowledged but not present. The meme narrative had passed. We couldn’t enter the scene of the disaster, the imaginary kitchen. The house had already come down. We were beyond the point where we could tell ourselves that this is fine. We were even further from that point than we are in the meme.
The dog, our character, our friend, the thing we could identify with, was gone. There was nothing but these cartoon fires, looking ridiculous, stiff and hard in the desert. Any built object out here is ridiculous. A knowledge of that ridiculousness was part of Uranda’s work. It’s right and appropriate that the flames looked like a strange piece of plotless theatre. The wreck of the house gave them a stage, a place where they could act it out. Look, this sculpture ends here, just beyond the edge of the carpet of glass. Now it’s done.
Tiffany Lin and Saskia Krafft, Arterial. Photograph Mikayla Whitmore.
Antwane Lee’s Ancestral Tótem made a boundary for itself by setting up a symbolic circle of stones. Torches had been placed around the edge of the circle and the metal totem itself stood taller than a person with a pair of curved horns in the air, waiting to hold the sun in its cup. Tiffany Lin and Saskia Krafft’s Arterial created boundaries with its whole being. It was a structure like a bus shelter walled with crimson mesh (blood-colored, therefore “arterial”? The wind passes through this air-artery?). There was a bench inside the shelter where you could sit and listen for the music of the wind harp on the roof, but I was never sure if the faint hum I heard was the harp or the sound of the electrical wires on the telegraph pole that stood over the little red box. Was the wind strong enough? How strong did it need to be? The floor of the shelter was rough and coated with dust. The preexisting conditions of the desert were against the restfulness implied by the offer of a seat and the pretty ceramic moons stitched onto the mesh. Meanwhile, Tótem was working to undo the self-contained integrity of its circle by waiting for someone to fulfil its torches by setting them on fire. The first time I saw this totem it was dusk and a woman who introduced herself as the social media person for the town of Beatty drove up and told us she was here because she had been assured that the torches in the circle would be lit at sunset. She was planning to take a picture. No one came and the torches remained intact and cold.
I thought that desert art shouldn’t ask for participation. No one should be expected to visit it at certain times, or help it to realise itself. It repudiated the idea of “engagement” that city art loves so much. It did not need to network with the community. A nonparticipatory object imitating the still, enigmatic, nonexpectant nature of a rock, was better.
Javier Sanchez, I Am Here. Photograph Mikayla Whitmore.
Meeting Javier Sanchez accidentally in the desert I talked to him about his sculpture, I Am Here. Unlike the other artists he was not imagining a stage or a boundary. Originally he wanted to create a line of glowing lights between the Red Barn and the Goldwell Museum building, but the materials to form a complete line were too expensive (the buildings are not close and putting plexiglass around lights costs money) and so we have a part-line, filling in a fragment of the imagined line, the glow rising and sinking and changing colour silently in the dark desert in the evenings. It might have been a guideline, showing you where to go, not a boundary but a direction; now it was a haunting faerie presence, an unnatural spectre in its own map. What were those red and blue lights out there in the bushes?
Ali Fathollahi and Shahab Zargari set their pieces right next to the Red Barn down the hill, finding a place where the viewer’s vision was already concentrated into the facets of a structure: a wall, a door, a window; your mind occupied with things that had to do with buildings and the purposes of buildings. Instead of being silenced by the harsh void of the sky you thought but do they have a toilet? as you steeled yourself for the responsibility of mastering the toilet if it was there. Zargari’s trio of pieces had the shapes of road signs, hinting at authority, rules, a helping hand, but the messages on the signs – go left, slow down – had been replaced with the artist’s photographs of objects from the surrounding landscape. The glass bottle hanging on a wire fence in one photo was visible if you looked from the sign towards the front of the barn. Where was that crumbling window on Sign 2? You were looking at the fact that he had chosen something. Here in the desert, where it was so difficult to choose one thing over another (there was one creosote bush or another creosote bush, one rock or another rock) this artist had picked three things out of the landscape and said: these are the things. I wondered how the signs would look if they were further away from civilisation, where we were already spoiled by an abundance of singular things.
Ali Fathollahi, from the Ready Made Project series. Photograph Mikayla Whitmore.
Fathollahi’s Ready Made Project pieces (some outside the Barn, some inside) were recreations of dangerous or strange failures the artist had found on the internet, makeshift solutions or accidentally pointless objects, like a gutter drain with high concrete rims around it so the water couldn’t get in. Fathollahi’s recreation of this drain was set snugly into the dirt by the Barn’s side door. Why would anyone be draining water next to a barn in the dry desert? But the form made it look functional enough to be ignored. People stepped over it. Someone put a beer cooler next to it to take advantage of the light that was meant to illuminate the work at night. His Ready Made pipe sculpture by the front door of the barn made no sense either, but the form was enough. They were not obviously silly, as they were in the internet photographs. They had reached a mimicry of sense.
Inside the Barn, in the front room, three similar pieces by the same artist had a different aura. People stood away from them; nobody invaded their area with a cooler. They wore the armour of the exhibition space. Indoors, an artist’s gestures could be small and delicate. The details of Ian Racoma’s human figures were drawn with thin lines in ink. The material was safe on the wall, and you stood in front of it, knowing that it wouldn’t move. The mirrors in Trevor Ganske’s pictures of geckos and Joshua trees would not be scratched by blowing sand. Christopher Rietmaier could hang loosely-tied scarves against the wall and they would stay in place. Nothing would be touched by the dust, nothing waited for the wind to arrive, everything was still, everything was safe. Nanda Sharif-pour played with that idea by putting objects from the desert in a fishtank and then separating the tank from the ground on a pedestal. There were interior fixtures that could be used. Ross Takahashi’s Sabaku Origami was positioned to take advantage of the fact that you would probably encounter it for the first time by coming in through the big front door. It descended from a ceiling beam, playing at being a curtain. With a room behind it, this tangle of wire and metal origami cranes had a space to exclude you from. Step back outside the door and nothing could bar you from the hillsides and the sky. What does the Bullfrog give us? A chance to meet the desert and a chance to avoid it.
*A few of the new ones are permanent. Javier Sanchez’s lights are embedded in concrete and not going anywhere.
Shahab Zargari, Reflection Regarding Reflected Self-Reflections. Photograph Mikayla Whitmore.
The Bullfrog Biennial, Goldwell Open Air Museum & Red Barn Art Center, 1 Golden St, Beatty, NV 89003
October 29 - 31 October, 2021
Published by Wendy Kveck on December 2, 2021