Prince of the Beach

I met Tao Ruspoli in the Spring of 2017 in a small derelict town on the shores of Salton Sea, called Bombay Beach. Together with friends, art patrons and entrepreneurs Stefan Ashkenazy and Lily Johnson White, he co-founded Bombay Beach Biennale — an annual art gathering in response to the environmental disaster that fell upon the Salton Sea in the 1980s. Tracy Chung, one of the biennale organizers and art collectors, who I had met a couple of years back at a gallery in New York, invited me to create an immersive talk show documenting the experience — an indulgence of my fascination with site-specific art and dereliction.

I was already aware of the artist interventions happening in that area, but Bombay Beach was so much more than I could have imagined.

"Many people don't know that Salton Sea is the largest body of water in California, created by accident in 1905 when they were damming the Colorado River to bring water into Southern California," explained Tao. "It was the breach in the dam that caused it. For two years they couldn't control the flooding and the contents of the Colorado River spilled into this low, ancient riverbed, 250 feet below sea level." In the 1950s and 1960s the area became a popular tourist destination visited by the likes of Frank Sinatra, President Eisenhower and The Beach Boys — but in the 1980s, due to farm runoffs and increasing salinity, the sea got contaminated, most of the wildlife died, and Bombay Beach became an abandoned resort town.

Open to conversation and bursting with enthusiasm for the movement he had started, Tao was coordinating everything from moving airstreams — turned art galleries — to large otherworldly installations and thought-provoking sculptures. Our walk led us to the epicenter of Bombay Beach Biennale: The Bombay Beach Institute of Particle Physics, Metaphysics, & International Relations — part museum/gallery, part performance space, part sculpture park featuring elegant gardens with chickens and rabbits running around, like a scene out of a Wes Anderson film.

His mother, Austrian-American actress Debra Berger, was there too — helping other artists bring their visions to life, her sleeves up, holding a welding gun. This was not a public event. It was a secret gathering of art connoisseurs, writers, philosophers, opera singers, dancers, performers and intellectuals, eager to engage with this landscape and turn it into a site of critical contemplation. Did I mention there was a museum where you could hold a real human brain?

The Prince

Unsure if I had met a mad scientist, an architect, or a philosopher, I immediately took a liking to Tao — not just because we had similar interests, but because talking to him was like engaging with a character from a well-written novel. It only got better when I later found out that Tao was the second son of an Italian Prince, Alessandro "Dado" Ruspoli — a very eccentric, rebellious, and unconventional man who in part inspired Fellini's film La Dolce Vita. "My father was friends with all of these amazing creative people — Cocteau, Dalí, Picasso and Orson Welles — who were questioning conventional art, morality and lifestyle," said Tao, who studied Philosophy at Berkeley and went on to become a filmmaker and photographer.

That evening I walked around Bombay Beach, admiring the works of Randy Polumbo, William Attaway, Stefanie Schneider, Alexandra Sand, Steve Shigley and Damian Elwes. I dove into incredible installations like vortexes scattered around this remarkable town that had become a Mecca for hungry intellectuals. Inside the graffiti-covered ruins were philosophy talks by Ivy League professors. Towering over the crushed fish carcasses that make up the beaches of Salton Sea was an Opera House — designed by James Ostrer — where world-renowned dancers and opera singers shared a stage. Further along, on Avenue E, was an eerie, retro drive-in movie theater made from old, lined-up discarded cars. Each place had been touched by the hand of an artist, brought back to life, revitalized.

Filmmaking as Therapy

Tao has always been interested in everything, and filmmaking was the only thing that would allow him to pursue his eclectic interests. He was obsessed with flamenco and made a film about it. Then he became interested in Heidegger and made Being in the World — also the name of his podcast. His divorce sparked an interest in relationships and sexuality that led to Monogamish. "Why does marriage exist as an institution? And why does monogamy exist as an ideal? I spent four years traveling the world exploring those questions." His brother's struggle with addiction inspired Fix, about a charming, larger-than-life heroin addict and the two brothers navigating it. Filmmaking, for Tao, has been a kind of therapy — a way of understanding and coming to terms with what is happening in his life.