AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

Brave New Site

Elizabeth Sims

To enter the latest outdoor installation at Materials & Applications, one must trust one’s weight to a softly curving bamboo vortex which bows, creaks and gives as it spans a small terraced pool. This bridge glitters in dull greens and golds, shifting and resettling in constant response to its use and to its environment. Its construction is apparent and simple, involving what appear to be industrial-strength twist-ties. Sheltered and cooled by tall, live bamboo, the small pool is fed by a rooftop rain catchment, and is seeded with water plants. However, as the title of the work, Here there be Monsters, warns, unknowable things lurk in this emphatically comprehensible and calm space. These hi-tech enigmas, at first shy, become bolder throughout the development of the installation, expressing themselves as gestures of watery movement in direct response to certain actions of startled visitors. They evolve and mature like the settling bridge, the rustling live bamboo, and the creeping water plants, in response to the activity and conditions of the environment. However, the things alone remain invisible and obscure, endangering the more transparent elements of the piece, including even the visitors, with a sense of overexposure. These mysterious, elusive residents manifest an apprehension and anxiety within the otherwise accentuated comprehensiveness of the installation, undermining and problematizing its progressive thrust.

Lauren Bon’s Not a Cornfield
Elizabeth Sims

“This is real. You feel like you’re in something real in a city that is at least largely about the creation of an image.”
-Lauren Bon

Ironically, the sprawl of hegemonic globalization has produced a hankering for localism that seeks to reject a democracy diverse only in its consumer choices. Redefinitions, within the spatial-cultural discourse, of “community” and the “public,” continue to indicate a desire for the comprehensive intimacy of belonging. Contemporary site-specific art practices tend to evince an embattled conviction of the possibility of a more authentic life. However, for consumers indoctrinated by a massified media, this desire is liable to manifest as an objectification and appropriation of marginalized cultural traditions, rather than as an engagement with the ephemeral matrix of relations in a unique environment. Site specific art projects in particular, because of their dependence on institutional funding and promotion, are often caught straddling these two dynamics. Lauren Bon’s Not a Cornfield project attempts to extract locality from downtown Los Angeles the way its crop leaches the soil, drawing out the large and small histories, relationships and visions of its residents. Unfortunately, the primacy of its heavy symbolic content simulates, instead of stimulates, an empowered and grounded community.