Real Properties, part 6.

More thoughts on dirt, and the many kinds of things that are hidden in it.

When I moved to Los Angeles, I was clueless about what the native landscape actually looked like. Like many a transplant to LA, I found leafy green friends from my childhood planted cheek by jowl with all the other (trans) plants, a dazzling and fascinating mash up. One garden in my neighborhood sported specimen cacti living happily amongst immaculate roses—thorns revealed as their true communion. LA is a sunny, well turned out city, 'angels’ indeed, and definitely femme. Plants were my gateway to everywhere they came from, using the best local guidebook out there, the Sunset Western Garden Book.

It wasn’t until 1997/8 when I rode horses regularly into the further reaches of Griffith Park, past the thirsty golf course, beyond the eucalyptus trees, that I began to see how heavily dolled up my hometown was. For a while, I was content to laugh at my inner image of post WWII Los Angeles, the perky wife of 1950’s appliance ads, or the 60’s swinger wife who got silently out of her marital bed an hour early to ‘put on her face’ and ‘do her hair’ before hubby woke to the wonder of her, her delicious instant coffee, and (Wonder Bread) jelly toast. White Lady LA had been fashionable for decades, at least until the Manson gang brought a brutal end to poor, pregnant Mrs. Roman Polanski herself, Sharon Tate.

Los Angeles was a proto-selfie culture long before the advent of smart phones and Instagram. I have ruminated on photographs all of my adult life, and I know that it’s really hard to think about what isn’t ‘in the picture,’ especially if you don’t have a clue that anything is missing. (Any grown up kid can tell you the same is true for all kinds of stories.) Photography is invariably about the world around whoever is wielding the camera. It is about time too, both the time at which an exposure is made, and, like the unknowing dead, the time that rolls on, even as the picture from that moment loses all its context, bedded down deep in the darkness of carefully assembled photo albums I enjoyed in thrift stores. All the pictures from the last twenty years of my ranch life will never have even that material afterlife; they languish in liminal ones and zeros that make sense to some digital code, maybe, inside the everchanging box of lights on my desk. In that, they are not materially different from the ones and zeros my keystrokes generate as I write this.

Much of what I used to teach aspiring artists was how to explore their own individual exposure impulse, the what-do-I-recognize that precipitates some self-conscious mark, a word, a paint stroke, a move, a noise, an assembly, or an exposure. From that pebble hitting an attentive mind, many associated ideas, large and small, may ripple outward. But most of my interest as an artist—and this I attribute, in part, to living in Los Angeles as I became one—was about the rest of the story, the artist’s decision to extend the hunch, to double down on it, to refine it, and, most importantly, to speak a very carefully crafted, often partial, version of it back to the world. And what, pray tell, happens to such a tenderly pruned and hothoused thing in the world, once liberated from its maker? Who knows, always the question, but done even at the risk of becoming more stuff to be forgotten in the dark, like old photos, the ones and zeros in my computer, or the fossils on the mountain.

When I was lucky enough to land a teaching job where I was asked to stretch and share my own personal pebble drops, I began to develop and teach classes about the space and logic of making exhibitions, both with and without photographs. Quickly, my own ripples led me to extend to students my wonder at the logic of Los Angeles’s composed landscapes. There are the famous ones, like the Hollywood sign, or the roadside attraction dinosaurs at the George C. Page Museum at the La Brea Tar pits, but one of my favorites is the aptly named Suiho-en, or The Garden of Water and Fragrance, at the Tillman water treatment plant in Van Nuys. The plant reclaims gray water from sewage. It opened in 1984 to a very squeamish public, so Mr. Tillman commissioned classical Japanese gardens alongside the plant to prove the water was benign, even in a delicate garden. And fragrant it is, but not enough to bother the migrating water birds grateful for the stopover. The mature classical Japanese garden is stunning and might even be familiar from Star Treklocations and the like. Late 20^th century Los Angeles’s character was always themself, out in the light of day, and ‘as advertised.’

Ultimately for me, the pressure of self-promotion in LA and in the “art world”—the one you might have read about in glossy magazines, or seen at galleries, art fairs or auction sites felt both hollow and tiresome, just like all advertising. Standing on that bridge in 2005 watching the flood water scour the river clean, I was absolutely ready to be a bit more arm’s length. Ventura County was close enough to keep my hand in everything that I wanted to hold on to, and yet was—almost unimaginably—far, far away, as they say in fairy tales.

So, how did Ventura escape LA’s development pressure. How could the native California chapparal and the undammed Santa Clara River survive such intimate adjacency. I imagine there are as many theories as there are people who have noticed this anomaly, but my considered answer lies in all the plot points left on the cutting room floor of another Hollywood gloss on LA and Ventura County history—this one brought to your screens by none other than the violently widowed and no doubt wigged-out Roman Polanski. I am of course talking about 1974’s Chinatown.

I saw Chinatown as a sophomore in college. In my cold college dorm room in upstate New York, I too was seduced by Towne and Polanski’s rendering of Los Angeles, but the real story Towne was inspired by was never important to know until I became a Ventura County farmer worried about water.