Journal of Alta California Winter 2023

JASON ASENAP “Hubris in Art Form,” page 6 What is your earliest art-related memory? I grew up the son of a painter in Norman, Oklahoma, so I was constantly surrounded by my dad’s Indian (and non-Indian) artist friends. Possibly my earliest art-related memories are of various Oklahoma artists collecting at the house in the evenings, drinking beer, listening to records, hanging out, lots of laughter. I myself drew a lot back then, and I fancied myself to be an artist. I just didn’t anticipate I would turn toward words and the moving image later in life. GORDON WILTSIE “Living with Death Valley” photos, page 60, and “The Drought” photos, page 78 While on the road, chasing the drought in the American Southwest, which sights shocked you? The magnitude of drought…

T.E. Lawrence was taken by his guides to a ruin in the desert of North Syria. The Arabs believed that it had been built by a prince for his queen and that its clay had been kneaded with the essential oils of flowers. As Lawrence wrote in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, they showed him through the rooms: “This is jessamine, this violet, this rose.… Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all.”… We went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert.… “This,” they told me, “is the best: it has no taste.” We associate the desert with a kind of purity or cleanliness; it’s a spare place where…

The first time I encountered the concept of “land art” was during an art history course I took at the University of New Mexico in 2013. It was there that I saw images of Robert Smithson’s land art piece Spiral Jetty, which sits in the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The 15-by-1,500-foot sculpture struck me as interesting but not terribly arresting. Much as I had with Maya Deren’s experimental films and David Gatten’s placement of film underwater in a crab trap to literally find out What the Water Said, Nos. 1–3 (1998), I cataloged Spiral Jetty as another eccentric type of art by a white person I had never heard of before. It didn’t resonate with me like a Jean-Luc Godard film or a T.C. Cannon painting, but it taught…

MARILYN MONROE Photographed by Eve Arnold, 1960 Arnold first took pictures of Monroe in 1952 for a feature in Esquire. Over the next 10 years, the two became friends, collaborating on six photo shoots. For the longest of them, Arnold spent two months in the Nevada desert shooting thousands of photos of Monroe as she filmed John Huston’s The Misfits, a movie intended to signal the actress’s shift into serious dramatic roles. One of the most compelling images—Monroe standing in front of an expansive landscape, looking pensive as she memorizes her lines—is about as far from the actress’s typical glam shots as one gets. ANGELINA JOLIE Photographed by Annie Leibovitz, 2007 The famed portraitist has made regular pilgrimages to the California desert to shoot her subjects, including a nude, mud-caked…

Howdy, partner! Welcome to your new home (or second home, or Airbnb investment) in the High Desert. Whether you’re here for a bender or a lifetime, you’ll surely find the “Hi Dez,” as it’s called, or “Joshua Tree,” as it’s not called, to be everything you could ever Instagram. Now that you’ve flipped your first property and they know you at the Home Depot, you might think you’ve got your sand legs. But navigating this tricky terrain and blending in among the carpetbaggers, utopia seekers, serape-draped opportunists, energy drink millionaires, drunk bachelorettes, microdosing idealists, and Jason Momoa can be disorienting at first, especially if you’ve taken mushrooms and can’t find your friends. As with many super laid-back communities, fitting in here is virtually impossible, but there are a few things…

It’s an April afternoon in hallowed ground—“JTree,” as the climbers like to call the place. The fabled Joshua trees are in bloom, as are the globe mallows, the Mojave kingcup cacti, and the desert dandelions. A lone coyote trots across Park Boulevard and vanishes into a chaos of rock. If you look carefully, in the distance, you’ll see the telltale remains of a prehistoric supercontinent called Rodinia, with its remnant lodes of pinto gneiss. Closer by, Skull Rock bristles with tourists and their selfie sticks, cars clot the entrance stations, and in many places, invasive mistletoe chokes the creosote. Still, up on Sheep Pass, during a rare pause between the caravans of Sprinter vans, you might just hear the susurrus of yucca moths’ wings as they carry pollen between Joshua…