(dramatic orchestral music) - Something about the desert.

- Kind of light I've never seen anywhere in the world.

It's really kind of spectacular.

- It's on the edge.

- I've never felt so a t home in this environment.

- A little dark and twisted and dangerous.

(dramatic vocal music) - There's a reason so many of the minimalists practice in the desert.

Donald Judd, James Turell.

- Are you familiar with the terms, power vortex, or place of power?

- The desert...it's always mystical.

- Three kings walked into a desert, and look what they found.

(eerie electronic music) - Salvation Mountain, Leonard Knight's amazing creation.

He was there for 27 years, living in the back of a truck.

- This old truck is where Leonard used to live.

All those years.

It might have been early on he was in that truck.

I'm not exactly sure, but I know he lived in this truck when I knew him.

Wherever they've run you out of, there's still Slab City.

- Creating this expression of love, even though he was a Jesus freak in some facet.

- But he didn't push that, he let his own faith and his own works speak for him.

And he really was pretty adamant about not having church services, and things like that here.

- There's a lot of people in the valley just love me a lot.

Everybody now I think in the whole world is just loving me.

And I want to have the wisdom to love 'em back.

That's about it, so I really get excited.

- [Man] You really believe in love then?

- Yeah, totally.

- He was all about love and connection, and he was open to anybody of any religion, and people just loved him so much, they'd volunteer and help him and stay there.

- I lament at this truck where the paint is fading off because this is one of the last places where you see Leonard's own hand, in painting this.

The people in town loved him, because he was the first person in centuries to do anything special.

And plus people just loved what he was doing here.

Even today, every once in a while you meet somebody comes out of the museum there, crying, just from seeing this.

So this this thing moves people.

My job would be helping to mix adobe or carryin' buckets up the hill for him.

In this little dome here, the story on this, is that once Leonard got goin' with this, people started believin' in him, and what he was doin'.

Some people built this dome, thinking that he could live in it, that it would be better for him than in the truck.

But I guess he never did, but he did do a lot of artwork in here.

This is all gettin' old in here.

We're gonna have to start working here pretty soon.

It's a dirt hill, and it moves.

Ever so slowly, but it does move.

It's all made of hay bales and adobe.

So it's not a very solid medium.

It's stayed up for all these years.

The sun here is so intense, that anything made of plastic rots away.

Paint is made of plastic.

So it has to be repainted on the average about every two years.

- He was a pattern maker for Douglas Aircraft, and also for the studios in Hollywood, where he worked in plaster.

Doing some of the work he did for Douglas Aircraft, he began tinkering with the idea of doing life-size statues, or bigger than life statues as you can see here.

He wanted to build statues that would withstand an atomic blast.

(explosion) He wanted it on a hill, where everyone could see.

The original idea was to build this Christ, and to put it on the rim of the Grand Canyon.

Because of the laws of church and state, he was not able to do that, and so he brought it back and it was just sitting in his driveway, marked as "The Unwanted Christ."

Drew a lot of attention in the Los Angeles area before it was ever moved up here.

April, 1951 issue, the transport up here, of it, and they used Eddie Garver's broken down pickup truck, the statue on the back of his truck, coming across Banning Pass, coming up the Morongo Grade, and all the way up here to Desert Christ Park.

And then of course, pulling the statue up the hill on big heavy timbers, to the top where it stands now.

And the townsfolk had made a base for it to go on.

They slid it up the hill, and set it on the base.

(dramatic organ music) He eventually moved up here in his little trailer, a little teardrop old white trailer, on the property, but he was not paid a wage for it.

The townspeople here jumped right in, and they helped feed him, they helped clothe him.

Everybody in town, they were amazed at not only the heights these statues were, and the amount of cement and steel that were in them, but also the carving, and the way he carved, right down the toenails and the leather sandal straps.

He began to form these characters, and bring them to life, moved up to where he had the window, and that's where he created the three-dimensional head of Jesus.

There was folks that told him, not only could he not do a bas-relief out of concrete, but he would never be able to make it morph into a three-dimensional head, but here it is.

The materials he used were steel, rebar, which it was welded, and then he used a cement, which formed the basic statue, and then he put over that a white cement, of which then he started to carve, and then he would polish and buff them until they gleamed.

For all we know is the concrete, the slurry, the pigment, the silica, and forming it over the steel structure that he made.

He built them, and as you can see by standing here, these are 69 years old, and they have withstood earthquakes, and weather, and time, and no atomic blast yet.

His wife did not follow him.

He worked here day in and day out, until he passed away, in December of '61.

- When I got to Slab City, Leonard had been doing this, 16, 17 years.

And when I started having the idea of doing The Range, I said well, nobody owns any property here.

Whatever I do will just get swept away.

But then I got to knowin' and seein' Leonard working down here, and how long he'd been at it, you get to, what's your excuse now?

♪ I can't remember (muffled) ♪ I have to feel the money (lyrics muffled) Okay, at the end I broke my machine here.

I got a flat tire.

(muffled singing) ♪ The only thing you left behind ♪ ♪ And then the magistrate ♪ Becomes a smaller thing ♪ And like her mother she lost her mind ♪ - So my name is Carlos, I'm gonna play a few little songs, Gabriela on harmonica (muffled singing) - Let me tell a little bit of my story.

I was in San Diego, I had worked construction, and as I started gettin' older it got harder and harder to find a job, and pretty soon I'm livin' on the street in a van.

San Diego Police Department was on me here and there and everywhere, and if you're poor you can't keep up with everything, and finally they catch you at something, and then the fine grows bigger, and then there's a fine for not having money to pay the fine, and pretty soon you have to get out of town.

There always should be a place where a person can stand on the Earth, and breathe the air.

And that's really the key ingredient of Slab City.

Well after World War II, when they didn't need the base anymore, about '56, they closed it down.

(trumpet music) Some people say the buildings got scrapped, some people say the military took it down, but who knows?

All of that time, Slab City's had people livin' here, generations, you know?

- You can do anything you want, as long as you're not murdering people.

Once or twice a year, somethin', the Sheriff would come through, looking for people that bailed on parole, or this, that and the other thing.

- The most unique thing is, that you can be here, and everybody has to come up with their own dwelling, whether it be a trailer, or a motor home, or a car, or a tent.

So I'd heard about Slab City, that you could stay here for free, and it was time to go.

So here I am.

- East Jesus belongs to a dead man.

We're all guests in his house.

- Charlie Russell, Charlie's was the place, as far as amazing art.

Unfortunately passed away but created an amazing giant installation.

- He was a squatter.

He squatted for a lot of years, but he had vision.

- A guy named Charlie Russell, who came here, and he was into the art car scene, and connected to Burning Man.

I guess he wanted to do something in the style of Burning Man, that wasn't temporary.

He came here, and he picked a piece of land over there, where for years, even decades, what we used to call range runners, people who would get scrap metal off the bombing range, would do their cleanup work there.

Get rid of the steel parts so they could cash in the aluminum.

So there was a big field of metal junk, and glass, and other garbage.

Appliances, and Charlie took that stuff, and he started making it into kind of a garden.

- He ended up calling it, East Jesus.

- East Jesus is not a religious term, it is a colloquialism from West Texas.

When someone said, where you from partner?

And if you don't feel like answering, you would say, I'm from by East Jesus, which is a nice way of saying, it's none of your damn business where I'm from.

- Meanwhile, Charlie had lots of friends that were artists, and art car enthusiasts, and they'd come down to East Jesus, make some art out of all the junk piles, trash dumps, down the road.

It was an interesting structure, saying, oh we're gonna add this and add that, and do this and do that, but Charlie was always working on a dozen different pieces of the puzzle of East Jesus, at all times.

A lot of it was having to do with survival, and you know trying to keep old school basically found for free, solar panels and batteries, functioning, which was a big challenge.

(gentle instrumental music) - Slab City, all of Slab City is influenced by this power vortex.

- A lot of the Slab City residents are a little bit shaky, and a lot of the people are kind of wannabe artists, and get recognized, but didn't have the talent and the go-get-em, that Charlie did.

- When died, East Jesus almost died.

So for three or four years, it was running on life support.

It was running on food stamps.

People come here, and they have no intention of doing art, and for some reason they end up having a compulsion to do art.

- We here in Slab City are economically deprived.

(laughing) That means we don't have any capital for purchasing the land.

What happened with East Jesus, is they had money.

And so they were able to purchase their piece of land over there.

But that introduces money into the field of what we're trying to accomplish, so it's gonna make it so we have to come up with some money, too.

(blues guitar) - Borrego was dying.

storefronts were empty, the town was just dead.

But, it needed something.

We didn't want industry.

So we thought, well why not make it an art destination?

Well it took off much faster than we thought.

We have artists moving here.

We used to have to beat the woods to have artists to show.

Now we have to be very selective on who we pick.

There's just so many people wanting to show here.

Dennis Avery was a longtime resident of Borrego Springs, very much supportive of everything in the community, and he picked up a lot of private land, and put in the wonderful metal sculptures by Ricardo Breceda.

- Borrego Springs has 133 pieces, mine.

(eerie western music) - Ricardo is just an amazing character.

A master, just using sheets of tin to create all these amazing creatures and people and things.

- Destiny.

Managing a place, a restaurant and bar.

I met this guy in construction, and he was my customer.

So I'm gonna start construction, I become pretty good in construction, but I had an accident.

Broke my back.

One day I buy a welder machine, and I started playing with that.

After I made one dinosaur for my daughter, and just because she wanted a dinosaur for Christmas, I've become an artist.

(soft music) - Well Dennis Avery was an entrepreneur, as well as a environmentalist, fallen in love with the area here.

The lands that he bought through his foundation, 4,000 acres, scattered up here in the northern part of the valley, and then the southern part of the valley, was fallowed basically.

The whole idea was to keep it from becoming housing, and also to preserve a lot of the pristine desert.

That was purchased over time, so the whole project is called Galleta Meadows.

- The whole story about Avery, the guy that bought up the land, and basically to protect it, I think is phenomenal.

- [Fred] It was in 2008 that he discovered Ricardo Breceda.

- When I have my building right here you will see things that Ricardo, you haven't seen yet.

- Because there was a project that he was sponsoring.

It was a book on the paleontological treasures here in this Borrego area.

- Hello Huell, I'm Dennis Avery.

- Nice to meet you.

- Ricardo Breceda.

- And we have a wonderful book.

We decided to go three-dimensional.

We needed an artist.

We found the artist, Ricardo Arroyo Breceda, who makes these out of new rolled steel.

- So he worked out a deal with Mister Breceda, to find out whether he could make these critters, and sure enough he could.

- A picture or model is good enough for me.

All I need to know is the size, and we go from there.

- Pieces of metal that have been shaped, and they're all tack welded.

Thousands of tack welds, holding this thing together, and then supported on the bottoms with concrete and other heavy materials, so it doesn't blow away in the winds out here.

(blues music) - The only metal I use is 26 gauge sheet metal.

Rust is beautiful, it's a natural element.

It changes, every day you see it.

After the rain is the beauty of rust.

- The attention to detail, I mean horses aren't like stick figures, their veins and muscles, and it's amazing, I think.

- The critters you're seeing behind me and around are early proboscideans, that is elephant-like creatures.

And they're called gomphotheres.

Animals that were here in the Pleistocene, million to a million and a half years ago.

Today, we have well over 130 examples of, not just prehistoric critters, but we also have fanciful things, like dinosaurs, which were never here.

And a 340-foot dragon.

When one sees the dragon, they see a Chinese head, but a long, serpent body and a rattlesnake tale.

(blues music) - Perfect sometimes is not good.

You cannot have a perfect cast.

You cannot have in my work straight lines.

You cannot have perfect circles in my work.

Everything is rustic, everything is different, unique.

(blues music) - We're 30 miles from Salton Sea, to the shoreline.

The Salton Sea is big enough that it's going to affect the Imperial Coachella and all the surrounding hills and mountain areas, if something terrible goes wrong, which is it literally dries up.

(solemn piano music) (birds calling) - That was a very interesting installation.

The figures, the colors, the environment, sitting in the Salton Sea, and 50 feet away, you've got dead fish rotting, and something that is working with extremes.

- Because this sea is below sea level, water flows in from all points higher than this, including the Colorado River, which flows to the south of us, out to Mexico.

- They tried to divert water from the Colorado River, and there was a major accident that got out of hand, and then all of a sudden it filled up with water.

And then down the road, people thought, oh, well now we got a lake, maybe we can capitalize on this.

- [Phil] Colorado River flooded into this area in 1905, for two and a half years.

Because of an irrigation drainage ditch, that was cut too deep and too wide, during a flood season.

That was the beginning in 1905 of the current Salton Sea.

- Bring vacationers here and have skiing, and you can't have surfing, but you can have water skiing, and beachfront properties, and hotels, and restaurants.

- [Announcer] Now the flood is moving beyond Palm Springs, and into the Coachella and Imperial Valleys, where we find the second key that has opened up the desert.

Water, water has changed the face of the desert, and has made the land so fertile that anything grows here.

And another kind of water has been added to the desert, that was never planned, never dreamed of, recreation water, the vast Salton Sea, 385 square miles of water, formed by accident back in 1905, when the Colorado River ran wild over manmade dikes.

Here is truly a miracle in the desert, a whole new outlet for the crowded millions in big cities, a Palm Springs with water.

Here is where you can find the good life in the sun.

Today, the Salton Riviera, beside the blue Salton Sea, is the place for you to take charge of your future.

- All of a sudden, things started dying, and now it's so polluted, and it's drying out even more, and it's going back to the sandy desert it was.

- When the water is evaporated away, which is happening now, they've lost 10,000 acres of shoreline already.

- The salinity in the Salton Sea is about twice that of the ocean.

Keep in mind, that sea is still fed by agricultural run off.

Irrigated lands around this sea provide two thirds of the vegetables consumed during the wintertime in North America.

(solemn orchestral music) So it's basically a giant catch basin.

There's no output, just drainage from all the surrounding mountains in the Imperial Valley, and everything that's draining from those fields and from the mountains, goes into that basin.

About a third of the agricultural irrigation water that feeds the lake, now bypasses and goes to the coastal area, so we have a lowering elevation.

- If this all dried out, then we got one giant dust bowl, which would be putting out material in the air, which would turn the Coachella and Imperial Valley into the worst air quality spot in the nation.

- If nothing is done, we expect as much as 100 square miles of playa to be exposed.

That means dust, dust so thick you can't see your hand in front of your face.

- A lot of people will move, or they'll go away because they physically can't stay here.

That reduces the number of people that are coming into the desert area in general, so all the surrounding little towns, from Mecca to Julian to Borrego, will start seeing a lot fewer people.

- Worst case is somewhat speculative, but with 100 square miles, we also expect to have some air quality impacts that could reach as far as Los Angeles.

Los Angeles area, Orange County, breathing dust.

We know this because we've measured hydrogen sulfide from this area all the way to Simi Valley.

(dark instrumental music) - There have been interesting installations in artworks at Desert X. I guess the plus is, that it draws different artists who work in different formats, from basically I guess all over the world.

- [Sterling] I think it's artwork, Southern California, California land art.

I think that rectangular form is closely related to things that we might experience in the desert, whether or not that's a train that's going by, whether or not that's a shipping container, whether or not that's an RV.

(eerie instrumental music) - [Rasmus] Due to climate change, the sea will be rising.

If sometime in the future, the ocean will be coming to a place like Palm Springs, creatures, such as the polyps, will gather around our Drive-In construction, because it's pink.

In the day, you will just see this like skeleton of the Drive-In.

But then in the weekends, like in the classical American tradition of the drive-in, put up the screen, and we'll screen this movie.

You'll just see fish looking at a similar structure for hours and hours and hours.

(bubbling) - [John] As seen in Texas, in Spindletop, where at the very first major oil strike in world history happened in 1901.

And it was more oil than was being produced in all the other wells in America combined.

The landscape itself is a portrait of that place, but as it is now.

A flag which is made of virtual smoke.

So it's kind of a smoke flag.

Represents carbon dioxide, black smoke, but it also represents it as national risk.

This particular flag is effectively disintegrating.

I was interested to point to how much of a risk climate change is to the nation-state.

(traffic passing on highway) - It's so magical here, it's just become the home of my spirit.

My family is in New York, my daughter's in New York, and I love being in New York, but I really love it after I've been in Joshua Tree for three, four, five days, or a couple of weeks sometimes, so every month I'm out in Joshua Tree, for some period, and then I'm in New York hitting it hard at my day job and taking care of business and going to my studio in Brooklyn, as well.

Everything is so interesting here, from the dark mysterious beauty of different things, even things that have been burned, or decayed.

And then the tolerance for all different kinds of life.

There's a lot of extremes in the desert, from the hot and the cold, the light and dark.

- I think it's better to use the metaphor of like a piece of marble, let's say.

The desert is a perfect medium in that sense.

It's not completely blank, it's not a particle board, it's not a sterilized environment.

But at the same time there's open space, there's silence.

- Is there a desert art?

I don't know, I mean that's like saying there's a black art.

- Noah, another character, out here in Joshua Tree, came out I believe in the late 80's, originally was in Los Angeles and made art installations out of the debris of the Watts riots.

That ended up traveling around the country.

When Jerry Brown was the Governor of California, the first time, they created the California Arts Council, and Noah I guess was the head of that for a decade or so, and then decided to come out to the desert, and spent 20-something years or more creating an amazing installation that is political in social commentary of his whole life.

- I think Noah Purifoy was an enormous influence.

- I'm always inspired by Noah's work.

It's usually the first place I take people, if somebody new comes to Joshua Tree and says, "Show me everything."

- I'm a very big fan, and understand folk art, and art that is actually made about the true foundations of like, I have to make this.

A lot of people that also went out too, and took their homes, and turned them into avenues for their creativity, to just put it out there, and get it up, because they actually have to do it.

- I didn't really find out about him until I was pretty well along as an artist, but immediately recognized a kindred spirit.

- Amazing character, fortunately I was out there numerous times, and one afternoon was fortunate that he happened to be there, and spending like five hours hangin' around with Noah, who was more interested in what we were doing as artists, and why we did the things we did, than talking about himself.

He was curious, and I guess that's, being the open person he was, then always wanting a conversation that wasn't about him.

That's how I assume the ideas and motivation to create what he did out there.

It was amazing.

- Well, it has many names, but I think the name that fits best, is environmental sculpture.

- He could combine a payload of a critically important social message, with an object that was so compelling, that you stand in front of it, and you're enchanted, and he really gets inside your brain, and he makes people think.

Everyone who goes to that 10 acres, they're thinking not just for when they're there, they're thinking for the rest of their life.

(eerie electronic music) He has this one installation that I think is my favorite Noah Purifoy, where he took a bunch of old toilets, and he bolted them together, and he slipped a washer in between them as he was going around, and he made this beautiful arch, that if you walk up to it, it looks almost like the Pearly Gates, or a marble arch in a classical structure, and then when you finally approach it, you realize, wow not only are they old crappers, but they're the most derelict, hideously not cleaned, used crappers one could find.

But he made something so elegantly beautiful and provocative out of it.

- When Noah was thinking about leaving Los Angeles, this is what he had in mind.

That plan was, he didn't have a plan.

Sometimes people asked him, well do you think about this stuff ahead of time?

And some of the pieces obviously you had to think about ahead of time, but generally speaking he was much more interested in kind of the intuitiveness of the creative process, and how things would react, one next to the other.

So this is Voting Booth, and if you come around to the other side, you'll see the humor in it.

Some people don't think it's humorous, but I do.

Commissary builds on the idea of the company store, this vehicle of oppression in poor communities, where a company will control the means of production, where they were sharecroppers and factories, and people would buy everything from the company store so there was no need for actual cash money.

This is Collage, Noah said it was the largest collage in the world.

And this is realization and acceptance of the environment being his collaborator.

Obviously, he left this out here for a reason.

The environment would work with it.

He was a student of art history and the philosophy, and in fact, he talks a lot about Heidegger and Kant.

The Assemblage Movement, there was something that is pretty well anchored in Southern California.

There's a big thing happening with that on many levels, here in Southern California, so it's not necessarily an outgrowth of Duchamp.

You can definitely draw a line to Duchamp.

I'd say, if there's anything Duchampian, probably this is the closest we get to Duchamp.

(upbeat jazz music) Now that Noah's had a couple of shows, had his first show in New York.

He's in Soul of a Nation, which is at the Broad now, which started at the Tate in London.

And he had his retrospective obviously at LACMA.

Things are starting to pop up at auction.

Noah says that a lot of his work stems from his remembrances and experiences as a child.

Shelter, for example, also deals with homelessness, Commissary, from the point of view of the little people.

Colored, water fountain.

These were things that made an indelible mark on his inner psyche.

So this is what it's like being a child, looking up at your parents.

This is a good example of the spirit of Noah, is that we change the clothes.

Like the clothes disintegrate, we put on new clothes.

New shoes, it would just keep doing that, and we've done that many times.

And that's really in the spirit of Noah.

A museum on the East Coast had one of Noah's pieces and they called us and very excitedly, "oh, this leather strap came off of the piece.

"What shall we do?"

And we said, "go buy another leather strap."

And of course, they were aghast at that.

And I think The White House is significant because Noah saw it as a place where he could create like ongoing exhibitions.

But this is the trailer that Noah lived in.

This really tells you the major challenges and issues that the Foundation has, which is trying to keep this stuff going, and keep it together.

We spend 90% of our time trying to figure that out.

- Up here in the high desert in Joshua Tree, there's a fabulous art community.

Something about the desert, the night skies, even though we have the extremes in weather, we're not inundated with rain, and people can work indoors, or outdoors, most of the time.

Joshua Tree attracts people from all over the planet, coming mainly to the park, but now to art events, now to music events.

My neighborhood is called Monument Manor, here comes Action Pumping, because we're all on septic systems up here.

Straight ahead this way, one mile, is the Joshua Tree entrance to the National Park.

I started doing assemblage art, pretty much back in the 80's.

I bought a house in Laurel Canyon, which was 830 square feet.

Sold a big art piece, and decided to rent a studio space in Hollywood.

Since I arrived here, my whole attitude changed about attention to community, so most of the art that I make, kind of put in public locations to create dialog.

One day I'm at the recycler, I see a bunch of bullet casings in the steel bin.

Came up with this idea of spelling peace out of bullet casings.

Found out that there were like over 4,000 Americans, just Americans, that had died in the war in Iraq.

Each letter is approximately a thousand bullet casings.

Every bullet casing represents one soldier that died.

The name, age, unit, hometown, and details of their death, so there's a face to go along with every bullet casing.

I had this installed at the Joshua Tree Music Festival.

Saw a person standing there looking through the notebook.

It turned that he was a Marine.

About half a dozen or more of his friends were unfortunately in the books.

That his friends were honored by this art piece that they didn't die in vain, that somebody recognized their sacrifice and that conversation made all the work it took to create this piece, that was worth everything.

This is a piece that I put together.

Mobile home trailer and jack stands with steel balls.

Bullet-ridden pieces from the truck I found out in the desert.

And the piece is called Star Wars.

The east coast gets snow and moisture, and things tend to corrode and die faster, because of that being more of a year-round sort of thing.

Here, things tend to dry out.

I mean I built steel buildings because they'll stand up to winds, they take no maintenance.

They actually reflect the sun, so it can be 110 degrees outside.

You walk into the studio space without even a fan, it drops 25, 30 degrees.

Furst World Community Performance Space.

We have the Howling Coyote Stage.

We have music, we have film screenings, spoken word, plays.

(eerie electronic music) - I consider this the headquarters of the Joshua Tree Artist Community, Furst World.

- He's a fixture, he's famous here.

- I'm in Joshua Tree probably about two years ago, after working in LA for 25 years.

A lot of artists out there, they really get tired of the rat race, so I moved out here to have the freedom and time to do it.

- Even though we're not in deep in the Mojave, there is a sense of being on the edge of the world here a little bit.

So it does give you a sense of mortality with it all.

- So I live up in Pioneer Town, and there was a big wildfire that went through there, so there's a lot of dead Joshua trees, and they're silver, and extremely figurative, so painting them in contrast with the living Joshua trees, is amazing.

I mean just imagine them growing over the 100 years.

(bright orchestral music) (industrial music) - Shed your skin.

And ladies and gentlemen please, get that raffle ticket drawing, because you're gonna be really upset, you're not gonna see what you're gonna lose out on.

- I'm very inspired by the landscape, and the creative community here is unbelievable.

This is wire, and an insulator, from a power line.

I would share my art with people and they would always say, oh do you know Bobby Furst?

Do you know Bobby Furst?

I was like, no, no.

What the hell is a Bobby Furst?

And I drive over here, and I pull into the driveway, and I see a guy and I say, "Are you Bobby Furst?"

And he says, "Yeah."

I said, "Everyone says I should meet you."

He says, "Come on in."

Shows me all his art, we have a great time.

(muffled speaking) - He did what they do with this desert.

He goes, "He lives over there."

It took six months to find him.

- To me, I think I ended up here because I needed to find that part of myself, that needed the healing, but also needed that part of myself that needed to be discovered, more deeply.

(sexy jazz music) - Everyone stops at the Ski Inn for a drink, so that is Rockefeller Center here.

The Ski Inn started in 1956.

It was basically just a cinder block shed.

- [Man] That was the first building in Bombay Beach.

In the winter months is the best months, because you got all the snowbirds come down from Canada, and we called them snowbirds.

Well most of them are going home now.

They leave in April.

- There was really very little to nothing going on here when I first started coming here 10 years ago.

People would be shooting music videos, or fashion shoots on the beach, but there was this ruin porn quality to it.

It was exploited and people were afraid to even stay the night here.

- A young fellow named Tao Ruspoli was here about 10 years ago, making an independent film, fell in love with the place.

- As I fell more and more in love with the place, I noticed that there was nothing to show for all the creativity that place inspired, and there was no pride of place amongst the locals.

- I think they were attracted to the, my phrase, the poetry of decay.

- So that's why the place is called, where we're sitting is the Bombay Beach Institute of Particle Physics, Metaphysics, and International Relations.

The first year we had this idea of making the Bombay Beach Particle Accelerator.

- Lily Johnson White, who was a scion of the Johnson and Johnson family, and Stefan Ashkenazy, who is a hotelier, and they just thought, yeah, let's do this.

They call it the Biennale, they have every year, because they're ironical.

It's one weekend a year.

- There's an idea of a traveling gypsy circus, that was a tented version of a hotel that I've been running in Los Angeles.

And the idea was born well over a decade ago, and it was deployed into other locations.

- So this is becoming, has become, quite the artist colony.

- Well the basis of how I have a relationship with Bombay Beach, is building the opera house.

Things come out of the ashes that you didn't know could.

Started that like three and a half years ago, and there wasn't a whole lot of art in this town at that point.

For me like what drove me to do that, was to actually put on a ballet and an opera in a place where you just don't experience it.

It's an open platform, anyone can watch it.

(somber instrumental music) - The sculpture, a massive eight-foot flower vertebra, to do with the fact that flowers really don't have a skeleton.

So I wanted to give them a vertebra, or a skeleton.

It's actually a permanent installation in Bombay Beach.

The first time I came here was about four years ago.

I was struck by the decay.

I was struck by the decay of the fish on the beach.

I was struck by the decay of the cats that had eaten the fish and then died.

- With the runoff you get some fertilizer that comes in.

It's full of nitrogen, and you get an algae bloom, and then the fish die of hypoxia.

They always die off, in the summer they lose the oxygen in the water.

They've done that for years.

They all get up in a bunch fighting for oxygen, and just die.

- You have this kind of confluence of environmental catastrophe, economic issues.

Again, there's this kind of blankness to it, and there's a surrealness to it.

- Well we've had a place out here since in the 70's.

We used to come out on weekends, when the fishing was good, and go boatin' and fishin', and we bought this double-wide in '76, put it on here.

And then we retired in 1990, just sold our place in Riverside, and moved out here.

- There's no water going in, and it evaporates a million and a half acre-feet of water a year.

It's been fed for 115 years by irrigation runoff.

Between fallowing fields, and irrigation conservation, and the water, before the water transfers.

There's virtually nothing going into the lake.

The problem is, that as the lake dries up, the sediments in the lake bed are exposed, very fine particulate matter that will blow into the air all over Southern California and northern Baja.

This particulate, little tiny fine particles of dust and salt and sediment are going to blow everywhere, and basically Coachella Valley, Palm Springs, will be uninhabitable.

Everywhere around the lake will be uninhabitable.

The farmland that provides 90-some-odd percent of this country's winter produce will be untenable.

Eastern San Diego County, over the mountains, will be unlivable.

And northern Baja Mexico will be unlivable.

In the late 50's and early 60's, it was a blue collar weekend getaway.

There were 2,000 people in this town, and it's a quarter of a square mile.

They loved it here.

There were five restaurants and bars, fishing and off-roading and water skiing and just having fun.

From the late 50's, through the 80's even, this place was like the wild wild west.

It was a party place.

It was crazy.

It was supposed to be the desert Riviera.

- I kept thinking, this is America, and I wasn't expecting to find anything like this.

It kind of reminded me of Mad Max in a weird way.

I actually left, and I couldn't stop thinking about it.

- So artists will put up with a lot of discomfort in order to get that genuine, authentic relationship to the environment.

So it's very hot here, it gets to be 130 degrees in the summer.

The air is dirty sometimes because of the dust that blows.

Vandalism and theft and poverty, all of these things, but artists seek this out.

- The original idea was to be lost in nature, amongst boulders, the Joshua trees, or whatever other environment, and coming to Bombay Beach altered the idea completely.

- [Tao] So what happens though when you bring in the artists, other people follow.

- Welcome to Bell Tower, my newest thing, just completed a few weeks ago, timed with the Biennale.

It's the new corner post of the Ski Inn.

The other corner post being the iconic sign, going back to the days when there was actual water skiing.

This used to be a phone booth outside of a train station, very far from here, and kind of reanimated it as a portal into maybe an enchanted forest, or a galaxy or crystal magic, cosmic, ectoplasmic, all in one little walk-in forest universe.

- The art that is in museums, I don't believe that the artists that are creating them are hoping that they one day end up on a wall where someone has collected a ticket to stand in front of it for five seconds, and get shoved down the line.

The art should be lived with, it should be played in front of, people should eat in front of it.

- 90% of the people who already lived here love what we're doing.

- It's wonderful.

I love it when they come every year.

I think the people that are interested in the art are really fascinating.

And just seein' and talking to artists themselves, it's really great.

- There's a few loud minority of maybe five people who like to yell and scream about how we're messing things up somehow.

- Maybe what the naysayers don't like is that it brings a certain sophistication they're uncomfortable with.

I don't know, it's not a judgment.

It's not a judgment at all.

I'm just saying, that's not what they want.

- There was trash on every lot when we got here.

We hauled away thousands of pounds of trash.

And again, we've become residents here a lot of us.

- Like you get a county permit, they say they won't give you a permit to put anything below 4th Street, which is the next street up here.

And they bought all of this property below 4th Street.

So they got it pretty reasonable.

And they're cleaning it up.

They're helping it.

- And yes, there's gonna be a certain conservatism amongst some of the populace, but I think the artist's job is to provoke.

You know, the drive-in theater is a provocation in a way, an in-your-face confrontation with the decay that's happening here, the American Dream gone wrong.

- Found two empty lots, drove out to a salvage yard, and picked up a variety of interesting-looking cars, and drop them into place, and lit them on fire, and put a screen up.

- You know that 50's veneer of the drive-in theater, and the perfect cars, has been deconstructed.

If some people find that offensive, good.

That means it's working.

Francis Bacon said, "Could you imagine "any greater condemnation of my work "than everybody liking it?"

- There's no fishing and no boating, but now we have art, amazing amazing art, which you may not always agree with, but it's still art.

- I feel like a lot of my favorite things have converged at this funny little half-collapsed house.

And the minute I finished it, I feel like, I don't know, it's like the interior of a brain or a dream or something.

This giant ocular opening is kind of looking back out at you when you walk by.

People come into the project, and they spend time in it.

And I think like it often turns into kind of an aquarium, kind of walk-in kaleidoscope, an accelerator maybe.

The weird orgon box that Wilhelm Reich was making people go in in the 60's.

It affects people's energy, I think they become particularly present, they're overstimulated visually, and they talk to each other, so something interesting happens that I can't really take credit for.

The Angler, it's not really the Salton Sea fish, but it could be a distant, distant cousin of the tilapia here that's dead all over the edge of the Salton Sea.

(funky jazz music) - It's a very difficult dance you engage in, when you bring, for lack of a better word, coolness, to a place.

And we've seen over and over again what happens, like in Soho in New York, or in Venice Beach when I moved there.

The Biennale.

There have been a couple of articles where it's been described as the anti-Burning Man, anti-Coachella, whatever.

It's not anti-anything, and the only pro thing it is, is the Biennale.

- A lot of people, well the reason I moved out here was for the peace and quiet, and then that comes in.

Well, you can kinda overlook something like that for two or three days, anyway.

- The curatorial bench is mostly organized by the three founders, and I'm not sure if they even talk to each other, they just kind of do what they do, and then things mesh together in a way that's partly random, but it's partly brilliant, and then it's partly concentrated in a crucible or like the particle collider of Bombay Beach into something that everyone wants to see.

(spiritual choral music) - A tiny bit more, if we run it parallel to this line right here.

Ready, one two three.

(woman vocalizing) (eerie instrumental music) - What does a town need that it doesn't have?

The town has two bars, and really nothing else.

So the idea started with, there should be a movie theater, there should be a museum, there should be an opera house, there should be an aquarium, there should be an observatory.

All the ridiculous things that are usually the trappings of the town.

(dramatic orchestral music) - The absence of a real agenda.

We're not selling tickets, we're not selling anything.

Food's free, drinks are free, so having no financial motivation.

It's important to ourselves as a group friends, to not sell out on that idea.

I think it's the one thing that will help maintain its ability to live.

You remove greed, you remove the reason to be fighting over certain directions with it, so having more people doesn't really do us a service.

But typically if someone wants to open anything, open a bar or restaurant, whatever it is, you want to sell stuff, so the more bodies the better.

This is the exact opposite.

This is also a living town, and being respectful of the people that live here, and we are now residents of the town.

- Stefan's idea, he approached a friend of mine who is one of the world's most famous ballet dancers, and I was like, yeah but let's make this into something even more special, and cut the front of a house so it opens like a kind of magic box, and then all the world inside.

(piano music) (singing in foreign language) - Using this very nice wonderful opera house for a classical program, so we had Handel, and a French program.

So we started off rehearsing in Paris, and then the last rehearsals were very comfortable.

It was okay, we were quite tired and jet-lagged and everything, but we enjoyed it a lot.

- We wanted to get different body parts coming out of the ground to give it a sort of apocalyptic feel and kind of a commenting on the times we're in at the moment.

- A lot of, you see here, a lot of hands that are actually, they are coming out of the ground but at the same time with the sea as a backdrop, you have the context of almost like drowning.

(lyrics muffled) (crowd cheering) - The idea for that spot on 1st and A, it's like the development of a sub-town, which we call Showtown.

- The general theme for it is discarded circus, amusement park memories.

The idea for the Ferris wheel, it'll actually become a permanent installation.

And so we began with the water slide, which was conceived of by an artist by the name of Boris Chouvellon.

In the future, in the near future, we can drop a desert night circus experience inside Bombay Beach, and in a little bit more of an already very amusing space.

- How did you want to start this?

I'm so aware of how people cut s**t together.

This is the inside of the opera house, and this body of work's called Current Sea.

Around the whole room is thousands of flip flops that I collected in Lagos, Nigeria.

All color coded, so you know to get to this point, was an epic journey, which started with just me and a couple of other guys, and then it expanded into me having a middle man and employing him to manage a bunch of people, and then it got out of control.

Where I became disconnected almost like a micro version of the CEO.

The basis of it is all these flip flops, and then the works that are mounted in mattresses from Bombay Beach.

Sonya, who's a big figure in the town, she helped me get these.

I mean these are from the 70's, right?

Just having this sort of nod to when this town was at its peak.

This material is from that era, when it was flying.

So I wanted to integrate that into these works, because obviously the bed, mattress, you spend like half, a third of your life on it at least.

You make love on it, you die in it.

You know, it's the life cycle that occurs on the bed.

You're born on one.

- We do a philosophy conference here every year also as part of the Biennale.

In know it's very unexpected, the idea of bringing academic philosophers from Oxford, and it's definitely unusual for them to be here.

But on the other hand it starts to make a lot of sense very quickly, because the place evokes questions.

It poses problems.

- Just the flow of people that come through here, amazing people from all over the planet.

I love to travel, and I don't have to go anywhere.

I work at the Ski Inn, and they come here.

- There isn't commerce, there isn't things being bought and sold.

We've gotten some donations but there's no formal funding.

Eileen Getty has been very generous in a few donations.

- There's the financial aspect, which apparently some people are upset with.

There's a lot of money comes in.

They're fairly well self-contained.

They do their own events, and they're catered.

- The museum was in tandem with the movie theater.

It was originally launched as the Ermitage Museum in Bombay Beach.

This year it became the Foundation Foundation.

- That's kind of a noteworthy title, because it was the very very very first thing that was out here.

Ground zero, bellwether, more or less of the whole Bombay Beach art movement.

I was granted the place by Stefan Ashkenazy, and where he was at, was he told me this, I could do anything that I wanted to do with it.

I kind of fell in love with the place.

I didn't really see it as all that controversial or crazy.

I explained to them though I wanted this to actually be a fully functioning residency and art museum.

Set it all up to basically make artwork but also to show artwork and bring other artists out.

- It's very rare for an artist to be given a canvas, and then to volunteer to share most of it with other artists.

And he's chosen to year after year curate other artists into the space, but it's completely his.

(muffled speaking) - I wanted to create something that made you feel very peaceful, and relaxed, and be like a healing type feeling, because this area's experienced a lot of trauma.

This is the sculptural element of the installation, and it's primarily known to make people walk around the space.

Get inside of it instead of just standing out front, and looking at it as a panorama.

I want them to come in and feel the different ratios of the room and this is very specific to the situation with not only the town, but the Salton Sea.

- Steve Hash.

They're all concrete.

I work primarily in.

No, I'm happy with it, I literally just finished it up.

It turned out well.

It's interesting working out here though with the temperature, the dryness out here, it's so different, so it's interesting working with concrete.

And I work a lot with concrete, but working out here was definitely a different experience.

Typically, I would normally do it in my studio first, but here I felt like it was important to actually do it here.

(muffled speaking) - So it was actually like already like deconstructed and reconstructed?

- No, it was, it's all stretcher bars.

I broke all the stretcher bars.

- What did you use, a chainsaw?

- Demolition saws, chainsaws, whatever.

- Take this like a lot of other artists have done, and their lives like Donald Judd, Noah Purifoy, a lot of southern folk artists like turn more or less their property into an art installation.

Be very true to the town itself, and bring in kind of a New York style gallery in the middle of nowhere.

- I think he's the first one really who would come here for weeks or months and create the actual work here, and leave it here, too.

- So this is the back end of the Opera House, one of those is called Snuffling For Love Truffles, which is a film over there.

The stills from it, the outfit I'm wearing, made out of real pig heads.

A couple of pig's body, right there, and that's a still from the movie, where he's watching pornography on a computer.

The beginning of the film he's consuming a mass amount of pizza, stuffing in the head, so the head got bigger and bigger.

And now he's crawling out the bathroom where he's throwing up like in that picture.

And he eventually lands out in the bedroom lying down asleep.

And it's kind of about disconnection really.

It's a self-portrait.

It was sort of like I wanted to take myself to an extremity of self-loathing, and kind of just take it as far I could and then work back from that.

A lot of my work relates to consumption, and ultimately excess, and I suppose addiction, and what surrounds like the emotional landscape that perhaps the addiction is masking.

Recognizing my own negative relationship to self.

- I consider myself to be pretty political in the way I drive my work.

But also reflecting on how I relate as a white male within the context of the world now, and looking at why was I scared about going to sub-Saharan Africa?

What was like the in-built racism within me and what was that about, and then to express that honestly.

It started off with the squiggles, and for me this is literally a playful relationship to meditation.

That was actually based on looking at artists who've committed suicide, or have extreme mental health issues.

So thinking about Kusama I guess most famously alive now, or even like Jackson Pollock, or people who kind of have these sort of physical actions that are repetitive that in some ways anesthetize their emotional state.

- It's called, Find Me Through You, and it's about a sort of foundational aspect to how you were loved or feel love or interrelate in love.

And I think that's the vibe I get from being in Bombay and it's just like, I love this, I feel so great about this room right now.

- In a weird way I'm kind of addicted to kind of the adrenaline and the speed of New York City, but at the same time I think I came out here and I actually found my center point, of kind of what just makes me tick.

The bottom line is for this.

A lot of this is based on the ash that I work with.

I take my paintings, I'll buy them back or I'll have them and then I'll basically cut them into pieces with chainsaws or demolition saws, light them on fire afterwards.

Soak them in water, and turn the pieces themselves into like a form of paint.

And then I actually manufacture my own paint out of ashes of my previous paintings.

- He's often kind of brutalized the materials.

You'd think he couldn't make anything good out of it, that he's somehow rung the life out of it, and then he takes it back from the dead, makes it into some little piece of poetry that has this incredible energy that still is in it.

- Basically all my utensils, re-staple-gunned in the way an artist structures canvas, on the surface of the canvas which is sponges and towels and rags and all my cutup canvases, when I cut up my paintings.

This guy is all my smaller paintings cut up to wood blocks, and it's a self-portrait of me.

Pieces even like this, I'll cut them in half, and then place them on door hinges, and put them into the walls to give the feeling of movement, or it can be moved in any kind of a configuration that you like.

I think he's kind of a microcosm, or a quantum particle that is Bombay Beach, 'cause he went into that white box, and he made this incredibly complex thing that everybody wants to go in, and now he's inviting other artists into it.

- Like just being out here actually pushes me a lot more, because the capability and the capacity is so much more.

I'm honestly incredibly limited in New York City.

So I think there's this realm for me out here of freedom that allows me to just really divulge and dig into the environment.

Just eat it alive and just go for it.

(dramatic choral music) - My name is Dadaonysus.

We are in Bombay Beach, California, and this is my Temple to the Scientific Method.

I have persecuted scientists as religious icons.

I hope to create theology without theos, or veneration without worship.

It's the Holy Trinity of AI.

We have HAL 9000 over the top from 2001.

We have Roy Batty on the left.

Hypatia of Alexandria, the last curator of the second library of Alexandria.

And I have Alan Turing as Joan of Arc, both persecuted by the Church of England.

We have Rosalind Franklin, she was actually the discoverer of DNA.

Wilson and Crick took her work, incorporated it into their own.

They got the Nobel Prize, she got ovarian cancer, and died at 37 years old.

Well it took me a year and a half to do the oil paintings in the back, and then three months ago, the Bombay Beach Biennale provided me with a grant for these shipping containers, that I had cut and shipped in here.

Grand Theft Auto 5, and Fallout video games brought me to Bombay Beach, because they were locations in those games.

I'm not involved in the art world, I haven't shown my work before.

Bombay Beach gave me the opportunity to express myself, and create this.

(spiritual choral music) - I've been making sculptures for over 40 years out of a lot of found objects.

And with an airplane fuselage you need to have flight dynamics, which come from the birds, which Leonardo Da Vinci knew about.

So what you see when you're looking at the tail and the wings, we went off of Da Vinci's drawings of what he called La Machine Volante, the wind machine.

(spiritual choral music) The third element we added with this, is the fact that this sea is dying, in essence.

The idealism of the all time renaissance man, who is Leonardo Da Vinci, we're seeing a renaissance here in this town, this town that's seen decay, a dying sea that you can't really go swim in.

The name was given to the town, from the fact of these bombers flying over the town and opening up their bomb bay doors, then they would drop these practice bombs over the water, the water's surface.

They would do it on low level flights and they would also do it at high altitude.

- Yes, that's the story I believe.

The other one is that somebody came here, who had been to India, to where is currently Mumbai and said, oh my gosh this looks just like Mumbai, or Bombay then.

No, no it does not.

There is a credible story that the Manhattan Project dropped a sort of mock-up, with not fissable uranium, it fell apart.

It was one of their tests.

- I bought a place here in 2011, and I immediately thought, give the place its due, and elevate it to the stature that it deserves, for all the great creativity it inspires.

Is that yours?

- Well, it's my friend's.

I'm not really sure where it came from, though.

It just showed up one day, and then we put it on the roof.

- I've never felt so at home in this environment.

As this place is growing in terms of the number of artists that are coming here.

I just feel like I'm with my tribe, more than ever, then I ever have been before.

And being isolated in a city like London or New York, or even LA, like this definitely perpetuates a sense of freedom.

- Lodestar had more my normal path where I often hoard things obsessively in large quantity at ridiculous scale, which the desert is also great to do.

And sometimes I get hung up on things online, so I came across the fuselage, and it was being sold by this interesting guy who is an airplane nut and a barbecuer.

And he had cut the tail off, he removed the wings, he scrapped the whole interior.

All that was left was the empty fuselage, and a little bit of the cockpit.

Fortunately for me, Coachella was interested in having it for two weekends, and they paid a good bit of what it cost me to get the ball rolling.

And then of course I spent at least six times that much, because it was incredibly labor-intensive to get the smooth curves.

We were thinking it's a little under 30,000 pounds, although every crane that has the pieces on the hook, comes up with a different number.

It took I would say six to eight months to build it.

It was a lot of work, quite a lot more than I thought.

Welcome to the harrowing interior of Lodestar.

The ascent of this first flight is the final harrowing vertical climb, which some have likened to rebirth, or maybe even unbirth.

(upbeat jazz music) - The mud pots on the south end of the sea are a result of volcanic activity, created by the tectonic plates.

Some of the deepest and hottest geothermal production wells, known anywhere on the Earth, are down at the Salton Sea.

The tectonic friction is generating heat down below in the groundwater and the mud, and it bubbles up to the surface.

Creates an opportunity frankly for geothermal energy production found nowhere else on a scale, commercially available scale, found nowhere else in North America.

- [Announcer] This is the half million dollar Salton Bay Yacht Club, where a view of the Salton Sea can be enjoyed from any spot inside.

(solemn instrumental music) The Holly House Restaurant and Coffee Shop, which is the focal point of the Salton Riviera.

- The recreation aspect of what made this place what it was, or could be, is gone now.

There's nothing going in.

It's going away.

♪ How sweet the sound ♪ That saves a wretch like me (marching music) (dramatic orchestral music)