“Mirage” is located inside the 110-acre Desert Palisades, a hillside enclave dedicated firmly to a neo-modernist aesthetic. But to me it was the details of the setting that were the most meaningful - and the most revealing of the project’s ambitions and its limits. The house, with its funhouse-mirror architecture, is especially well designed for selfies, making it an ideal installation for an age that conspires in so many ways to make each of us a Narcissus. There was a young woman in a pink quinceañera dress being guided from room to room by a professional photographer there were grandparents snapping pictures of grandchildren and vice versa there was a toddler crying because he didn’t want to leave there were packs of teenagers hiking through the desert just below the house, their jeans stained with yellow pollen from the flowering bottlebrush plants, looking for the perfect angle for a group photo with “Mirage” and the mountain range as the backdrop. SIGN UP for the free Essential Arts & Culture newsletter » And not just crowded with bodies - though in some rooms it was difficult to move, as if we were all shuffling through a Monet blockbuster at the National Gallery - but filled with the most aggressive kind of social-media strategizing you can imagine, with people arranging complicated trompe l’oeil effects involving one friend’s feet and another’s head. When I visited “Mirage” last weekend, as the sun began to slip behind the mountains that rise up steeply behind it, the place was packed. (Aitken will be giving a talk on the project at noon Sunday at the Palm Springs branch of the Ace Hotel, with an introduction from Brooke Hodge, director of architecture and design at the Palm Springs Art Museum.) This is not the kind of project where you can compromise and do it wherever.” “Where the sprawl ends and the desert begins. “I knew for the work to function I need a location on a hillside where there’s a view of urban sprawl,” he told me in a phone interview. As ever, vernacular and generic architecture remain an irresistibly convenient vessel for contemporary artists.Īitken describes “Mirage” as a study of the relationship between the architecture of the typical suburban ranch house (and its forebears, including residential designs by Frank Lloyd Wright and others) and the natural landscape that it both relies upon and threatens to destroy. It is the most architectural of the Desert X offerings, though pieces by Gabriel Kuri, Sherin Guirguis and Richard Prince come close. Though most of the Desert X pieces will come down at the end of April, “Mirage” will remain open through the end of October. The piece is located in a high-end residential subdivision that is among the last major undeveloped parcels of hillside land in the valley. From certain angles it disappears almost completely into the landscape it endlessly reflects. It takes the form of a single-story ranch house in the foothills of the San Jacinto Mountains that is wrapped inside and out in mirrored surfaces. “Mirage” is one of 16 artworks scattered around the Coachella Valley as part of the inaugural Desert X, a contemporary-art festival organized by curator Neville Wakefield. OK, checking my phone - I’m not superhuman - but also wondering about the boulders. Most visitors to “Mirage,” an installation by the artist Doug Aitken on a hillside overlooking the Coachella Valley, leave wondering about the traction their pictures of the supremely photogenic project are getting on social media - at least if their posture, bending intently over their phones as they trudge back to their cars, is any indication.
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