Expert_Researcher

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TRASH Victor J. Jones

Certain works of art and architecture can be considered trash, but when is trash art? Spolia and Arte Povera are two exam- ples at either end of the historical spectrum where refuse is transfigured into art. Constantine’s triumphal arch in Rome uses reclaimed sculptural elements from previous buildings. Luciano Fabro composed sculptures from commonplace materials and used wares to create works such as Pavimento (Tautologia). Whether from the spoils of war during Roman antiquity or resistance to modernism and technology in Italy during the 1960s, their practices crafted cultural relevance from discarded matter.

In line with these instances is assemblage art, which has had a hand in shaping art and architecture in Los Angeles for almost a century. This essay travels into Watts, moving past the familiar path of violence in this legendary part of Los Angeles to revisit experiments with trash that began there in the 1920s. The story reveals how today a grassroots nonprofit arts organization, its director, and a handful of architects, artists, and neighborhood residents are working together to refurbish a row of dilapidated houses along East 107th Street. Their collective efforts and participative production weave art and architecture from detritus and the everyday to build and sustain an alternative vision for this underserved commu- nity. The trail of unexpected combinations and juxtapositions begins at the end of a narrow street under a monument made of rubbish—the Watts Towers.

While visiting Los Angeles for the first time (to attend the opening of his 1963 Elvis exhibition at Ferus Gallery), Andy Warhol bought a sixteen-millimeter sync-sound Bolex camera and shot his partially improvised riff on the Hollywood adventures of Tarzan.1 In Tarzan and Jane, Regained, Sort of…, a free-spirited cast of artists and actors roams the tangled web of freeways and unlikely destinations that replace the wil- derness of a jungle. The Beverly Hills Hotel swimming pool substitutes for a lagoon and the Watts Towers stand in for trees,

1 The purchase of the Swiss black box marked the beginning of a five-year period during which Warhol directed and produced over sixty experimental films. For more information about the films of Andy Warhol, consult Andy Warhol’s Blow Job, by Roy Grundmann, and The Black Hole of the Camera: The Films of Andy Warhol, by J.J. Murphy.

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vines, and low-lying flora. Midway through the film, Tarzan rests with a dog under one of the smaller structures of the Watts Towers. The narrator whispers, “Jane has been changed into a dog by the forces of evil.”

Ominous forces are not alien to Watts. The politics that define and shape the place are murky. Infamously dark tales of corruption, dubious business deals, discriminatory policies, and corrosive public services have transformed the once placid 220-acres of alfalfa fields and livestock farms from a thriving multiethnic, working-class community into one of the earliest examples of a twentieth-century American ghetto.2 Well before the decay that ravaged most American inner cities during the late 1960s and 1970s, Watts became the embodiment of destructive urban practices.3 On August 11, 1965, on the one-hundredth anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment enactment to the united States Constitution, America’s most violent social uprising ignited in Watts, only to be followed twenty-eight years later by another. Subse- quently, the notorious 1965 Watts Riots and the 1992 Rodney King Riots have cast dark shadows on the region.

Not surprisingly, many Angelinos never venture to this 2.5-square-mile section of southeast Los Angeles. For most, Watts resides in the collective psyche as a euphemism, a one-word cautionary tale of persistent cultural, social, and economic tension. What the novelist Thomas Pynchon wrote in 1966 still rings true: “Watts is country which lies, psychologi- cally, further than most whites seem at present willing to travel.… Yet, in the daytime’s brilliance and heat, it is hard to believe there is any mystery to Watts. Everything seems so out in the open, all of it real, no plastic faces,

2 Known as the “crossroads of Los Angeles,” Mexican, African, and Asian Americans worked and lived alongside White Americans in Watts from the

early 1900s until the late 1950s, when Watts suffered the effects of white flight, due to the early erosion of jobs in heavy manufacturing. In addition to the struggles of urban restructuring, redlining, and freeways, right wing politics pressured Jews and other white ethnics to leave peacefully integrated neighborhoods for white suburbs. Sarah Schrank, “Nuestro Pueblo: The Spatial and Cultural Politics of Los Angeles,” in The Spaces of the Modern City: Imaginaries, Politics, and Everyday Life, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton: Princeton university Press, 2008), 276.

3 unemployment, decreased home ownership, and the loss of public transportation were provoked by practices such as racial discrimination, restrictive housing covenants, and redlining policies intended to limit

where populations could live based on race and ethnicity. Schrank, 276.

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no transistors, no hidden Muzak, or Disneyfield landscaping, or smiling little chicks to show you around. Not in Raceriotland. Only a few historic landmarks…” 4

At the heart of Watts on East 107th Street stands the neighborhood’s best-known historic landmark—the Watts Tow- ers (figure 1). Stained by neglect and fierce social uprising, the towers are a memento of the neighborhood’s other legacy, assemblage art. Seventeen structures in the form of tall spires, elaborate fountains, and gazebos are nestled in a triangular parcel of land left over from the Pacific Electric Railroad line. Each spindly edifice is hand crafted from bent rebar and caked on cement mortar carefully encrusted with little pieces of broken glass, ceramic tile, and seashells in ornate mosaic patterns. Starting in 1921, Simon Rodia, an Italian immigrant, spent thirty-four years building what he endearingly called Nuestro Pueblo. ultimately, with the neighborhood in rapid decline, the oeuvre and its artist fell prey to ridicule and petty vandalism. Rodiadeeded the artistic work and property to a neighbor before leaving definitively in 1954.

Figure 1 Young men hang out at Simon Rodia's Watts Towers, 1966. Photo: Bill Ray © Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

Much debate circulated around the towers’ fate. Venom- ous critics condemned their eccentric character as nothing more than heaps of garbage. Among those anxious to see the towers demolished were officials from the Los Angeles Depart- ment of Building and Safety who, in 1957, attempted to tear them down. Simultaneously, adventurous artists and actors, architects

4 Thomas Pynchon, “A Journey into the Mind of Watts,” New York Times, June 12, 1966, 264.

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and engineers, historians and journalists, as well as museum directors and international luminaries, converged to preserve one man’s expressive assemblage of found objects. Their advocacy not only produced an unprecedented solidarity to save and protect the towers, but also fostered a cultural move- ment in Watts where art became a tool for social change.5

By 1964, the towers had become a contested site for local artistic and cultural activity operating outside of the art world’s institutionalized circles. Without access to galleries, museums, and publishing, artists began experimenting with ideas of community building to reimagine their creative role and purpose. The racial tension growing in Watts at the time offered an ideal stage from whence to pronounce an alter- native vision to the violent protests. Artists such as Noah Purifoy, Dale Brockman Davis, John Outterbridge, Betye Saar, and Charles Dickson believed political aims could be achieved through aesthetic means.6 Trash became the predominant medium as objets trouvés and everyday items were recon- figured into expressive works of art. Sharing a commitment to art as a means of social change, Purifoy and Outterbridge became known for their Duchampian interprtations using debris and junk from the 1965 Watts riots.7 unfortunately, little historical research has been devoted to this creative renaissance in Watts, which spanned two decades, and its significance to the realm of participatory art practices and cultural production remains underexplored.8

In the aftermath of the Rodney King Riots, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles presented UNCOMMON SENSE. The 1997 exhibition was a timely appraisal of artists

5 Cécile Whiting, Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s (Berkeley: university of California Press, 2006), 138–65.

6 Curtis J. Carter, Watts: Art and Social Change in Los Angeles, 1965–2002 (Milwaukee, WI: Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette university, 2003)

7 Noah Purifoy’s Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum displays Purifoy's assemblage sculptures, all created on-site between 1989 and 2004, on 7.5 acres of open land. John Outterbridge’s The Rag Factory (2011) was a site-specific installation commissioned by and exhibited at LA><ART in Los Angeles

as part of the Getty initiative Pacific Standard Time.

8 For a more detailed overview of the Watts art movement, consult Curtis J. Carter, Watts: Art and Social Change in Los Angeles, 1965–2002; Cécile

Whiting, Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s, 138–65; and Kellie Jones, Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980 (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2011).

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engaged in public participation and social interaction. One of the six contributing artists, Rick Lowe, created the Watts House Project (WHP), a pilot art initiative addressing the neighborhood immediately surrounding the Watts Towers.9 Over the course of the installation, neighborhood residents, local artists, business leaders, city officials, and others vocalized their vision for East 107th Street. They concluded the neighborhood should be further developed as an artists’ district by reinforcing the existing community arts and education youth centers surrounding the fabled towers. In addition, they resolved that more services should be provided to the influx of art tourists that visit the towers each year. Following the installation, Lowe, with the assistance of Los Angeles-based artist Edgar Arceneaux, continued to organize community efforts and develop a strategic plan for initiating WHP.

In 2007, Arceneaux and Sue Bell Yank, assistant director of academic programs at the Hammer Museum, officially launched Watts House Project. Its founders, eager to reinforce the cultural legacy surrounding the towers, set out to delin- eate anew how art and architecture could operate as a catalyst for economic and community development. In the spirit of assemblage art practices, WHP enlists neighborhood residents, artists, architects, and scholars to reimagine collaboratively a social, political, and spatial trajectory for process-based projects outside conventional forms of practice. As with earlier Watts art projects, the work emerges organically from the untidy and everyday. The gritty “hands on” approach wrestles with the unpredictable and provisional to broaden the concept of archi- tecture and art and the processes that define each discipline. Artist John Outterbridge, who was director of the Watts Towers

9 Rick Lowe founded Project Row Houses in Houston, where he transformed twenty-two row houses into an art center equipped with artists’ housing, a sculpture garden, and an art park. Lowe began meeting with residents in the Northern Third Ward district to imagine how this historic and struggling African American neighborhood could be reimagined in an economically sustainable way. Project Row Houses has evolved from a single block to span six and a half blocks of buildings. It has spearheaded a major artists’ residency program and helped boost the community’s basic services and infrastructure. Many similar problems plague Watts. The 2010 Census report indicates that half of all families in Watts live in poverty, with an average per capita income of $6,681, compared with the national average of 15% who live below the poverty line and a per capita income of $26,558. In Watts, 64% of the residents do not have a high school diploma; nationally, 15% have not obtained a high school diploma.

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Arts Center for more than thirty years, describes WHP as unique: “up until now, the story of gentrification and architectural philoso- phy, in Watts, didn’t include this.”10

WHP was awarded a significant grant by the Warhol Foun- dation in 2009.11 Three subsequent projects—one realized and two proposed—are part of WHP’s effort to define a new gener- ation of cultural activism, where the potency of the work is drawn directly from its ability to venture beyond the studio and into the city. One of these projects, the Cerant | Love House, opts for disposable imagery over constructed matter to propa- gate a cultural agenda. Another, the Garcia House, reassesses flashbacks of life, time, and diminishing memory to create a patchwork of physical spaces otherwise forgotten. The Platform reformulates the wastelands produced by security fences.

The Cerant | Love House One of the earliest projects initiated by WHP, the Cerant | Love house is a collaborative effort between the studio artist Alex- andra Grant, architects Roberto Sheinberg and Arnold Swan- born, and local residents Louis Cerant and Moneik Johnson. Borne from an installation piece by Grant entitled A Love That Should Have Lasted, the initial concept was to erect a large- scale sculptural piece using the word LOVE to symbolize unity and affection in a place seen more often as divisive and riddled with conflict. In a photomontage by Grant, the language and text-based artist digitally collages the word LOVE with an image of the Cerants’ home; the word stands upright like a billboard fixed atop of the bungalow (figure 2). The photomontage was meant to act as a lightning rod to attract attention and resources for the realization of the project, which intermingles narrative, message, and spatial dimension. The project took an unexpected

10 Lynell George, “Watts House Project: Art Meets Architecture Near the Towers,” Los Angeles Times, November 2, 2008.

11 The Warhol Foundation awarded a grant in the amount of $125,000 to WHP. The primary focus of the foundation’s grant-making activity is supporting work that is experimental, under-recognized, or challenging in nature. The program has been both proactive in its approach to the field of cultural philanthropy and responsive to the changing needs of artists. A strong commitment to freedom of artistic expression led the Warhol Foundation to play an active advocacy role for artists during the culture wars of the 1990s and continues to inform its support of organizations that fight censorship, protect artists’ rights, and defend their access to evolving technologies in the digital age. Blake Eskin, “Making More Andys Possible,” ARTnews, vol. 101, no. 5 (May 2002), 48.

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Figure 2 Alexandra Grant, Love House, 2008. Digital photomontage, 5 × 5 inches.

Figure 3 The Garcia House, Tapestry, Escher GuneWardena, 2010.

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but fortuitous detour when the architects announced a series of challenges, including insufficient structural support from the existing roof and numerous zoning restrictions from the Los Angeles building department. As a result, the proposed project was never built, but the photomontage took on a life of its own.12 An object in its own right, the LOVE image is a mecha- nism of popular culture that takes many forms and connects directly with the hearts and minds of the public, becoming an instrument for fundraising and garnering support for WHP from institutions and individuals.

The Garcia House

The Garcia House compound consists of several structures that accommodate three generations of one tight-knit family. The design scheme of hodge-podge elements, by architects Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena, adds necessary living space for the second-generation family members who cohabit the com- pound and remodeled the bathrooms and kitchens to keep them in functioning order. In addition to addressing these more prosaic needs, the architects, in collaboration with the artists’ collective Slanguage, developed a distinctive identity for the family’s home through a series of interventions. The first is a memory book tracing the family’s history in the neighborhood; second is an artwork in the form of a reliquary to enshrine the family book; and third are decorative architectural elements interwoven in the architectural fabric of the home. For example, a new carport, doubling as an outdoor dining pavilion, serves as a communal gathering space for family festivities (figure 3).

The Platform Security is a preoccupation for all people living on East 107th Street. Fences surround every property, including the Watts Towers, creating an archipelago of safety zones. The ubiqui- tous infrastructure of fear is a localized notion of border con- trol and defense against urban terrorists. To ease their sever- ity, some of the fences are embellished reflections of Simon Rodia’s towers, such as the work of self-taught sculptor Raul Curiel, which is sprinkled throughout the neighborhood. Nonetheless, as Mike Davis points out in City of Quartz, “We live in ‘fortress cities’ brutally divided between ‘fortified cells’ … Today’s colossal scale of residential and commercial security

12 Phone interview with Alexandra Grant, April 20, 2013.

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supplants residual hopes for urban reform and social integra- tion…” 13 The Platform is an inverse of the fortress phenomenon. The design compresses a new fence against the fronts of two rundown structures that WHP purchased in 2009 to house their offices and a variety of community amenities. In direct colla- boration with WHP’s executive director Edgar Arceneaux, man- aging director Will Sheffe, and program director Trinidad Ruiz, the project set out to strengthen the neighborhood's sorely lacking civic amenities by providing a point of interest that serves the institutional needs of WHP as well as the community. My firm, Fièvre + Jones, designed and built the Platform along with com- munity resident Genaro Alvarez and student volunteers from the university of Southern California School of Architecture.

The relocation of the property enclosure allows the Platform to respond to a variety of performative needs with minimal resources and complexity. The two houses share a courtyard and are connected by gates that act as a visual marker for the activities within; more importantly, they are unified by a screen of “hardiplank” slats painted in primer white, which do double duty as visual organizers and as security devices (figure 4). Event spaces, such as a coffee shop and intimate yet public spaces that residences and visitors can use at all times, are defined by the simple act of opening and closing the various doors, gates,

13 Mike Davis, City of Quartz (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 224.

Figure 4 Drawing indicating closed and opened position of the new Watts House Project Platform, Fièvre + Jones, 2010.

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and window shutters integrated into the single surface (figures 5 and 6). The ubiquitous bars on doors, windows, and around yards constitute a negative infrastructure in the community, highlighting fear and uncertainty. By transforming this infra- structure into an aesthetic element, rather than foregrounding fear the two houses bespeak unity and modernity.

Figure 5 Diagram indicating the spatial variation of the Watts House Project Platform.

Figure 6 The Watts House Project Platform with the Watts Towers in the background, October 2012. Photo: Eric Staudenmaier.

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Margins of Opportunity These three projects in Watts re-conceptualize conventional notions of place, space, and the street in order to capitalize on margins of opportunity that would otherwise go fallow. Ques- tions of where art and architecture overlap are coupled with broader issues of public policy, zoning, and land use. The projects conflate physical and perceptual structures to call out and alter space and offer a positive sense of place in an other- wise daunting political reality.

Instead of evoking destructive behavior or unwarranted circumstances, trash draws connections between seemingly unrelated artists who acknowledge and confront a constellation of physical and cultural differences. Their cultural production challenges a singular vision of creative practice and raises awareness of the other. Simon Rodia, Andy Warhol, Noah Purifoy, John Outterbridge, and their contemporaries contributed to a way of seeing and making that demonstrates the ability of art and architecture to be a catalyst as well as disperse forces on behalf of social change—reinforcing art and archi- tecture’s necessity in brokering a complex world. The artists and architects working today in Watts and with the Watts House Project carry forward that vision in art, architecture, and infra- structure projects that endow Watts with a proud public face, the beginning of a much longer journey.