Location: Joshua Tree, CA and environs
Date of Completion: 2019 – 2021
Program: Experimental event/publication project
Scope: 12 site-specific “issues”
Cost of Work: est. $12,500
The project officially known as KEEPITDIRTY.ORG/VOLUME2, but also referred to as “Keep it Dirty, Volume 2” or simply Volume 2, is a proposed second volume for the online multimedia journal Keep It Dirty, also known as KEEPITDIRTY.ORG.
KEEPITDIRTY.ORG launched in November 2014 as the platform for a weekly single-installment publication, which features prose, poetry, photography, and performance pieces. Content follows a few broad themes, including “a wringing out of the purposive guilt from the cause of the environment, while calling for a full-hearted embrace of everything we do bad, for good,” and “inaction, in action.”
The broad framework of the website has fostered a uniquely vibrant multi-media discourse about ourselves, our bodies, and the exploration of their variegated interactions with the earth, environment, our belongings, and each other. Expanding upon the collaborative potential generated by its website’s free-associating and literalist approach to content production, Keep It Dirty now endeavors to launch a second “IRL” volume, to be published in parallel with its existing online platform.
Like its original volume, Keep it Dirty, Volume 2 will follow an affiliative model for content production, soliciting prospective submissions from established collaborators as well as the general public. The project will feature (“publish”) twelve works (“issues”), installed independently, over twelve approximately consecutive, approximately month-long periods.
Works published in Volume 2 is to include prose, poetry, sound, moving images, sculpture, and live or pre-recorded performance, executed onsite. For our purposes, let the sanctioning power for such execution be considered what constitutes the editorial framework for the volume. Therefore, in the framework of Keep it Dirty, Volume 2 “published work” shall entail any undertaking, material or abstract, whose manifest presence has been facilitated by its editorial activities.
To Keep It Dirty‘s existing engagement with new forms of solidarity with each other and our planet, executed around ideas of soil, water, filth, and cleanliness, Keep it Dirty, Volume 2 adds new paradigms considerate of place, community, commodities, and their impact on our landscapes and ontology. Concomitantly, in addition to amplifying the online journal’s unique multi-media framework and basic, iterative publishing style with new, material and performance-based dimensions, the second volume also insights engagements of transit, procession, and locality, as generative modalities for the production literature, social commentary, or political discourse.
It is presently planned for the activities of Volume 2 to be conducted in purpose-built structure, in the high Mojave Desert, about 150 miles from Los Angeles. Design and construction of the Volume 2 space will be conducted by HAHA.
The Morongo Basin has been selected as a site because of its remote beauty and unique history. Among the last regions in the country affected by the Homestead Acts, many thousands of acres of this 450-square-mile community were distributed in small tracts (2.5-10 acres) between the end of the Second World War and the completion of the program in 1970. To this day the basin floor is littered with thousands of abandoned small structures, constructed at that time to secure free title to allotments of government land, distributed via lottery. These shacks and cabins are an inescapable part of the landscape, and a powerful reminder of the ecological impact of the Jeffersonian ideal of small-scale land ownership as a cornerstone to healthy democratic governance. Joshua Tree National Park occupies the southern portions of the basin, which is also home to the Noah Purifoy Outdoor Art Museum and Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center. The region lies within four hours’ drive of over 30 million people and attracts about 2 million tourists annually.
The planned opening of this project in late 2019 is intended to coincide with the foundation of REBOOT, a new media imprint in development with punctum books. It is expected that “Volume 2” will model the work of the imprint to follow. This is part of its purpose, as well as its context.