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Artistic intervention in the Los Angeles urban geography: the art practices of Charles Long, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn

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Artistic intervention in the Los Angeles urban geography: the art practices of Charles Long, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn

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ARTISTIC INTERVENTION IN THE LOS ANGELES URBAN GEOGRAPHY:
THE ART PRACTICES OF CHARLES LONG, HARRY DODGE AND STANYA KAHN

by

Anne-Marie Elizabeth Gregg

____________________________________________

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES

May 2010

Anne-Marie Elizabeth Gregg
Copyright 2010

ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am tremendously grateful to everyone who supported and assisted me in
preparing and writing this manuscript. Thanks to Charles Long for his generosity and
assistance in my research.

I would like to dedicate this thesis to all my friends and family who understood and
respected the time and effort it took to complete this work, especially to my mother and
father who have supported me in everything I do.

Special thanks to Janet Owen Driggs for her patience and for guiding my writing and to
Tracy Stone for her insight and feedback. Very special thanks to my sister Elizabeth,
Whitney and Justin for editing and reviewing my work time and time again.

Thank you to Joshua Decter, Rhea Anastas, Elizabeth Lovins and the USC MPAS
program for their encouragement and guidance. Finally I would like to thank all the
students of our program who went through this undertaking with me and who provided
great encouragement and assistance.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ii
List of Figures iv
Abstract v
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: 12
Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn: Video works set in and around the Los Angeles River 12
Nature Demo, (2008) 13
Dodge, Kahn, Humor and Filmmaking 15
Artists Seeking Voice and Solitude in Los Angeles 16
All Together Now, (2008) 18
Can’t Spit It Out, Can’t Swallow It, (2006) 22

Chapter 2: 28
Five Years of Introspection: Charles Long’s River Sculptures and Photographs 28
Poem of the River, (2005) 28
We Wait a Long Time To See You, To Beat You, (2005) 32
Long, Wandering and Autonomy Through Art Making 36

Chapter 3: 41
Long, Dodge and Kahn, The Situationist International and the Practice of the Dérive 41
Can’t Spit It Out, Can’t Swallow It and Nature Demo in Relationship to the Dérive 44
Charles Long’s Art Practice in Relationship to the Dérive 47

Conclusion 50
Bibliography 58
Appendix 60

iv

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1:
Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Nature Demo, 2008 60
Figure 2: Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, All Together Now, 2008
61
Figure 3: Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Can’t Swallow It, Can’t Spit It Out, 2006
61
Figure 4: Charles Long, Poem of the River, 2005
62
Figure 5: Charles Long, We Wait a Long Time to See You, To Beat You, 2005 63
Figure 6: Charles Long, Untitled Photograph 64
Figure 7: Charles Long, Untitled Photograph 64
Figure 8: Charles Long, Untitled Photograph 65

v

ABSTRACT

The art practices of Charles Long, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn present alternative
interpretations of the Los Angeles urban geography. Working within the cracks of the
city construct, the artists repurpose the Los Angeles River a site of abandon reshaping it
into an arts laboratory in which they produce counter realities, experience solitude and
commune with nature. Author Brian Holmes believes our societies are failing as a result
of the way artistic invention and display has been instituted. The assertion for self and
collective reflection on the imaginary, which we depend upon for self-understanding,
enables us to navigate and re-define our experience. Where can spaces that foster
reflection, communion with nature and invention be found? Through a close study of
their works, I will examine how their art practice enables them to create spaces for
solitude, reflection and reinvention, breaking the prescribed notions of Los Angeles urban
geography and artistic invention.

1

INTRODUCTION

“Art can offer a chance for society to reflect collectively on the imaginary figures it
depends upon for its very consistency and its self-understanding, But this is exactly where
our societies are failing, and failing miserably, as a result of the way artistic invention
and display has been instituted as a central function over the last twenty years. We are
looking at an extreme limitation on the varieties and qualities of self-reflection.”

-Brian Holmes, Artistic Autonomy and the Communication Society

Saturated in congestion, noise, traffic, delineation of public and private spaces,
security restrictions and planned developments, the metropolitan construct limits our
capacity to engage in unregulated or non-commercial spontaneity. It is nearly impossible
to find solitude, commune with nature or experience self-reflection in the dense urban
terrain. How we navigate public and private spaces serves to define how we experience
our surroundings and impedes or enhances our inventive and creative abilities. Finding
sanctuary for reflection in the urban terrain can be nearly impossible.

The ways in which we respond and enable ourselves creatively in urban density is
determined by motivations to reshape and repurpose our surroundings for creative
interventions and reflection. Author Brian Holmes believes our societies are failing as a
result of the way artistic invention and display has been instituted. The assertion for self
and collective reflection on the imaginary, upon which we depend for self understanding
enables us to navigate and re-define our experience. Where can spaces that foster
reflection, communion with nature and invention be found?

2
The designation of public and private space fluctuates in an urban center such as
Los Angeles. As the city is developed and reinvented by planners, corporations and
government there remain temporary unregulated or non-commercial sites. Between the
cracks of the officially renegotiated city there is room to reclaim spaces for reflection and
invention. Here, art can repurpose sites of erasure and neglect to create spaces of
contemplation that are temporarily released from the confinement of structured civil and
social order. Through the intervention and reconsideration of such sites, artists and the
public are provided with alternative readings and use of the Los Angeles urban plan.

The temporary artistic undertakings of artist Charles Long and collaborative artists
Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn present alternative interpretations of the Los Angeles
urban geography. Working within the cracks of the city construct, the artists repurpose
the Los Angeles River reshaping it into an arts laboratory in which they produce counter
realities, experience solitude and commune with nature. Through a close study of their
works, I will examine how their art practice enables them to create spaces for solitude,
reflection and reinvention, breaking the prescribed notions of Los Angeles urban
geography. Dodge, Kahn and Long’s efforts respond to Holmes assertion for our
individual desire for varieties and qualities of self-reflection.

Artists Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn created three video pieces that take place in
Los Angeles. All three of the films are situated in the northeast and downtown sections of
the city. The derelict and seemingly invisible Los Angeles River is a common thread, and

3
re-occurring site, that provides the artists with a wealth of content and space in which to
conceptualize and reshape the audience’s perception of it.

In my thesis I will focus on these three video pieces by this team. The first, Can’t
Spit It Out, Can’t Swallow It, (2006) is a character driven piece that leads the audience on
a walking venture through a plethora of neighborhoods and backdrops in search of “some
action.”
1
Their 2008 video piece, Nature Demo, features the artists as themselves and
documents their journey to, and attempts to survive in, the “urban wilderness”
2
of the Los
Angeles River. The humor and playfulness interwoven into each piece engages the
audience, allowing them to be in on “the joke” and part of the adventure. The final piece I
will discuss, All Together Now, (2008) is a futuristic post-apocalyptic narrative that
presents a vision of what could (or will) become of the Los Angeles urban plan. The
video piece lacks the element of “choose your own adventure” present in their previous
work. Nonetheless, it enables audiences to re-contextualize and reconsider their own
view of Los Angeles.

Over the course of five years, Charles Long lived and worked by the Los Angeles
River. While struggling with his creative direction, he was driven to respond to the river,

1
Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Can’t Spit It Out, Can’t Swallow It, 2006 UBU Web Databank Media
Player video file. http://www.ubu.com/film/dodge_swallow.html (accessed December 20, 2009)

2
Nature Demo Description Electronic Arts Intermix http://www.eai.org/eai/title.htm?id=14605 (accessed
December 22,2009)

4
which he found as an ideal site for contemplation and artistic interventions.
3
Through his
assemblage pieces Poem of the River, (2005), We Wait a Long Time to See You, To Beat
You, (2005), as well as his untitled sculptures modeled after white heron excrement
markings, Long conjures a visual representation of his exploration and investigation of
the Los Angeles River. It was through his intensive searching and reflection within this
physical urban landscape that Long found a sense of clarity and inspiration. Viewers are
invited into a fanciful alternative, as well as repurposing, of art practices through his body
of work.

LOS ANGELES URBAN GEOGRAPHY AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LOS
ANGELES RIVER

Beginning in the 1920’s more and more of the Los Angeles landscape became
privatized. As fewer new parks were realized, the notion of the family backyard, the
theme park and the shopping mall became the normative use of the urban landscape.
Authors Ed Soja, Mike Davis, Michael Sorkin, Marget Crawford and Norman Klien
describe this phenomena as a multi-level transformation: through this process social
classes are increasingly isolated physically; industry sprawls into former farm areas, and
simple suburban bedroom communities maturate into cities. Simultaneously, the built
environment is continual, restructured in response to the automobile, which brings the

3
Vesela Sretenovic “Charles Long: More Like a Dream Than a Scheme,” Charles Long More Like a
Dream than a Scheme. (Providence: David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, 2005),7.

5
steady loss of green space.
4
The works of Charles Long, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn
serve as a platform from which to view a reanimated urban geography in Los Angeles.
Central to their undertakings, the Los Angeles River enabled the artists to reposition and
remap Los Angeles, examining the need for ownership and solitude, and questioning the
contemporary construct of our urban surroundings.

Over 30 years ago the US Army of Corps of Engineers tamed and confined the
Los Angeles River’s natural waterway, transforming it into a drainage channel. Set apart
and hidden from public view the River’s concretized pathway exists as relatively open
space that has been neglected by city and state officials. Silent and seemingly bare, the
River harkens to our individual desire for contemplative space from urban static. The
space set apart from the officially negotiated city streets and neighborhoods invites us to
ponder alternatives to urban space usage and partake in self-reflection.

Dodge, Kahn and Long represent a shifting in urban considerations. Rather than
accepting or engaging within the prescribed environments designed by urban planners
and their development efforts, the artists reconstructed the Los Angeles urban geography
in order to realize their artistic vision in what “many in Southern California, consider a
blighted concrete ditch too ugly to care about.”
5
In order to understand the role of the

4
Norman Klein The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (New York: Verso,
1997), 84.

5
Blake Gumprecht, The Los Angeles River It’s Life, Death and Possible Rebirth (Baltimore: The John
Hopkins University Press, 1999), 299.

6
River in the work of Dodge, Kahn and Long we must begin by taking a closer look at Los
Angeles urban geography and consider the readings and interpretations of the city’s
history. According to author Reyner Banham “no city has ever been produced by such an
extraordinary mixture of geography, climate, economics, demography, mechanics and
culture; not is it likely that even remotely similar mixture will ever occur again.”
6
The
scope and evolution of the cityscape has inspired many myths, disparagement and a noir-
esque reverence. Norman Klein demystifies the city’s expansive reach describing it as,
“far more a city of neighborhoods than appearances suggest.”
7
The city is designed to
immerse urban dwellers into prescribed invasive environments that limit our experiences
of self-reflection and creativity. The secured spaces are designed to emphasize the spirit
of buyer’s impulse, you alone in the shopping mode – in a state of distraction, feeling
coddled and swindled at the same time, over stimulated and desensitized, gated in, but
under surveillance.
8
Despite these impediments there remain pockets and areas of Los
Angeles’ terrain that lure individuals to ascribe their own values, while stimulating the
possibility to re-define the city’s architecture and significance for themselves. Authors
Elizabeth Moule and Stefanos Polyzoides ponder the idiosyncratic history and evolution
of the city in their essay The Five Los Angeleses, giving voice to the role of individuals
roving and re-defining the landscape as follows:

6
Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (Berkley: University of California
Press, 2001), 24.

7
Norman Klein, 85.

8
Norman Klein, 80.

7

“What we believe makes Los Angeles truly unique is the peculiar process by which it has
been constructed and reconstructed over time, each phase of growth displacing the one
before it and generating the myth of its perpetual modernity. As we are currently entering
yet new era in the city's rebuilding, it is imperative that a compelling version of Los
Angeles' history should be presented to both its citizens, its political leaders and its
architects. Our city is too incomplete and in places too dysfunctional to leave it alone and
too vast to imagine that it can be changed rapidly. Our only hope is to begin to transform
it deliberately and selectively in awareness of its historical profile. The production of
culture and of wealth can only be sustained by people who understand the burden of
maintaining a city's continuity over time and in space.”
9

The character and distinctive nature of Los Angeles urban geography as described
by Elizabeth Moule, Stefanos Polyzoides, Reyner Banham and Norman Klein is ripe with
spaces which are relatively open, either through neglect on the part of the state or because
they have somehow escaped notice.
10
Author Peter Lamborn Wilson’s theory of The
Temporary Autonomous Zone examines the existence and potential of such sites. Wilson
argues that spaces that are relatively open and neglected, “unfold within the fractal
dimensions invisible to the cartography of control.” According to Wilson, “we are

9
Elizabeth Moule and Stefanos Polyzoides, "The Five Los Angeleses" World Cities: Los Angeles ed
Maggie Toy (London: Academy Editions and Berlin: Ernst + Son, 1994), 1.

10
Peter Lamborn Wilson, T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic
Terrorism (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1985), 101.

8
looking for spaces (geographic, social, cultural, imaginary) with potential to flower as
autonomous zones.”
11
It is in these autonomous zones that artists can abandon
conventional notions of society and feel free to express their creativity without
succumbing to the traditional notions of artistic expression. The River, set within and
apart from Los Angeles’ urban geography, loosens creative limitations, enabling
examination and exploration. This in turn can lead to individual repurposing of the River,
transforming the landscape into a “site of abandon,” which is a site where temporary
investigations and undertakings enable artists to abandon prescribed notions of limitation,
urban access and urban site use. Despite the River's central location within the city, the
subculture and “other” experiences of this landscape exist just below the radar. It is in
these very places that society can reflect on those elements that Brian Holmes describes
as, “the imaginary figures it depends upon for its very consistency and its self-
understanding.”
12
Within the Los Angeles urban geography artistic invention and display
can break away from instituted functions and broaden qualities of self-reflection.

The Los Angeles River is a hotly debated and commonly explored site, navigated
by locals, artists, and designers, each repurposing and translating the waterway’s past,
present and future in efforts to remap and define individual and urban geography. The
most pro-active authorities or protective “griffins” of the river are the Friends of the Los
Angeles River (FOLAR), founded in 1985 by Lewis MacAdams. Venturing with sculptor

11
Peter Lamborn Wilson, 101.

12
Brian Holmes, “Artistic Autonomy and the Communication Society,” Third Text, 18: 551.

9
and architect Pat Patterson and Roger Wong, owner of a gallery called the Los Angeles
Museum of Art, the group used a pair of wire cutters to slice through the L.A. County
Deptartment of Public Works' fence and made their way down the embankment into the
concrete channel of the Los Angeles River. MacAdams describes their first venture to the
River as follows, “We felt like we were exploring the moon. We didn't know where we
were going, but instinctively we walked upstream. Roger, Pat, and I came to the
confluence of the Los Angeles and Arroyo Seco. The air around us was in an unholy din.
A Southern Pacific freight train rumbled up the tracks on one bank. A Santa Fe freight
rumbled down the tracks on the other. Traffic on two freeway bridges and the Riverside
Drive bridge roared by. The odor was industrial. The scene was latter-day urban hell.”
13

The experience inspired MacAdams to create the non-profit FOLAR which he describes
as, “the act of calling, the welcoming of the return of the sycamores. In another sense,
Friends of the Los Angeles River is an artwork, an ongoing performance. I've always
tried to reserve for the organization the freedom claimed by artists -- to take any tack, to
work in every realm -- in proceeding on behalf of the river.”
14

Dodge, Kahn and Long’s work share similar notions of intervention and creative
realization. The pieces I selected to focus on highlight the neglect and urban sprawl
present in the Los Angeles landscape. Likewise, their artwork emotes feelings of solitude

13
Lewis MacAdams “Restoring the Los Angeles River: A Forty-Year Art Project.” Whole Earth (Spring,
1995), http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1510/is_n85/ai_16816238/ (accessed December 27,2009).

14
Lewis MacAdams, 2.

10
and captures a seeking, or gathering, of experience and individual representation in the
sprawl of an urban environment.

Dodge, Kahn and Long seek breath and voice in the static of urban density. The
artists work to liberate themselves from the extreme limitations placed on the varieties
and qualities of self-reflection described by Holmes. Their processes and undertakings
are a revival and application of the work of The Situationist International. The
Situationist International rejected prescribed notions of everyday behavior and the
development of urban landscapes. The Situationists were concerned with an experience
of one’s surroundings that was distinct from a simple stroll or journey.
15
The theories of
wandersmanner and the dérive articulated by Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord mirror
the practice of Dodge, Kahn and Long who sought locations in Los Angeles that allowed
them to produce counter realities, experience solitude and commune with nature.
Vaneigem and Debord’s theories addressed the constraints and power struggles enmeshed
in our urban surroundings and described processes of creative remapping of urban
environments.

Los Angeles is notorious for the erasure and re-erasure of history. Artists Charles
Long, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn are contemporary practitioners unearthing and
redefining their urban environments. A shared site and reoccurring reference in their art
production, the Los Angeles River has served as a site of investigation and individual

15
Guy Ernest-Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” Internationale Situationniste #2 1958
http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/314 (accessed January, 24, 2009)

11
repurposing for decades. Considering the complex history of development and
redevelopment of the Los Angeles urban plan, one can’t help but wonder, are current
revitalization and remapping efforts of the Los Angeles River reflective of how the public
utilizes the space today? Long, Dodge and Kahn give examples of how to use and
reanimate the silenced River and concrete banks. Their works transform a site of erasure
and neglect into a rich platform from which alternative perspectives are created.

12
CHAPTER ONE: HARRY DODGE AND STANYA KAHN: VIDEOWORK SET IN
AND AROUND THE LOS ANGELES RIVER

Artists working in metropolitan centers must continually forge new ground and
reclaim space for experimentation and production. While attempting to navigate the
continually shifting urban landscape of Los Angeles, we are confronted by the city’s
sprawl of strip malls, freeways, housing developments and expansive concrete. The
restriction and confinement of a defined urban geography provokes creative individuals
to intervene, to reclaim and to utilize space for artistic production as an act of resistance.
Edward Soja reflects on Los Angeles and the development of a post modern geography
stating that, “Different routes and different roots must be explored to achieve a practical
understanding and critical reading of urban landscapes. The illusions of empirical
opaqueness must be shattered, along with the other disciplining effects of Modern
Geography.”
16

Artists attempt to reposition and re-route our understanding of the urban landscape
through their creative efforts. Often the most attractive and productive spaces for these
undertakings within the city are derelict or abandoned sites. Through the remapping of
these spaces and production of their work, artists are liberated from contrived notions of
art-making as soley for exhibition or sale, but rather as reflective expressions in response
to their surroundings. The production of art offers a chance for not solely the artist to

16
Edward W. Soja, “Taking Los Angeles Apart: Towards a Postmodern Geography,” Postmodern
Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso Books, 1997): 242.

13
reflect and critically respond to their surroundings, but for society as a whole to revoke
limitations and the quantification of self-reflection in our urban surroundings.

NATURE DEMO, (2008)

The video work of collaborative artists Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn attempts to
reposition our view of Los Angeles, questioning the “normal” experience of the urban
plan and associated civilized behaviors. Their piece, Nature Demo, focuses centrally on
the Los Angeles River, which they refer to as “urban wilderness.”
17
In the video piece the
artists document their attempts to build a shelter and scavenge for food, questioning their
ability to survive alone in the Los Angeles River. This performative work documents the
artists exploring the flora and fauna of the river and deals with themes of survival and
sustainability at the edge of civilization.
18
The audible presence of the traffic from nearby
freeways reminds the viewer of the urban perimeters just out of view.
The piece begins as Harry Dodge closely examines their selected site for shelter
remarking that, “This whole dead glob is full of spiderwebs. Did you not see that?” to
which Stanya Kahn responds, “I think spiders are pretty anti social. I don’t think they
want to get near you really.”
19
As they continue to stake out their locations for camp and

17
Nature Demo Description, Electronic Arts Intermix, 2008 http://www.eai.org/eai/title.htm?id=14605
(accessed December 30,2009).

18
Nature Demo Description, Electronic Arts Intermix, 2008.

19
Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Nature Demo, VHS (New York, NY: Electronic Arts Intermix, 2008).

14
demonstration sites, Dodge and Kahn collect river mud scum, create a wind block and
gather empty seed pods. The viewer is made aware of the proximity of the river to Los
Angeles as footage of city streets are included in Dodge and Kahn’s journey to the
riverfront. Even the initial location scouting and filming includes a dialogue where Kahn
asks Dodge, “Are you going to get out of the car?”
20
This scene includes the car sideview
mirror in the lower right hand corner, which captures Dodge filming. In order to establish
their space, Kahn taps out the periphery area of their shelter with a stick stating, “Here,
here, here” and later, “Space, space, space.” The juxtaposition of nature and the typical
Los Angeles topography is depicted during their journey to the river, with the view of a
gas station and 7-11 from the car window.

Dodge’s placement of the camera from the comfort of the car’s passenger seat
establishes their nearness and accessibility to civilization. As the film progresses, their
scenes and presence along the waterfront become more solitary; there is little outside
disruption or encounters with fellow city dwellers in this “urban wilderness.” The artists,
in effect, are free to experiment−build wind shelters, scavenge for logs or collect debris.
Shots of Dodge and Kahn working individually and navigating the space depict a sense of
isolation and solitude. Kahn walks barefoot through the waterway and collects mud scum
while Dodge clumsily scales the slanted cement embankments, pulling and struggling
with branches and logs.

20
Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Nature Demo, VHS (New York, NY: Electronic Arts Intermix, 2008).

15

DODGE, KAHN, HUMOR AND FILMMAKING

Intrinsic in their exploration and negotiation of the River is Dodge and Kahn’s
genuine voice and humor, which they maintain throughout their documentation. While
discussing moving a heavy log for their windshield, Kahn asks, “Where is it exactly? My
boots are feeling a bit rubby.”
21
Likewise when they are discussing the possibility of
having ticks on their bodies, they bicker about the best way to find and remove one.
During their back and forth, Kahn apologizes to Dodge for questioning her choice of tick
removal. Their interplay and comedic undertones suggest the dismissive and apathetic
public opinion and impression of the Los Angeles River itself.

For decades the Los Angeles River has served as a set in which filmmakers
experiment and reconstruct reality in order for audiences around the world to escape and
temporarily experience foreign and imaginary landscapes. A toothless creature of
“unnatural nature,”
22
the River bears witness to experiments and temporary creative
undertakings, both large and small. The River is well known as a filming location for
motion pictures and the advertising industry. Giant mutant ants are discovered in its
concrete channel in the 1954 science fiction classic, “Them!” A national magazine
advertising campaign for Nike hiking boots used the industrialized River to turn the idea

21
Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Nature Demo, VHS (New York, NY: Electronic Arts Intermix, 2008).

22
Patt Morrison, Rio L.A. Tales from the Los Angeles River (Santa Monica: Angel City Press, 2001),19.

16
of wilderness adventure on its head. “Test how rugged it is in the Los Angeles River,”
was the quote, which appeared above a photograph of climbers scaling the River’s
vertical walls.
23
The sheer malleability of the concretized river makes it ripe with
possibility for creatives.

What makes Dodge and Kahn’s undertaking in Nature Demo so unique and distinct
is the fact that they do not seek to create an illusion or distract the viewer from the
surroundings, quality or presence of the river. Instead, they incorporate and utilize those
qualities in order to establish their narrative, to highlight its distinction, and to consider
its relationship with urban contemporary lifestyles. Living in an urban center, individuals
must explore and navigate man-made surroundings and predetermined routes in efforts to
establish their individual paths and markings. There are challenges and limitations to
these undertakings in a city.

ARTISTS SEEKING VOICE AND SOLITUDE IN LOS ANGELES

Urban centers designate terrain for cars, parking, business, personal and public
property. Sidewalks laid out as walking paths for pedestrians are four feet in width and
frame the copious amounts of non-public land sanctioned for “other” uses. What is
available and accessible for public use and resources is limited, controlled and confined.
Authors Neil Smith and Setha Low call attention to these concerns in their book, “The

23
Blake Gumprecht, 244.

17
Politics of Public Space,” where they clarify the distinctions and existing definitions of
public space arguing that,

It is important to recognize that many constituents of public space are privately
owned, managed and regulated elements of the public sphere: the preponderance
of media outlets, access to the Internet, many rights of way in the city and
countryside alike, travel on railways, planes and buses, public houses and so
forth…there is considerable public (as in state) regulation over many aspects and
uses of private space, from zoning laws to laws governing sexuality and social
reproduction, the policing of national borders, state surveillance of personal
activities, the right to congregate in public space, and so forth.
24

Certainly each of us living in densely populated areas find a way to manage a
space of experience and usage, which is defined by our encounters. These spaces are
limited and re-determining a site’s purpose and use massages the location to become a
more “public” accessible space. Dodge and Kahn’s Nature Demo is a visual
demonstration of how, and in what ways, we can begin to reconsider and conceptualize
our surroundings. Reflecting on Brian Holmes assertion that, “ Our societies are failing
and failing miserably, as a result of the way artistic invention and display has been
instituted as a central function over the past twenty years.”
25
Dodge and Kahn’s
undertakings serve as examples of how individuals can begin to repurpose urban sites in
order to realize varieties and qualities of self-reflection. Our surroundings, and urban
landscapes in particular, are shaped and morphed according to human need and use. In
dialogue with Michael Smith, Kahn states that for her, “Humor especially relies so much

24
Neil Smith and Setha Low, eds., The Politics of Public Space, (New York: Routledge, 2006), 5.

25
Brian Holmes, “Artistic Autonomy and the Communication Society,” Third Text, 18: 551.

18
on shared understandings, especially jokes steeped in concept and language. In reading
and interpreting the work, Smith asks Kahn about scenes of her laying on the concrete
embankment, questioning whether she was giving up on their experiment, or if she was
attempting to become one with the embankment. To which Kahn responds that she had
simply been tired and was laying on the ground while they figured out the shot.
26
The
depiction of Kahn laying out, sunning herself on the cement embankment, is a peaceful
serene moment that gives her authorship over the physical site. Her presence, and silent
moment of rest, reconditions an urban concretized river in that moment, creating a
temporary sacred space of contemplation.

ALL TOGETHER NOW, (2008)

Dodge and Kahn’s re-textualization of Los Angeles urban geography is
heightened and transformative in their video piece, All Together Now. In their efforts to
re-conceptualize urban space, the artists strip Los Angeles of contemporary presence and
recognizable function. Utilizing the Los Angeles River and surrounding downtown
environments, the video piece reconstructs Los Angeles’ social geography by creating
and documenting various characters wandering through a radically restructured
apocalyptic Los Angeles. Through a fictional representation of the city’s landscape and
wasted resources, Dodge and Kahn’s new urban order requires characters to forage for
water, food and collect debris in order to survive. In this vision there are no 7-11s, gas

26
Michael Smith, “Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn,” BOMB 108/Summer 2009: 11.

19
stations or cars from which to ponder the notion of survival or the repurposing of their
cityscape. Rather, it is a gutted and devastated landscape in which the artists re-engineer
the human experience of Los Angeles.

The piece opens with a blood splattered Stanya Kahn struggling to kill her unseen
attacker hiding in the brush. The eerie gusts of wind and her guttural noises fade into the
tune of Rick James’ Mary Jane playing on her transistor radio. Kahn’s character is not
the sole survivor in the apocalyptic cityscape. We are introduced to blue hooded “others”
who wade in the Los Angeles River to a melody of music, while simultaneously Kahn
sifts through dirt mounds, scavenges for roots, and collects water and dead carp from the
River. In their enclosed systematized bunker, a cast of blue and white hooded “others”
feverishly tweak, shape, smash and tinker with wires, computers, plants and
miscellaneous garbage. Their efforts appear to be part of a new social order and
production process that utilizes the waste of the former civil society. In apocalyptic Los
Angeles, the cement boundaries and geography are jack hammered apart, and portions of
the concrete walls are carted away in wheel barrels, possibly for use in the restructured
alternative Los Angeles.

All Together Now reflects upon Kahn’s former existence through romantic
flashbacks; scenes from simpler, serene moments, during which two children frolic and
play on the beach. These images strongly contrast the present/future dirt caked, sun burnt
and bruised Kahn, who wades and bathes in the Los Angeles River. The foragers seek

20
temporary shelter in the Standard hotel, however, even in the clean modern interior, the
viewers gaze returns to the vacant looming skyscrapers through the room’s window. The
stagnant atmosphere shifts as one of the city’s skyscrapers is demolished, echoing Los
Angeles’ current state of destruction and abandon.

A central site of the characters foraging and survival, the Los Angeles River
supplies the hooded den-dwelling scavengers with boards, plants and miscellaneous
rubbish, which they fastidiously wash, dry and break. The remnants of human pollution,
which were once discarded into the river, are now reclaimed, reprocessed and reused. The
items represent the visceral exploration of the human relationship to materials and to
resources.
27
Author Rachel Kushner describes Kahn and Dodge’s paradise as, “a gritty and
anarchic one, the place is in fact all too earthly: The resource-rich, technological ease of
modern life has dropped away, and what we're left with is a barren and crumbling
metropolis--Los Angeles and its dwindled, cement-encased waterway. Indeed, the Los
Angeles River, which in real life has become something of a trash-filled open storm
drain, features as the main artery in Dodge and Kahn's imagined world, a sick zone
teeming with natural life.”
28

27
Rachel Kushner, "1000 Words: Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn; Talk about All Together Now, 2008.”

Artforum
International
46.5
(2008):
240.

28
Kushner, "1000
Words:
Harry
Dodge
and
Stanya
Kahn,”
241.

21
The urban decay in which the artists have remapped the city terrain, and staged
their vision of a new world order, is appropriately sited in the Los Angeles River-the
city’s birthplace. In his writings on a post modern geography of Los Angeles, Edward
Soja concludes his essay by stating that, “The reassertion of space in critical social
theory- and in critical political praxix – will depend upon a continued deconstruction of a
still occlusive historicism and many additional voyages of exploration into the
heterotopias of contemporary postmodern geographies.”
29
Soja’s call for reassertion of
space materializes through the artistic experimentation of Dodge and Kahn’s work All
Together Now. The artists interweave the darker reality of abandon and loss present in the
apocalyptic new world order with a romanticized view of free urban exploration and
intimate encounters with nature.

The conflicting experiences of serene, sun filled moments of solitude in nature are
contrasted with images of dead kittens, squirrels and decaying pigeons along the barren
city streets. Dodge and Kahn’s film portrayal of an “urban eden” reanimates and
repurposes Los Angeles’ urban geography in an effort to reconstruct social order and the
experience of public and private spaces. Dodge and Kahn’s exercise through performance
reflects Guy DeBord’s Situationist Theses in which he calls for, “Revolutionary urbanists
who will not limit their concern to the circulation of things, or to the circulation of human
beings trapped in a world of things. Rather, they will try to break these topological
chains, paving the way with their experiments for a human journey through authentic

29
Edward W. Soja, 248.

22
life.”
30
All Together Now strips Los Angles of contemporary confinements and social
order. Through the vision of the artists, an alternate regenerative lifestyle is presented for
viewers to reflect collectively on the imaginary figures it depends upon for it’s
consistency and self-understanding.
31

CAN’T SPIT IT OUT, CAN’T SWALLOW IT, (2006)

In his essay Artistic Autonomy and the Communication Society Brian Holmes
critiques the way in which artistic intervention and display have been instituted.
Considering his statement in relationship to Los Angeles art practice, their exists a site
separate from traditional models that enables artists and public to experience self
reflection and self-understanding. In its current reincarnation, the Los Angeles river
serves as a platform on which the individual can temporarily escape traditional notions of
social and political behavior, or can reconstitute urban decay as a means to express
themselves creatively. Dodge and Kahn’s artistic undertaking exaggerates the notion of
freedom, and the realization and construction of their alternative reality hinges on the site
of their artistic undertaking-the Los Angeles River.

30
Guy Debord, “Situationist Thesis on Traffic,” Situationist International Anthology ed. Ken Knabb
(Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 70.

31
Brian Holmes, 551.

23
A close inspection and consumption of dense urban landscapes requires
exploration and wandering. Venturing through streets and neighborhoods while absorbing
the complexities of city living, artists render a visual document of life. What to some may
seem like rudimentary practices and mundane activities, in actuality, gives new meaning
to our purpose and existence. In his piece Walking in the City author Michel de Certeau
eloquently transcribes the significance of passage through the city as follows:

The ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below,’ below the thresholds at
which visibility begins. They walk- an elementary form of this experience of the
city; they are walkers, Wandersmanner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins
of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it. These practitioners
make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as
that of lovers in each other’s arms. The paths that correspond in this intertwining,
unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others,
elude legibility. It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were
characterized by their blindness. The networks of these moving, intersecting
writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped
out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to
representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other.
32

Movement and wandering are the primary drive in Harry Dodge and Stanya
Kahn’s video piece Can’t Swallow It, Can’t Spit It Out. The character driven piece shares
similar threads of economic, ecological, class and gender pressures touched upon in All
Together Now, 2008. Stanya Kahn stars as Valkyrie, a bloody nosed wanderer who wears
a Viking helmet with braids and carries an oversized piece of foam cheese. The piece
begins with Valkyrie discussing the best way to use a blade and how to cut your enemy.
She justifies her statement by clarifying that she only believes in such violence as a form

32
Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkley: University of
California Press, 1984), 92.

24
of self-protection. The intensity of her words and narration is heightened by the hand held
camerawork, which keeps pace with our narrator who is on the move. The film cuts back
to the start of the journey, where Valkyrie is seated in front of a hospital, talking on a cell
phone and drinking lemonade, discussing the possibility of having a broken nose. Upon
deciding she is fine, she continues to linger, pondering her surroundings.

As the viewer, we are clueless as to where she has come from; it is as if she is
“visiting” our planet for the day and arrived mis-equipped for her adventure. Our view of
Valkyrie is made possible by Dodge, who is filming across the street in the bushes. Once
Valkyrie realizes she is being filmed, she confronts the camera person. After some hostile
and paranoid confrontation, her tone changes and she remarks that, “I think the hospital
looks more like condos” and later nonchalantly states that, “I prefer to be alone myself,”
33

which seems to be in response to the camera person’s (Dodge) rejection of her presence.
Valkyrie befriends the camera person, and they embark on a quest to “find some action.”
Cruising around on foot, they come upon some strange local data: the residue of
spontaneous combustion; a municipal garbage truck inexplicably dumping garbage on the
side of a road. Valkyrie ponders their choices and direction musing, “I wonder what will
happen; I wonder what will go on; I’m curious how you pick a spot. There are a number
of spots you can pass by in a day and you don’t consider the kind of action that has taken
place there. I’m interested in how you want to be outside to catch the action. What’s wild

33
Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Can’t Swallow It, Can’t Spit It Out, 2006 UbuWeb
http://www.ubu.com/film/dodge_swallow.html (accessed December 30,2009).

25
can get ugly. Humans were meant to fall down and die and return to the soil from whence
they came.”
34

Not long after, their wanderings lead them to the Los Angeles River, which is
marked with caution tape. Valkyrie ponders the rushing water below remarking,
“Jackpot, swollen river. I think that current is a lot stronger than you think. If you threw a
little dog down there you would really need to run in order to catch up with it.”
35
Later
their journey leads them to the source of the rushing current, Lake Hodges Dam.
Overlooking the dam as water gushes in the background, Valkyrie plays air guitar using
her foam cheese and sings Led Zepplin’s Immigrant Song. She directly asks the camera,
“Are you a watcher? You are a watcher but maybe in a past life you were a thinker?”
36
In
the meantime six emergency vehicles blare their sirens as they make their way to what
Valkyrie refers to as “some action” nearby.

As their journey progresses, and their ability to find action ceases, Valkyrie
breaks chairs in an alley in front of the camera. Later she paces in front of the camera at a
traffic intersection, remarking that, “the location for action has to be the right spot and the

34
Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Can’t Swallow It, Can’t Spit It Out, 2006 UbuWeb
http://www.ubu.com/film/dodge_swallow.html (accessed December 30,2009).

35
Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Can’t Swallow It, Can’t Spit It Out, 2006, UbuWeb
http://www.ubu.com/film/dodge_swallow.html (accessed December 30,2009).

36
Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Can’t Swallow It, Can’t Spit It Out, 2006, UbuWeb
http://www.ubu.com/film/dodge_swallow.html (accessed December 30,2009).

26
right time. Sort of the whole space-time continuum thing.”
37
She continues speaking to
the camera, telling stories about her childhood, and some of the intense and gritty action
she experienced growing up. Her constant narrative stream dissolves into a more
voyeuristic documentation of her journey, as Dodge films her activities in a public park at
night. Valkyrie appears to be unconscious of the camera as she stands on a park bench,
absorbing a moment of personal space and solitude. In the same evening park setting she
begins to throw a rock repeatedly, in an effort to make a shot into a nearby trashcan. Her
childlike play continues as she lies down on the grass, silent for a moment, and then
jumps up to do a few hand-stands against a tree.

Can’t Spit It Out, Can’t Swallow It, a “choose your own adventure” of sorts,
combines Michael de Certeau’s notion of the wandersmanner and Guy DeBord’s
Situationist Theses’ call for “revolutionary urbanists.” Dodge and Kahn would appear to
be immune to the immersive fluxuations of urban geography as they make their way
through Los Angeles neighborhoods and streets. Their wandering and journey captures a
simple pure repurposing of which the sole intent is to traipse across the city. Their search
for “some action” leads them to locations that would appear to be rich in human
experience and historical texture, such as hospitals, the city’s original water source (the
Los Angeles River) and the fringes and neighborhoods of downtown Los Angeles. Their
access and presentation provides the viewer an alternative lens to view the city’s
construct. Free from traffic congestion and images of the archetypical “Los Angeles”

37
Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Can’t Swallow It, Can’t Spit It Out, 2006, UbuWeb
http://www.ubu.com/film/dodge_swallow.html (accessed December 30,2009).

27
landscape, Dodge and Kahn’s view is charged with possibility and re-animation, which
they transfer to their viewing audience.

Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn present alternative interpretations of the Los
Angeles urban geography through their artistic undertakings that negate the confinement
of structured civil and social order. Working within the cracks of the city construct, the
artists repurpose the Los Angeles River a site of abandon reshaping it into an arts
laboratory in which they produce counter realities, experience solitude and commune
with nature. Through the intervention and reconsideration of such sites, artists and the
public experience a renewal of the varieties and qualities of self-reflection. These efforts
break the prescribed notions of artistic invention and displays that have been instituted.

28

CHAPTER TWO: FIVE YEARS OF INTROSPECTION: CHARLES LONG’S RIVER
SCULPTURES AND PHOTOGRAPHS

In 2002 Charles Long moved to Los Angeles; to a neighborhood in Elysian Park
called Frogtown. The area − a mix of residential and commercial properties − received its
nickname following several infestations of frogs spawned from the nearby water source:
the Los Angeles River. The neighborhood is a sort of Bermuda triangle, lying between
the 2 and 5 freeways, and running parallel to the Los Angeles River. The area is home to
a small arts community, which has drawn numerous creatives to open studios, and to take
advantage of the cheap rent. Shortly after taking up residence in the neighborhood, Long
found solace by the Los Angeles River, and became enamored with its complexities. The
physical space of the River, and proximity to his studio, lead the artist to unearth and
amass debris and remnants of urban life from the ravaged river and its pathways. Long
describes the site and experience for him as, “the stillness of grace, the origins of
experience…”
38
the setting gave new direction and heightened the artist’s creative drive.

POEM OF THE RIVER, (2005)

One particular piece from this period in the artist’s practice, Poem of the River
stands 90 inches tall and is comprised of steel and found objects, and is coated in white

38
“Charles Long in Conversation with Vesela Sretenovic” Charles Long More Like a Dream than a
Scheme. (Providence: David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, 2005), 21.

29
paint and plaster. The work mimics the drips and delicate markings of the drops of water
that make a path along the cement overpasses and bridges by the River. The thin, almost
brittle, linkages between found objects and debris appear like stalactites, extending the
height of the assemblage. The textural protrusions and particles (despite their unique
existence) are all intimately linked and connected, structuring a cave immersed in
semblances of human waste. The base is comprised of a television table, metal bits, mesh
wire, steel rods, tree branches, wood, a bit of found pottery and miscellaneous bits and
pieces that conform to their new role as particles of the reformed assemblage.

The piece carries with it the ebb and flow of the River’s waters. From a distance one
can feel the sway, and gentle lure, of the water-current collecting and repurposing
particles of human existence that are now recast and set apart for contemplation and
reflection. Long spent a great deal of time scavenging for the components that make up
Poem of the River. As part of his process, Long would head down to the waterway with
his shopping cart, boots and protective gloves, and root through the foliage and water.
39

Later he would return to his studio with a bounty of waste, in efforts to capture and
recreate the dance underway within the River proper.

Significant in the description of this particular piece is not just the finished work,
but also the impression left from Long’s search and assembly of the piece. The pure clean
white and the reflection of nature in the construction, provide the viewer with a sense of

39
Gregory Volk, “Nine Paragraphs for Charles Long,” Charles Long More Like a Dream than a Scheme.
(Providence: David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, 2005), 11.

30
awe or spirituality. Author Gregory Volk reflects on these qualities, stating that,

“With Poem of the River, and others, sheer air is a major ingredient, and the big gaps
between objects are as much a part of the work as anything else. This emptiness
communicates absence, loneliness, inertia, and loss, but more implicitly, a letting go of
control, and even a spiritually wise acceptance of things that deeply disturb, but that can’t
be altered or solved. While there is nothing overtly religious in any of these works, it’s
likely that Long is making his own quirky kind of sacred or devotional art. Works that
forgo using vaulted symbols, but instead are made from things so well-known and
familiar, that under normal conditions, one would hardly give them a second thought.”
40

Long’s reflections and contemplation are not simply reflections on the ebb and flow of
the water making it’s way through the city, rather, his inception and articulation of the
significance of the River is a reflection of the duality of the River-space itself. Secluded
and hidden from plain site, the water’s path is a hidden oasis of nature, plush with urban
pollution. In his assemblage Poem of the River Long articulates not-so-much the state of
the concretized waterway, but rather his wanderings and solitude which are materialized
for others to experience.

The artist, in expressing and establishing an essence, and a presence of
experience, through the physicality of his sculpture, reanimates the moment of relief from

40
Gregory Volk, 11.

31
the urban grid. Despite being surrounded by noise, freeways, traffic and pollution, Long
was emancipated from the dictated definitions of city space. Just out of sight and acting
independently, Long successfully redesigned his notions of creative production and
studio practice, going beyond a designated workspace to the temporary repurposing of
authorized city landscape for the production of his own artistic undertakings. The
evolution of Long’s process echo Holmes assertion for liberation from instituted artistic
invention and display.

Long expressed his sentiments on the validity and necessity of art stating that,
“There is only life, and then art is this peculiar game that we play in it. And Thank god
for it: it becomes a way of locating a way of interacting with life; it becomes the
stimulant for life; it becomes a way of stepping out of it. In a fake way, you get to pretend
something with life through art, but it can be horrible if you actually believe the game to
be reality.”
41
It is critical for artists and society to seek out and re-navigate our
surroundings in order to increase the varieties and qualities of self-reflection. The Los
Angeles River served as a creative template for Long’s artistic achievements. The site has
given individuals of various backgrounds and temperaments the opportunity to step
through the sanctioned Los Angeles geography and reassess its purpose and use.

Long uses his creative force to seek breath and voice in the static of urban density, the
artist seeks what each of us longs to express: an interpretation and rationalization of our

41
“Charles Long in Conversation with Vesela Sretenovic” Charles Long More Like a Dream than a
Scheme. (Providence: David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, 2005), 15.

32
existence. It is through seeking or questioning that the artist can come to a greater state of
enlightenment. The manifestation of the artist enlightenment and experience, according to
Long, is translated through the production and creation of a physical object. Long
describes his theory on the relationship between art and life stating, “In a sense art is not
an object but rather a response to our experiences of life. Art exceeds intellect, and it sets
out to exceed all expectations, while still managing to fail in most ways except one: it got
made.”
42

The title of his assemblage, Poem of the River exemplifies Long’s sentiments. Just
as poets have weaved and manipulated words and verses to narrate their experiences,
Long’s construction of particles and minutia give breath and new meaning to his liberated
creative experiences at the Los Angeles River. His work serves as a conduit between his
creative drive and the discovery and reinvention of an urban landscape. His journey and
experiences with the River were critical in his reformation of artistic style and self-
examination. Long’s drive to absorb and define the surrounding urban geography made
him search for relevant creative landscapes in Los Angeles. His journey lead him to the
riverfront: a transformative site of re-invention and solace.

WE WAIT A LONG TIME TO SEE YOU, TO BEAT YOU, (2005)

Another piece from this period, We Wait a Long Time to See You, To Beat You is
constructed of steel, plaster, and papier-mâché. The work shares similarities to A Poem

42
“Charles Long in Conversation with Vesela Sretenovic,”15.

33
for the River particularly in the presence of moment. Rather than the sway of the river’s
tides, the piece embodies propulsion. The shape of the assemblage consists of an organic
structured upper region that is rich in bumps and texture. This gives way to independent
particles that are attached to a larger massive shape that resembles a small crouching
figure, or a portion of a jaw, complete with perforated teeth. However, this portion of the
assemblage does not dictate nor define the piece. Just below the white plaster, a lower
portion includes a rusted shopping cart with all four wheels intact. Lower still a V-shaped
rusted metal frame connects to the plaster fossil and the shopping cart. Chains, rope and
dried remnants from the River drape down over and across the structure. The entirety of
these elements profess a feeling of forward momentum; a sense of urgency. The parts jut
forward and echo the plaster top, the shopping cart and the V-shaped base, pushing
onward.

When displayed in a gallery or museum setting, the piece is silenced, and
becomes something of a carcus without its original birthplace. Reinstated in new
surroundings, Long’s sculpture gives audiences a taste of the River’s existence, and
offers possibilities of alternative incarnations of site. The shopping cart wheels are lifted
just high enough above the steel V-shaped base, preventing the entire structure from
moving in accordance of the work’s aerodynamic shaping.

Long’s evolution of structure and practice–in relationship to the Los Angeles
urban geography–developed through his personal access and interpretation of the city

34
during contemplative walks and bike rides into ambiguous urban territory. The Los
Angeles River served as an extension of his artistic temperament, and allowed him to
probe and unearth irregularities in urban surfaces. His surroundings morphed to shape
and communicate the internal struggle and investigation of life each of us are confronted
with daily. Gregory Volk describes the communion between Long’s personal
temperament and creative struggles in his description of We Wait a Long Time to See
You, To Beat You which he describes as follows,

(the piece) involves a slightly contorted, pained, quizzical and deeply human
face that morphs from one end of a slab of plaster. Protruding upward from
head to toe, so to speak, of this slab are several stalks that look like exposed
vertebrae. It’s a weird, arresting sculpture, mixing painful claustrophia and
repose, and to complete it Long loaded it into a shopping cart and sent the
cart careening down the river’s sloping, concrete bank, until both cart and
sculpture toppled into the river. The sculpture was allowed to remain in the
river for some days. When extracted, it had a grayish, slightly muddy patina
made by the river itself and not by artistic procedures in the studio.
43

Speaking of the video performance and the active, dynamic construction processes,
Volk continues describing Long as, “a participant in a solemn ritual; a vandal on the
loose; a tender friend, father, or lover when he cradles the work in his arms and gazes at
the figure, who gazes right back, and who might be a self-portrait, and he is also the
ringmaster of his own nutty show.”
44
Long’s nutty show was a self-reflective and
immersive undertaking that took place over the course of five years, and that did not
strictly materialize in assemblage sculptural works. He amassed a tremendous body of

43
Gregory Volk, 12.

44
Gregory Volk, 12.

35
photographs, and created a video performance with the help of a friend. His extensive
engagement with the River was thoroughly documented as Long would spend hours (at
all hours) by the River taking photographs. His subjects were things like trash in the
weeds and trees, the play of sunlight and shadow on bridges and their stanchions, color-
streaked skies, friends and assistants who would sometimes join him, and sculptures in
their various stages of development, from trash heap to finished work.
45
Oftentimes, the
photographs move far beyond documentation, to become striking and evocative images;
and in-fact, works of art all their own.

Long’s documentation and mapping of the River from a multitude of positions
and angles represents his attempt to remap and reinterpret the space for himself. Each of
us that wishes to claim and distinguish ourselves in a complex and dense urban
landscape, must seek to establish territory, or to re-map said space, and give the
surroundings a permanence and root (at the very least in our own memory.) To be
inspired to work from our memories is to designate a significance and purpose to a
particular place or territory. A massive and expansive site, such as the Los Angeles River,
served as a touch point to spark and enlighten Long’s sense of wonder and creative drive.

Pivotal in the expansion of himself as an artist–and as an urban dweller–Long
negotiated the complexities of the River’s history, and competing ownerships, by creating
his own visual documentation, and capturing his personal impressions and engagement

45
Gregory Volk, 12.

36
with the site. These solid and frozen moments gave Long the reserve of visual imagery
and residue from which to restructure and reanimate the river through his assemblages.
One of Long’s untitled photographs is a clear reflection of the artist’s construction, and
visual manifestation, through his sculptural work. The photograph, taken along the banks
of the River, is an image of the lower portion of a rusted shopping cart that is lodged in a
tree with grass, brush, leaves and general refuse surrounding the hanging metal frame.
The background consists of a distant telephone pole, security gates and the descending
cement embankment and River. The physical realization of visual components, the
photographic composition and documentation, and the collection of debris and trash, are
all immersed in the physicality of his constructions. Comparing the photograph to the
assemblages, A Poem for the River and We Wait a Long Time to See You, To Beat You
one can easily draw connections and view similarities in construction, placement and
texture.

LONG, WANDERING AND AUTONOMY THROUGH ART MAKING

Only through Long’s wanderings, and reflections on the site’s existence and
isolation from the surrounding static of the urban terrain, was he able to refine its essence
and extract a memory of site, and exchange, to share with his audience. Wandering and
photo documentation were critical in Long’s evolution of art making and process. Long
describes his process as beginning with bike rides along the River pathways, listening to
specific selections from his ipod, such as Blonde Redhead or Wilderness. Throughout his

37
bicycling journey he would make stops to collect trash and photograph his discoveries.
During these journeys he would contemplate and visualize how these artifacts might be
realized as sculptures.
46
Through his drawings, he would begin to shape and
conceptualize his visions as structures as a step into form and art while still in the
wilderness. He would then choose from hundreds of images–visuals that he describes as
having less “beingness.” “If they are too interesting they are no good, absence is key,
incompleteness.”
48

Long’s streamlined metal and plaster sculptures were developed from
photographs of the white heron excrement markings that can be found on the cement
river embankments and on bridges. From these photographs, he creates full scale
drawings–as close to scale as possible–and then cuts and bends steel into the drawing’s
shape.
49
Using drawings as a map, and with photographs as reference, he then would weld
a 3D drawing in steel. Long describes the welding, like drawing, as a joyful process,
which allows him to move from the photo to the steel. Through this process he
experiences "projective seeing" or "interpretive bias" and knows exactly what will
become a front appendage and a back one.
50

46
Charles Long, phone interview with author Los Angeles, CA, December 1, 2009.

48
Gregory Volk, 12.

49
Charles Long Email message to author, December 5, 2009

50
Charles Long Email message to author, December 5, 2009

38

Long’s “projective seeing” and “interpretive bias” are personal artistic
experiences that are extracted from the self, following his infusion and saturation from
the environment. Long’s process, creativity and final product are enmeshed with the
physical site of the River. In order to realize the work, the artist sought solace and refuge
along the River. His actions and exercises in accessing and channeling the site for his
own purposes is not unique. Individuals often seek sites in which they can momentarily
experience relief and solitude from the onslaught of constant urban static. Likewise,
predetermined urban landscapes in metropolitan areas limit access, individuality and pure
experience. We are seeking sites in which we can temporarily strip ourselves of outside
influences and to find relief and creative inspiration. Artists such as Charles Long seek
out and experience such landscapes, which serves to influence and shape his work.

Charles Long’s artistic experiments were rooted in the repurposing of the Los
Angeles River a site of abandon reshaping it into an arts laboratory in which he was able
to produce counter realities, experience solitude and commune with nature. Long presents
alternative interpretations of the Los Angeles urban geography that negate the
confinement of structured civil and social order by working within the cracks of the city
construct. Through the intervention and reconsideration of such sites, artists and the
public experience a renewal of the varieties and qualities of self-reflection. These efforts
break the prescribed notions of artistic invention and displays that have been has been
instituted.

39

In his essay Temporary Autonomous Zone, author Peter Lamborn Wilson
describes spaces liberated from the predetermined urban geography as sites that: “Unfold
within the fractal dimensions invisible to the cartography of control. We are looking for
spaces (geographic, social, cultural, imaginary) with potential to flower as autonomous
zones- and we are looking for times in which these spaces are relatively open, either
through neglect on the part of the state or because they have somehow escaped notice.”
51

These sentiments, and the desire to discover landscapes, in part, shaped Long’s discovery
and use of the Los Angeles River. The site served as a laboratory in which he was
capable of extending and re-engineering the purpose(s) of the space and his own creative
process. Through his process and art-making, Long manifested his desire to redefine and
remap his experience through the creation of his assemblages and documentation. In his
journey and wanderings, he reshaped a pre-determined environment for his own
expression.

In his essay Kant, Adorno and the Social Opacity of the Aesthetic author Tom
Huhn reflects upon Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, specifically autonomous art, arguing that,
“The autonomy of art signals the transfer of human autonomy from the human subject to
the aesthetic artifact. When we speak of the spirit of art, we do not just infer our own
alienation but so, too posit the privileged site of alienation.”
52
Critical in the creation and

51
Peter Lamborn Wilson, 101.

52
Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart eds The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno's Aesthetic
Theory (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Boston:MIT, 1997) 245.

40
realization of Long’s work was a seeking by him of autonomy from a number of
constraints, the prescribed reputation of his art practice (as determined by the art world),
and the navigation of the expansive urban grid of Los Angeles.

Long’s site of investigation–the Los Angeles River in its current state–would
appear to be only a vacant concrete ditch, nearly invisible to most people. But, where
better for Long to begin his journey than here: a deep scar through the heart of Los
Angeles, legally unoccupiable and impassable, acting as a concave Berlin Wall in its
separation of communities of different incomes and functions.
53
The River a “wild” area
in the city of Los Angeles, served as a breeding ground for re-creation which, due to it’s
slick barren cement encasing, can be approached with few preconceptions.
54
Long’s
rediscovery and repurposing allowed him a sense of autonomy and solace. Long’s body
of work in turn gave his audiences an opportunity to view the breadth and depth of their
urban surroundings from a different perspective.

53
Los Angeles Board of Public Service Commissioner (LABPSC), Annual Report, 1911, 9; Layne, “Water
and Power,” 185.

54
LABPSC, Annual Report, 1911, 9;Layne, “Water and Power,” 185.

41
CHAPTER THREE: LONG, DODGE AND KAHN, THE SITUATIONIST
INTERNATIONAL AND THE PRACTICE OF THE DÉRIVE

Charles Long, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn’s artistic interventions in the Los
Angeles urban plan were realized through wandering, reflective and immersive
contemplation of the Los Angeles River. This site of abandon served as a space for the
pursuit of their creative interests, allowing them temporary relief from the confinement of
structured civil and social order present in the normative paths of everyday experience.

The works presented in the previous chapters embody transitive reflective
interpretations of the Los Angeles urban geography. The city’s landscape serves as the
material and driving force for Long, Dodge and Kahn’s creative interventions. The
artists sought locations within the city that allowed them to produce counter realities and
experience solitude and commune with nature. Their reflection and absorption of the site
lead to creative remapping and unearthing of alternate interpretations of their urban
surroundings. In turn their efforts and creative processes reshape public preconceived
notions of a prescribed Los Angeles geography.

The density of a metropolis, its configuration, and the ways in which we move
through it greatly impact the experiences we have in our lives, our selves and each other.
In an urban center such as Los Angeles, which is continually being reinvented by civic
and corporate development, the layers of a site – its concrete, its populations, its uses and

42
its history – are evolving.

The destiny and complexity of the Los Angeles terrain serves as a breeding ground
for urban critique and analyzation. Authors Elizabeth Moule and Stefanos Polyzoides
describe the problematic readings and interpretations of Los Angeles experienced by the
public stating, “Many visitors, let alone residents, don't regularly traverse this metropolis
or engage themselves in its diverse life. When they see vast distances, unfamiliar signs
and symbols, fragmentation, local discontinuity and even chaos, what most observers
overlook is a much larger territorial perspective; a vast infrastructural and natural context;
and a tangible and coherent historical town structure and building fabric which would
explain the wholeness of the metropolis' form over time. The propensity to ignore these
signs of formal order in the urbanism and the experience of living in Southern California
is a failure of both knowledge and imagination.”
55
Los Angeles demands intensive and
personal immersion in order for the viewer, visitor or resident to gain tangible memorable
impressions. These impressions inspire a wealth of artistic responses.

How then can the public come to greater understanding or realization of the city’s
offerings? It is the role of cultural producers to bring to light the nuances and
complexities of the Los Angeles urban geography. Through their production, reshaping
and remapping of the Los Angeles urban geography, the texture and varied legibility is
communicated to broader audiences. Charles Long, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn

55
Elizabeth Moule and Stefanos Polyzoides,1.

43
produced works that reflect their own immersive experiences. Their journeys allowed
them to unpack the prescribed notions of the Los Angeles urban landscape and reclaim
the city’s terrain as sites of contemplation, reflection and artistic intervention. Author
Holmes ascribes the role of art as, “offering a chance for society to reflect collectively on
the imaginary figures it depends upon for its very consistency and its self-understanding
key in the development of the public’s self-reflection.”
56
The process and sites
highlighted through artistic undertakings can magnify and exhume urban landscapes for
public re-imagining.

A critical site and space within the Los Angeles urban geography for artists Charles
Long, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn’s artistic experiments was the excavation of the Los
Angeles River. Their re-discovery and repurposing of the site for their creative
undertakings evokes the Situationist International rejection of prescribed notions of
everyday behavior and the development of urban landscapes. In The Revolution of
Everyday Life, Raoul Vaneigem addresses the constraints and power struggles enmeshed
in our urban surroundings and expresses the infringement on our senses describing the
experience as,
Hardly possible for looks, thoughts and gestures to escape the attraction of the
distant vanishing-point which orders and deforms them; situates them in its
spectacle. Power is the greatest town-planner. It parcels out lots of public and
private survival, buys up vacant lots at cut price, and only permits construction
that complies with its regulations. Its own plans involve the compulsory
acquisition of everybody. It builds with a heaviness which is the envy of the real

56
Brian Holmes, 551.

44
town-builders that copy its style, translating the old mumbo-jumbo of the sacred
hierarchy into stockbroker-belts, white collar apartments and workers flats.
57

Vaneigem’s sentiments echo Holmes’ assertion for alternative readings and self-
understanding. Likewise, Vaneigem’s sentiments are poetically echoed in the artistic
undertakings of Long, Dodge and Kahn.

CAN’T SPIT IT OUT, CAN’T SWALLOW IT AND NATURE DEMO IN
RELATIONSHIP TO THE DÉRIVE

Dodge and Kahn’s video piece Can’t Spit It Out, Can’t Swallow It leads the
viewer on a loose unscripted and haphazard tour of Los Angeles. The filmmakers hand
held camerawork and jump cuts from recognizable settings and urban surroundings to
sites of nature, such as Lake Hodges Dam and the Los Angeles River, remove familiarity
or consistency from their presentation of Los Angeles. Much like Valkyerie’s bloodied
nose and Viking hat, the purpose, (or lack there of), are never revealed or addressed. It
would appear that the filmmakers set off on their journey of experimentation lacking
direction or a clear narrative for their undertaking. The use of the foam cheese wedge, hat
and makeup serve as props to heighten and exaggerate the “what if” element of each
segment.

57
Raoul Vaneigem, “Impossible Communication or Power as Universal Mediation,” The Revolution of
Everyday Life, Red & Black, 1967 (http://library.nothingness.org/articles/all/en/display/40).

45
The stimulus and urgency of Valkyerie’s actions to her environment stimulate a
diverse collection of experience from which the viewer may choose. Her improv and
nonlinear choices emulate the dérive first introduced by the Situationist International. In
his essay, Theory of the Dérive, Guy Debord describes the process of the dérive as a
practice realized through rapid passage through varied ambiences. Dérives involve
playful-constructive behavior and an awareness of psychogeographical effects. The
situationists were concerned with a “distinct experience of one’s surroundings which was
distinct from a simple stroll or journey.”
58

The dérive requires a looseness, an unpredictable outcome or reading of one’s
evirons and journey. Ascribing one singular message or tone to Can’t Spit It Out, Can’t
Swallow It is an exercise in futility. The schizophrenic nature of the film’s narrator,
Valkyerie, allows viewers to pick and choose their level of participation or thread of
experience in order to better understand the Los Angeles urban geography she navigates.
Her behaviors captured on film mimic the “dérive (during which) one or more persons for
a certain period of time drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their
other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the
attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important
factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have
psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that

58
Guy Ernest-Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” Internationale Situationniste #2 1958
http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/314 (accessed January, 24, 2009)

46
strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.”
59
These qualities in Dodge and
Kahn’s film present and enable publics to reflect on the experiences of urban terrain and
to reconsider notions of prescribed passage and everyday use of the Los Angeles urban
geography.

What are the spaces and terrain Valkyerie investigates on her journey? The film
highlights a variety of locales in and throughout Los Angeles. However, consistent in the
portrayal of these sites are remote foreign sections of the city. The Los Angeles River is
properly attired with a dilapidated chain link fence and caution tape. Her discovery and
investigation of the precarious site leads the viewer into a neglected, restricted portion of
the urban grid. The site featured only briefly in Can’t Spit It Out, Can’t Swallow It is
revisited in a more concentrated investigation in their piece Nature Demo set entirely in
the Los Angeles River.

Dodge and Kahn’s remapping and recontexualization of the Los Angeles urban
geography mediates dissolution of the city grid for the viewer. Their work is driven by
internal drive of expression rather than conditioning habits and readings of Los Angeles.
Dodge and Kahn’s dérive lead to a point of creative conception and reconception. For
their film Nature Demo the artists themselves, rather than an avatar, raise questions of the
river’s existence and of the purpose of city space and urban life. Nature Demo much like
the practice of the dérive, is free and experimental in construction. Although Kahn and

59
Guy Ernest-Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” Internationale Situationniste #2 1958
http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/314 (accessed January, 24, 2009)

47
Dodge initially appear to be working collaboratively in the efforts to camp and
experience nature along the Los Angeles River, their individual experiences and
contemplation supersedes a singular reading of the river’s landscape. Audiences are
introduced to a plethora of states and expressions experienced in the waterway. The
solitude, scavenging and immersion into the site present the viewer with a landscape that
is impressionable and void of permenace.

CHARLES LONG’S ART PRACTICE IN RELATIONSHIP TO THE DÉRIVE

Charles Long embraced the practice of the dérive as a means of harnessing his
time of self-reflection as a way to commune with his new home, Los Angeles. Unlike
Dodge and Kahn, Long’s intent and initial motivations were not focused on the
production or creation of artistic undertakings. For Long the steps and paths of free
exploration were more fluid and loose in inception. His beginnings and the initiation of
his journey reflects Debord’s sentiments on the process of the primarily urban character
of the dérive which he describes as, “in its element in the great industrially transformed
cities that are such rich centers of possibilities and meanings, could be expressed in
Marx’s phrase: ‘Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything
speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.’ ”
61

61
Guy Ernest-Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” Internationale Situationniste #2 1958
http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/314 (accessed January, 24, 2009)

48
Long’s passage and absorption of Los Angeles was a complex and layered
navigation, which evolves into a series of artistic artifacts. The forward propulsion
present in the structure of We Wait a Long Time to See You, To Beat You is the physical
manifestation of Long’s practice of dérive over several years. The bits, stumps,
retractions of plaster and idiosyncratic gestures of natural forms mimic the unpredictable
process and drive of publics attempting to absorb and develop psychogeographical
pathways.
62

The force to move onward, to gain momentum is frozen in We Wait a Long Time
to See You, To Beat You. The sculpture epitomizes our captured desires to explore and
experience our surroundings on our own terms and conditions. As individuals we long for
recognition of our unique and individual voice. Living within the constructed Los
Angeles urban geography, the terms and movement through our landscapes are
increasingly determined by architecture, transportation and predetermined allocations of
private and public access.

Long’s work serves as a substitute for the experience of the dérive. The jumble
and raw recognizable urban debris recalls the familiar texture of urban life for the viewer
while simultaneously providing a new fastidious constructed relic to ponder. The River’s
wealth of urban debris and artifacts allows for ecological analysis of the absolute or
relative character of fissures in the urban network, of the role of microclimates, of distinct

62
Guy Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” Situationist International Anthology ed.
Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 9.

49
neighborhoods with no relation to administrative boundaries, and above all of the
dominating action of centers of attraction to mesh, bend and reform as sculptural
artifact.
63

The Los Angeles River, a shared site of investigation and reflection for Long,
Dodge and Kahn, is a transitional site for artistic invention. Their practices in relationship
to the waterway present the public with an opportunity to replenish the varieties and
qualities of self-reflection
64
The artists were drawn toward the River’s removed path and
fascinated by the way the concrete boundaries shelter the space from the car -oriented
urban terrain. Despite its central placement the 52 mile cement vein remains relatively
barren and separate from the confines of structured civil and social order present in the
normative paths of everyday experience.

63
Guy Ernest-Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” Internationale Situationniste #2 1958
(http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/314 accessed January, 24, 2009)

64
Brian Holmes, 551.

50

CONCLUSION

Art provides breath and possibility for society to experience self-understanding and
reflection in sites of abandon. Despite the efforts of planners, corporations and
government officials, there remain cracks within the Los Angeles urban plan, which
allow individuals to disassociate from the prescribed urban lifestyle. The Los Angeles
River serves as a sounding board for creative experimentation. Removed from the
mundane everyday happenings of a metropolitan center, the space enables individuals to
create counter realities, seek solace and commune with nature.

Working from within the cracks of the city construct, Charles Long, Harry Dodge
and Stanya Kahn repurposed Los Angeles urban geography, creating alternative
perspectives in a site of abandon, the Los Angeles River. Through viewing their
temporary artistic undertakings, we can psychologically re-engineer our experience of
Los Angeles. Their practices evolved from dérive, during which the artists sought to
absorb and contextualize their environment, in order to forge their own unique paths.

Long’s process and contemplation of the Los Angeles urban geography radically
repositioned his artistic practice, and lead him to materialize his experiences through his
assemblages. Speaking on the diffusion of his emotions and experiences he states, “I
don’t make the kind of art that starts with an idea. I work from my experience, my

51
materials, my presence, my joy, my anger. And so when I talk about digestion, I’m
talking about how for me as an artist, I process these things and output it. I want the work
just to be floating and strange for the viewer, to have that strangeness that I feel in the
river of seeing an automobile stuck in a tree, It’s so riveting and beautiful. And that’s
what I’m after, this sense of imbalance and beauty.”
65
Long’s efforts resonate with our
human drive to understand, and translate for others, what (or how) an encounter in a
particular site alters our preconceived notion of our surroundings.

According to Guy Debord, these desperations–or rather instinctual desires to
wander–are ingrained in each of us. In 1953, Debord was wrestling with the complexity
and demands of urban geography. He describes urbanism’s main problem at the time as,
“Ensuring the smooth circulation of a rapidly increasing number of motor vehicles. A
future urbanism may well apply itself to no less utilitarian projects, but in the rather
different context of psychogeographical possibilities.”
66
The notion of psychogeography
is firmly positioned in relationship to the creative will and drive of artists working in and
around the Los Angeles River.

Debord defines psychogeography as a practice which, “sets for itself the study of the
precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously

65
2008 Whitney Biennial New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008, 170.

66
Guy Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” Situationist International Anthology ed.
Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 9.

52
organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. The charmingly vague
adjective psychogeographical can be applied to the findings arrived at by this type of
investigation, to their influence on human feelings, and more generally to any situation or
conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery.”
67
Long spent over five years
immersed in reflective examination of the Los Angeles urban geography. His dérive
shares similarities to the erratic course of The Los Angeles River prior to its
concretization. Long perceives the waterway as a “vivacious topography complete with
125 species of birds and everything from the streets of Los Angeles, which gets caught in
a torrent of rain making its way down and into the river and getting caught in the trees
that grow up through the concrete.”
68

Rather than collecting material items for physical representations of their
experience, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn document and expose the disjunctive and
irrational course one may take in order to shift the reality of urban life. The artists see
their efforts in performance and video as part of a larger body that deals with the totality
of experience. Dodge and Kahn describe their efforts stating, “In Can’t Swallow It, Can’t
Spit It Out we were tapping into the social surface through video camera-plays.”
69

Stanya’s character teams up with an unseen camera-person (Dodge) who is loitering

67
Guy Debord, 8.

68
Charles Long, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2008 Whitney Biennial transcript,
http://www.whitney.org/ajax/magic_modules/video_module/transcript?id=2831&page_id=63509
(accessed November 1, 2008)

69
Michael Smith, 1.

53
outside a hospital emergency room, and she becomes his impromptu tour guide as they
set off together in hopes of catching some kind of dramatic footage. “In All Together Now
we’re returning to the same question, same places, but this time tunneling through them.
We’re trying to dip beneath language into lived experience.”
70
Their description is in line
with Debord’s theory of the psychogeographical mapping of urban landscapes, which he
feels, “can contribute to clarifying certain wanderings that express no subordination to
randomness but total insubordination to habitual influences.”
71

Immersion in the urban geography of Los Angeles led artists Long, Dodge and
Kahn on self-reflective paths, which culminated in the repurposing and use of existing
Los Angeles sites. The artists share a commonality in their flow of discovery and
reanimation of the Los Angeles River. Debord remarks that the alteration of urban
geography creates an atmosphere that provokes, “A sudden change of ambience in a
street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct
psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance that is automatically followed in aimless
strolls; the appealing or repelling character of certain places.”
72

70
Rachel Kushner, 240.

71
Guy Debord, 11.

72
Guy Debord, 10.

54
The artist is critical in unearthing and representing sites of abandon in Los
Angeles urban geography. In the case of the Los Angeles River Long, Dodge and Kahn
created works through which, the public could vicariously reanimate and reassess their
view of the city’s scope and use. How or in what ways is the public exposed to these
artistic undertakings? There is no substantial system of measurement or quantitative data
determining their impact. Rather, their existence, presence and significance to the public
rely solely on the art world’s reproduction and exhibition. Does their work provoke a
large enough audience to activate the Los Angeles River for their own self-reflection?
How can the Los Angeles River serve as a site for a larger population to experience
solitude and alternative readings of the city’s urban geography? The reality exists that in
unofficial and abandoned sites, there are complexities of access and limitations, which do
not effect temporary interventions and undertakings, but however, can thwart or
compromise like-minded future, or more permanent, creative realizations.

A graffiti event sponsored by pro-active authorities and protective “griffins” of
the River, the Friends of the Los Angeles River (FOLAR), took place at Arroyo Seco, in
Highland Park, in the Los Angeles River waterway, in October, 2007. While permits
were issued by County officials for a painting event, the project faced scrutiny and
opposition from local authorities. Within a week of the completed project, Los Angeles
County Supervisor Gloria Molina demanded a meeting with organizers. FOLAR and the
collaborating graffiti artists and art collective Crewest were reprimanded for not
following procedures and not providing plans. In addition, officials deemed some of the

55
content of the murals to be ‘unacceptable.’ At that same meeting, Molina demanded the
work be removed despite the organizers proof of secured permissions from various
agencies. The city’s failure to recognize alternative readings of the waterway’s access
and creative production stifled individuals from creating a new layer of experience and
texture to their surroundings.

Author Brian Holmes commiserates with the public’s desire to alter existing
landscapes creatively. He reflects on the collective drive for intervention and liberation
stating, “It is exactly in regard to art and its reception, or better, its uses, that freedom
appears fundamentally as an open strategy among the multitudes, because the dynamic of
expression and use can never be directed by the one – that is, by any single, sovereign
instance of decision. And in this way, collective autonomy becomes a question both of
individual or small group artistic production, and of the large-scale cultural policy that
conditions its uses.”
73

The Los Angeles River revitalization master plan, which began in 2002, provides
a 25-50 year blueprint for transforming the city’s 52-mile stretch of the river into an
“emerald” necklace of parks, walkways, and bike paths. Additionally, the master plan’s
goals are to provide better connections to the neighboring communities, protecting
wildlife, promoting the health of the river, and leveraging economic reinvestment.
74

73
Brian Holmes, 3.

74
The Fifth Ecology Los Angeles Beyond Desire (Stockholm: The School of Architecture at the Royal
University of Fine Arts, Stockholm, 2008), 4-6.

56
Recently, students from the Department of Architecture at the Royal University Collage
of Fine Arts in Stockholm developed a revised urban plan for the Los Angeles River
entitled the Fifth Ecology. The designers describe the site of their investigation, the Los
Angeles River, as: “A stretch with no specific beginning or ending. A place to see and be
seen in. A space defined by myth, spectacle, expectation and experience.”
75
Likewise,
their investigation, and the evolution of their creative reimagining of the space through
their design plan, echoes the common desire for the dissolution and reshaping of public
and private space in Los Angeles. The architects describe their undertaking as a, “test
ground for a post-material American dream. The Los Angeles River will be its point of
departure. This is a river we have all seen in the movies. In reality, even an Angelino
would have a hard time finding it. Nevertheless, the Los Angeles River is the very origin
of the city. Today, it carries dirty drainage water through a gated concrete ditch.”

According to the Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan, since the
concretization of the river, and the subsequent building of rail yards, warehouses and
other industrial uses along the River’s edge, isolate the site from most people and
communities. The master plan states that, “Most residents cannot see the river let alone
enjoy it as valuable public resource.” Although presently the space does not exist as a
beautified or coiffed public recreation area, there exists a tremendous amount of activity
(and certainly social interactions) within and around the river and the manmade concrete

75
The Fifth Ecology Los Angeles Beyond Desire, 4-6.

57
walls surrounding the waterways.

The practices of Harry Dodge, Stanya Kahn and Charles Long construct a
window from which to view alternative readings of the Los Angeles urban geography.
The Los Angeles River served as a critical site for their investigations. The site—separate
from the urban grid—awakened their creative drive, allowing them to experience
alternative realities, solitude and reflection. The public should embrace the River as a site
of abandon where one can transcribe and validate their voice and experience through the
imaginary and varieties of self-reflection. The River is a site ripe with possibility for the
assertion of self, and collective, reflection on the imaginary. The artistic experimentation
of artists Dodge, Kahn and Long promote the Los Angeles River as a space where the
public could conceivably “reflect collectively on the imaginary figures it depends upon
for its very consistency and its self-understanding.”
76

76
Brian Holmes, 551.

58
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Banham, Reyner. Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Berkley: University
of California Press, 2001.
De Certeau, Michael. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkley: University of California
Press, 1984.
Debord, Guy. “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” Situationist International
Anthology ed. Ken Knabb Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981.
Debord. Guy. Situationist International Anthology ed. Ken Knabb Berkeley: Bureau of
Public Secrets, 1981.
Dodge, Harry and Stanya Kahn, Can’t Spit It Out, Can’t Swallow It. UBU Web Databank
Media Player video file, http://www.ubu.com/film/dodge_swallow.html (accessed
December 20, 2009)
Dodge, Harry and Stanya Kahn. Nature Demo. VHS New York, NY: Electronic Arts
Intermix, 2008.
Gumprecht, Blake. 2001. The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth.
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
Holmes, Brian. “Artistic Autonomy and the Communication Society.” Third Text 18, no.
6 (2004): 547-555.
Huhn, Tom and Lambert Zuidervaart eds. The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in
Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought). Boston:
MIT, 1997.

Klein, Norman. The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles And The Erasure of Memory.
New York: Verso, 1997.
Kushner, Rachel. "1000 words: Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn; Talk about All Together
Now, 2008." Artforum International 46.5 (2008): 240+.
Long, Charles. Whitney Museum of American Art, 2008 Whitney Biennial transcript,
http://www.whitney.org/ajax/magic_modules/video_module/transcript?id=2831&page_id
=63509 (accessed November 1, 2008)
McAdams, Lewis. “Restoring the Los Angeles River: A Forty-Year Art Project.” Whole
Earth Spring, 1995, 2.

59
Morrison, Patt. Río L.A.: Tales from the Los Angeles River. Los Angeles: Angel City
Press, 2001.
Moule, Elizabeth and Stefanos Polyzoides. World Cities: Los Angeles. ed Maggie Toy
London: Academy Editions and Berlin: Ernst + Son, 1994.
Smith, Michael. “Harry Dodge & Stanya Kahn” BOMB 108/Summer 2009, AR.
Smith, Neil and Setha Low, eds., The Politics of Public Space. New York: Routledge,
2006.
Soja, Edward W. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social
Theory. London: Verso Books, 1997
Vaneigem, Raoul, The Revolution of Everyday Life. Red & Black, 1967
http://library.nothingness.org/articles/all/en/display/40 (accessed January 20,2010)
Wilson, Peter Lamborn. T.A.Z.:The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy,
Poetic Terrorism. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2003.
Nature Demo Description Electronic Arts Intermix
http://www.eai.org/eai/title.htm?id=14605 (accessed December 22,2009)
2008 Whitney Biennial New York, NY : Whitney Museum of American Art Distributed
by Yale University Press, 2008.
The Fifth Ecology Los Angeles Beyond Desire. Stockholm: The School of Architecture at
the Royal University of Fine Arts, Stockholm, 2008.
The Los Angeles River Revitalization Masterplan. Los Angeles, CA: 2007.
Los Angeles Board of Public Service Commissioner (LABPSC), Annual Report, 1911, 9;
Layne, “Water and Power,” 185.
Irvin, Kate., ed. Charles Long More Like a Dream than a Scheme. Providence: David
Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, 2005.

60
APPENDIX

Fig. 1. Video Still from Nature Demo, (2008), Video Duration 9 minutes and 19 seconds
Source: http://www.elizabethdeegallery.com/artists/view/harry-dodge-and-stanya-kahn

61

Fig. 2. Video Still from All Together Now, (2008), Video Duration 26 minutes and 34
seconds
Source: http://www.elizabethdeegallery.com/artists/view/harry-dodge-and-stanya-kahn

Fig. 3. Video Still from Can’t Swallow It, Can’t Spit It Out, (2006), Video Duration 26
minutes, 58 seconds
Source: http://www.elizabethdeegallery.com/artists/view/harry-dodge-and-stanya-kahn

62

Fig. 4. Poem of the River, (2005) Steel, found objects, plaster, paint 90” x 33” x 31”
Source: Irvin, Kate., ed. Charles Long More Like a Dream than a Scheme. Providence:
David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, 2005.
Photo by Shane Photography, Warwick, RI

63

Fig. 5. We Wait a Long Time to See You, To Beat You, (2005) Steel, plaster, papier-
mache, 55” x 76” x 21”
Source: Irvin, Kate., ed. Charles Long More Like a Dream than a Scheme. Providence:
David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, 2005.
Photo by Shane Photography, Warwick, RI

64

Fig. 6
Untitled Photograph by Charles Long
Source: Photo courtesy of the artist

Fig. 7.
Untitled Photograph taken by Charles Long
Source: Photo courtesy of the artist

65

Fig. 8. Untitled Photograph
Source: Photo courtesy of the artist

Abstract (if available)

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Asset Metadata

Creator Gregg, Anne-Marie Elizabeth (author)

Core Title Artistic intervention in the Los Angeles urban geography: the art practices of Charles Long, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Public Art Studies / Master of Arts

Degree Program Public Art Studies

Publication Date 05/07/2010

Defense Date 01/20/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag artistic intervention,Autonomy,Charles Long,Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn,Los Angeles River,OAI-PMH Harvest,public art,urban development,urban geography,Urban Planning,waterways

Place Name California (states), Los Angeles (city or populated place)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Driggs, Janet Owen (committee chair), Decter, Joshua (committee member), Stone, Tracy (committee member)

Creator Email agregg@usc.edu,amagree@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3039

Unique identifier UC183035

Identifier etd-Gregg-3554 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-332061 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3039 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Gregg-3554.pdf

Dmrecord 332061

Document Type Thesis

Rights Gregg, Anne-Marie Elizabeth

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu