Private Views: Notes from Reno

Greetings from the high desert, as the immortal broadcaster Art Bell once said. This month, I was in northern Nevada for the Nevada Museum of Art’s triennial Art + Environment Summit, a heady three-day gathering in Reno bringing together artists, scholars and writers for talks and performances on concepts like time, the Anthropocene, environmental stewardship and art as a mediator for solutions. 

The event started with an excursion to Pyramid Lake, a prehistoric lake northeast of Reno that is the ancestral home of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, who call it Kooyooe Pa'a Panunadu (Lake of the Cui-ui Fish). Its ‘colonial’ name came in 1844, when John C. Frémont, an American politician and explorer who charted the Great Basin region, arrived at the lakeshore and saw a monumental, toothlike limestone tower in the distance.

En route, we pass other sites, like a phallic rock nicknamed after the Paiute slang for penis, our guide tells us. There is a series of hot springs where alligators were once farmed for their leather; the flock didn’t survive long in the desert climate. Alfalfa grows well in the region; it’s like “crack cocaine” for the animals, he adds. There’s also a smokeshop that does “more than 85 percent” of its annual business during Burning Man. But as we approach the lake, the conversation takes a more sombre turn.

The Great Basin spans around 518,000 sq km and is the largest endorheic basin in North America, meaning that its water doesn’t flow into the ocean but evaporates into vast lakebeds and playas, where rich lithium deposits have formed. In the state of Nevada, the Bureau of Land Management has approved several lithium extraction projects, like Thacker Pass on the Nevada–Oregon border, which are aimed at reducing reliance on foreign lithium, a critical component of the kind of battery required by electric vehicles. But such sites are sacred to tribes, and lithium processing carries risks of air and water contamination.

Timothy O'Sullivan, Rock Formations, Pyramid Lake, Nevada (Site #79-33), Second View Rephotographic Survey Project Portfolio, 1867 (printed 1984-85), gelatin silver print, 15.2 x 21 cm. © Collection of Nevada Museum of Art, The Altered Landscape, Carol Franc Buck Collection

There are striking photographs of Pyramid Lake in the museum’s Altered Landscape collection that give insight into what the nineteenth-century frontiersmen saw in northern Nevada. Some of the earliest were captured by the government photographer Timothy O’Sullivan during the mid-1860s. Later works like Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe’s Panorama from O’Sullivan’s ‘Pyramid Lake’ Camera Position (2000) show the extent of environmental change over the last two centuries. Since O’Sullivan’s survey of Pyramid Lake, the water level has dropped more than 18 metres. The oceanic landscape is a spectre of its former self.

It’s a common misconception that there’s ‘nothing’ in the desert. This sense of emptiness makes it more surprising that the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center, a series of windowless data centres for companies like Tesla and Google, is so close to the city. Beyond this data corridor, there’s an area reputed for meth cooking. As we drove through, we saw police violently ejecting a person from their car. One of us wonders aloud whether that person was trespassing or cooking meth. These data centres, and the taquerias and gas stations around them, didn’t exist a decade ago. They’re fenced-off, imposing and opaque structures; some are privately owned and no one knows what’s inside. The scene could be in Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1982). You could almost hear the Philip Glass score.

The publicist assures us that none of the museum’s trustees are involved in the data centre business, which seems surprising given how the buildings completely engulf the area.

During the mid-2010s, the Nevada Museum of Art and the architect Rem Koolhaas of OMA developed a proposal in collaboration with Switch, which builds and operates hyperscale data centres, to create infrastructure within the data corridor to expand the museum’s Center for Art + Environment, an initiative launched in 2009 by the writer William L. Fox, my all-time favourite author, who has written extensively about art in the Great Basin, including Michael Heizer’s work on the landscape. At the time, when asked about the implications of merging these two disparate entities, the museum’s director, David Walker, allegedly framed it as an opportunity that had presented itself, and why not make the best of it?

A mismatch in expectations, financial setbacks and other logistical challenges were cited by the museum as reasons why the project was never realised. Someone tells me that Koolhaas delivered a talk at a previous Summit in which he pointed to a Switch-made building as an example of ‘banal architecture’, offending the wife of an executive. Nonetheless, the failed proposal speaks to the institution’s visionary spirit and its willingness to think expansively. It’s a museum of dualities, which can invoke Burning Man ephemera and a world-class collection in the same breath, and that considered a partnership with a tech giant not as something to be demonised or dismissed but as an interesting idea worth pursuing.

We arrive at the museum for a walkthrough of Into the Time Horizon with the curator Apsara DiQuinzio. The exhibition fills all the galleries of the 11,148 sqm museum, which most of us (including me) are seeing either for the first time ever or since its $60 million expansion was unveiled last year. The exhibition examines themes like climate change and long-term human survival through the work of nearly 200 artists, including a significant number of Indigenous artists from the US, Canada, Australia and South America.

The exhibition delivers everything you want from the theme, from monumental Aboriginal dot paintings by Lily Kelly Napangardi, to images of pollution and mining and the lasting effects of human intervention on the land, like Kim Stringfellow’s photograph of Southern California’s Salton Sea, and more conceptual works like El Anatsui’s monumental sculpture of found aluminium and copper wire that evokes the undulations of the earth.

Kim Stringfellow, Abandoned Trailer, Bombay Beach, CA, 2000/printed 2009, chromogenic print, 77.5 x 96.5 cm. © Nevada Museum of Art, the Altered Landscape Carol Franc Buck Collection. Courtesy the artist

While it is an incredible showcase of the museum’s collection and curatorial focus, a few critics were ambivalent, arguing that the messaging of the exhibition felt overly explicit. A mention of the biodegradable ink used for the wall labels was another point of contention. “This whole ‘listen to the Earth’ thing does nothing for me,” one said. “I’m also not going to judge an exhibition based on how sustainable the signage is.”

Time moves slowly in the desert. The summit began later that afternoon with a talk by Jonathan Keats on his work Centuries of the Bristlecone, a project on long-term view (until 5025) made in collaboration with the clockmakers Phil Abernethy and Brittany Cox over the course of 11 years. The work is based on the idea of trees as “natural calendars”, Keats said. “We live more in ‘bristlecone time’ than this artificial time that we’ve constructed.” It’s fascinating but fails to win over critics like the aforementioned, one who exits the room. One of the founders of Burning Man is at the summit the following morning, and we all listen intently as the science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson speaks about his vision for a more equitable and sustainable future.

During lunch, the group turns to the precarity of artworld jobs and how many people have recently lost theirs, and what art publications treat people better. Then the conversation shifts to the Las Vegas Museum of Art, originally developed by the Nevada Museum of Art, but stalled when its director, Heather Harmon, left the project. Harmon later revived the museum in collaboration with the late collector Elaine Wynn and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, entering an agreement that will see the Las Vegas site act like a satellite to LACMA, borrowing works from its collection. But the lack of a standalone collection means that the museum “can’t properly serve the community that way,” someone tells me, citing this concern.

Then, another writer makes brings up an odd point: they are glad Olafur Eliasson wasn’t part of the main exhibition. “Artists who sometimes seem like the obvious fit for an ecology show are actually the opposite,” they note. In an exhibition at SFMOMA in 2007, Eliasson transformed a BMW race car into a vehicle coated in layers of ice that allegedly required so much energy that the museum had to buy an extra generator to keep the ice from melting for the year-long duration of the exhibition. 

There was a dinner at collectors Pamela Joyner and Fred Giuffrida’s home near Lake Tahoe, which is packed wall-to-wall with art. There’s a Martin Puryear in the foyer, a recently purchased Kennedy Yanko suspended from the ceiling of the living room, a monumental 360kg Mark Bradford hanging at the centre of the dining room and a bathroom full of Julie Mehretus. There are 300 works installed throughout the house, and most are largescale. I talked to a chic Seattle collector whose most recent purchase was from a gallery that represents a sculptor who’d asked me out on a date not long before. She texts his dealer to see if he’s a nice guy and they text back right away with glowing reviews.

Lily Kelly Napangardi, Tali (Sandhills), 2007, synthetic polymer paint on linen, 152.4 x 152.4 cm. Nevada Museum of Art, gift of Debra and Dennis Scholl. © Lily Kelly Napangardi | Aboriginal Artists Agency

On the final day, Jeffrey Gibson moderated a powerful talk with fellow artists Judith Lowry, Jack Malotte and Lawrence Paul Yuxwelupton; all have works in the main exhibition. The talk aimed to unpack the concept of ‘Indigenous Futures’, with participants citing seismic events that have shaped their lives and will affect future generations. “It takes time to heal the world,” Malotte said. “It takes around 2,000 to 3,000 years for a tree to mature. Does the planet have that much time?” Gibson tries to put a hopeful spin on the conversation, but there doesn’t seem to be one. 

I leave the summit inspired, with new friends and reading material, but no firm conclusions. The scale of what was discussed resists closure. Two things stuck with me: the oldest known petroglyphs in North America are near Pyramid Lake, but no one is allowed to go there because we can’t stop people from carving their names on the art; and how everyone who goes to Burning Man still seems to have a great time, despite sceptics on the outside disparaging it for becoming too shallow and commercialised and for committing the ultimate sin of embracing tech bros. A fun fact is that the museum’s director was a founding board member of the festival; another is that the festival has a board. 

It can be easy to think about these things and slip into cynicism, as critics like us are prone to do. “What’s the point?” one writer asks me. I think the point isn’t resolution but an honest attempt to consider the complexity of nature without flattening it. The ‘bigger picture’, and our role in it, is much more esoteric than anyone can illuminate in a lifetime, much less over the course of a three-day summit, a week-long festival or through an exhibition. The desert makes that clear: meaning arrives slowly, if at all, and only in fragments that are constantly changing. And the point may be to keep noticing them anyway.

Gabriella Angeleti is an arts and culture writer based in Brooklyn. She was born in Rio de Janeiro, raised in Las Vegas and has an MA from City University in London. She was a staff writer and editor for The Art Newspaper for nearly a decade and is a regular contributor there and other international publications like The Financial Times, The World of Interiors, Elephant, Artnet, Southwest Contemporary and Artsy.