Wasteland Wonderland

How three renegade curators are building an ethereal world of weirdness on the shores of a man-made lake in a scrappy pocket of the California desert

- Adam Skolnick

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 middleaged 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.