Zhivago Duncan: Desert Sublime

Of myth and imagination, an interpretation of the artist and his work in the Jordan desert

Zhivago Duncan, Ghost Portrait of the Artist swinging a light in the desert night (2014) Digital C-print. Courtesy of the artist.

Inspired by Zhivago Duncan, with text by Kit Hammonds, curator.

Among a scatter of papers I came across by accident was a handful of photographs, each labeled for the archive of Dr Tiq. While waiting for my own box request, I broke archival protocol, idly flipping the images over to find hand-written notes on the backs, presumably written by the doctor. The first image casually captured a rifle in a dilapidated car interior.

“The harsh rattle of Kalashnikov gun fire and a procession of echoes from nearby cliffs brought me to consciousness by stabbing into my already throbbing skull. While I parsed reality from the troubled dreams, fearful adrenalin took hold that these shots might be directed at the abandoned car that I found myself curled up in. It was not that unusual to hear gunfire in the Jordan’s desert region of Rum. But this seemed to be closer than normal. Reason slowly overtook fear as I remembered this was part of the plan, but still I raised my head cautiously in case a stray bullet found me as its unexpected target.”

The next photographs pictured a paint-splattered canvas, a mechanical horse and an illuminated truck, each standing alone in landscapes of rock and sand. The notes continued:

“Through the dusty glass the light of the stars shone over gloomy sands and rocky outcrops. A couple of hundred meters away was the mob that had brought me here milling around in a halogen oasis cast by the headlamps of a bulldozer. It was an unruly scene and an unruly group of Bedouins and westerners. The lamps created a shooting gallery without walls, the apparent target a lonely looking white panel now splattered with gunshots and paint explosions. The shooter was the artist I had been sent to observe who looked about as American as anyone could in jeans, a t-shirt and a baseball cap, holding the automatic rifle in one hand and a glass in the other poured from at least two bottles further down the track than the one that had urged me to retire, and was responsible for the stiletto pain that passed from the back of my eyes at isometric angles through my brain.”

“The day had been a frenzy of activity without formal break. The artist and his entourage and the local crew had worked as if on a film set, grabbing food on the go, each going about their task to meet the deadline of nightfall. Here the desert was the studio, art not so much in situ as completely outside of it. In preparation I had done some research into other artists working in the vast expanses—mainly Americans—the beat poets and land artists in particular. New to me, the poetic, philosophical and intimate writings and works of Robert Smithson naturally satisfied my bookish curatorial interests. Smithson saw his own distant ‘sites’ in the null industrial hinterlands as condensing a deep past with a science-fiction future. But what was taking place here was different, not merely geographically, but also for the sense of the suspended and isolated present that was being created in the fraction of a second that it takes for a camera shutter to click.“

“As I finally dragged myself out of the car a spry photographer—the French-Morrocan photojournalist Justin Dustin, a man whose demeanour was reminiscent of Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now, came over with another scotch, but all I wanted was water. At the astro-archeological conventions I was more used to attending, I prided myself on the ability to hold my own in receptions and bars. Here I was gravely out of my depth. Even over the short distance, I had to stop twice from a swimming head, and at one point rested on a mechanical children’s ride that sprang into action as I leaned on it, rocking and signing, without reason, in Chinese. It was just one of the set pieces for this shoot that broke down this border where white and red sands met into a disorderly dystopia of cultures. With the gunfire over, the bulldozer was now in operation, pouring sand from its shovel while video images were projected onto cascading walls of sand."

I sat mystified and mesmerized by Dr Tiq’s commentaries. Still waiting for the archivist to return from the storage with my request, I pulled out my phone and, resting on an empty glass display case whose fabric interior had exposed the sun-bleached outlines of the objects that had once sat within, I searched for the doctor to pass the time. Although the Wiki page was little more than a stub, it seemed he had been something of a polymath. While his core discipline was in the alignment of ancient civilizations’ architecture to the stars—the birth of geometry—he had a sideline in reporting on art exhibitions for a local newspaper. Oddly, the search also turned up an obituary dated for only three months prior. One passage caught my attention:

“The respected and widely travelled academic entered into the public eye in his later year through his unusual reporting of cultural events having adopted a Jordanian iteration of the gonzo journalism of the American Hunter S Thompson famed for his “Fear and Loathing’’ series. His frequent collaborations with Justin Dustin, who had originally arrived in Jordan as a photojournalist during the conflicts, were seen as a landmark in liberal reportage. Despite a reputation for provoking the ire of establishments, and for embracing Western conventions, they were now understood as spearheading a local investigation into the fluid, nomadic cultures that exist outside of the urban centers and the modern state."

When the archivist finally appeared with the items I requested, I returned them and began instead to piece together more details of what Dr Tiq had been witness to in the desert. No newspaper report appeared to be produced that I could tell, although their records were also incomplete having been forcibly moved from their headquarters due to political tensions. They did have a number of images that one might assume to be by Justin Dustin rather than a local photographer, framed as they are in the lineage of the American Sublime tradition and doctored with symbols of the United States desert highways. A further name arose, Zhivago, although it was not clear from other fragmentary notes if this was a singular artist or the composite name applied to the crew (given his origins appeared to be a merger of Middle Eastern, European and American at different times). Among Dr Tiq’s notes was a single live round of high caliber ammunition. The paper tag indicated the round to be surplus from the Syrian Civil War, available on the black market in the deserts during the early 2000s. What emerges from the complex of temporary studio of nowhere is still to be defined, but the photographs stand as testament to something that did occur, and is still to be synthesized within a history of art and of the region.

This is a first attempt to reconstruct the events that brought about Zhivago Duncan’s featured works, and capture in spirit, if not always in fact, the circumstances, influences, histories and narratives in which it is situated. These photographs are documents that bear witness to the events that occurred in the Rum Deserts. But they are also part of a story in the making, one whose reality is more fluid and unfixed, but no less truthful. Dr Tiq, Justin Dustin, and other characters populate this alternative history as Zhivago and I elucidate the missing archives, catalogue texts, museum and provenance labels, and reviews. What happened in the Rum deserts is true—but who was there, and which role they played, are details that remains to be written.