WASTELAND WONDERLAND

Joséphine Wister Faure’s Levitation speaks to the paradoxical relationship between beauty and decay that characterizes the Salton Sea and the art created there.

As the sun sweeps its western arc over the Salton Sea, toward the distant desert mountains, a prism appears on the cottony clouds, a rainbow rabbit hole in the sky. Just by looking up, we all drop in.

We are participants and spectators at the 2019 Bombay Beach Biennale, an underground art party that some call the new (or anti) Burning Man. (Despite the name, it has been held annually since 2016, this year over a weekend in late March.) In the next 40 hours I, along with roughly 500 invited guests, will stroll through an atheist church, watch a sleeping woman levitate four feet above her bed and see a world-class prima ballerina, flown in from Berlin, dance at a trailer-park opera house. I will glimpse half-naked hipsters smeared with vibrant colors frolic in the cold desert wind, and eavesdrop on middle-aged locals with the sunken faces of chemical dependency. I will be approached by a penniless stranger desperate to borrow a toothbrush, and I’ll gawk at dinosaur bones and crystals nestled within the cracked shell of an old mobile home marinating in deep house music and starlight. Through it all I will wonder if art is enough to shift the fortunes of this small, hobbled town—and if the locals believe the art-as-salvation promise in the first place.

As the sky darkens on the first day, I retreat toward the berm that overlooks the one-square-mile dirt-road grid that is Bombay Beach, California. At first glance it looks like a postapocalyptic trailer park. Although the town has hundreds of properties, many of the modular homes are crumbling and only about 300 people live here, with a median household income of less than $14,000 a year. Twenty miles from the nearest gas station or supermarket and an hour southeast of booming Palm Springs, Bombay Beach is a town where reliable work is scarce and meth addiction widespread, where both the sea and the air are feared to be toxic. A handful of retirees subsist on fixed incomes, and other residents survive without water or power—which means no air-conditioning or fans in the brutal summers, when temperatures can reach 120 degrees.

And yet it is here that three wealthy, well-connected friends have launched a radical experiment in art, culture and regeneration. In the process, they’re raising significant questions about a community on the precipice of change: Namely, is Bombay Beach becoming just another elitist playground, or is something deeper happening in this desert town built on the cracked foundation of a mistake?

• • •

In 1905 the Imperial Canal, which brought Colorado River water to farms in the southern California desert, breached. By the time the engineers completed their fix, in 1907, they’d accidentally created the largest lake in California. It was named the Salton Sea.

Beginning in 1959, celebrities including Jerry Lewis, Frank Sinatra and the Beach Boys water-skied and partied in the area. The lake was stocked with fish to lure anglers and vacationers, who built second homes along the shore—then a 1981 flood destroyed the local yacht club. A spike in the lake’s salinity, combined with toxic algae blooms caused by agricultural runoff, resulted in a biblical fish kill. Dead tilapia by the thousands washed up onshore (and still do), their bones degrading in huge drifts. It didn’t take long for the tourist economy and the town itself to wither.

In 2007, Tao Ruspoli, a photographer and filmmaker with royal Roman bloodlines, opened a Kim Stringfellow photography book and saw pictures of the Salton Sea for the first time. Within days he was in Bombay Beach. “It looked like this dark underbelly of the American dream,” Ruspoli says. “I was married at the time, and I said to my wife, ‘We could buy a house in Bombay Beach for the price of a used Jetta.’ ” His wife (the actress Olivia Wilde, whom he’d married in 2003) didn’t bite, but when they divorced in 2011, his first move was to buy property in the area. He started spending weekends by the lake, and in 2015 he brought Stefan Ashkenazy to town.

Part carnival barker, part hospitality impresario, Ashkenazy owns the Petit Ermitage boutique hotel in West Hollywood. In 2015 he had plans to host a pop-up hotel experience in Joshua Tree, but when he arrived in Bombay Beach, he torched those plans on the spot—despite the smell, the dead fish, the flies and all the other things he’d been warned about. “The idea transformed from communing with nature to commiserating with it,” Ashkenazy says. He and Ruspoli seized on the idea of bringing high-caliber art, ballet and even opera to a town in tatters.

They called in another friend, Lily Johnson White, an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune. White sits on the board of Creative Time, a nonprofit that funds and produces ambitious public art projects. “I really wanted to focus on bringing emerging or established artists out and see how they reacted to the space, and how they would create work that was in dialogue with the town and the community,” White says.

Together, in April 2016, they launched what they call “year zero” of the Biennale. The event was modest. Ashkenazy called in artist Greg Haberny to create an installation out of one of the few properties he owned at the time. Haberny was urged to purchase a junk plane and stage some sort of crash, but the artist—a former soap actor who had gone from the set of One Life to Live to a life of struggle making art in New York and Baltimore—opted to rebuild.

“I didn’t want to add more carnage to the landscape,” Haberny says. In his hands, the building, which was filled with nesting birds, fist-size spiders and scorpions when he arrived, became Foundation Foundation, Bombay Beach’s first art museum, which now hosts residencies for willing artists.

In 2017, more properties were purchased and transformed, and White recruited legendary street artist Kenny Scharf. To create his installation, Scharf piled the roof of a crumbling home with plastic junk he’d collected from the streets of L.A. and swirled the walls and windows with his signature fluorescent monsters.

Ruspoli estimates some 30 artists now own more than 50 properties in town. They’re still a minority, but they are a force, in part because of the stunning public works they leave behind—Steve Shigley’s metallic cubes, Olivia Steele’s neon-light installations, Randy Polumbo’s masterwork Lodestar, a 47-foot-high sculpture carved out of a World War II jet purchased on Craigslist.

But Ruspoli and company weren’t the first artists to set up shop here: Predating the festival by three years is the Bombay Beach Arts & Culture Center, run by Dave Day, who has owned property and lived at least part-time in the town for the past 22 years. An artist in his own right, Day has long been inspired by the Japanese ceramics process kintsugi, in which a broken pot is bonded with silver or gold. “In the process of being broken and then put back together,” he says, “it becomes something more.”

Under his watch, the center hosts Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and offers public showers and free breakfasts to impoverished residents. Day also houses artists who spend part of the year working in town and generally serves as a bridge between both worlds. When I ask him if the art movement in Bombay Beach has helped the town, he pauses and smiles.

“We’ll see,” he says. “The jury is still out.” The community is primarily white retirees, with fluctuating populations of other demographics, but meth doesn’t discriminate: “It goes along with people dealing with boredom and hopelessness.”

• • •

When the first Biennale launched, local opposition was widespread. According to Day, area retirees weren’t fond of the hedonistic displays that came with it—the scantily clad attendees, the all-night psychedelic dance parties.

“It could have been a good thing if they’d come into the town and been respectful to the people who live here,” says Gloria Town, a year-round resident and active community member. “But they feel entitled to do whatever they want.”

That sentiment has mellowed somewhat. “It’s probably 50-50 pro and con,” says James Andrews, another permanent resident. “I love it because it’s only a week or two out of the year, and it brings a little life to the beach. It definitely helps the local economy.”

Some locals and members of the artist community hang out socially, both during and beyond Biennale season. The latter also patronize the Ski Inn, the town’s sole watering hole, and attend community board meetings. Day adds, “The event organizers are seeing the benefit of meeting and addressing the needs of the community rather than just being a big fiesta for family and friends and the artists—something we’ve been stressing and working on since it started.” In the days following the 2019 Biennale, organizers take steps to fund a waste-management pilot program and install solar streetlights. But as the town’s fortunes rise, there are other costs to consider.

Nowhere are the potential implications of growth more acutely rendered than in an installation by an artist known as Jae Fella, who created signs for Sotheby’s International Reality [sic] and placed them on several properties in town. He also built a fake real estate office and, in its window, posted listings for multimillion-dollar properties that had been worth $500 just two years earlier. The fact that some property values have risen to more than $30,000 suggests life is already imitating art. Ashkenazy plans to open a hotel in town called the Last Resort. If Bombay Beach gentrifies further, where will that leave its current residents?

“If I were to have a personal goal, it would be to see artists, who were never able to afford real estate, move here, reside and create, live and die,” Day says. “If it gets to where the people with the most money buy the most lots all at once and build big campuses, then it makes it a little more challenging.”

• • •

Among the 500 or so people who have flocked to this year’s Biennale, those questions are for another time.

The event peaks on Saturday night, unfurling like a choose-your-own art adventure. A marching band and two stilted dancers dressed like a bride and groom on their way to a funeral lead a sunset parade. Blissed-out bohemians pack a bandstand to enjoy a stunning ballet performance at the Opera House, and a line of people wait to glimpse Haberny’s abstract paintings and wood collages—their own form of kintsugi—at Foundation. To create the pieces, he bought back his previously sold work, chopped up the canvases, burned them to ash and used it as paint.

Eventually everyone spills into the Estates, Ashkenazy’s derelict property, where acclaimed KCRW DJ Jeremy Sole’s eclectic, genre-bending grooves bounce off graffitied cinder-block walls.

I roam the galleries, get down on my knees to look a triceratops in the eye and stand tall to measure myself against amethyst boulders cracked wide open. I mingle and dance among revelers in colorful galleries festooned with toilet bowl brushes.

All the while, I can’t help but believe that perhaps art is the great antidote after all—not just for this town but for what ails people everywhere. We may not live by a toxic lake, but we consume way too much plastic and industrial food. Our trash is collected for us, but it piles up somewhere. The gears of our existence run smoothly and feel antiseptic, but nothing is. We’re deluged with advertising and curated content to the point of anxious distraction. Art, on the other hand, exists only in a specific time and space. It’s three-dimensional and real, fashioned from raw or found materials and creative force. And when it’s exhibited in a place like Bombay Beach, where poverty and beauty, desecration and promise collide, that art, and the charge it delivers, is elevated.

At sunrise, French-Iranian opera singer Ariana Vafadari performs on the beach with a small band for the night’s survivors. They wear angel wings or faux fur or are dressed like desert gypsies. Colorful smoke grenades are set off behind the virtuoso mezzo-soprano as she sings her Zoroastrian songs of praise. The sky blushes pink. There is beauty and there is reverence.

Bombay Beach has become a wonderland.

Olivia Steele’s fieryI Still Love You installation lit up the lake at dusk and dawn each day of the Biennale.

Highlights of the year-round Bombay Beach Drive-In include muscle-car seating and French cinema.

In 1944, B-29 pilots training for Hiroshima dropped a 10,000-pound payload onto targets in the Salton Sea. Local legend has it that one dummy bomb landed onshore—hence the name of the town, and of artist Joe Regan’s Bomb Bay Shelter.

Kenny Scharf’s signature Day-Glo masterpieces—constructed from salvaged trash and plastic toys—reflect the pop artist’s longstanding concern for the environment. He describes Bombay Boom! as his famous Cosmic Cavern installation “turned inside out.”

Randy Polumbo’s five-story Lodestar serves as a watchtower; visitors can climb the fuselage for 360-degree views of raw desert that from on high looks like the surface of a strange planet.

A performer heats up the big-top tent during Toledo Diamond’s sexy spoken-word performance on opening night of the 2019 Biennale. The show christened a new circus-themed venue called Showtown.

The Biennale’s culmination: a surreal sunrise opera performance by Ariana Vafadari.

Stephanie Cate’s Toxic Tea for Two is a reminder of the lake’s continuing decline despite more than 15 years of environmental legislation and restoration efforts.

Neon-light wizard Olivia Steele’s Paradise, Abandoned, housed in a crumbling waterfront shack, reflects a weekend (and a town) of paradoxes.

Kirk Kunihiro and Huy Ngoc-Quang Tran’s Discard, a (functional) trash receptacle inspired by regeneration.

Artist Greg Haberny (left) and the event’s organizers, including Tao Ruspoli (above), hope the arts community will bring attention to local social and environmental issues.

Left: Foundation Foundation is the Biennale’s first permanent addition to the town of Bombay Beach.

Vera Sola, a haunting, velvet-voiced folksinger-songwriter (and daughter of Dan Aykroyd), jams with her band through a paneless window frame on Saturday night.

A flexing luchador and hipsters in party dresses crunched across the smelly, bone-carpeted beach to preen on The Water Ain’t That Bad, It’s Just Salty—a submerged steel swing constructed by Chris “Ssippi” Wessman and Damon James Duke.