Shimmers in the desert

A small fleet of black motorcycles hovers beside a saloon on the outskirts of Twentynine Palms. It’s the week of the Laughlin River Run -- a ritual of bikers ripping across the desert to the Nevada gambling town -- and the bar is filled with sunburned guys who could play guitar for ZZ Top. Cattle skulls hang from the walls.

But it’s not all desert rats at the Palms today, as three young artists, a Los Angeles art dealer in tinted shades and a zine queen file into the bar, which seems impossibly dark in the afternoon sun. They head for a back room, order cheeseburgers and pour Pabst Blue Ribbon from plastic pitchers.

This crew has come to the Palms seeking something more than blue-collar chic. They’re planning the opening-night party for a desert art extravaganza, with a guest list of artists, collectors, curators and critics.

A waitress in faded jeans materializes to describe the food, drink and entertainment they can expect. “We also have a dunk tank,” she says with enthusiasm. “I don’t know what kind of party you’re having?”

The urbanites, truth be told, are not entirely sure what kind of party they’re having, either. They’re plotting an unusual project: a weekend that’s one part Saturday night in Chinatown, one part Burning Man. They’re calling the whole sprawling array of Earth art, Conceptual art and assemblage -- which runs this weekend at seven sites sprinkled along 60 miles of the Twentynine Palms Highway -- the High Desert Test Sites.

The art dealer in the group is Shaun Regen, whose Regen Projects is one of L.A.’s most cutting-edge galleries. The world of pristine, white-walled, by-appointment spaces, she concedes, can limit what artists produce and exhibit. The Test Sites are “an opportunity to do art in a new way.”

Another organizer, New York- and Joshua Tree-based artist Andrea Zittel, put on the first Test Site event last fall and drew more than 1,000 visitors. The Test Sites are a sign of a slow migration of New York and L.A. artists to the scorching Mojave.

The sites are also the most tangible expression of a move to put the area on the contemporary art world map, even, in the long term, creating an artists colony: Laguna Beach without the ocean, Provincetown without the cape. This weekend shows a new kind of art taking root in the hard desert floor.

Artists and rock climbers

The high desert has a hipness quotient that goes back to country-rock musician Gram Parsons and the longtime presence of artist Ed Ruscha, who has a retreat in the area. An arts council in Joshua Tree supports painters and performers. Rock climbers add outdoor chic. A handful of galleries show traditional landscapes and crafts, and Twentynine Palms has nicknamed itself “Oasis of Murals.”

But it still seems like an unlikely spot for an avant-garde artists’ enclave. It’s a place where barbershops advertise Marine haircuts, where billboards concern holy salvation and teen pregnancy. Amenities are limited, and the creative community is small enough that many of its members, native and newly arrived, eat at a single restaurant, Joshua Tree’s Crossroads Cafe and Tavern.

And that’s the appeal for the new wave of urbanites. They’re looking for an alternative to the high-rent, high-end art scene. Land is cheap -- often less than $1,000 an acre -- and the desert outback conjures up utopian associations.

The desert has a long way to go before it becomes like Laguna in the ‘40s. But Zittel hopes to coordinate an array of artists’ sites every fall and spring, on unused patches of land, most of them far from the main highway. She owns some of the parcels, others are owned by an Ohio collector named Andy Stillpass who bought in out of curiosity over how the experiment will turn out.

Superficially, the spaces resemble outdoor galleries, but Zittel says they’ll be less conventional than that. Besides the catalog -- put together by Lisa Anne Auerbach, who edits the online zine American Homebody -- there will be nothing from the shows to sell.

“It’s more like a place to do experimental artwork, on a really low budget, that doesn’t belong to anyone, that just deteriorates and blows away,” Zittel explained last fall, during the first Test Sites event, walking amid the boulders, yucca plants and creosote bushes outside her own retro-modernist house in Joshua Tree.

Even Regen, whose gallery sells Zittel’s work, says she’s here for noncommercial reasons. “It’s not that expensive; it’s not like you have to underwrite these huge projects,” she says.

One of the sites will feature Noah Purifoy’s compound of folksy, whimsical assemblage art. Purifoy, now in his 80s, was a founder of the Watts Tower Arts Center in the 1960s, but he retreated to the desert in 1989.

Several other established artists are involved in the current project, which includes a video by punk-inflected artist Raymond Pettibon and a painting by New York artist Elizabeth Peyton. But most of the three dozen artists are still breaking through. A few live in the area, but most are New York and L.A. residents who’ve recently graduated from art school and joined the project because they knew Zittel or another organizer. So far, there’s a let’s-put-on-a-show spirit to the whole thing.

“I don’t know if we can keep it this open in the future,” says Zittel, who explains that the show isn’t curated. “We wanted to be democratic. But there’ll have to be limitations next time; I just don’t know what they’ll be. I don’t want it to be another Burning Man -- I want it to be a community of artists trying to figure something out.”

Space and freedom

As Thai takeout and bottled beer arrives, about a dozen artists have come to a meeting at Zittel’s house to plan the nuts and bolts of the Test Sites with just a few weeks to go to the opening.

Jedediah Caesar, 29, a sculptor who recently moved from New York to L.A., has come to the desert for the space and the freedom. “Here the parameters are different,” he says, explaining that he sees himself in the homesteader tradition. “The people who came to the West to build a new life were searching for something weird and individual.”

Others speak about following in the footsteps of the Earth art pioneers -- Walter De Maria, best known for 1977’s “Lightning Field” in New Mexico, or Robert Smithson, who set 1970’s “Spiral Jetty” in Utah’s Great Salt Lake. They left the commercial New York gallery world behind to work in the open spaces of the desert and mountain West.

Allen Compton, for instance, a 37-year-old L.A. designer and CalArts alumnus, is intrigued by putting art in unusual environments. He’ll install LED lights in the hills near Joshua Tree National Park to draw attention to their darkness. He hopes to continue working in the high desert.

Tao Urban, an Eagle Rock artist who is a beatific presence in a baseball cap with red flaps, sees the desert as the place for a statement: He’ll build a roofed pavilion with wood seats, and offer huge water bottles from which people can drink. “I went to the tap waters of the three rivers that feed L.A.,” he says. Inspired by California history and Marc Reisner’s water-rights chronicle, “Cadillac Desert,” Urban hopes visitors will reflect on the region’s tortuous water politics.

“I’m interested to see what you can do outside of the institution,” says Colombia-born Giovanni Jance, 33, an Art Center College of Design and USC graduate who, with his dark hair and Lacoste shirt, looks more like a tennis player than a Conceptual artist. He’s driving down a dirt road to the site where he’ll mount an enormous arrow loaded with meaning. The piece, sitting in an empty stretch of desert, will have what he calls spatial and “existential connotations.”

Others are less zealous. Jack Pierson, a New York-based multimedia artist, moved his second home to the high desert in 2000, after a Provincetown cottage grew too expensive. “I thought I was being a real pioneer,” says the red-haired, freckled Pierson. But he promptly bumped into Zittel, an old friend from New York.

Before long, Pierson, who is mounting a large billboard announcing “Silence” on one of the Test Sites, heard that others he knew from New York -- photographer Jennifer Bolande, for instance -- had moved in as well. Unlike Zittel, who’s driven to create community, Pierson moved to the area to get away from all that. He enjoys the hot days and open skies, not the company. “I’m sort of a hermit type,” he says, managing a campy curmudgeonly tone. Pierson’s yard is made up of well-placed cactuses and found objects: bomb crates from the Marine base, a washing machine riddled with bullet holes.

His lifestyle here differs vastly from his time in New York. “I like to play this game of risk in the summer,” he says, squinting in the noonday sun. “How long can I go without going into town? I can live for a week with a dozen eggs and a case of Coke and a bottle of Scotch.”

It’s a time of change

The Crossroads, a healthy, airy place that wouldn’t be out of place in Silver Lake, shows the region’s recent change. It opened in 2000.

“There was a place there called the Winner’s Circle,” Dave Davis, a Joshua Tree developer, says of the cafe’s predecessor, “which all the locals called ‘the Loser’s Circle.’ It was drunks hanging out together. Coming into Joshua Tree now is a new atmosphere -- rock climbers and artists.”

Davis is planning to build two dozen “artists’ residences,” with studio space, in a 7-acre spot nearby.

As it turns out, the rock climbers have their own “test site” ambitions. Ernie Ale, a climber and contractor who lives in Joshua Tree, dreams of an institute of sustainable housing that holds workshops on green architecture. Ale and friends have already begun building homes made of bottles and tires that blend architecture and art.

So far, the gradual arrival of big-city artists, projects like Test Sites and the growth of the local art community are happening mostly separate from each other. Will they cohere?

Some hope they won’t. Christine Carraher, a local environmentalist, saw San Francisco gentrified and worries that the same process could destroy the desert’s idiosyncratic, live-and-let-live culture. “The desert,” she says, “is about emptiness and sparseness.”

Carraher fears that the out-of-town artists will bring more development and higher prices in their wake. “It’s a constant topic of conversation,” she says.

Zittel, for her part, doesn’t think the Test Site artists -- and the attention they’ll attract -- will damage the area. But she does see the newcomers growing more attached to the high desert.

“I want the artists to have a relationship to the place,” Zittel says, explaining that the next series of test sites, in the fall, may include only artists with continuing desert projects. “I want them to be drawn to the area because it has a quality of light they’ve been trying to get, or something. I want to display works that make sense out here.”

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High Desert Test Sites spring event

When: Today until 6 p.m.

Where: Begins at the Projects, 7319 Acoma Trail, Yucca Valley; sites throughout the high desert

Price: Free

Contact: www.highdeserttestsites.com