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A thing is a slow event.
—Stanley Eveling1
Drive out into the desert and everything slows down: the air around you, the wheels of your car against the ground as it switches from asphalt to sand, time itself. Google Maps insists that you're still on the grid, but immediately all the lines start to warp; when you decelerate, everything starts to reveal nonlinearities.
A strange place to find a book, much less a library, even one such as this. The African American artist Noah Purifoy's The Library of Congress (1990) (fig. 1) is one of approximately thirty works that compose the ten-acre space of the Noah Purifoy Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Art in Joshua Tree, California.2 The museum consists of a wide range of found-object junk sculptures by Purifoy, all deeply enmeshed within the space of the desert. Situated in the open air of Joshua Tree, each work is installed on the desert floor without protective walls or ceiling. The museum is open from sunup to sundown, 365 days a year. There is no entry booth, no fee, no barrier separating the museum from the space around it, no forward-facing staff as such—just a single trifold pamphlet to guide visitors as they wander through the space. The experience of this wandering is surreal and uncanny, the timeless, inhuman landscape covered with the decaying detritus of the human-built environment.
Many of Purifoy's works are large, capable of towering over or subsuming the human form: Sculpture Defined (1989–90), for example, is a twenty-four-foot-tall framework of water pipes, ladders, shovels, and other materials welded together; San Francisco–Oakland Bridge (1990), an assemblage of three ladder-like frames, is thirty feet tall at its highest point, connected by metal wire and cabling; and The White House (1991–93) is a twenty-by-twenty-by-forty-foot structure of discarded building material, logs, toilets, and statues, all painted white. The Library of Congress, by contrast, is more modest in size and scope, consisting of a rectangular
wooden frame on the desert floor, roughly eight by fifteen feet, weathered into irregularity. Within the frame are two threadbare easy chairs, their backs to a rusted stove with a shining steel chimney, facing a vertical grid of warped wire covered with tattered cloth, a porous demarcation...