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InterviewsPhotography/Art
The Boom Interview: Lauren Bon
The Metabolic Studio's devices of wonder.
Boom California	on August 4, 2015
From Boom Summer 2015, Vol 5, No 2
The Metabolic Studio's devices of wonder
Editor's Note: Lauren Bon is a transformative figure—her canvas is huge: Los Angeles, the American West, the way we think about landscapes, our water and where it comes from, and what we owe the land and communities, our moral, economic, and political relationships. "ARTISTS NEED TO CREATE AT THE SAME SCALE THAT SOCIETY HAS THE CAPACITY TO DESTROY" proclaims a red neon sign on one wall of the Metabolic Studio in a warehouse on the edge of Chinatown in downtown Los Angeles. It's a very high standard, and one that Bon takes very seriously in every aspect of her work from her first major work, Not A Cornfield, which transformed an old contaminated railroad yard, a literal brownfield across the street from the studio, into a verdant color field in view of downtown's skyscrapers, to her latest work, Bending the River Back Into the City—a waterwheel that will draw water from the Los Angeles River and distribute into the City. For its monumental images of the Intermountain west, the Optics Division of the Metabolic Studio uses landscape material rather than traditional chemistry to document the landscapes that the Metabolic Studio is working to transform. Bon sat down to talk with editor Jon Christensen about her work reconnecting Los Angeles with the source of it's water and about how silver and water mined out of the Eastern Sierra has catalyzed photography and film making for this special issue of Boom on photography, art, and landscape.
Boom: I wonder if we could just start by you describing where we are sitting right now.
Lauren Bon: Well, right now, we're sitting inside of a frame that was built to house the Salon De Fleurus, which is a re-creation of Gertrude and Leo Stein's art collection in Paris at the turn of the last century. That salon space has now been moved. This frame we are sitting in next to the Amtrak lines that run adjacent to the LA River corridor—[pauses for a train passing by]—this is a new vista for us. This concrete block wall didn't have any doors or windows that opened to the east. Between 2006 and 2013, the front of the studio was looking at the Los Angeles State Historic Park, and the back of the studio opened to the underside of the Spring Street Bridge. We were actively cultivating these places, and both closed at the same time. The park went into construction and so did the bridge. So now we are looking at the industrial corridor of the city of Los Angeles when we come out here. Your back is to the Spring Street Bridge, and my back is to the Broadway Bridge. And those two bridges cross the LA River from the west side of the river to the east side of the river.
Where we are sitting will be very different by next year at this time. Everything you see around here is transforming. The Spring Street Bridge is being rebuilt now. Across the river Albion Park is being put together. The state historic park is under construction. And if all goes well, a year from now where we're sitting right now will be a massive hole in the ground.
Lauren Bon in a cottonwood grove. Saplings were grafted from a mature cottonwood grove in Owens Valley and transported to Los Angeles via One Hundred Mules Walking the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 2013.
Boom: Just because our readers won't all have been here, we're sitting right outside your studio, Metabolic Studio in this warehouse, a former warehouse.
Bon: Current warehouse.
Boom: Your studio, where many of the things that we're going to talk about have happened. But pretty soon, there's going to be a giant water wheel bisecting this building.
Bon: Yeah. Cutting it in half.
Boom: And that's La Noria. Can you describe that?
Bon: So historically, where we're sitting right now would have been a floodplain of the unbridled LA River. And Spring Street was a very active spring that pooled quite a bit of water from the LA River all the way to a giant sycamore that was located behind what's now Union Station. If you look at old photos of LA from up until 1890 when it was cut down, it was the largest visual object in this area. So all of the early photos of LA have this giant sycamore called "El Aliso" or "the sycamore." It was rumored to be 400 years old and have a 200-foot canopy, and all the tribal people would come from miles and miles around to sit under that tree for problem solving.
So we're sitting in a place that has lots of history, both told and untold, and lots of mythology, both told and untold, and La Noria taps into some of that. La Noria is a kind of avant-garde nostalgia. In looking forward to what can be, we're looking back at what was. Because when the river was here, it supported trees. When the river was here, it supported industry. And it supported industry in that age-old way by creating power for things to happen. And one of the means by which power was created was waterwheels. The state park was a place that supported about six different power waterwheels. And we're alluding to that typology in the waterwheel that we're about to build.
We are about to build a waterwheel that will bisect this building and pick up water that will be redirected from the LA River channel via a pipe under that railway track where the trains are going by. So the trains will still be going by, and all the sounds you hear will be pretty much, more or less, like they are. And all that you see around you—the riverbank, built of concrete and covered with graffiti—will still look the same. The LA River's reintroduction to its own flood plain will happen through a single hole that will puncture that jacket. Water will be pooled up from the river by a dam that will be right out there. Water will enter the pipe, run under the railway track, be picked up by La Noria and deposited on the roof of this building before it begins its journey through a new network of pipes, and channels, an infrastructure artwork that aims to form a distribution network that we call the "Delta of Mount Whitney."
Boom: What does that mean, the "Delta of Mount Whitney"?
Bon: Every river has a delta, the place where it deposits its load before it dissipates. The delta of this new river, the parallel river that will form from moving our wastewater that would normally go out to sea back into the city will be known as the "Delta of Mount Whitney." We have chosen that name to allude to a source of our water, 240 miles away. It's only one source of that water, but we think it's an important one to name in that delta, which is the snow peaks, or what once was the snow peaks of the Eastern Sierra.
Boom: You've talked about La Noria as a device of wonder. What do you mean by that?
Bon: I know it when I see it, that thing that raises you up out of the daily discussion of a thing into a kind of transcendent appreciation of it. The motivation of the work that I do with the Metabolic Studio is to utilize devices of wonder to catalyze a paradigm shift. So one can talk for a long time about master plans for the LA River, but in proposing a device of wonder, like a waterwheel and a dam and a new distribution system, I've been able to catalyze a change that needs to happen. It's happening because it needs to happen, not because I'm a great artist. But maybe I am a good enough artist to get that ball rolling. And I'm happy with that, you know?
So the work that I'm doing with the studio is about creating an opportunity for a paradigm shift through utilizing devices of wonder. These devices and the engagement the studio has around them can help reframe the discussion from master planning alone to intervention that can perhaps catalyze the master plan because then there's one that's done. This piercing needs to be one of many piercings. It alone will only provide 100 acre-feet of water per year to me. And then I can choose how to redistribute it. But through that paradigm, I hope that the California Water Board sees potential for other kinds of interventions in the stormwater management system.
One Hundred Mules Walking the Los Angeles Aqueduct, October 18 to November 11, 2013, an artist action to commemorate the centenary of the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct.
Boom: What is the paradigm shift that this is part of?
Bon: Well, we need to reuse our wastewater. Right now, all of the water that's going out to sea does not reenter the city for any beneficial use, and that's a paradigm that needs to shift. That's the primary goal of La Noria.
Then it will be up to the contracts that we develop with other delta users to see if we can also galvanize other paradigms to shift. For example, we're in negotiation with the state historic park across the street. They wish to receive water from us. We have agreed in principle to supply water, but there are conditions. One of the conditions that they have agreed to is to change the pesticides and herbicides that they use on what they grow, so that the watershed does not become compromised. That's become policy in the whole state park system, not just this state park, as a result of that contract from the Delta of Mount Whitney. So the device of wonder utilizes language to create a connection to a snow pack, but its knife angle is in changing paradigms of behavior within entrenched bureaucratic systems.
Bending the River Back Into the City, 2012—ongoing. First, an inflatable dam will pool wastewater headed out to sea. Then a piercing in the storm channel will move water under the railway tracks via a pipe. Finally, a waterwheel will lift the water from the river bed to the roof of the Metabolic Studio.
Boom: This might be a good moment to talk about the metabolic in Metabolic Studio. Why "metabolic"?
Bon: Metabolic means that we're dealing with life processes. All living things are divided up into two activities, the anabolic and the catabolic. The anabolic builds up and the catabolic tears down. The Metabolic Studio looks at taking land and water that can no longer support life and aims to return it to supporting life.
In our work along the Owens Dry Lake, we're actually playing within the catabolic dust and repurposing it to find it has some agency. We take a system that has almost ceased to support life—the Owens Dry Lake—and explore it for new potentiality. The water that has been redirected from the lake is held in trust for us as citizens of the state of California. And now the dust from the dry lake is blowing dangerous chemistry into the air. All kinds of health and safety problems have ensued around that.
But it's still a lake in terms of how it's politically organized. It's held in trust for the people of the state of California as a water body, which means that as a water body, we all have access to it for recreation.
So our Metabolic Studio Optics Division uses it to recreate. We've found we can use the dust as photographic chemistry. We go out onto the dry lake in the middle of the night to bury exposed film, large format sheets of photographic paper in the mud. We leave them for the night and pull them out in the morning. The images we make there are not just images of the landscape but made out of the landscape itself. And the action of making them is an activist action. Taking time to work out there is an important thing to do because we participate in a civic right by occupying that space. We know other artists who are thinking similarly and have launched kayaks on the dry lakebed.
As an art practice, we don't want to leave physical objects behind, but to use our labor as transformation—to make art work as a verb rather than a noun. Up until the waterwheel, all of my work in the last ten years has been ephemeral. Everything is about catalyzing other things to happen through these devices of wonder. The waterwheel is the first piece that is permanent.
Boom: Speaking of Owens Valley, on the hundredth anniversary of the Los Angeles Aqueduct you traveled with a hundred mules along the whole route. What was your vision for that project? And what was it like?
Bon: One of the puzzles for me is how to draw a line for people in Los Angeles between those two points. They see the river. And they see the snow. They recreate in that snow. But the 395, the massive highway that drives up there, has a whole lot of Mojave Desert in it. And people tend to listen to their music and enjoy what deserts do best, which is to get you into the bubble of your car and that kind of great space of the West that allows us all to think differently.
But I really felt that for the centenary of the aqueduct, I needed to build a device of wonder for people in both locations, in the Owens Valley and in Los Angeles, to acknowledge that the snow pack of this year is being moved to Los Angeles, and to acknowledge it by spending time with the intention of celebrating the physical object, saying that this is an amazing piece of engineering that has a physical reality, that has a fiscal reality, that has a historical reality, that has a relationship to the history of engineering. It's not just this secret pipe.
The Los Angeles Aqueduct, the physical reality of it, is a phenomenal thing. It will be, in the distant future, the central ruin of our civilization, of our moment. It's reasonable to assume at some point, all of this will be gone. I don't know when. I don't know how. But when it is gone, the aqueduct will be there. The aqueduct was built by mules as was the Panama Canal, which opened the next year. So it seemed to me that in drawing that line to connect the Eastern Sierra to Los Angeles, how wonderful to be able to use the very animals that built it to begin with, the very animals that have been so critical to the construction of the West as we have come to know it.
Walking the Los Angeles Aqueduct with one hundred mules was moving on so many levels. Quite literally. It was great to be able to move that slowly—twenty miles a day, over a one-month period. It was wonderful to be part of something that was so well organized. Days just kind of had this rhythm to them, because everything was organized around moving the mules. And I also really understand every inch of the LA Aqueduct now, probably better than most people, because I walked that slowly the entire network of open channel, pipes, siphons, and underground channels covered with concrete from the intake through the Alabama Hills, through the canyons like Jawbone Canyon where the heroic siphons are, into the Mojave Desert, through to where the California Aqueduct meets the LA Aqueduct in Neenach, into the Verdugos after the Cascades. I really know it. I know how it looks. I know how barren the Mojave really is. I understand that the aqueduct was a miraculously lucky thing to be able to build because it's all downhill.
Walking from the Owens Valley to LA means you're walking downhill the whole way with an occasional climb up a pass. The mules did that with not a lot of work. The mules thought this trip was super easy. Basically, they didn't carry anything but a pad that said "100" and an occasional rider. There was only one rider per every ten mules. And it was all downhill. They were extremely well kept. They all came in plumper, happier.
Bending the River Back Into the City, 2012—ongoing. The water filtered through this three-part metabolic sculpture will become a community asset ready for redistribution via a new network, or Delta.
Boom: Your work in the Owens Valley has taken place under the rubric of what you've called AgH20—silver and water. Why silver?
Bon: Silver mined from places like Cerro Gordo on the top of the Inyo Mountains gave birth to the film industry—perhaps the best example of any of a devise of wonder. George Eastman, way over in Rochester, New York, figured out how to take silver from the mountains out here in California and turn it into film stock that could become a populist activity. "You press the button and we do the rest." Film stock for motion pictures was shipped back from Rochester across the country to Hollywood and brought back up to the Owens Valley where they made Westerns.
So silver and water mining from the Owens Valley are the two elements the city of Los Angeles has been constructed from. This body of work that I've done with the studio since 2008 called "Silver and Water" includes a myriad of action, hundreds, in fact, of artists' actions that have been taken around this idea of silver and water, including the photographic prints and experimentation, including the sonic work being done at the silos, including the mule march, including the metabolic soil project, including the IOU Theater project and the IOU Garden project, and all of these devices of wonder are, in effect, tending to this space, which is the kind of sacrificial twin of the city of Los Angeles. The more I understand Los Angeles, the more I realize that it kind of has a symbiotic birth, like it is born with the Owens Valley, which has ultimately been the compromised twin. One has thrived at the expense of the other. And I feel that part of AgH20 is the consciousness of acknowledgement saying, "We do owe you."
Boom: The project that I think you are really best known for was Not A Cornfield. Is that where the idea of a metabolic practice really came together?
Bon: Oh yes, the "Chlorophyll Revolution." The moment when the old train yard became emerald green with corn, things shifted. That was a big, big shift, and I could see the power of both a metaphor of corn and the reality of how life brings life, whether it's ladybugs or hummingbirds or crickets at night. The power of living things in juxtaposition with a place like this gave birth to a notion of a practice that I would call a "metabolic sculpture" to differentiate it from other kinds of sculpture.
It's not land art, per se. A lot of times Not A Cornfield would be construed as land art because it was on the land. It's not that it wasn't land art, but there is also a whole lot about it that was not normally associated with land art. One of the things that it was about was transformation. Because we weren't going to have a cornfield there forever, it was both a cornfield and not a cornfield. It was a way of creating the potential for something else to occur there because the site had stalled in its process of becoming, and the cornfield was meant to galvanize it into that possibility again. So that seems to be an unusual way to look at sculpture, which is often about its formal end being the subject of the work, rather than it consuming even its formal end into a greater notion of transformation, which seems to be more about metabolic things than it does about sculpture in a traditional sense.
Boom: Your artistic practice, a practice that is engaged in activism, sometimes provokes some pretty strong reactions. Not A Cornfield got some pretty strong reactions at the time.
Bon: I see it now as a kind of acupuncture needle. I hit a nerve when I began this work, and like the work that I had done in the Owens Valley, it's been the fact that I have stayed put for ten years that things have changed. I think people were concerned that I came in to take something away rather than to offer a transformative potential that I would then stay and support. And I think over the ten years, I've shown who I am around here. And now times have changed, but at the beginning, it was very frightening and very confusing. I have come to understand where it was coming from, and so I see it differently.
I don't think I would do anything differently, by the way. I thought about this, knowing now what I know, how would I do things differently, and I think it's also important to acknowledge that sometimes things are -check-the-box "Other." One of the things that Not A Cornfield was not was public art. I think a lot of people would have liked me to go through the way public art gets commissioned in a city, and it wasn't that way. So would I, knowing what I know now, do it that way? No.
Boom: You have this neon sign in the studio that says, "Artists must create on the same scale that society has the capacity to destroy." Is that your saying?
Bon: Actually, I thought it was, and it turned out not to be. I love to take notes in notebooks, mostly around drawings, and I had an old notebook from the years I lived in Belgrade where I had written that quote.
I found it during Not A Cornfield. People would question me about scale. Not A Cornfield was thirty-two acres. It's a lot, a big, big piece.
It turned out to be Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz from Electronic Café. It was a statement that they made during the work they were doing with the early Internet about connecting people in the Soviet Union and in the United States via a café that had Internet in it in the 1980s. That was their statement, not exactly that, but pretty close to it. And we now call that the "metabolic manifesto" via the Electronic Café manifesto, which is also cool because it's West Coast thinking.
One of the things that's interesting about art coming from the West Coast is that there's something about these vast expanses that causes you to think differently. You think about these big things, these big expanses. In living out here as an artist, this mandate to operate on a scale that society is destroying is where that comes from.
Lauren Bon and Richard Nielsen at Owens Dry Lake Bed.
Boom: What did you take in your experimenting and your self-education and the decade that you spent in Europe where you really said, "I'm just going to experiment for a decade"? What did you carry there from California and the West?
Bon: Liability obsession. I realized while I was there that a lot of things don't happen in the West out of feared of being sued. That certainly, places in the Eastern Bloc, places like Russia, Mongolia, China, ex-Yugoslavia, are different. So a project like what I'm undertaking now, which is a metabolic sculpture in the form of a revisionist review of infrastructure comes straight from Belgrade in the years just before the war, the wars in Belgrade, where what it meant to be really modern was to have the best possible infrastructure. So societies were really proud of hosting conversations when the city streets would be ripped open and people would be showing these new pipes and new roads. And they would allow people to walk over these crumbling pieces of sidewalk in a way that if that happened here, people would be terrified that somebody would sue.
And I find that that's a really big difference. Like even in phobia about—there's a definite phobia about lawsuits that operates—even in the water dispute site, I was talking to a journalist who recently passed away, who lived up in the Owens Valley. I said to her, "If there was one thing that you would like to see changed with the Department of Water and Power and the Owens Valley situation, what would it be?" She said she'd like them to stop their litigious behavior, that it was a waste of time and money. I thought that is really important to hear. So much of the energy of transformation is being subsumed into litigious behavior. So that was one thing I really got through my self-educating period around the globe is that not all countries are equally litigious, and that was a big, big difference.
Boom: That's interesting. The other side of that question is, what did you bring back to California and the West from those experiences?
Bon: You know, really from my days as a college student, I've been interested in the collapse of the avant-garde and the relationship of the last century to this idea that to be totally modern meant to be working on a collective project, and that the whole of an avant-garde was that community of creative enterprise, and this mandate to be modern, and how that came about during the World Wars—so the relationship between destruction and art production and collectivity and art movements and an avant-garde. When I was a college student in the eighties, most of the smartest people would say very definitively that the avant-garde was dead. And I've tried to bring the avant-garde back to the West with me because I think about the West as still an open field for creative life. In other words, it's very different in tone and temperament from the East Coast, which is much more referential to the art market and to Europe than the West Coast needs to be.
A lot of the reason why people come to Los Angeles is that it's really possible to reinvent one's self here and to define the terms of one's engagement. And I've really worked on collectivity since I've been back. I've worked on demystifying art practice as the bastion of genius and tried to really support and incubate talent without a host of intermediaries that usually divide us so that we are not engaged with one another. The whole notion of collective engagement is something that I have focused on that really had its beginnings in my work at the Hereford Salon in London, where I brought artists together to work on what I called "work in progress." The only thing that we wouldn't show at the Hereford Salon or discuss is finished work. So the rule of thumb was, it had to be something you were stuck on or wanted to address.
Our work has intersected with a lot of different galleries and art museums. So in no way are we not wanting to engage with them. But at the same time, there's a whole world of opportunity for creative life that we've tried to make tangible for people, so that when people come, they see it. We definitely, ten years into it, see how much it inspires especially young people to see that there's another way of being an artist outside the traditional system.
Boom: Another thing that you seem to have brought back was a kind of artistic and a philanthropic practice that was based around projects.
Bon: You know, one of the things that we talked about is how Not A Cornfield was not a public art project, partly because there wasn't an intermediary that made it happen. In a similar way, I can say that a lot of the work I do is not philanthropy because there's no nonprofits involved. There's no nonprofits that are involved with AgH20. So Silver and Water is not a normal practice of philanthropy whereby money is passed to a nonprofit for programming or capital campaigns. This is direct project-based philanthropy, which doesn't exist, like the term I gave metabolic sculpture. I mean, you're not going to go look it up in a book for my definition. But what it has meant is that I've been able to activate potentiality toward a nonprofit in places like Owens Valley. There is today a growers' co-op in the Owens Valley that receives funding from other organizations that came about because of my soil production project.
Similarly in the Veterans Administration site in west LA, there was no nonprofit by which I could do Strawberry Flag and activate that site for anything new. So Strawberry Flag was a means by which potential could be grown. And now there is a new nonprofit, the Veterans Print Studio, that comes from the work that we did in turning art supplies we found in the basement of an under-purposed building into an art studio for veterans.
So in many ways, I've been able to, through the devices of wonder, like a strawberry aquaponic farm, learn a lot about how to catalyze potentiality toward the more traditional philanthropic approach.
So ten years in, a lot of the work is not as unusual as it was when I began, because we succeeded in growing the potentiality to support more traditional approaches. But what we've also done as a team is the Metabolic Studio. Since 2010, we've called ourselves the "Metabolic Studio," and the Metabolic Studio is different from Not A Cornfield in one important regard and that is that the eighteen full-time employees of the Metabolic Studio share my trustee-hood in the Annenberg Foundation. So they are the philanthropists in the studio. I've decided in order to be able to focus my time on what I do best in this life, which is to make art and to organize community and to speak to power from my experience as an outsider, I need to be able to make sure that I have a team that is backing me up with the work that people do in making philanthropic decisions.
The Metabolic Studio is different from those earlier incarnations of my work in that that relationship is formalized. All the full-time people here are my trustee-hood manifest, so we work through that collaboratively. And I no longer function as a unique philanthropist in this city. I pass that on to the community that I work with. And we call that "citizen philanthropy" because the eighteen people who work here are not trained to do that job any more than I was. They are just living their lives, and they found themselves in this position. And we have trained ourselves to process that potentiality through our direct engagement with site, not through papers or applications or any of that. The foundation does that for us. So we are like the satellite to the foundation, a satellite that is operating on the ground and in places that are challenged in the absence of sufficient nonprofits to pass the money to. The demographics of philanthropy are often in cities, so when you move into places outside of cities, there can be a real drop in the opportunity for traditional philanthropy to be practiced. We really run into that question quite a lot.
Richard Nielsen and Tristan Duke using alternative chemistry on a Metabolic Studio Optics Division photograph.
Boom: That's true in some cases in cities, too, though, like the Veterans Administration project, no? Tell us about that project.
Bon: In the year and a half that I worked on a daily basis at the VA of West LA, I learned about the complexity of creating the opportunity for paradigm shift. In the case of the VA, that means that land should stop being just a hospital. The VA of West LA is on land that was donated to the US government in 1888 by Arcadia de Baker, who owned all of the land in one hacienda between the beach in Malibu and downtown. And she gave choice land for recuperating veterans in perpetuity as a home. In the 1960s, the asset moved from being part of the Department of War to the Department of Veterans Affairs. There was no Department of Veterans Affairs before Vietnam.
When the asset was moved from one department to the other, it just ceased to be a home anymore. They built a new hospital. They moved all the functions out of the home. It's now the most valuable asset in the VA chain. And it's been a big puzzle for people for forty years about what to do with all of that land that was left undeveloped, underused in the midst of the largest homeless population for veterans in the country.
So the question as an artist was how to bring awareness to that, and Strawberry Flag was the answer. What we learned in the time it took to make that artwork became a lawsuit.
I realized that there was no nonprofit out there that protects veterans' land use. There are nonprofits that deal with veterans who are homeless. But we're talking specifically about land use. How do you make that land operate for the people it was left in trust for?
So the thing I was able to do when Strawberry Flag ended was write a lawsuit that showed how donor intention has been upheld in the court of law over time, and say, to begin with, that we would never sue the federal government. This was simply a lawsuit in case someone else wanted to sue the federal government, because I don't want to be litigious. But the ACLU picked up that lawsuit and sued the federal government, and the result is, five years later, everybody in charge of the VA has been fired. And the whole thing has cracked open again for a discussion.
So what I've been able to do through my art practice is focus more incisively because I have time where I'm actually working on something—a lot of these projects are durational—to ascertain what can be done and what can't be done to shift the paradigm and utilize my trustee-hood at the foundation to take those actions that I can take to move the agenda toward some kind of happier return.
Bubblers of Owens Lake Rehydration Project, 2012. Indexical image of the lake made with materials from the lake itself.
Boom: I want to come back to this phrase that "Artists must create on the same scale the society has the capacity to destroy." A lot of your work in the last ten, fifteen years has gotten you involved with very big institutions like the VA, State Parks, the LADWP, the Army Corps of Engineers on the river. It seems that part of this practice has made you need to learn about these big institutions and how they operate and how they might change in order for the practice to succeed.
Bon: I think that's true. Every one of the signature projects of the Metabolic Studio has had to engage with the structure that the land or the water is owned by and controlled by. In the case of Not A Cornfield, we were working directly with the State of California as well as the City of Los Angeles. So my role as an artist and private citizen and trustee of the Annenberg Foundation was, in a way, to build a bridge between the people of the state of California and an asset held in trust for them. And, therefore, the work cannot be classified as public art because it's coming from a very different place.
Similarly, with the VA of West LA, that land is held in trust for veterans by the federal government. So even though it's in Los Angeles, it actually has very little to do with the city of Los Angeles in terms of how it's organized or run. It has its own police force. It has its own, essentially, mayor, who is the person in charge, and it's like the Vatican. It's a separate city within Los Angeles.
So, it's partly because of my unusual practice at the intersection of art and philanthropy that I've been able to have these direct engagements that are usually not available for the general public, and to sometimes slowly, sometimes not so slowly, see change happen. I don't think any of us thought there would be these massive transformations at the VA of West LA in five years since Strawberry Flag.
Boom: In order to create at the same scale that society has the capacity to destroy, the art has to engage with these big institutions.
Bon: Yeah. It has to become sympathetic with those agencies. When the LADWP agrees to allow the Metabolic Studio to walk 240 miles of aqueduct, something is happening systematically. That's a first—that they opened up all of the gates to let those mules through. I think that's an important consideration of the project—that we didn't break their trust. They had a good experience for a public-private partnership. And part of what we were aiming to do for the centenary is also reframe the LADWP from being the villains of the water system that we have, to being an agency that's doing a job, and is also the largest employer in the Owens Valley. So there is no human being who is the LADWP. It's an agency. And it doesn't do any good for us to continue to place the LADWP in the role of villains in a narrative they didn't create.
The project was really about let's try and move forward into a new century of thinking by looking at rehumanizing, reconnecting with the human beings who actually work at the LADWP, who are showing up every night for dinner as the mules pass through their section of the aqueduct, who show up and tell stories or bring a violin to play by a section of the pipe. Let's allow this agency to be a series of individuals who like the benefits that the LADWP community gives them. I think it's a good job. I think it's a good service. It's certainly one that we can't do without right now, and it could be a lot worse. It could be a private system, and that would be worse.
So these are the kinds of things that each of these projects have been able to do—make small changes within the VA and create opportunities for a different VA, create different opportunities for a different California urban state park system, create opportunities for the LADWP to rethink its public face. And that's where those intersections of the devices of wonder, which are the artworks, dovetail with my trustee-hood.
Boom: There's always artistic authorship in all of these projects. There's the really authentic and reciprocal engagement with community, with these institutions, but there's also always your artistic vision that is important there.
Bon: The art is what's driving the agenda. The art and the urgency. This is something that needs to happen. And they know that. Somebody has to be first. Somebody has to pierce that jacket and bring that water back into the city, and this is the best way to do it.
Boom: And if it's based on the art, the agent here is the artist.
Bon: The water right I have for one hundred acre feet of wastewater that we pull from the river via La Noria is not a water right to a philanthropic organization. It is not for the Annenberg Foundation nor the Metabolic Studio. It's my water right. As an individual, I applied for a water right in order to create a distribution network to share the water, without exchange of capital and without commodifying the water. I ascribe to the United Nation's dictate that water is a human right. So just like I have shared my trustee-hood with the Metabolic Studio, I will share my water right at no capital cost to the people or organizations that will form the Delta of Mount Whitney. As human beings, we speak for all living things, all the animals, all the wildcats in these hills who need water too. That's the big challenge.
Boom: Where do you see going from here?
Bon: Me personally or the project or the water?
Boom: You as an artist.
Bon: Oh. I don't know. There's so much to do. Right now, I'm forming a new country, the country of Rose, so I think that's the next project.
Boom: Can you say more about this country? Where is it?
Bon: Well, to really try and understand what the waterwheel is and is not—it's a drop in a bucket in a systemic collapse. The LA Aqueduct gave birth to the Hoover Dam, Lake Powell, the California Aqueduct. And because of the drought, we're getting a glimpse into a system in crisis. Because whether or not there is a drought, we're maxed out in terms of what we can do demographically with the amount of water we can move in the Intermountain West. So the country of Rose is an opposition that we need to reorganize, not around states, but around watersheds. It's based on the idea that there are four basic watersheds in the country of Rose: the Columbia, the Colorado, the Rio Grande, and the water table of the ancient lakes Lahontan and Bonneville that run between Lake Tahoe and Salt Lake. The basic idea is that outmoded state boundaries don't serve us anymore. And for metabolic processes to continue in the Intermountain West, we are going to need to reorganize around the protection of our watersheds as the primary purpose of all political organization.
Los Angeles and LA Aqueduct are just a small part of a system that's all interrelated through its water. So when I really came to understand that, I realized that's probably the next body of work. And that's what I'm working on with the mule team packers for them to do a survey of Rose as a relay of all the packers in the Great Basin. We're going to get them all involved.
One Hundred Mules Walking the Los Angeles Aqueduct, 2013. Penultimate trek with view of Los Angeles Skyline.
Boom: Wow! That's huge.
Bon: You can apply for a passport, by the way.
Boom: Really?
Bon: Yeah. The passport is on the Metabolic Studio website.
Posted in: Interviews, Photography/Art
Tagged in: Art, Photography
River Glass


Kawa Japanese Restaurant makes a strong raw calling in the new-restaurant-deprived North Shore.
It was called Sushi Magic. This kit promised to turn the stickiest of fingers into a nori-rolling pro. If I had only opened the box. But my Sushi Magic, a well-intentioned gift, ended up on a yard sale table (where it didn't sell).
There's nothing like exquisite sushi, nori rolls and other raw wonders served up by the professionals. That's my thought as I watch the men (always men) behind the sushi bar at Kawa, Whitefish Bay's newest and thrillingest restaurant, if you gravitate to vinegared rice, toro (fatty tuna) and sheets of seaweed and pickled ginger.
Kawa dramatically changed the tenor of 325 W. Silver Spring Dr. – a former Eastern European diner and a bagel shop. The flesh tones of fish seem to respond to sleek interiors with black banquettes, shiny white tables with an eye-catching inlaid marble pattern, sparkly backsplashes and silver-toned pillars.
'Stop, Drop and Roll' appears in the November 2015 issue of Milwaukee Magazine.


text:
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl