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Review Dec 28 2009 « | »
The Mojave Desert Project Ian Giles's residence in a hut in the wilds of the Mojave Desert recorded in Battersea Park Library and...

Scott Brown

It was supposed to be 24 days alone in the desert. He made it to 17, then 'stepped out'. Too hot apparently. Too little food. An absence of any decent artistic output was also, quite possibly, an issue.

It's a great prospect - being isolated in the Mojave desert for the best part of a month - but Ian Giles's shack-based residency didn't get to grips with it. Despite the web and Battersea Park Library both providing designated portals for Giles to relay his experience to the world, the desert project can at best be interpreted as a metaphor for the desert landscape itself: the sense of a vast, dry and baron nothingness really prevails.

In his 17 days, Giles commented on the heat, country and western music, the presence of rabbits and a few other fairly mundane things. He also took many pictures of himself rolling around on the ground, and sometimes walking across it. I quite liked the photo's of him mimicking the form of distant mountains with his body, one of many references to scale that seem to have preoccupied the artist. Some of his written compositions were also OK. But as a whole - as a linear piece of performance art - the desert project never took off. It was 'unwinged' and 'lost,' just as the artist himself seemed to inadvertently acknowledge.

A woman from the library commented on the project as being wonderful. As an intervention on the often sterile environment of those places, I would agree. The idea of Giles's residency being accessible and supported by material from the library worked, but this didn't do much to improve the quality of his performance.

It became clear early on that the artist was struggling in his new environment, and was perhaps winging his way to a response. This left a jumbled trail of work that was inconsistent, unstructured and poorly conceived.

Tackling the subject of a vast and uncompromising landscape, the intensity of solitude, heat and hunger, is all great raw material that others have worked with in magnificent ways. However, it's also an enormous undertaking. As for this attempt? I was glad it ended early.

Ian Giles's The Desert Mojave Project ran from the 19th November until the 6th of December online and in Battersea Park Library. You can view the website here.

Tim Howard

7.45. It's the 19th November, 1971. I'm standing in Santa Ana's F Space gallery. I have in my hands a .22 long rifle and I'm about to shoot an artist. He's my friend, and he's stood across the room from me. A crowd of people have gathered, but they're not stopping me. They're here to watch. I'm here to shoot. All because my friend asked me to do it. He stands, resolute.

My finger on the trigger.
It's time to fire.

I'm going to shoot Chris Burden.

At the last second, the artist holds his hands up and yells: "Stop!"
So I stop. He's not going to go through with it. He's had to pull out.

If only he'd gone through with it! The potential's here in my hands and I can't use it!

*

This is what I felt about Ian Giles' Mojave Desert Project at Day 17: disappointed.

Ian Giles had planned to spend 24 days alone in the desert. On Day 16, he posted a warning that he planned to leave the desert. On Day 17, he left without telling us why, leaving seven days just as unspent potential. It's that potential which makes his decision to leave all the more frustrating.

He'd been, with photos and words and drawings, telling us all what the desert was doing to him. Now obviously this meant that his first few posts mostly said: "I'm in the desert and it's empty!"

The concept raised the question of what the desert, and the inherent isolation, does to the psyche. The performance was the day-by-day snapshot view. We all know that most people come back saying that each night Marlon Brando appeared as a giant mammoth in the sky. This was a unique chance to join Giles on the way.

Sure enough, about Day 10 the blog started to look less descriptive, more forensic. By Day 12, Giles appeared in pictures looking as if he was planning on hunting a gazelle with his teeth; and on Day 15 he was posting with still less cohesion. In those few days the work had become about the humble human brain, and not about the location. Fascinating.

That's what made it so much more disappointing when he left. What remains is that empty sense of what if, and that's never satisfying. I'm not going to advocate the idea that an artist must suffer to make great art, because you don't, but if it's declared that 24 days will be spent out there, then they should be spent out there. No compromise, because you'll compromise the work. He was on the cusp.and dropped it.

I can only think of one excuse for that, and it involves a Faustian pact with the great acting elephant in the clouds.

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