Operating Conditions at the Salton Sea
The wind started kicking up as we hauled the first box of tools from the truck to the shoreline, stumbling over deep ruts where adventurous souls had lodged their wheels up to the axle in toxic sludge. Meatball, the loving pitbull puppy, looked apprehensive. The Salton Sea looked…and smelled…just as I remembered it, albeit with the shoreline receded by over 100 feet since 2021. The wet gradient of lake sludge near the water’s edge displayed it’s sickly green tinge in the flashlight’s gleam, a harbinger of the algae we would soon become all too familiar with. Foam was building up in little clumps, delighting the millions of flies that call the decaying wreckage of the ecosystem home.
First order of business, build the flesh pool. Fondly named during the creation of The Reckoning, a flesh pool is typically a tarp draped over some kind of boundary and filled with water to leave the rawhide soaking overnight to become workable by morning. In this case, the boundary was the cinderblocks we would use to later weigh down the sculpture, and the water came directly from the Sea itself.
Arsenic, selenium, pesticides, cyanobacteria. These are only a few of the delicacies waiting in the greenest and murkiest water you ever did see (or smell). You see, the water has nowhere to go, because it was never meant to be there in the first place.
The year is 1905 and a canal that would selectively allow some water from the Colorado River come down into the valley would finally fill so full with silt that it would need to be fixed. A temporary canal was built further south to accommodate this but because it was temporary, a few corners would be cut here and there. Mother Nature, never lacking a certain sense of humor, send record breaking rain that year which not only decimated the temporary canal, but completely diverted the Colorado River dumping approximately one olympic sized swimming pool’s worth of water into the valley…every second…for two years.
Suddenly this primordial lakebed became a very present and real lakebed which means it was TIME FOR SPRING BREAK!!! Humans being very…human…decided to capitalize on the ecological disaster and built “The California Riviera” including Bombay Beach, a small beach party town on the eastern coast of the water. Now celebrities from Los Angeles and all over had a new little get away where they could go fishing in the sea that had been seeded with mozambique tilapia, orangemouth corvina, gulf croaker, and sargo. Also flamingos, because why not?
There were those that knew the Salton Sea’s fate. They knew that the run off from the surrounding agriculture had nowhere to go and nothing to filter its impending toxicity. Even as waterskis glided across the water’s surface, the salinity was rising. The California Department of Fish and Game predicted in 1961 that increasing salinity would kill the Salton Sea by 1980 or 1990.
August 4th, 1999. 7.9 million tilapia die in a single day.
The salinity was too high. Between that and the heat, fish can no longer breath.
The fishbones shine white and prickly, watching us as we bolt together the main structure for the sculpture, unwrapping the padding that protected us from the spines upon which we would pierce the now saturated hide. Uncovering the flesh pool, we were confronted with a sickly emerald water with the skin of deer and goats swirling around with several million brine fly carcasses dotting the surface. Donning fishing waders, eye, mouth, sun, and hand protection, we began arranging the hide along the armature, letting the breeze guide our form. We took in the sky, mountains, and jagged shoreline and placed the skin such that the topographical nature of the stiffer skin would give way to the tattered ends closer to the legs and belly of the beast. The lowest skins would droop into the water, wicking the salt and toxins up into the hides. Likely disappearing first where the caustic water and weather would meet. As the skin began to dry, the pierced pieces tightened around their steel spines, creating tension between points. An endless war between steel and flesh, one bent and one broken. The broken texture of the steel was exposed, uncoated, and already showing signs of oxidation. Spattered details, dents that compress and stretch, shafts missing large swatches of structure bore aesthetic kinship with the tattered edge of the water. The steel too, would recede with time as the shoreline did, entangling with the giant blooms of blue green algae which are the mother of the cyanobacteria. That cyanobacteria would dry and become airborne causing damage to livers and kidneys and spreading neurotoxins into the air.
Sunset falls and the water turns to liquid gold, shifting into rainbow prismatic colors near the horizon. The surface is calm and perfectly reflective. We pull on our protective gear again. Another crew had reported few problems entering the lake to place artwork, but as we three carry the sculpture by the base, the soft lake bed makes way underneath our feet and we begin disappearing up to our knees in the sticky goop. I’m the first to fall, dropping my section of the base squarely on my shin. Ok, new plan.
Placing the base down on the ground we begin a synchronized pulling/pushing effort, shouting in time just as our ancestors from every corner of the globe had. “Pull! Pull!” We paused every time a foot got stuck, extricating limbs before continuing to push on.
I want to take this opportunity to address the human element of this install, something I think gets left out of artists’ stories all too often. I had to find two people willing to walk into a toxic pile of sludge with me. Two people that didn’t stop when they smelled the water or when the sun was hot. Two people who sweat into the waterproof waders and sunk to their knees and kept going. Fortunately for me, I know some adventurous souls and it so happened that when we finally pulled this beast to it’s final resting place, three women stood up and looked at each other, surrounded by gold light, horizon line completely indistinguishable in the haze. We had pierced the skin, committing the violent act of creation, then in a sprint of fury, pushed and labored this piece out into the world. A special thing transpires between women at the end of the world. Pain, exhaustion, corporeal demands co-mingle with endorphins to create love and understanding for each other, for beauty itself, for the creation and celebration of life, and for these weird flesh prisons that we all drag around this earth every day.
The sea glimmered back at us, winking in its deadly glory. It takes life freely as we give it. It is the way of things.
Endless thanks to my installation crew: Bex, Jelly, Noble, and Peter
What’s next?
Parking lot, the sun was hot, and I’m elbows deep inside a skull. The reckoning was living again, at least in part during an outdoor festival where the skull would be lit alongside a print of the full sculpture to celebrate it successful launch two months earlier in the Black Rock Desert. I had noticed these ethereal casted women installing down the street from me on my way in, with artists bustling to and fro holding alabaster limbs and tattered shreds of fabric. Valerie Mallory’s work and mine felt like they hailed from similar uncanny parts of the desert, specters arising to tell the story of the place and help the viewer understand their part in its past, present, and future. Valerie herself paused by The Reckoning and our two minds immediately formed a collaboration when she asked, “What about rawhide wings?” Now several years and two successful pairs of wings created, we are teaming up again and across the month of April I’ll be fabricating the next set for her newest sculpture. Stay tuned for the final result
Solve et Coagula
Solve et coagula is a Latin alchemical phrase meaning "dissolve and coagulate," or "separate and join together". It represents the fundamental alchemical principle that a substance must be broken down (solve) to its basic elements before it can be rebuilt or transformed (coagula) into something higher or more pure, such as gold.
I think about this phrase a lot, as I hope many people in big transitions do, at least in concept if not in these literal terms. If you, yourself, wish to become something else, you must first break yourself down in order to re-form. Perhaps we don’t make it to gold, much like original alchemy gold is a fairly lofty and frequently unattainable goal. Feeling our world in the process of breaking itself apart winds up becoming less scary if you remember that it must happen in order to become something new.
This sculpture deconstructs and rebuilds itself as you move throughout a room, though never forms a perfect picture of “what it is.” It refuses to resolve the tension of form for you, never giving you the right answer as to how to regard it. It is certainly dipping into the doubt and irony of post-modernism, but it is not without hope. It is for the viewer to decide if they wish to see a figure forming or coming apart, as we are committing both actions as beings every moment of our existence.
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