But is it Art?
By Jesse McKinnell
The first Installation was discovered on a sweltering day in early-July. Locals say that Hubert Dotter's old Chevy pickup was left abandoned by the side of Route 10 for two days before he was reported missing. The Texas Rangers, with their horses, their shiny badges and black guns hanging loosely from their oversized belts, scoured the barren landscape on horseback in shifts of two for eighteen hours following Hubert's loose trail of fur traps, some still full with large jack rabbits, slowly dying in the heat. By the time they arrived at the Installation the buzzards had picked Hubert clean and the ravens were circling for scraps.
Art history professors have taken to referring to Installations One through Three in almost primitive terms; created before care was taken to ensure the work was being properly preserved. They suck on their teeth, tsking away in front of their masses of unwashed students, thumb circling their laser pointers, as they point out how the Artist is speaking to permanence or impermanence or the beauty of the surrounding mountains or the savagery of nature or the frailty of the human race or the blending of man and machine.
Hubert, who never bothered to graduate from Jeff Davis High School or step outside of the state of Texas or into a museum or an art gallery, never planned on becoming one of the most famous men in the world. Posthumously, of course. Ten biographies, all of them NY Times Best Sellers, were penned only to discover the middle twenty-five years of Hubert's life were spent shuffling back and forth between the small trailer he shared with his sister and the fur traps he scattered haphazardly through the surrounding sand.
Meticulous forensic reconstructions of Hubert's final hours have concluded that early in the morning of July 1st, he left his sister asleep, rumbled his ancient Chevy to the scenic turnoff after mile marker 135, shuffled his diabetic nerve pain through the dust and into history. He checked somewhere between six and ten of his traps, collected two large pelts, then stumbled upon the Site just as the sun was beginning to crack the horizon, and became the first Exhibit.
Of course, the police, perched high on their horses and philistines to their core, did not recognize the majesty confronting them. They strung up their gauche yellow tape, spit their chew into the sand, and spoke solemnly into their walkie-talkies referring to the Site as a "crime scene."
The second Installation was completed barely an hour after the cops discovered Hubert. A young officer, named Edgar Wilson, walking backwards with a string, measuring the circumference of Installation One, misstepped and was exhibited. The police draped Installation Two in a dark black tarp and removed their personnel from the scene. The rudimentary attempt at preservation kept the desert animals at bay, but was far below standards of even the most laissez-faire public art curator.
Installation Three was completed in the early morning hours of America's birthday, two days after Installation Two. Janice Beale, a forensic crime scene scientist, and unknowing sculptural pioneer, became the first female Exhibit on the Site. Critics have noted her long hair, swaying in the wind, gives the viewer a sense of vitality, unique amongst the Installations.
After Janice was installed, the Site was cordoned off all the way back to Route 10 and law enforcement personnel were evacuated to the pavement. NASA's drones were called and the latest in radar and sonic technology was used to chart the Site, searching for signs of the Artist's tools hidden underneath the sand. They found only a handful of coyote skeletons.
It was after Installation Three that the unique glory of the Site was first uncovered by the art world. Due to budgetary cutbacks, necessitated by the slow death of the old media, the New York Time's junior art critic, Madeleine Pierce, was dispatched to Texas. By writ of efficiency, and as a way to pay her considerable student debt, she had agreed to cover both the paper's Southwest crime beat and the Brooklyn Pike Park gallery scene.
Ms. Pierce arrived on July 5th to write an article on the mysterious "murders" in the desert. She took advantage of the misguided, and since discarded policy of enabling a free press, and was presented with a police escort to the exact location of the Site. More details than are necessary for these purposes can be found in the numerous works on the Site Ms. Pierce has since published. For the sake of summation, suffice it to say that she immediately recognized the Site's savage beauty and artistic merit. It was her initial set of ten photographs, published in the Sunday, July 8th edition of the Times, on the front page of the Life and Style section that tipped off the art world that the most significant artistic movement since impressionism was afoot in deeply red, rural Texas.
The police read papers too. After the article, they beefed up their perimeter around the Site, they went on the news in their most serious faces with their manliest mustaches and their whitest cowboy hats, and they warned the public of the mystery and the danger. They said the Site was not a cultural marvel for all to behold, they said it was a graveyard, they said to stay away.
Nevertheless, they came undeterred. They came in pairs, in groups, in open-toed shoes, in flow-y floral patterned adult rompers, in large flat brimmed hats, in skinny dark jeans, in jangly gold bracelets, in handmade denim overalls tucked into meticulous cowboy boots. They rented up all of the cars from the El Paso airport and they drove to mile-marker 135.
In hundreds, they shuffled through the sand, face down, ignoring the tumbleweeds, as they scrolled through their smart phones, pouring over the hand drawn maps they had purchased on the dark web. They scrambled up hills made of limestone and peered down at the Site with their binoculars and high powered cameras. They published their pictures on Instagram using #Installation. Their pictures filled up with likes and their friends bought plane tickets. They waited on those loose hills until they were out of mineral water and it was dark and the police retreated back to their homes. Then they flowed out of their hiding spots like rivers out of mountains, spilling over their banks with curiosity.
Five more Installations were added from the initial wave of visitors.
In August, the popular subreddit, r/Installation, revealed the land underneath and on top of the site was owned by a family of cattle ranchers. Within three days the ranchers had sold their rights to Simon Augustas Furman, a German national, with a private collection rumored to be worth more than $250 million. He purchased the family's hundred acres for $3 million in cash, instantly pushing his net worth upwards of $10 billion. The land surrounding Furman's hundred acres was quickly parceled off by other enterprising farmers at the rich price of $1 million per half acre. They found no shortage of buyers.
Overrun, and out of ideas, the police retreated back to their offices and drug busts and prostitution stings and speeding tickets. The airlines tripled their flights into El Paso. Furman built a private airstrip. The locals established taco and flavored ice stands in the desert. Contractors built yurts on the side of the highway and rented them for rates that would make a five-star in Manhattan blush. And the Site grew, year over year, with Components firing out of the sand, immortalizing an average of five tourists per year.
Today, the hundred and thirty-five miles of road between El Paso and the Site contains seventy-three Starbucks, seventeen Apple stores, two Olive Gardens, an amusement park with the tallest Ferris wheel in the Western Hemisphere, and sixty-seven Exhibits.
Locals, such as they are, sit in miserly circles, drinking water-y macchiatos, lamenting as cars full of bright-faced sea-boarders speed past.
They look at each other and say things like:
- "I miss the old days when there was nothing here but dust."
- "I heard they had to open up a third landfill to keep up."
- "I heard there isn't enough water to make it through another summer."
- "Can you believe almond milk is still $0.50 extra?"