Ryan Griffis : www.yougenics.net/griffis
Experiments in the Garden of Good and Evil: a review of the gardenLAb experiment
"The ambitious time traveler doesn't need to know anything about Lorentz
transformations or black holes - a good road map of Los Angeles County will
suffice."
Mike Davis, _The Ecology of Fear_ , 1998
"I like the spaces in between."
Neil Hopper, quoted in Lelyveld Nita, "He Has His Walking Points," LA
Times, 9.16.04
Los Angeles is infamous for its mediated representations. The expanse of
utopic/dystopic literary depictions of cyborg assassins, cataclysmic volcanoes
and bikini clad romps in the surf mix seamlessly with the nightly news stories
of gang violence, deadly air quality and the excitement of Oscar night. These
make up the visible points of LA county's terrain, as much as the surrounding
mountains and Disney's blindingly reflective music hall. ( http://www.nd.edu/~acasad/images/news/ourladyofangels/disney/
)Of course, being the example of sprawl that it is, there is lots of space
between its "points of interest," both geographic and metaphoric.
It is this space BETWEEN the highly visible markers of LA's identity that is
investigated by a new exhibition at Art
Center College of Design's Wind Tunnel exhibition space in Pasadena.
The exhibition, entitled "the gardenLAb experiment," is part of a
series of gardenLAb programs initiated by curator Fritz Haeg to explore various "ecology-based
initiatives." It is also part of a larger network of events occurring
in small, sporadic niches of the arts community that are performing what Matthew
Fuller calls "not-just-art" - seen in exhibitions like MASSMoCA's "The
Interventionists." A good portion of the fifty-five works in gardenLAb
certainly are art, mostly created by artists, and meant to be looked at as
art, but there is also a substantial presence made by the work of architects,
urban planners, ecologists and others. There are also quite a few collaboratives
represented, ranging from community organizations like the Friends of the LA
River to the conceptual architects of AUDC and the performative interventionists
of the LA Urban Rangers. The "inbetweenness" of
the subject matter is complimented by "inbetweenness" in terms of
disciplines, desires, and approaches. This is intra-, as opposed to inter-,
disciplinarity.
One issue that comes up for a lot of LA artists and activists concerned with
ecology and space is the notion of "open space." Those who have been
to LA are most likely familiar with the expanses of under utilized space that
exists between neighborhoods, under freeways and along the LA
River. The
paradox is that there is less open space per capita in this sprawling metropolis
than any other major US city, with less than one acre per one thousand residents.
And the unevenness of development and allocation of what is there forms what
Mike Davis has aptly called the "third border" along race
and class lines. How is it possible that as many as half of the children living
in a coastal city have never
seen the ocean? As Jenny Price and David Kipen's "Malibu
Project" shows, what these
children might encounter on their first trip to the beach may tell them that
they're not wanted anyway. They have produced humorous variations on the signs
lining 20 miles of Malibu Beach warning that long stretches of sand there are
private property.
This may spark the desire in some to take matters into their own hands. Visitors
could take Lize Mogel's "Public Park: Personal Planning Kit" to their
neighborhoods and make any of those under utilized spaces a park for everyone.
We could also join urban planner James Rojas in playfully "Rebuilding
Eden" as a model city constructed of recycled and found objects. Or for
those more pragmatically inclined, join the "Path to Freedom" homesteaders
in their efforts to live the only "truly radical lifestyle" by growing
as much of their own food as possible. And if we can't be trusted to liberate
the planet, much less ourselves, perhaps we can radicalize our agricultural
subjects as David Burns and Matias Viegener's "Corn Study" suggests.
Their tongue-in-cheek solution: teach corn to revolt from the growing biotech
regime by exposing it to the ideas of Thoreau and its own natural history.
The horizontal movement of LA is an entropic force, as communities expand and
contract along the clogged arteries of the freeway system. And its shaping
of space can be found in the gaps of urban structure. The conceptual architectural
collaborative AUDC investigates this "culture of horizontality" in
their research on the symbiotic relationship formed between architecture, design
and social control through the development and implementation of Muzak and
dispersed telecommunications. As in their other projects, a relationship is
uncovered between the management of our interior and exterior spaces that is
creepy to consider in conjunction with the militarized histories of much of
our technological "advances."
Walking through the gardenLAb experiment, it's easy to get caught up in the
moment, thinking about all of the city's problems and potential solutions.
I imagine that that is indeed the intention of the curators. How else can we
ask, "What is to be done?" The gardenLAb is a response to such a
question on very localized and thoughtful terms. But it is also a response
that is contained, formed within a particular set of terms and through a specific
vocabulary. Walking through the designed gallery furniture, specifically designed
for the exhibit from raw plywood, cardboard and brightly colored, translucent
screens, I wondered what the framing
aesthetics had to do with the goals of
the exhibit. Certainly, much of it accommodated the weekly Saturday gatherings
of guided hikes and discussions. There could be arguments made both for and
against its success in facilitating the radicality of the projects it frames.
Many probably think it doesn't matter either way.
But I wondered what the two radicals in Nils Norman and Lincoln Tobier's video "Green
Love" would think. These two fictional women, who met during the great
Southern California supermarket
strike that took place earlier this year, became
guerrilla urban planners, reshaping the spaces of the city to be more livable
while no one was looking. How would they have redesigned the wind tunnel
into a radical eco-vision? Would they blow it up, as they did tens of SUVs,
as a symbol of over-consumption? But, such a question can never be answered,
not because these characters are fictional, but because they are already, and
prematurely, dead - the result of a Thelma and Louise style stand off with
reality, the LAPD.
Ryan Griffis
The gardenLAb can be found online at www.fritzhaeg.com/garden.html