Quill, ink, thorn intro

Samia Henni’s book Deserts Are Not Empty begins with the following: “Among the most common platitudes about the desert are ideas that ‘deserts are empty,’ that ‘the desert is absent of life,’ or that ‘there is nothing at all in the desert.’ This misleading conceptualization of the desert has served to legitimize its transformation, manipulation, toxification, and destruction.”^* Henni’s introduction offers a radical entrypoint into the psychosocial construction of desert land as free, empty space – the substrate upon which countless histories of exploitation in desert territories have been written.

The two largest deserts in the Southern California region are the Mojave and Colorado Deserts. Ancestral and contemporary homelands of the Cahuilla, Serrano, Chemehuevi, Quechan, and Mohave peoples, these deserts cover roughly 25 million acres – 23% of the state. Though distinct from one another (via geographical factors of elevation and precipitation, cultural factors in the division of “High Desert” and “Low Desert,” and histories of Indigenous presence), both deserts have become subsumed by the settler-colonial consciousness of The Desert: a constructed archetype of terra nullius against which all other forms of land are perennially measured.

Four Quick Points of History
Aggressive, industrial-scale development in Californian deserts was jumpstarted by the Gold Rush in the mid- to late-1800s. Mining in the Mojave and Colorado for gold, copper, gypsum, borax, and salt became one of the first indications of a growing paradox. The desert, full of resources to extract, was simultaneously empty and available for the destructive processes of extraction. 

In Southern California, histories of desert exploitation engage two main colonial traditions to realize this paradox: a physical remaking of land, and its constant conceptual re-envisioning.^◊ Commercial, aesthetic, governmental, and military agents have employed these tactics for decades, legitimizing this dangerous psychosocial construction in the pursuit of capital. In just a few examples:

[1]
As of 2024, over 12,000 acres of Mojave Desert land has been purchased by automobile companies for off-road vehicle testing. Roughly 4,200 acres are privately owned by Hyundai Motor Group alone. Throughout the year, SUVs spin across this swath of “Mojave Proving Ground” and rumble over rich ecosystems of interlinked human, animal, plant, and microbiological lives. The ongoing efforts of primarily upper and upper-middle class Los Angeles urbanites, venture capitalists, and real estate corporations to Airbnb-ify desert land are similarly, if less directly, violent. The rapid conversion of housing tracts into short-term rental properties operates at a staggering pace, particularly in communities such as Joshua Tree and Yucca Valley. As these permanent residents are primarily working class, they are subject to socioeconomic-based displacement; yet as primarily white settlers, they are simultaneously agents in the ongoing colonial project of the United States of America to kick Indigenous people off of their ancestral lands.^** While trading in multilayered histories of colonialism, this process drives up housing, food, and utility costs across the board.

[2]
Heir to those same colonial processes, architectural development throughout Southern California has been pitted in a race against the desert. Idealized throughout High and Low Desert communities and historically archetyped in Palm Springs, the ‘SoCal Aesthetic’ has developed construction models that include two key components: a pool and a lawn. Chlorinated, concrete pits and the Day-Glo green of freshly-watered grass are seen as antidote to the sand of the desert.^*** Their wheezing, mechanical maintenance is perpetually thrumming with fear of its reemergence. As suburbia beats back the desert’s physical nature with backhoes and vinyl hoses, it villainizes the desert’s very classification as a habitable landscape. Extensive and expensive development projects become requirements to life.

[3]
“Nature-oriented” federal protectionist projects, like the establishment of Joshua Tree National Park, further that same agenda. Operating from a position of false benevolence, governmental environmentalism becomes an additional agent of the terra nullius narrative. The artificial construction of “pristine” natural spaces inherently separates people from land. In 1995, historian William Cronon termed this process “The Trouble with Wilderness,” a system operating through the logic of “quietly express[ing] and reproduc[ing] the very values its devotees seek to reject [...] wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside of the natural. If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true, must also be wild, then our very presence in nature represents its fall. The place where we are is the place where nature is not.”^**** Constructing the desert as a space external to human existence makes the exploitation of the desert similarly impersonal. The establishment of dedicated protected zones legitimizes the role of exploited zones.

[4]
Range 220, the newest live-fire and full-immersion training complex at the Marine Corps Twentynine Palms base, exemplifies both the physical and conceptual exploitation inherent in the American psychosocial construction of The Desert. The globe’s largest Marine base, the Twentynine Palms complex occupies Serrano, Chemehuevi, Cahuilla and Mohave land, with petroglyph records and historical sites found within the base’s footprint. Throughout decades of militarization of the Mojave, the United States government has rehearsed warfare in Southern California for current and future engagements in northern Africa and the Middle East. To be clear, “Engagements” of this context refers to ongoing processes of imperialism and international destabilization sanctioned by the global expansion of U.S. military presence. The Department of Defense justifies its occupation and militarization of Indigenous land through the assertion that all desert territories are interchangeable backdrops. Through processes that scholar Brahim El Guabli terms “Saharanism,” deserts are “conceptualized as desolate, devoid of life and even dangerous, [...] offer[ing] unlimited tracts of disposable land that can be used by self-serving regimes of governance.”^***** The area of the Mojave occupied by the Department of Defense has become a universalized playset for both perpetrating and practicing Western expansionism.

An Artistic-Touristic Past and Present
These processes of resource allocation, itinerant rental construction, militarization, and the negotiation around human/non-human spaces are dicated, in large part, by the consistent and insidious ebb and flow of capital within desert territories. It is through examining tourism – a renewing, protean factor remarkably responsible for driving fresh economic traffic to the Mojave and Colorado deserts, year-over-year and decade-over-decade – that we can best understand what directs this flow. 

For quick context, tourism is intimately fingerprinted in one of the greatest disasters in Californian desert history: the wholecloth conjuring of an ocean in the middle of the Colorado Desert’s Imperial Valley. The mid-twentieth century saw the repackaging of the Salton Sea, initially engineered in 1901 as an agricultural water resource, into a luxe resort destination. Surrounding communities sprang up in short order, driven by the economic incentive of hotels and their increased demand for hospitality workers. When this “desert sea” began to experience horrific salinization and mass wildlife deaths due to agricultural runoff, resort tourism plummeted. Many of those who had packed up their lives to establish new ones in the supposed oasis could no longer afford to move away. Unfortunately, modern resuscitation efforts only furthered this legacy of harm. Improvements in water reclamation have begun draining the Sea, leading to greater lakebed exposure and dispersal of toxic particle pollutants into those same surrounding communities. Additionally, the recent discovery of rich lithium deposits under the Sea is a likely forewarning of future exploitation via dangerous mineral extraction processes. The story of the Salton Sea is far from over.

But today, desert tourism is of a slightly different flavor.

Haunted by LA’s status as a global epicenter for contemporary art, the landscape is dominated by the specter of art tourism. Over the past two decades, art-oriented tourists have created exhibition systems like Desert X and popularized events like the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival that cascade with self-fulfilling prophecy. The deserts of Southern California have metamorphosed into an Art Mecca. Modern desert art tourism exerts a seemingly magnetic pull; LA urbanites pack themselves and both the I-10 and Route 62 freeways in bumper-to-bumper traffic for days on end. They champ at the bit for price-gouged gas and overstuff motels and (of course) Airbnbs to bursting multiple times a year.

The primary lens through which to make sense of this is what I term the artist’s imaginary. A cosmological, often-noble force referring to the synthesis of the internal creative space and the outside world, the artist’s imaginary is more than the process of artmaking. It is creativity as a function of constructing existence; the process by which internal considerations on the nature of Art and Artist are brought into harmony with the external, shared World.

However, I contend that within the context of the desert, the artist’s imaginary tends to operate along a unilateral and destructive pipeline: The artist is inspired by The Desert’s percieved emptiness and quiet -> the artist uses that inspiration to create and site art in the empty Desert -> the inspired artist engages in physical remaking and conceptual re-envisioning of The Desert.

Does that last part sound familiar?^◊

The paradoxical, psychosocial construction of the desert originates with the pursuit of capital. If art tourism is now dictating the flow of capital into the desert, capital-a Art is inherently implicated in that construction. These two points bring us directly to the questions that gave rise to this book. At the forefront: how does contemporary art fit into the ongoing psychosocial construction of The Desert? How does it function, why does it function, and what does it say? And, further: in constructing histories of desert environments, is art – and those who make it – part of the problem? Is there a problem at all?

This book has been designed to encourage you to decide for yourself. 

The Book
The title of Quill, Ink, Thorn refers to the methods – historical record, artistic representation, and physical violence – through which Californian desert histories have been primarily established. It also refers to the overlapping circles – writing, art, and the physical landscape – that have become primary mediums for the telling of those histories. In the following pages, you will encounter photo work, interviews, excerpts of novels, documentation of sculptural and installation artworks, military photography, quotes from reporters, film stills, philosophical writings, and more.

Organized around five central thematic poles – Saharanist militarization, architectural exploitation, the human body and the land, resource extraction, and Indigeneity – the chosen works bridge a vast and disparate network of writers, artists, and individuals. While most artworks and writings are grounded in the history and context of this specific area, the book also includes less-concrete references that seek to emphasize the larger psychic fabric within which the concept of The Desert takes form. The inherent interconnectivity of these themes is central; these five poles are not mutually exclusive, but are often mutually reinforcing.

The arangement of the works is a product of deep consideration on how to tell a story about the deserts of Southern California. Many of the chosen juxtapositions reference a direct connection between the immediately preceding and following pages. Regardless, each work is linked to every other. The totality of the works accumulates as layers upon layers of sedimentary history. The following is one of many possible storytellings.


As a note, the space in which you read this book will undoubtedly transform its effect. There are many envisioned reading spaces that might activate or emphasize particular understandings. Regardless of the book’s physical location, it has been designed to afford a reader provisional access to existing conversations on conceptualizing The Desert.

[Initially written 2024, revised 2026]