Page 23 - C.A.L.L. #41 - Summer 2016

canning, wild food foraging
and huge, hand-knit circular
rugs made from recycled
textiles — the center of one
occupied the cabin in which I
was staying — that piece hadn’t
been dissimilar to the activities
of the young communards.

Haeg’s vision is to bring
together artists whose work, he
says, ‘‘goes beyond
conventional studio practice,’’
and who, rather, are
‘‘responding to wilderness and
the basics of daily life.’’ There is
a sense, as with the original
commune, of a kind of
withdrawal — from the cities,
from the overheated,
rigorously professionalized art
market — if only in the name of
a deeper engagement. Salmon
Creek: the land, the cabins, the
whole temporarily communal
aspect, is at once muse, studio
and exhibition space. It’s not
hard to imagine environmental
Haeg in a cabin at Salmon Creek Farm, California. Photo: Andres Gonzales sculptors like Andy
Goldsworthy, Patrick
Dougherty or David Nash having a field (and stream) day here. Or artists like Andrea Zittel (a friend of
Haeg’s), who is vaguely affiliated with the ‘‘social practice’’ movement, and whose High Desert Test Site
near Joshua Tree National Park is also a place where daily life becomes a ‘‘site of exploration.’’

And so Haeg has invited a young Los Angeles artist named James Herman to turn a huge, burned-out
stump of a redwood into an outdoor shower. The San Diego-based artist Keenan Hartsen, meanwhile, is
building a site-specific xylophone for the sauna so that, as Haeg describes it, ‘‘you can play the
structure.’’ And a Point Reyes-based sculptor, woodworker and abalone diver named Ido Yoshimoto has
been fashioning furniture from the abundant fallen tree matter. Others will work on the future dining hall,
currently staked out with pink ribbon in a clearing next to the meadow.

One spiritual antecedent might be Food, Gordon Matta-Clark’s influential SoHo restaurant-as-
performance-piece, which opened in 1971, the same year as Salmon Creek. Like Matta-Clark, Haeg
wants to essentially curate people, to see what happens when you put them together in a new space. In
the beginning, at least, this was an extended group of his artist friends. Now, though, he’s beginning to
accept letters of interest from students and recent graduates. They will come two or three at a time and
propose individual projects. There are no fixed plans as to how long they will stay or their specific chores
— beyond helping out with the cooking and the running of the place — but guests in general, he says,
should remain at the site at least a week. Any shorter, he says, ‘‘is disruptive for whoever the community
is.’’

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