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  • Devices of WonderArtist Lauren Bon reimagines the L.A. Aqueduct
  • Jon Christensen (bio)
Keywords

Los Angeles, Lauren Bon, Metabolic Studio, artist, environmentalism, philanthropy, la noira, farmlab, veterans, Los Angeles aqueduct


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Location of La Noria, the waterwheel Bon is constructing on the L.A. aqueduct.

(Lauren Bon and the Metabolic Studio, Bending the River Back Into The City, 2014. Collage.)

On any given day in artist Lauren Bons Metabolic Studio, a cavernous warehouse on the edge of Chinatown in downtown Los Angeles, you’re as likely to run into a water-rights attorney, a well-connected political fixer, a staffer from a city agency, an engineer, a fabricator, or even a brewer, as you are the artist, who is somewhere in the building, or on her way, or just as likely out in the field far away.

But on a recent day this spring, there she was, with a bemused smile, under a mane of wild strawberry-blond hair, standing with a half-dozen members of her studio and a few visitors by a high table tasting beer made from water from the Los Angeles River, which runs a stone’s throw away, behind the warehouse, [End Page 52] across the railroad tracks, in a concrete strait jacket. One of the beers was made from filtered water, the other not.

“Which one do you like best?”

It’s a kind of dare, isn’t it?

A small dare for a visitor in the midst of a very big one along the river, for the artist and the city where she has made herself a transformative figure. This artisanal river-water beer might literally work some small chemical or biological transformation in my body. But the communion with a larger vision seems worth the risk. And the beer is not half bad, a nice ale with well-balanced malt and hops, and mysterious but intriguing earthy undertones.

We lift our glasses to the river that has been for a very long time not a river, the river that is reenchanting Los Angeles, the river that will soon power an enormous waterwheel, which will turn right here where we are standing, destroying the studio where it is being conceived, pulling water from the river for the first time in more than a century, and distributing it around the city. Drawings, schematics, and models of La Noria, as Bon calls it, are pinned to the walls, lying on tables, and scattered around the warehouse.

Like its Spanish name, the waterwheel hearkens back to an old Los Angeles, if not the first Los Angeles, before the pueblo even got its name, when this was Tongva territory, then to the very early Los Angeles, where more than a dozen waterwheels lined the river, raising water into the zanja madre—the mother ditch—which carried water to a network of ditches supplying vineyards, groves, fields, and homes. The waterwheels connected Los Angeles to its source.

In the early twentieth century, a booming Los Angeles was separated from the river in three decisive steps. First, an aqueduct was built more than 200 miles north to bring water to the city from the Sierra Nevada—a move mythologized in the movie Chinatown. Then, the city took control of all water rights on the river. Finally, the river was encased in concrete after rampaging floods in the 1930s; it became a drainage ditch, shunting water as quickly and efficiently as possible to the ocean.

Now Bon wants to “bend the river back into the city” with La Noria, a grand piece of art that she sometimes calls “a device of wonder” and at other times “avant-garde nostalgia.” In the process, she has shaped her artistic practice to shake the foundation of L.A.’s relationship with the river and water by demystifying the Los Angeles Aqueduct, acquiring the first individual water right on the river in more than a century, and soon, penetrating the river’s concrete channel to reestablish a connection between the city and its source. [End Page 53]

Lauren Bon was...

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