Paul Clemente and the Art of Coachella

Art at Coachella, in Indio, CA, USA, on 15 April, 2016. | Photo: Goldenvoice.

This weekend, thousands of music fans -- flower crowns on their heads -- are descending on the Palm Desert east of Los Angeles for the first weekend of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. The main draw is of course the music, with dozens of acts performing, from reunited crowd-pleasers like Guns N' Roses and LCD Soundsystem, to contemporary acts including Grimes, A$AP Rocky, and CHVRCHES. As the festival's name implies though, art is also a crucial part of the event, and this year, they're stepping up their art game.

What were really trying to do is outdo ourselves from the previous year, Paul Clemente, the art director for the festival, told me. (Clemente is also on the board of Desert X, a multi-venue exhibition in the desert beginning next year.) This year, we went in a bit of a different direction. Wed been using a group of artists for a handful of years, commissioning new work from them. We love all of those artists and we did a lot of great projects, but we wanted to try and look for some new ideas and to do that we went outside of our normal circle of artists, and outside this part of the country.

Art at Coachella, in Indio, CA, USA, on 15 April, 2016. | Photo: Goldenvoice.

As part of this search, Clemente and his team travelled to art fairs, biennials, and artists' studios all over the world, from Venice to Havana, Mexico to Arkansas. They also changed the selection process. Previously, Clemente -- who has worked on the festival for over a decade -- would cast a wide net, accepting proposals from as many as 250 artists each year, ultimately picking only about six or seven projects. This meant potentially frustrating a number of good artists who were going through a lot of work to submit year after year without being chosen. Going forward, Clemente will make a short list with his colleagues of 15 or 16 artists, getting proposals from them, and picking from this more selective pool.

Another change this year is that the festival will be in charge of fabrication for almost all of the large-scale pieces, no small feat when every piece this year is the biggest piece that any of these artists has ever done by far, according to Clemente. Since January, they've been collaborating with local companies Rice Construction and White's Steel to bring the artists' visions to life, going so far as to build a temporary fabrication and carpentry shop on site. Although design, planning and fabrication can take months, they only had 11 days to install everything on the festival grounds before the gates opened. Clemente is well-suited to this kind of high-pressure production, having worked in visual effects for the film industry for 18 years, on blockbusters like The Matrix and Titanic. What were doing here is very similar to that world, in that we are building something for the first and only time, using a variety of different materials and processes, and having to do it safely, Clemente told me.

Armpit art at Coachella, in Indio, CA, USA, on 15 April, 2016. | Photo: Goldenvoice.

This year's project ranges from over-the-top festival spectacles that would fit in on the playa of Burning Man like Robert Bose's Balloon Chain and the Cirque du Soleil-esque Lucent Dossier Experience, to work by artists who have a closer connection to the rarified world of museums and galleries. This provides a unique challenge: appealing to a crowd of thousands of revelers instead of the well-mannered, erudite clique who are most at home in the white cube.

Latvian duo Katr na Neiburga and Andris Egl tis are recreating Armpit, a work that was originally shown last year at the Venice Biennale, perhaps the epitome of high art exclusivity. The piece was inspired by a sample of vernacular architecture with local character -- the Soviet era co-ops of private garages whose owners have adapted them for the hybrid use as workshops-cum-dachas, as their website states. Inside a ramshackle building built from reclaimed materials, multiple screens will show atmospheric videos of men in their home-workshops.

I think this work is very human, Egl tis told me when I reached the couple via Skype. In Venice, a lot of people who saw it, they understood everything as we meant it to be. Maybe it's even harder with curators and art critics.

Tower of Twelve Stories at Coachella, in Indio, CA, USA, on 15 April, 2016. | Photo: Goldenvoice.

Although they come from the fine art world, their background is not wholly antithetical to the music scene. Neiburga has designed sets for theater and opera, as well as created videos for Latvian pop groups, though she confided, we are not festival people. When we heard Coachella wanted us to come, we were like, hmmm, interesting. What is Coachella?' We didnt know anything about this festival.

Unlike some of the other works that are made specifically to appeal to massive throngs, admittance to the Armpit will be limited to 30 people at a time, so they can experience it more freely and intimately, said Egl tis. It will be like an oasis of peace.

Jimenez Lai, of L.A.-based architecture and design firm Bureau Spectacular, has also designed a kind of bulding, albeit one that has to be appreciated from the outside. Titled Tower of Twelve Stories, it is a 52-foot tall sculptural installation featuring a stack of cartoonish wooden bubbles, onto which colored lights are projected. Lai told me he was inspired by an article he had read written by superstar architect Rem Koolhaas.

Tower of Twelve Stories at Coachella, in Indio, CA, USA, on 14 April, 2016. | Photo: Goldenvoice.

He was talking about the qualities of a typical plan, talking about flexibility and repeatability, the plan with no character, Lai told me. In my mind, the plan with

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