Inquiry #1
Inquiry #2
This balance between art and life is perhaps the oldest struggle in art. How to maintain an artistic practice when your interests also lie in what is conventionally a political and social practice?
The collaborative husband and wife team of Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison have worked for decades as biologists, ecologists, and urban planners and work with communities to develop new strategies for improving living conditions. And they are also artists. Groups like Food not Bombs "rescue" discarded food from grocery stores to feed hungry people. This action is a symbolic effort against the market driven habits we have developed towards food and consumerism at the same time that it affects the lives of those involved. Every September, groups of activists convert paved parking lots into mobile parks in what is now an international event called PARK(ing) Day. These are, after all powerfully symbolic political acts that speak to a cultural moment in our country. For artists, this ultimately seems to always come back to the same question: what is art's relationship to community?
A related, but more pressing issue for most Angelenos is the rapidly changing nature of our city. Rising property values and gentrification only highlight older debates around public and private space while reminding us that both culturally and geographically, the "environment" always begins at home. The four groups we've spoken to: Farmlab, Los Angeles Urban Rangers, Fritz Haeg's Edible Estates, and Fallen Fruit concentrate their efforts in rethinking the ways we live in the city as both a cultural practice (cultural practice as art) and an actual way of life. The question of community and the way we operate and share space and resources is a central theme in the way these artists work.
Farmlab, conceived by artist Lauren Bon, is an environmentalist laboratory and research space with community involvement and public programming as a focus. The Los Angeles Urban Rangers organize urban safaris and compile research material for the public in order to question and educate others on the uses of public urban space, Edible Estates is a project that helps homeowners convert their front lawn into a usable vegetable garden. Fallen Fruit, together with volunteers, maps out fruit trees in Los Angeles neighborhoods that blur the boundary between public and private property.
For Sustainable LA, these four groups have decided to organize public events during the months of January and February. Farmlab will feature their Farmlab Public Salon series of discussions every Friday at noon. In early February the Los Angeles Urban Rangers will lead a Malibu Public Beach safari together with their downloadable Malibu Public Beaches guide. Beginning January 10th and lasting till fall 2008, Fritz Haeg will create an Edible Estate Demonstration Garden, together with educational information on why to create your own, within the Descanso Gardens in La Cañada. In late January, Fallen Fruit will be bringing volunteers together to help organize a public fruit tree mapping session in the Silverlake area.
These artists work in groups and collaborate with any number of people and organizations. They rarely create art objects, work almost entirely outside the gallery system, and use the city as a "workspace." These points are significant. They speak to an emerging trend in collaborative and collective art practices where community is a central part of what is being "created." Where aesthetics go together with active ways of collaborating and where artists and citizens are one and the same.
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This Is the LA River
USA, 2007, 30 min.
Created by the Echo Park Film Center Fall 2007 Youth Film Class
This Is the LA River invited twenty neighborhood youth between the ages of 14 and 19 to explore the River through the medium of 16mm film and create a unique picture of the waterway's complex past, present, and future.
Edible Estates Regional Prototype Garden #2: Lakewood, CA
USA, 2006, 12 min.
Directed by Fritz Haeg & Jacinto Astiazaran
Camera & editing by Jacinto Astiazaran
Narrated by Michael Foti
Turning front yards into farmland.
South Central Farmers
USA, 2005, 7 min.
Shot, directed, produced and edited by Ross Guidici
The struggle for food and dignity in an encroaching industrial wasteland.
Urban Fruit Action
USA, 2007 3 min.
Directed, written and produced by by Fallen Fruit (David Burns, Matias Viegener, Austin Young)
Fallen Fruit's URBAN FRUIT ACTION video shows neighborhood activists planting fruit trees to create a communal neighborhood resource.
You Can't Compost Concrete
USA, 2007, 4 min. 1sec.
Directed by Elon Schoenholz
Written by Bryn MacKinnon, Elon Schoenholz and Scott Singer
Produced by Elon Schoenholz
D.I.Y. backyard activism.
Green: Not a Cornfield
USA, 2006
Produced by Echo Park Film Center
A project by Lauren Bon.
Build a Self-Watering Container
Free Republic of Silver Lake, 2007, 2 min. 16 sec.
Directed, written and produced by SurviveLA
In this first of a series of self-sufficiency instructional videos SurviveLA, Silver Lake's own urban homesteaders, and proprietors of www.survivela.com, show you how to tell the MAN where to stick his tasteless, pesticide soaked, hormone pumped Frankenproduce.
Shifting Baselines in the Surf
USA, 2005, 4 min. 9 sec.
Directed by Randy Olson
Written by Randy Olson and Chad Nelsen
Produced by Ty Carlisle
A Joint Production of Shifting Baselines and Surfrider Foundation
In the 1950's you could clean your cuts and bruises in the ocean; today you need hepatitis shots if you are a surfer. Why didn't we notice the slow decline?
Farmlab grew out of these two experiences and has been a year-long attempt to catalyze the different organizations and specialists in the field of environmental sustainability, urban planning, and community activism. On Fridays the public is invited to have lunch and listen to invited speakers at the Public Salons held at the Farmlab space adjacent to the former Cornfield site. A performance area behind the offices under the Spring Street overpass called Under Spring hosts a variety of events for different community groups. In the Farmlab building space art exhibitions are shown, research is sponsored, and discussions are held. The research space is consistently overgrown with experimental projects, from gardens planted in converted abandoned cars, to mycoremediation research on the detoxifying power of mushrooms.
And given all the activity, the project is about to transform yet again. Farmlab is about to become something else. Perhaps under the self-imposed pressure of having to decide whether it is an arts organization, a public policy organization, or both. It's somewhat understandable, given the complexity of the issues here.
Some of their larger projects include saving trees from the South Central Farm and temporarily housing them at the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens. Agbins on Skid Row was an effort to bring communal garden to the homeless community in Los Angeles via mobile garden bins. Apart from these and other efforts, what makes Farmlab unique is its ability to bring variously specialized and concerned community together in ways that most art institutions rarely do. In this sense, what Farmlab has been trying to achieve is a community effort. Despite its generous funding, it was made possible because there were a need for a catalyzing effort amongst different groups and individuals. Its impact also lies in recognizing that fact.
]]> And given all the activity, the project is about to transform yet again. Farmlab is about to become something else. Perhaps under the self-imposed pressure of having to decide whether it is an arts organization, a public policy organization, or both. It's somewhat understandable, given the complexity of the issues here.Some of their larger projects include saving trees from the South Central Farm and temporarily housing them at the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens. Agbins on Skid Row was an effort to bring communal garden to the homeless community in Los Angeles via mobile garden bins. Apart from these and other efforts, what makes Farmlab unique is its ability to bring variously specialized and concerned community together in ways that most art institutions rarely do. In this sense, what Farmlab has been trying to achieve is a community effort. Despite its generous funding, it was made possible because there were a need for a catalyzing effort amongst different groups and individuals. Its impact also lies in recognizing that fact.
]]>Part of what makes the LAUR so unique, apart from the obvious fact that they're women, is that they take the role of the ranger rather seriously, even in a tongue and cheek sort of way. Formed in 2004, the group has steadily generated a dialogue around the urban/natural habitat we live in but very often ignore. After all, how often do we equate nature and urbanism together in the same sentence? Tours, or safaris, to use their term, the LAUR have organized include hikes through the LA County Fair, Malibu's public beaches, and Hollywood Blvd. Well-researched and detailed visitor information guides, similar to what you would find at a typical state park or nature preserve, generally accompany these events.
The language and rigor of this professional persona, that of the park ranger, is no coincidence. These tours are for the public and rangers are as accessible as they are well informed. It certainly makes the presentation all the more believable when the artists show up in full uniform and conduct their urban tour with as much skill and organization as the real thing. That performative slippage in reality facilitates in helping us, the public, rethink the contexts we've created for our urban environment. Why don't we think about of our geography more often in urban centers? That's what rangers do after all; they facilitate rather than dictate our own questioning and discovery of new places and information.
Given the perfomative nature of the work, words play a central role. In the language of the LAUR sidewalks are trails, architecture is topography, dogs and cats are fauna. There is a concerted effort to ride that slippery metaphoric slope once again when it comes to the contrasting language of the natural world and the cultural world. Again, it becomes a tool to not only be playful but to encourage new ways of seeing things.
Issues of public space and our relationship to our landscape are explored through a variety of geographic/cultural zones: freeway landscaping, public beaches, historic boulevards, but always with an eye on having us appreciate the everyday environment that we already have.
]]>Fallen Fruit is not only interested in mapping out fruit trees in your neighborhood, but they're equally amenable to planting and picking them as well. Fruit trees spring from the tricky middle ground between public and private space and that's a good thing, because it's entirely the point.
Burns and Viegener are interested in helping us think about what public space can be. It seems to be a learning process all around as they are as much instigators as participants in their group activities. Possibilities seem to lie in getting lots of people together for Nocturnal Fruit Forages, for example. Picking neighborhood fruit might seem daring but it's a small price to pay for getting to know your neighbors and their fruit trees (evenings are best as most owners are home). This defiant act of picking fruit hanging over into public property seems almost comical when you see the artist's costumes and hard hats.
"You've never been hit with an avocado over the head have you?" It's that kind of practical whimsy that makes the project so much fun. The notion of eating something one just picked off a tree seems to have become a foreign experience sadly, even in California. So part of this project is also about having us connect with the processes and politics of food, how we view food and by extension, how those views construct our habits. By taking the market out of the equation, you see food first hand and somehow manage to get to that communal idea of shared resources and shared experiences.
]]>Gardening as a cultural practice is as rich and varied as any other medium. Not only is it about the eyes; it is equally about other senses. One look at the great palaces of Europe and you can see why. Metaphors abound for all to see and the senses collapse in ways that a painting's effect can never approach.
But let's be realistic, homeowners who agree to take on a working garden on their front lawn have other issues in mind. "How will my neighbors react?" "How much is this going to cost?" "How much time is this going to take out of my day?" For the past few years Haeg has developed a practice where his own home in Los Angeles is turned into a salon of sorts, where projects and people come together. Part of the effort in taking this on, both for Haeg and his homeowners, is the commitment to see it through.
One of the byproducts of this process is that people end up growing their own food while sharing the inevitable overflow with others, very often their neighbors.
The traditional arguments around public and private space get a little reversed when it comes to the Edible Estates project. Typically, we bemoan the lack of public space and are critical of the power of developers to take what they want. What Edible Estates generates is as much a critique as it is an action: homeowners making gardens on the front lawns of their own property. So much money and effort is spent on beautifying the homes on TV and magazines. But for what? There is something to be said about the effort to turn private space into pubic space. After all, isn't bringing metaphors to life what art is really about?
