Bending the River
[photo: Gary Leonard]
“Combining nature and infrastructure while tying together—even defining—the basin, the Los Angeles River is the single most powerful space in Southern California: our Golden Gate Bridge, our Yosemite.”
-David Fletcher, Flood Control Freakology: Los Angeles River Watershed.
…The river is a rigorous mistress. but when you tickled her
with your deeds,
you can hear laughter
from beneath her concrete corset.
-Lewis MacAdams, from “To Artesia”
Crowned with a hard hat and a sporting a Day-Glo orange vest, I stand in the middle of the vast channel of the Los Angeles River, our river—that runs fifty-one miles to the sea. On a searing hot July afternoon, I’m listening to artist Lauren Bon explain her Bending the River work to a small group of people participating in a tour. I’m trying to understand what it is I’m seeing.
Bon, also suited in an orange vest, with a hard hat over her unruly curls, is surrounded by her crew: consulting engineer; construction crew; Metabolic studio team members. Up above us, a giant pile driver pounds rhythmically into the ground.
You can tell the artist loves working here, literally getting her hands dirty, conferring with her collaborators. Her delight is contagious
photo: L. Steinman
Here are just a few things you should know about artist Lauren Bon. She thinks large-scale. She believes that “artists must create on the same scale that society can destroy.” To commemorate the centenary of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, she staged “100 Mules Walking the Aqueduct,” in which she garnered permission from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to move 100 pack mules along 240 miles of channels, pipes and covered ditches, over the course of a month.
Take a look at the documentary about the project, with glorious aerial footage. The 10 strings of 10 mules, each wearing a blanket with the number 100, create a sinuous line of equines, a visible gesture in the landscape that fixes in one’s mind the scale of the effort and the actual path that L.A. water takes on its journey from the Eastern Sierra. Using the mules, working with mule packers in the Owens Valley she explains, commemorates the labor force that made the west’s infra-structure possible.
photo: Metabolic Studio and KCET Artbound
The work of Metabolic Studio, Bon says in a talk she delivered at the University of Michigan, is “a constellation of acts of restitution”: to the land, to its original indigenous inhabitants, to the river, to future generations.
Bon’s practice is rooted in asking questions, especially What if — questions that can change minds about what’s possible. What if we (the residents of this watershed) acknowledged the water that flows to us falls down from the sky in the Eastern Sierra? What if the City of LA that bought all the land between the city and those mountains, relinquished it? What if nobody needed to own land anymore?
Bending the River, she explains to our group, is, simply put, “a small diversion of the low-flow channel” of the L.A. River, which is itself, the “receiving embrace” of treated wastewater from three treatment plants in LA, Burbank, and Glendale, plus incidental urban runoff and groundwater upwelling. The water will be diverted to Metabolic Studio, where it will be treated at a new Mother Well (you heard it right, abstract painters!) and then used to water the LA State Historic Park (Not a Cornfield), the former brown site north of Chinatown that Metabolic continues to repair and replenish.
The low-flow channel, Bon explains, is what we see of the river all summer, the trickle of water in the center of the vast concrete canal. I raise my hand. So where’s the high flow channel? I look around.
You’re standing in it, Bon says. Right in the center of it.
That’s when I begin to “get it.” I recall how, a few months ago, walking the bike path in Frogtown during our deluge of winter rain, I was astonished to see the river surge past me. “The river is wild today,” I noted in my journal, in which I observed as well, a woman cooking tortillas on an open flame on a trash can lid underneath the overpass of the 2 Freeway. White caps on the surf, the height of the flow way above the half-way mark of the steep channel wall. The design of the LA River channel, Bon reminds us, was based on the engineers’ assumption of the worst flood, on the need to carry a vast volume of water away as soon as possible, out to the sea.
In a heavy downpour, after snow melt in the mountains, this entire empty space in which we now stand, would be completely filled with rushing water. When the rains come, the channel fills fast. The water doesn’t stay long. Author Patt Morrison, herself a thoughtful student of and voice for, the LA River, reminds us that the Tongva named the seasons of the river, “it is full of water” and “the water has departed.”
from “Bending the River Back to the City,” ©Metabolic Studio, 2019
Lauren Bon and her team are dogged. It took securing nearly 100 permits to begin work on “Bending the River.” Lauren Bon is now the first person in the history of Los Angeles to obtain a private water right permit (number 21,640). And, Bon adds, let’s give credit where credit is due: the Army Corps of Engineers accomplished an amazing feat, “to keep water from going where it wants to go in order to keep us safe and secure.”
Water Permit for Lauren Bon, from State of California
What would be here if this concrete weren’t here? Bon asks our group. Someone ventures an answer— wetlands? Yes, Bon says, adding, but the wetlands are STILL HERE. Underneath. Covered by concrete for almost ninety years.
Look at this! Bon points towards a large triangular piece of concrete, excised from the concrete floor of the river and turned on its side. It’s part of the surgical incision (of which Bon and her team of contractors will cover all traces) in which they will insert pipe and make their water diversion.
First triangular panel to be removed from the concrete jacket of the Los Angeles River, revealing the original floodplain underneath that has been sealed for almost ninety years. In 2019, a total of 31 triangular panels of concrete panels were removed to put three forty-foot pipes under the concrete to redirect a small portion of the Los Angeles River. One triangle is 7-feet tall; each side is 8 feet and its weight is 5000 to 7000 lbs © Metabolic Studio
But wonder of wonders, look at the bottom side of that Cosmic Dorito. It’s pitted and embedded with stones and silt; the river underneath has been wearing it away. When the Army Corps poured that concrete in the 1930’s, they poured it directly onto the River’s flood plain. It had never occurred to me until now that the free-flowing river is still there. The flood plain of what was the unbridled river still exists.
Indeed, just a few feet away, we can peer down into a pit where more concrete triangles have been excised, and there is the clear green groundwater surging. I gasp. The concrete floor of the river is, in Bon’s words, also “the ceiling of a pure healthy world.”
……..
Years ago, I traveled to the Dordogne in France, to see Paleolithic cave art. In the grotto of Pech Merle, we walked by images of bison, spotted horses,mammoths and handprints daubed in red. Then the guide aimed his laser upwards, brought our attention illuminating a stylized figure of a woman, painted 28,000 to 24,000 years ago.
Soon after my return, I dreamed I was walking around downtown Los Angeles with a group of artists and a tour guide. It was a very grey, foggy day. Suddenly the guide aimed his laser pointer at the side of a skyscraper, where we could see a faint, lavender glow. "That", he said triumphantly, "is an Upper Paleolithic drawing of an auroch.”I blinked my eyes. Really? On the shiny metal and glass skin of an office building? “Look harder,” the guide said, “The old things are still everywhere around us. You have to learn how to recognize them through the haze.”
As I stare down at what was once was our free-flowing river, that dream returns to me. Lauren Bon is that guide to help us recognize what of those old things still exist, when this land was stewarded with respect; when the river had its rights, too. Bending the River will serve to remind us of the sources of our water, and to consider the direct benefit to citizen stewardship of the water supply.
The joy of that encounter with the river has stayed with me—useful to summon to counteract the daily images of ecological disaster: the shrinking Tigris, wildfires, heat waves, whale strandings, bird extinctions, coral bleachings.
Bending the River is a conceptual art piece. An ecological intervention. A civic response. A teaching moment. It is the work of a poet of history and time. You can join a Metabolic Studios tour for Bending the River until September . Go.
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You’re invited to tour Bending the River, currently in construction in the LA River until September 2023. Metabolic Studio will provide safety vests and hard hats which must be worn while we are in the construction zone. Please sign and send back the Release of Liability form to amartinez@metabolicstudio.org RSVP required.
Calendly Link to sign up
Seating is limited, additional guests need their own RSVP on Calendly.
Location details sent upon confirmation.
Tour schedule thru September 14:
Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at 3pm
Tuesday and Thursday at 5pm