But Is It Art?

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

“Concrete Is Fluid” reads a neon sign at the industrial space Farmlab, the kind of million-square-foot, brick-and-mortar art paradise that makes you bite you fist in envy. We had come to see a “salon” on the Watts House Project (“a collaborative artwork in the shape of a neighborhood redevelopment”). But we’d gone to the wrong place first, per usual (though, unusually, we’d at least gotten the day right), and so had finally gotten to see the swooping, glittering, crazymaking and beautiful Towers themselves. Then we discovered our mistake—the salon on the Watts House Project was not at the Watts House Project—and drove up the 110 and past Chinatown to Farmlab just in time to miss the PowerPoint presentation and wander instead about the wonderful container gardens (some containers, naturally, composed of the husks of old El Caminos) and the wonderful space. You should really go to Farmlab. They’ve got just all kinds of things!

As a liberal in good standing, you’re not supposed to admit you find a particular neighborhood scary, unless it’s the immobile foreheads and duck lips of, say, Rodeo Drive. But if you want to say out loud that you’re afraid to go to Watts, I honestly don’t blame you. Poverty is rarely all moral uplift, all the time, no matter what that darned Jesus said. Here is one lady, at the salon: “My husband used to be a librarian in Watts,” she said. “He would tell me not to come down even to visit, because there were pools of blood at the 103d Street Station!”

That does sound like something it would be worth steering clear of, and I think that dear lady would do well to avoid the 103d Street Station and drive her car to Watts instead!

Charlie Mingus used to walk to school every day past the Watts Towers as Simon Rodia was erecting them. It’d be two stories high one day, he recounted, and the next day it’d be gone.

The Watts House Project is a spin-off of Project Row Houses, a housing/art project in Houston; at Project Row House, WHP director Edgar Arcenaux tells me over coffee a few days later, night watchman Arthur is an authority on Aristotle. Tony, a security guard in the tiny gem of a park (the “Cultural Crescent”) at the Towers, is from Haiti and speaks seven languages. Then there is Felix, the first of the property owners on 107th Street across from the Towers to collaborate with the artists of WHP. First there is a beautification phase: fences, driveways, paint jobs and porches, interior architecture and design. It will involve all 20 properties on the street at a cost of $30,000 to $50,000 a remodel. The talent for these remodels comes from the block itself: cabinet builders, roofers, house painters, and a blacksmith. Next will come solar, and water purification, and intranet. The money for these comes from individuals and from L.A. art institutions such as LA><ART and the Hammer, and hopefully in the future from LACMA, which would make me hate the museum slightly less than I did last year when it announced a $55 million donation from Lynda and Stewart Resnick; doesn’t LACMA have enough “pavilions”? How many high school art teachers would $55 million buy the LAUSD?

Christina, who lives next door to Felix and has a pretty new fence and landscaping, wants to start a café for visitors to the tower, formalizing the neighborhood’s existing economy; for a dozen years, she sold water and snacks from her porch. Also? There will be edible landscaping. Hopefully, in a Camaro.

Of course it is. Everything is art.

Edgar Arcenaux’s grandfather came to LA in the first wave of black migration from the South. In 1984, when the Olympics hit, Edgar and his family left the city for the San Gabriel Valley. When the city went up in flames in 1992, Edgar felt survivors’ guilt. Then he went to art school, where he studied concepts that could be applied to social imbalances—perhaps it was Joseph Beuys’s “social sculpture,” which posited Gesamtkunstwerk, or society itself as an artwork—and also met Rick Lowe, the founder of Project Row Houses in Houston. Is there a fear that beautifying one street creates its own social imbalance? Absolutely, Arcenaux says. “The fear of gentrification is not as big a problem as the disparity that can be produced between one neighborhood and another with this kind of investment.” So, that would suck then. But it could mushroom, or snowball, neighbors working collaboratively, maybe in the way that immigrant groups pool their money to loan one another startup funds for Greek restaurants or Korean drycleaners or whatever: “We work directly with property owners, talk to them, and start the same day. If the fence at Rosa’s house was on city property, it wouldn’t have taken two weeks; it would have taken two years.”

Where the Watts House Project—from USC students to JetBlue employees volunteering their time—mobilizes the neighborhood’s residents and artisans in a progression from house to house, there is no announced timetable for the mayor’s $1 billion revitalization of Jordan Downs, 2100 units on city property. It sounds very nice—mixed use, mixed income, etc.—and I am all for it! But will it be ready before or after the Subway to the Sea?

Community redevelopment agencies can be a terrible scandal—declaring upper-middle-class neighborhoods “blighted” so you can put in a mall for your developer friends, or killing a local institution for a Marie Callender’s. Instead, WHP takes on the redevelopment itself, acting like America’s idea of America, before we got quite so fat and retired to the sofa—can-do, bootstraps, I don’t need your stinking government bureaucrats, etc. It’s sort of Republican, really, in a socialist utopian intellectual kind of way.

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