One summer night in 1947 the science fiction
writer Ray Bradbury and a friend decided to take an
after-dinner walk down Wilshire Boulevard. Even then,
just two years after the end of World War II, Los
Angeles was in the expansionist thrall of the
automobile. The idea of two men strolling, not driving,
down the Miracle Mile was already seen as somehow
deviant, anti-social, potentially criminal. Within
minutes a police patrol car came up alongside the two
suspects, who were questioned at length just for
attempting the Old World social activity of flâneurie.
In LA, a place that thinks itself a city but is just a
centreless agglomeration of low-density hubs that could
not communicate were it not for the freeways and
boulevards that link them, it has become a cliché that
no one walks, that people are separated by distance, by
the cocoons of their cars, by their insular lifestyle.
It has become the guiding myth of its own self-image of
modern alienation. It creeps into films such as Robert
Altman’s Short Cuts (1993) or Crash (2004), whose
opening voice-over monologue confides that ‘In LA,
nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and
glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash
into each other, just so we can feel
something’.1
It is a seductive cliché fed by a
narcissistic film industry, one with traction based in
social and topographic reality. But there are other ways
to create that sense of touch and break through that
somnambulistic drift of dislocation and alienation.
Fritz Haeg, a Minnesota-born architect who teaches at
Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, has been
experimenting for the last five years with ways of
bringing people together, introducing communities that
rarely mix, practitioners from different cultural
disciplines that seldom overlap or mingle. Haeg lives in
a 1980s-era geodesic dome on the top of a hill
overlooking Eagle Rock, an area where young artists
priced out of gentrified Silver Lake have found more
affordable digs and garage studio spaces. The dome on
the hill sits with unlikely authority surrounded by
ranch-style houses overlooking a megalopolis without
end. It’s a personal dwelling, an architecture studio, a
site for a terraced subsistence ‘gardenlab’ and, most
significantly, a venue for an ongoing series of Sunday
events that he calls Sundown Salon. His remodelled
Buckyball, which caps a Dr No-like sprayed-concrete
subterranean cave, is the perfect futuristic HQ for
someone like Haeg, who will admit to a certain
self-conscious Utopian strain in his practice and his
ideals (recordings by Terry Riley, Steve Reich and other
Minimalists seem to be on the stereo a lot). During a
recent visit to his hilltop eyrie Haeg stressed that he
is most interested in encouraging the idea that a house
can be more than what we expect of it, that a home can
be a bubble of privacy and at the same time a venue for
communal activities that take on a life and history of
their own. The Salons – there have been 26 since 2001 –
have involved artists such as Pipilotti Rist, Los Super
Elegantes, Assume Vivid Astro Focus, Yoshua Okon, Alice
Könitz, Katie Grinnan and Liz Larner. But the Sunday
soirées are polyglot, and collaborating participants
come not only from the visual art world but have
included dancers, architects, musicians, filmmakers,
designers, DJs, feminist Agitprop performers,
hairstylists, needleworkers, critics, poets, clothing
designers, community activists, horticulturalists and on
and on. Variously themed around things as diverse as the
Futurist Baroque, reading, botany, Glam Metal, hot rods,
radical gardening, collaborative collage-making, the
body, knitting and boys (or, on another night, girls),
the salons are part performance, part workshop, part
seminar, intended to create a sense of convivial
community among people who might otherwise never meet or
consider one another’s professional interests as in any
way relevant to their own. Some gatherings have been as
demure as book readings (LA Literary, Salon no. 21);
others have been frenzies of competitive needlecraft
(KnitKnit, Salon no. 11, which brought together Andrea
Zittel, Liz Collins, Jim Drain and a host of others
willing to crochet their hearts out). Still another (LA
Masterminding, Salon no. 12) assembled the heads of
creative non-profits and community arts organizations to
encourage collaborative experimentation and foster
future dialogue. Others have clearly just been fun
free-for-alls, as in a salon introducing Nordic artists,
designers, DJs, performance artists and cooks to their
LA counterparts (Scandinaviangelenos, Salon no. 25) in a
pot-luck cultural exchange project.
In all this
Haeg is following a tradition established by the
Austrian-born architect Rudolf M. Schindler, who became
the quintessential LA Modernist in the 1920s, forging
the first local link between Modernism in domestic
architecture (the open plan, the blurring of indoor and
outdoor space, the congenial exterior fireplaces) and
the European model of the avant-garde salon. Rudolf and
Pauline Schindler’s Kings Road House in Hollywood
(1922), now home to the MAK Center, became the locus for
artists, musicians, dancers and writers – many of whom
were transplants from the East or exiles from Europe –
and their salons a vital forum for progressive and
radical ideas where artists could become aware of one
another and express their shared, emergent LA-ness in
the 1920s and 1930s. (As early as 1916 Pauline dreamed
of a house ‘open just as some people’s hearts are open,
to friends of all classes and types […] where
millionaires and labourers, professors and illiterates,
the splendid and the ignoble meet constantly
together’.2)
Haeg bristles at the suggestion that
his own salons are merely excuses for parties. Shying
away from overstretched fall-back frames such as
‘relational aesthetics’, he sees the events as
happenings that can be laboratories of creativity and
cross-pollination. Art that sits in a corner doesn’t
interest him as much as the artistic residue produced
through some social interaction, some mutually shared
experience. He wants the ‘salonists’ to take something
constructive home with them, but it’s up to them to
discover what it is.
Haeg has multiple irons in
the fire: aside from a nascent private architectural
practice, he is also expanding his idea of demanding
more from the average home via his Edible Estates
project, coaxing enterprising volunteers in nine
climatically distinct parts of the country to scalp
their placid, sterile American lawns and replace them
with productive, regionally appropriate gardens that are
completely edible and sustainable. (One already exists
in an otherwise trim neighbourhood in Salina, Kansas.)
It may be nearly impossible to wean suburbanites from
the glories of the over-fertilized, hyper-manicured
artifice that is the front lawn, but Haeg isn’t alone in
this green insurrection, and if social critics like
James Howard Kunstler and the makers of the documentary
The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of
the American Dream (2004) are correct in their
predictions about the impending implosion of sprawl as a
workable model for living, experiments such as Edible
Estates may be just the beginning of an infrastructure
of agrarian subsistence that will become the
norm.
But doom is still down the road, and Haeg,
who is compiling a thick book about the salons as a
definitive record, diary and instructional handbook
(with Rashomon-like recollections by various
participants about what actually did or did not take
place), recently thought out loud that he might bring
the salons to a close in 2006. In fact, expressing a
need to leave LA for a while and travel, he mused about
holding local Sundowns in cities around the world,
taking the salon back to its origins and inviting the
locals to bring something new to the idea. That way,
like the proverbial one-suitcase man, or a tortoise, you
can always take your home with you anywhere you go and
still make new friends.
James Trainor is US
editor of frieze.
1 From Crash (2004), screenplay
by Paul Haggis
2 Pauline Schindler (née Gibling) in a
letter to her mother, May 1916, quoted by Justin Beal in
a forthcoming essay, ‘Last Stop
West’ |
