FARMLAB: How to Make a Junker Garden
Lauren Bon’s farming-as-art project in downtown continues to germinate the roots of arty green activism in L.A., but it is expanding with ease into a web of other broad civic relationships including co-collaborations with L.A. South Central Farmers, the Verde Coalition, farmworkers groups and various neighborhood groups and environmental non-profits. Although the one-time cornfield (a one-liner of a 6-month land art piece Bon constructed on the site of a new state park in the derelict downtown area) had to be harvested and ultimately ended there; the cornfield spinoffs (now dubbed farmlab) have begun to take on a life of their own, and it’s almost as if they’re just getting to the good part. Last Saturday’s workshop, exhibit and all around enjoy-the-sun-and-breeze-session on the process of turning junk into something that is beautiful and/or that grows (including junker cars-turned-garden workshops and spring bonnet-making), raises the farmlab initiative towards a local micro-movement. There’s a subtle realization coming on at Farmlab, just like the gentle breezes under their shady highway overpass, maturing right along with their beans, watermelons, cassavas and apples.
After the cornfield buzz died down and the harvest was hauled away, it took Bon and her staff about a year to accept that it was over. But now that the land has been returned to the State Parks dept., its as if a purging of the foundation's one-hit-wonder was just a segue to something equally good. Now Farmlab can more deeply interrogate the underlying questions the cornfield initially brought up: issues concerning sustainability, urban community biulding, the non-profit as art piece, public space and class status, and artistic/civic partnerships. Which brings us to the first really great art exhibit of the post-cornfield era at the foundation.
"How to Make a Junker Garden" is an art piece to be sure, don't let the "workshop" feel of the thing distract you from noticing the finer details of meaning. Self-assembled instruction manuals laid out on a banquet table under Spring Street's breezy underpass serve as a guide book. Opposite the table, a dissected Volvo wagon sits out like a companion diagram, the motor is set aside and other parts are fastened to steel posts, serving as outdoor seats or a shading device.
Its easy enough to catch the moral of the story – re-use and recycle. But the "Junker" car epitomizes so much more than this surface treatment, especially when its parked here, abandoned under a freeway.
The mix of classes, ethnicities and ages one finds at farmlab events like last Saturday’s, isvirtually non-existant in LA art circles. At Farmlab, where homeless people smoke and dog roam around with migrant workers helping hipsters water, its an environment that makes “How to Make a Junker Garden” an uncanny metaphor for an essentially Los Angeleno form of gentrification, seen and experienced here in process and object form. "Re-use and recycle" has traditionally been an upper-class colloqialism, part of the Whole Foods vernacular. Seeing it fused with a beater car jacked up on cinderblocks is puzzling at first, but then seems inevitable. And it's just about as subtle as a hipster moving into Elysian Heights. The public exhibition of this Junker-metaphor gives Los Angeles it’s own edge in a world of city-centric “green art.” Both the Farmlab foundation and the art piece are evocative of a dream of classlessness or class-blurring that happens ever more infrequently in the city. Farmlab and not a cornfield have hit on this note before, but it never looses its passion for the cause, its basic simplicity, subtlety and humor.
There’s a green tint to a lot of the cultural production in the city right now – with Fritz Haeg’s "Edible Estates" making every art mag’s features page, the "Pyschobotany" show at Machine Projects and Farmlab, once Not a Cornfield, going on one year now. What happened in the bay area with Amy Franceschini’s Future Farmers in 2003 has trickled down the interstate and taken its own stronghold in dry, brown and drought riddled LA.
HOW TO MAKE A JUNKER GARDEN closes July 6th
