In 1998, author and activist Mike Davis published a book, The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster.(I had reviewed one of his preceding brilliant analyses of the geography, ecology and politics of LA, City of Quartz, last spring here, which I mention because it gives you a short overview of the issues he was concerned with and how he approached them.) The new book included profound analyses of the danger, handling and, yes, politics of wildfires with an emphasis on Malibu.
20 years later, a Malibu fire started on November 8 and burned nearly 97,000 acres, destroying over 1,600 structures and resulting in three fatalities. More than 295,000 residents were evacuated and an estimated $6 billion in damages incurred. The folks at Longreads.com used the occasion to publish an excerpt of Davis’ book describing the history of fires at the Malibu coast, by consensus deemed the wildfire capital of North America, and a postscript he added in 2018.
Sunrise colors accentuated by smog from wildfires.
I was sent a link to the excerpt given that this week saw another Malibu fire erupt, the Franklin Fire, which seems to be less likely to develop into a monster fire like last month’s Mountain fire in Ventura County, or the earlier, massive Thomas and Woolsey fires, which exploded with disastrous winds that pushed flames for miles and grounded firefighting aircraft. Saved by luck only – the direction and strength of winds for once in favor of the fire fighters.
My own brush with fire on a California hillside this year still sits in my bones and occasionally keeps me up at night. Reading Davis’ chapter on the politics of California wildfires – the reasons why they occur more strongly and frequently, why they harm populations in inequitable ways, and why no-one considers stopping the rebuilding of houses and mansions on fire-prone hills – and even expanding further onto the wilderness – helped to focus my head on the issues, rather than give in to my soul that shudders at the memories. What he wrote in 1998 is more relevant than ever, a quarter century later.
One of the core issues lies with our approach to fire. Fire prevention tactics like nurturing large areas of chaparral and forest into old age, have actually created conditions for stronger fires, once they ignite. Horticultural fire-breaks near towns, like citrus groves and agricultural land have disappeared due to water issues or the need for more land for construction. And we insist that we have to focus on fire handling: ever new regulations specify flame retardant building materials and brush clearing, in essence “fire proofing” human habitat. More than half of new California housing has been built in fire hazard zones since 1993, with more than 11 million Californians, roughly a quarter of the state’s population, living in high-risk wildfire areas known as the wildland-urban interface.
Karen Chapple, an urban planning professor and director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Community Innovation suggests that rather than focussing on specific [wildfire] mitigation measures such as hardening homes, prescribed burns, fuel breaks, we should revise land-use planning, creating more sustainable settlement patterns around the state. (Ref.) This is particularly urgent in light of all the insurance companies now refusing to insure for damage or loss due to fire, given how costs have skyrocketed with more frequent fires. You could lose everything if you (re)build in fire-prone regions.
I very much encourage you to read the 15 minute excerpt of Davis’ book, it is grippingly written as well as informative, and might provide insights for all of us who are exposed to future potential catastrophes, given that climate change has upped the ante for fires now spreading into previously less likely areas, followed by landslides and flooding. Dare I add that the historian’s prescience, evidenced in historical unfolding of his predictions, likely extends to what now lies in wait? Here is a summary of another of his books:
“Davis’s 2005 book, The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu, argues that a combination of poor government planning and a consolidation of resources in the hands of profit-obsessed pharmaceutical companies has left the world—and especially its poorest populations—dangerously vulnerable to pandemics. (The book was widely praised for its foresight during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and it was expanded and republished that year as The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu and the Plagues of Capitalism.)”
What can we do, in an era when this morning’s news included the announcement that R.F.Kennedy’s advisor had earlier asked the F.D.A. to revoke approval of the Polio and Hepatitis B vaccines? Never mind the development of pandemic vaccines…. If RFK gets approved to be the new health secretary, he can intervene in the F.D.A. petition as well as approval processes. I refuse to say “we are doomed.” But we should seriously think about what can be done, because we very well might be – particularly our grandchildren – if this insanity rules the day.
In the meantime, here are some photographs from Southern California with glimpses of the ecology that burns like tinder.
“At its outset in the mid-1960s, the historic preservation movement contributed to the racial splintering of the nation’s urban fabric. It denied the freeway’s entry into communities deemed historic while granting its passage through communities judged differently. It empowered some communities in their fight against the freeway while putting others at a disadvantage. In the disproportionate number of black communities that bore the brunt of urban highway construction, the preservation strategy had no chance, leaving displaced residents with a meager set of resources to recuperate their connection to the past. This is why we need to pay attention to murals, festivals, autobiographies, oral histories, and archival efforts. In the high-stakes struggles over the fate of the American city, these were the “weapons of the weak,” the tools invented by displaced communities to fight the forced erasures of their past.” ― Eric Avila, The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City
WHEN YOU ARE NEW to a city, like I am to Los Angeles, one way of exploration is to hit the history books. I had described my early mapping of the city onto Mike Davis’City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles in April here, while reviewing an exhibition from the LACMA archives, Pressing Politics: Revolutionary Graphics from Mexico and Germany.
This time, I brought Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism by Ehrhard Bahr, thinking I might follow in the footsteps of my exiled Landsmen during the 1940s, artists and intellectuals fleeing Nazi persecution. The book’s introduction contains the following description: “Los Angeles has occupied a space in the American imagination between innocence and corruption, unspoiled nature and ruthless real-estate development, naïveté and hucksterism, enthusiasm and shameless exploitation.”
I don’t know about the American imagination, but those of us who devoured Berthold Brecht’s California poetry 20 years later as German teenagers obsessed with America were undoubtedly influenced by his assessment:
Contemplating Hell
Contemplating Hell, as I once heard it, My brother Shelley found it to be a place Much like the city of London. I, Who do not live in London, but in Los Angeles, Find, contemplating Hell, that it Must be even more like Los Angeles.
Also in Hell, I do not doubt it, there exist these opulent gardens With flowers as large as trees, wilting, of course, Very quickly, if they are not watered with very expensive water. And fruit markets With great leaps of fruit, which nonetheless
Possess neither scent nor taste. And endless trains of autos, Lighter than their own shadows, swifter than Foolish thoughts, shimmering vehicles, in which Rosy people, coming from nowhere, go nowhere. And houses, designed for happiness, standing empty, Even when inhabited.
Even the houses in Hell are not all ugly. But concern about being thrown into the street Consumes the inhabitants of the villas no less Than the inhabitants of the barracks.
Bertolt BrechtNachdenkend über die Hölle, 1941, translated by Henry Erik Butler
Mural and Paintings by Devin Reynolds on the walls of the Hammer lobby. Contains references to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, displacement from a beautiful home acting as a red thread through the histories of many Angelenos.
Many decades later I wholeheartedly disagree with Brecht’s description – I find L.A. vibrant and fascinating – though not his political analysis. He knew class divisions and precarity when he saw it. By all reports, he clung to negative emotions as a motor driving his writing. But his ability to pick up on what makes this city thriving, underneath capitalistic excess or popular culture driven by interests to keep racial segregation intact, might have been curbed by what was then and still is not easily visible to the outsider. At least that is my speculation after chancing on Eric Avila’s The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City, from which I cited at the very start of these contemplations.
Knowing the history of a place is essential to understanding its character. Who rose to the top and who was pushed to the bottom will define the nature of both the lay-out, the (d)evolution of neighborhoods and the way power hierarchies are distributed. My hometown of Hamburg, Germany, for example, needs to be read in the context of its merchant marine and membership in the Hanseatic League, its intermittent warfare with Scandinavian neighbors, and its destruction under Allied firebombing during World War II.
There are ways of learning about the past of a city and her people that are not found simply by looking in all the traditional places. Clearly, mainstream historians have little incentive to document attempts towards self-empowerment or organized resistance by those not among the ruling classes. Facts about the past are instead often woven into the fabric of experienced daily life, painted on neighborhood walls (I had written about Pacoima, for example, here,) told during story time in corner libraries, experienced during Saturday’s soccer matches at the local park, found during celebrations of special days for different nationalities. Not just the past, I’d add, but the present, as it resurrects what was to be extinguished. Not exactly easily accessible to a foreigner like Brecht, struggling with the language, not particularly mobile, traumatized by persecution and exile, and facing the fact that there are 88 cities, approximately 140 unincorporated areas, and communities within the City of Los Angeles.
Jibz Cameron Cops, Coyotes, Cars, Crows (2023) Watercolor, Correction Fluid and Graphite on Paper
We, on the other hand, are lucky enough to find quite a bit of it all in one place, a weave that is compact as well as sprawling, screaming as well as whispering, consciously representing or intuitively describing, like L.A. itself. It’s made possible by curators who brought a cross section of yet undiscovered stories into an exhibition that in many aspect mirrors the city it drew from.
At least that is how I experienced the Hammer’s current exhibition Made in L.A. 2023: The Act of Living, an iteration of its biennial attempt to showcase new talent, unknown or underrepresented artists, providing access to what is likely hidden to most of us from different cultural enclaves. Guest curator Diana Nawi and Pablo José Ramírez, who joined the Hammer museum full-time in June, and Ashton Cooper, Luce Curatorial Fellow, have assembled some 250 works of 39 locally based artists, challenging us to confront our stereotypes and navigate an abundance of thought-provoking art. I come back to what I had written about our own Portland’s current art extravaganza, Converge 45: perceptive curation is a mystery to me, like herding cats, but when it succeeds it is a gift to the community (never mind an intellectual feat.)
Their guiding principles can be found in their statement above.
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AT RISK OF FALLING for surface rather than structural characteristics, here is an analogy I can’t resist: as L.A.’s neighborhoods differ along multiple dimensions, so does the chosen art in this show. By size, by spacing, by density, by degrees of familiarity. Just as I like some neighborhoods more than others, some leaving me cold, some moving me to the core, some eluding my comprehension, some dull, some riveting, some evoking scorn, and others longing or admiration, so it is for much of the work on display. What registered most deeply was the fact that many of the exhibits taught me something I would not have otherwise known, and how much, sometimes viscerally, texture ran as a common theme through the galleries. Texture, indifferent to past, present or future, is, of course, a stand-out characteristic of Southern California’s nature for this Northerner, with its unusual mix of desert and tropical plants, all ridges, grains, thorns, spines and spikes, peeling bark, twisted fronds, and leathery surfaces.
Kinetic sculpture by Maria Maea“Lē Gata Fa’avavau (Infinity Forever)” (2023) including parts of palm trees, car parts and feathers.
Really, I think there are few materials known to man not included in this biennial. Natural materials like wood, bones, wool, cotton, pearls, wax, mica, graphite, dirt, salt, limestone, copper, leather, feathers, palm fronds, sea shells, corn, corn or other plant based substances. Fabricated materials like acrylic, plastics, paper, forged metal, glass, lead alloys – you name it, it was affixed or served as a constituent even in the context of more traditional forms of painting. Some assemblages consisted of more material detail than you could possibly take in at a single visit. Videos were (blissfully) few and far in-between, although demonstrations of octogenarian Pippa Garner triggered some giddiness.
What follows are some photographs to relate the overall variety of art on display, not necessarily work that I liked, but work that speaks to the range of cultural production, the focus on texture, as well as entryways into histories new to me. I will then turn to my absolute favorites, both artists I had never heard of. In one case, apparently, the same was true for the curators, who only met the young painter upon recommendations of other studios.
Beautiful weavings by Melissa Cody, Scaling the Caverns (2023) at center, detail below
Sensuous configurations of leather, painting- or quilt-like, by Esteban Ramón Pérez,
Esteban Ramón PérezCloud Serpent Tierra del Fuego) (2023) Leather, rooster-tail feathers, urethane, acrylic, nylon, jute wood.
Disquieting collages by King Seung Lee,
Kang Seung LeeUntitled (Chairs) (2023) Graphite, antique 24-k gold thread, same, pearls, 24-k gold leaf, sealing wax, brass nails on goat skin parchment, walnut frame.
(Aside: what it is with chairs that can so easily register as ominous? Look at Tadashi Kawamata‘s currently exhibited at Liaigre’s building in Paris: Nest at Liagre. Or is it just me?)
Photo creditL Sylvie Becquet
From the younger set:
Michael Alvarez 2 Foos and a Double Rainbow (2019) Oil, Spray Paint, Graphite and Collage on Panel
A reminder for those of us who vicariously experienced the AIDs epidemic as young adults when living in NYC, with friends dying:
Joey Terrill works, the selection depicting formative memories and daily experience in queer communities.
The Munch-inspired scream on steroids below attracted a lot of attention, justified, in my opinion, only if you looked more closely on the backside of the sculpture that provided a narrative worth the attention grabbing. The sculpture was co-created by numerous Native Americans.
Runner-up to the works below that inspired me most, was this assemblage using a silk parachute. Talk about texture!
Erica MahinayLunar Tryst (2023) and Details. Acrylic, raw pigment and aluminum leaf on half-silk parachute, lead, ostrich feathers.
And here are Kyle Kilty’s paintings, as vibrant, patterned, and hibiscus-colored as L.A. itself, capturing the imagination with abstractions that turn representational upon closer inspection – just about the same process the traveler experiences when getting to know and learning to navigate this moloch of a city.
For some reason I was reminded of Paul Klee, had he lived in another century, under the California sun and caved to demands for size. (The Phillips had an informative exhibition on Klee’s lasting influence on other American painters, some years ago.)
Kyle KiltyIt could be, Frankly (2022) Acrylic, mica flake and oil on canvas.
Kyle KiltyIt Could Get the Railroad (2022) Acrylic, oil, and graphite on canvas
Kyle Kilty Arranging (2019) Acrylic, oil, and gold leaf on canvas
And here, finally, is the essence of story telling about the facets of this city here and now, its hidden treasures and traditions, the diasporic nature of its people due to displacement from their home countries and/or the grid of highways, literally embedded in the substance of L.A. county itself: the soil collected from its various neighborhoods, mixed with salt, rain, limestone and masa. Jackie Amézquita’s 144 slabs are testament to the unwritten history of the many unseen people who constitute the lifeblood of L.A., the embedded drawings representing typical sights during quotidian encounters.
Jackie Amézquita El suelo que nos alimenta (2023) Soil, masa (corn dough), salt, rain, limestone, and copper
Here you can see her at work and hear her explanations of the artwork. It is terrific on so many levels.
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THERE IS CHANGE AFOOT at the Hammer. This week we learned of the planned retirement of long-time director Ann Philbin, with a search for a replacement underway. It will be difficult to fill those shoes. Hopefully, the core of her focus will endure, a commitment to contemporary art with a focus on emerging artists and social justice. The 2023 biennial certainly can serve as a model: reconsidering the past in the sense that it paves the way for grasping a more equitable future, but then moving on, creating our own utopias.
Started today with an incisive German voice. Might as well end with another one. If you replace the words “(social) revolutions” with “art,” and “19th” with “21st” century, the museum might eventually follow this model:
“The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content.”
Karl Marx The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 1852
