Memory of

   
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I built this tower for High Desert Test Sites in 2004 as both a sculpture and a support for a transmitter for Christy Gast and Fabienne Lasserre’s pirate radio station project. The tower stood at the end of a sandy road called Neptune Avenue. Neptune was one of several roads in the immediate vicinity with celestial names—Polaris, Milky Way, Starburst—but I was more interested in Neptune’s association with sea than with space. I had made a program to be broadcast on the pirate radio station that was a compilation of clips from several British pirate radio stations that broadcast from offshore to work around the BBC radio monopoly in the early 1960s. The compilation included, the first song played on Radio Sutch, “Jack the Ripper,” by Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages, conflicting accounts of the two “first ever” live performances on offshore radio (by Jose Feliciano and Jimmy Smith respectively) and excerpts from the final broadcast of Radio Caroline shortly before its host ship, Mi Amigo, sank. I liked the idea of displacing these clips in time, geography and altitude. I liked the idea that you might find yourself driving around a mile above sea level in the desert and pick up an English pirate radio signal from the 1960s. The color of the tower is a standard Valspar exterior enamel color called Neptune.

After the event, I used all of the wood to frame out the bar and benches at the Mandrake, so it’s all still there, buried in the bar… if anyone ever tore it up, it is framed entirely in teal 2x3s.