Reyner Banham, Olafur Eliasson and the Landscape of Los Angeles: Toward a Creative Relocation of the Oikos of Political

Ecology

ABSTRACT Since its conception, ecology has been the study of a unified architecture (or oikos) of nature, and its independence from society. Yet the metaphor of a natural habitat, which suggests a division between the natural (bios) and the social (polis), becomes unwieldy when appropriated by Political Ecology in its attempt to enfold and reanimate the agency of human, nonhuman and technological actors. In productively relocating the conceptual basis of ecological thinking, political ecologists might benefit from dialogue with artists and art critics, who dramatize and reimagine agency in specific geographies. In particular, I propose that Reyner Banhams Los Angeles: Architecture of Four Ecologies and Olafur Eliassons L.A.based intervention Green River are two creative gestures that disperse, extend and democratize agency in the urban landscape. As a means for unveiling perspectives and generating questions, art may have a role in crafting a more fluid and liberal oikos for Political Ecology.

When your house contains such a complex of piping, flues, ducts, wires, lights, inlets, outlets, ovens, sinks, refuse disposers, hi-fi reverberators, antennae, conduits, freezers, heaters when it contains so many services that the hardware could stand up without any assistance from the house, why have a house to hold it up?

~ Reyner Banham1 I. Introduction Ecology is the science of dwelling. It is the delicate study of the habitat, the whole science of the relations of the organisms to the environment including, in the broad sense, all the conditions of existence.2 In its original conception by Ernst Haeckel, the science of ecology encompassed the systems and relations of the natural, nonhuman world. However, in recent decades, the project of ecology was appropriated by numerous other academic disciplines. Notably, experiments in cultural ecology and political economy gave rise to the field of Political Ecology: an academic discipline crafted to enfold not only nonhumans and natural systems but also societies, things, technologies and inorganic processes. Yet in appropriating the basic tenets of ecology for its own academic practice, Political Ecology did not rid the term of its history, or its discursive assumptions and affiliations.3 Numerous scholars, among them Bruno Latour, Sarah Whatmore and Jane Bennett, have placed pressure on the notion of ecology, claiming that it can be made more democratic, more secular and therefore productive for the social sciences and for Political Ecology in particular.456 It is to the contemporary conception of ecology that I

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Banham, Reyner, A Home Is not a House, illustrated by Franois Dallegret, Art in America (1965): 70. Haeckel, Ernst. Generelle Morphologie Der Organismen (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1866), pp.286-87. 3 By discursive assumptions I mean the framework for ecology that was designed by scientists like Haeckel which located ecological study firmly in the realm of the nonhuman. 4 In, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences Into Democracy, Bruno Latour argues that even in the contemporary field of Political Ecology, academic study occurs as if there existed one mono-natural entity holding

briefly turn to in this paper, not to criticize the limitations of the discipline or the term, but to show how a relocation of the intellectual and metaphoric framework (oikos) of ecology can take place not only through writing and research, but through creative experience. Art can serve as a catalyst for a discursive and conceptual transformation of ecological thinking, expanding its potential for the democratic practice of Political Ecology. While it would be possible, within this context, to analyze the work of numerous artists and creative performances, I will focus on the criticism of the architectural theorist Reyner Banham and the recent urban interventions of the contemporary Icelandic installation artist Olafur Eliasson.7 Banham and Eliasson were chosen for this paper for precise reasons. First, their creative work is explicitly concerned with the interplay among humans, nonhumans, things and technologies; it differs from the work of Political Ecologists primarily in incorporating creative methods and perspectives. Second, their work is intimately related: Reyner Banhams criticism of urban design, environment and culture is implicated in Eliassons construction of dual sunsets and colored waterways. Finally, Banham and Eliasson exist in intimate conversation since both critic and artist have written about, theorized and worked in the landscape of Los Angeles; in this way they are invested in the same urban geography, and in the same series of political and ecological considerations.

numerous multicultural worlds. His argument is extremely relevant for this paper, as he argues that ecology still takes as given an external world of Nature that is accessed only by elite scientists and experts. 5 In her work, Hybrid Geographies, Sarah Whatmore questions the hierarchy of relations between the categories of the human, nonhuman, social and material, upholding the interference of the non-human in social life. 6 In Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Jane Bennett argues for a new vital materialism one in which agency was understood as more democratically dispersed among humans and nonhumans. She examines the political and theoretical implications of a new recognition of dispersed agency, going so far as to call for a shift toward green materialist philosophy. 7 An comprehensive examination of the way artists are employing scientific and sociological concepts in their artwork can be found in the book, Signs of Life: Bio-Art and Beyond by the artist and theorist Eduardo Kac.

II. The Oikos of Political Ecology In his 1866 text, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, the German biologist and naturalist Ernst Haeckel coined the term ecology to denote, all conditions of existence. These are partly organic, partly inorganic in nature (my emphasis). Haeckels definition of ecology denotes a world outside of human influence, a world of natural systems and complexities. It is interesting to note, however, that in delineating a nonhuman world, Haeckel employed the root of the Greek word oikos, meaning dwelling-place, home and house.8 Haeckels terminology therefore suggests a unified kingdom, or in Bruno Latours terms a veritable Noahs Ark, separate and apart from the sphere of human life. In The Politics of Nature, Latour wonders, that a term [ecology] used for nature external to humanity can take from Greek the most anthropocentric, the most domestic, the most patriarchal of its terms, the one that has always been the most distant from polis and the exercise of liberty?9 Indeed, it is exactly the alienation of the polis (the center of social life) from the so-called kingdom of nature, and the separation of human agency from that of the nonhuman world, that makes the traditional formulation of ecology such an uncertain framework for examining the cosmopolitical spaces of the twenty first century.10 What is at stake, therefore, in Political Ecologys incorporation of a term, and a scientific discipline, that contrasts a single, unified nature-system (bios) with multiple, variant and chaotic human societies (poleis)?11 Latour argues that in order to progress further in the study of human/

My analysis of the term oikos as a metaphor and an architectural term is also informed by: Kulper, Amy. Ecology without the Oikos: Banham, Dallegret and the Morphological Context of Environmental Architecture FieldJournal. Vol 4 (1) pp. 67-84. 9 Latour, Bruno. The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences Into Democracy. Paris: dition la Dcouverte, 2004, p. 10. 10 Stengers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitics I. Bononno, R (trans.), Mineapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. I use the term cosmopolitical as it was coined by Isabelle Stengers and later appropriated by Bruno Latour to denote the management, diplomacy, combination, and negotiation of human and nonhuman agencies. 11 Poleis is the plural form of the Greek word polis (city, center of social life).

nonhuman relationships and the economic forces intertwined with them, Political Ecology must let go of Nature: Political ecology does not speak about nature and has never sought to do so. It has to do with associations of beings that take complicated forms-rules, apparatuses, consumers, institutions, mores, calves, cows, pigs, broods and that it is completely superfluous to include in an inhuman and a-historical nature. Nature is not in question in ecology: on the contrary, ecology dissolves nature's contours and redistributes its agents.12 Latour proposes that the Ecology of Political Ecology must be conceptually hollowed out it must be understood to denote not a unified architecture of nature but a space for the active performance of humans, nonhumans and technologies together. In other words, the oikos of Ecology the somewhat limiting intellectual basis on which the term has been built and the discipline practiced must be relocated to a new, cosmopolitical ground, if it is to be made useful for the purposes of Political Ecology. Moreover, the metaphor of a unified oikos, or home, which suggests a natural realm separate from the multiplicity of human societies, might be replaced with the concept of a network or system (if a house is entirely supported by systems, why keep the walls?)13 It is through this paradigmatic and conceptual shift that Political Ecology can freely incorporate bios and polis, and the agency that lies in the interstitial links between the two.14

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Latour 2004, p. 15. The epigraph to this essay by Reyner Banham is a lucid and creative analogy for this idea, and like Latour and other theorists, privileges the autonomous system over the confining structure of the house. 14 Is there a reason that we should have to stick with ecology, and its heavy affiliations, rather than employing or inventing some other term? Latour makes the salient point that the study of ecology is still in its infancy: why must we assume that it cannot mature further, evolve more closely with the work we wish to do? Moreover, Latour asks, What term other than ecology would allow us to welcome nonhumans into politics? (Latour 2004). Ecology has the fundamental strength of including both nonhumans and inorganic processes in its intellectual netting. Rather than eliminating a resonant term, it might require less effort (and produce more benefits) if we shake up or relocate an existing one (Latour 2004).

In considering the conceptual framework of Political Ecology, it is beyond the scope of this paper to measure and evaluate the many recent trends in the discipline, except to note that many political ecologists are breaking new ground in performing rigorous studies of the entanglement between the human and nonhuman, social and technological in diverse sites and conditions.15 The topic to which the remainder of the paper will be devoted is the understudied fact that economists, ecologists and social scientists are not the only thinkers weighing the politics of ecology. Rather, artists and art critics are also engaged with the ways humans and nonhumans form site-specific and evolving networks. An example of this cosmopolitical gesture in the world of art criticism is found in the work of Reyner Banham, an architectural critic and writer whose 1971 book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies characterizes Los Angeles with four ecological spaces (Surfurbia, Foothills, The Plains of Id, and Autopia). Olafur Eliasson, on the other hand, is directly engaged with Stengers cosmopolitics: in addition to his creative practice, Eliasson has lectured at the Universit des Sciences Politiques in Paris, and has been labeled by Bruno Latour himself as, cosmo-politically correct.1617 It is to creativity we now turn, in the hopes of elucidating how an art critic and a contemporary artist have dissembled the traditional architecture of ecology in favor of one that is even more liberal and fluid with its designation and understanding of agency.

15

Two wonderful examples of Stengers cosmopolitics in practice (to my young understanding of the discipline of Political Ecology) are: Swyngedouw, E. Power, nature, and the city. The conquest of water and the political ecology of urbanization in Guayaquil, Ecuador 1880-1990. Environment and Planning 29: 311-332.; and Nightingale, Andrea J. 2011. Bounding difference: Intersectionality and the material production of gender, caste, class and environment in Nepal. Geoforum 42 (2):153-162. 16 Eliasson, Olafur. (2008, October). The Sun Has No Money. Lecture given from the Universit des Sciences Politiques in Paris. 17 Bruno Latour called Olafur Eliasson C.C., or Cosmo-politically correct in his introduction to Eliassons lecture at the Universit des Sciences Politiques, The Sun Has No Money.

III. Reyner Banham and Olafur Eliasson in Dialogue Reyner Banhams Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies is a study of environmental experience in a city that, at the time of his research, was beginning to wax from its glittering status as a model metropolis for the future.18 Banham sought to understand the growth and life of Los Angeles in terms of human and nonhuman influences, including the rocks of the Santa Monica Mountains, the cultural territories of South Central and Beverley Hills, the ubiquitous eight-lane overpasses, and the horizon-obscuring smog. While Banham privileges architecture and methods of moving, the piece as a whole incorporates the varied spheres of public and private investment, shifts in agrarian production, and the politics of hydrology to map the peculiar growth of the city. In his Ecology IV: Autopia, for example, Banham examines how the entity of the freeway conditions its users and prints itself deeply on the conscious mind and unthinking reflexes.19 He explores the transportation systems of L.A. from without, as a constellation of possible contexts, as well as from within as they impact the lives of their various inhabitants. Yet his infrastructural analysis is informed by the geologic properties of the region: Los Angeles has only recently emerged from the ocean; most of what is now the Greater Los Angeles basin was below sea-level in Jurassic times, and has been hoisted into the sunshine by a prolonged geological lifting process.20 Banhams work on the landscape of Los Angeles is concerned primarily with systems: of water and power, building, transit, communication, and pleasure.21 Banham does not view Los Angeles as a static entity, but as a dynamic space of flows one that is perhaps most effectively

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Banham, Reyner. Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. University of California Press: 2001. Banham 35. 20 Banham 20. 21 In his analysis of such systems, Banham is very informed by the work of the French theorist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre, who theorized the relationship between social modes of production and concrete city spaces in his work, The Production of Space.

understood in the language of motion.22 As Anthony Vidler writes of Banhams urban geography: it was a freeway model of history, looking at the city through movement and as itself in movement.23 Banhams focus on systems is evident in the design of his text: his analysis of Los Angeles is less historiography than a psychogeography of the citys space-time scenarios.24 From a structural perspective, Banham intersected chapters on the four ecologies with those on architecture itself, and these further with historical and bibliographical notes. Passages of history or description are literally interrupted without warning by passages on related but different subjects. Readers are confronted with a work of urban political ecology that is interwoven again and again with aesthetic observations, auto-ethnographical descriptions, and significant histories. It is as if the book itself has a topography with flatlands, foothills, arteries of movement and multi-scalar vistas. This was indeed intentional: Banham explains that a traditional historical account of the city would be, a boring and uninstructive journey, because the point about this giant city, which has grown almost simultaneously all over, is that all its parts are equal and equally accessible from all other parts at once.25 Just as everyday commuting in Los Angeles seems to move by, an almost random or Brownian motion over the area, Banham demands that the reader should treat the book in the same way, with that freedom of movement that is the prime symbolic attribute of the Angel City.26 The aspect of Banhams work that is most relevant to our discussion is not that he undertook in the 1970s what many Political Ecologists today might consider a sophisticated

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Banham 150. Vidler, Anthony. Introduction. Los Angeles: City of the Immediate Future. Los Angeles: Architecture of Four Ecologies. By Reyner Banham. 1971. Los Angeles: University of California Press: 2001. 24 With the term psychogeography I am referencing Guy Debord and Asger Jorns Psychogeographical Map of Paris, which the two thinkers/ artists completed in conjunction with the Situationist Manifesto. Debord invented a way of experiencing Parisian city life and terrain by drifting through its corridors and alleyways, absorbing its concrete as well as cultural and ephemeral realities. 25 Banham 18. 26 Banham 18.

analysis of a modern city, albeit with aesthetic leanings. Rather, Banhams work is incredibly relevant in its radical reframing of agency in the urban environment. In Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, freeways weave humans in webs of entanglement and dependence just as actively as humans build new freeways; and the term architecture is expanded to denote anything from villas in Malibu to the strip-malls of the Valley to beach shacks and even surfboards. Ecological conditions, synthetic structures, and objects have agency as part of an endless web of design, acculturation and reinvention. The point is not only that humans, nonhumans and things all exercise agency, but that the expression of agency is never uniform and lies in the complex relations between entities. Even in the way he writes, Banham delegates agency outward from his pen to the hands of his readers; readers can map their own paths across the books highly unusual historical and pictorial landscape, actively designing their own experience of both the authors representation and the city it documents. The political ecology of the Los Angeles cityscape reaches into the space between the readers eye and the page, between the individual and the book-object (two actants in a network of mediation). Therefore in perspective and in design, Banhams project presents us with a Los Angeles that is dramatically ecological, and whose systems rely on mutually evolving human and nonhuman actors. Reyner Banhams ideas on urban ecology and aesthetic form can be traced directly into the work of the contemporary installation artist Olafur Eliasson, whose practice is informed by a similar intersection of aesthetics, geography and natural sciences. Olafur Eliasson is no environmentalist, nor a scientist, but through collaborative processes in his studio, and intellectual dialogue with theorists across the world, Eliasson has established himself as a leading

voice on the democratic use of public spaces, and the intersection of technologies, organic materials and human life. Olafur Eliassons works are not confined to museums and gallery spaces; rather, they intervene in urban landscapes. The artist has constructed dual suns on the Utrecht skyline, and placed a series of 30-meter high waterfalls on the Lower East River dividing Brooklyn and Manhattan (Figures 1 and 2).27 For a piece called Erosion, Eliasson emptied a rainwater reservoir and slowly spilled its contents onto the streets of Johannesburg (Figure 3). A permanent outdoor installation entitled Yellow Fog is activated every day at dusk in a downtown square of Vienna (Figure 4). Now, leading a new school for space experimentation in his East Berlin studio, and willfully expressing his ideas on the relevance of art in political and social conversations, Eliasson is changing how natural and built environments are negotiated by everyday people. IV. The Agency of Rivers, Colors, Visions: The Green River Project Olafur Eliasson would likely agree with Bruno Latour that humans exist in complex systems of dependence with non-human entities; and, like the anthropological scholar Ian Hodder, Eliasson might include in these networks the agency of waves, colors and ephemera.2829 For Eliasson, one way to prove that nonhuman bodies or materials have agency is to dramatically alter their features so that they transcend what humans understand as their stereotypical mode of being. This is perhaps best explained through an installation: in an intervention entitled Green

27

An examination of Eliassons heliotropic projects can be found in: Birnbaum, Daniel. Heliotrope. Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson. Ed. Madeleine Grynztejn. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: Thames and Hudson, 2007. 13142. 28 Hodder, Ian. Human-thing entanglement: towards an integrated archaeological perspective. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Vol 17, pp. 154 177. 29 In his recent publication, Human-Thing Entanglement, Ian Hodder defines his conception of what constitutes a thing with agency in networks of which humans are a part: naturally occurring objects, animals, plants, and humans, as well as sounds and words any object or sound in which humans have an interest. Hodder 156.

River, Eliasson and a small team dumped an ecologically safe neon-green dye into the urban river of Los Angeles.30 Eliasson described the effect: Putting the green colour in the stream for a moment made it hyperreal everybody, without knowing that it was an art project . . . looked at the river, and for an instant the power and the turbulence and the volume and speed of the water, and all its histories became extremely visible. The point was not even Green River, the point was how it looked before and after. The Green River is just a catalyst.31 The green was so startling that the river could be seen for miles, snaking like an abstract stroke of paint through the browns and grays of the L.A. landscape. The green effluvium spun through the eddies of the concrete-walled stream, recalling mutant life forms and petrochemical production in surprising beauty.32 What viewers in L.A. witnessed during the Green River project was that the urban river has agency, and has possessed this agency for centuries. Since the beginning of human presence in the region, the L.A. River has been a force of place-making.33 As an alluvial river, it held an unusually dramatic role in shaping the landscape of the Los Angeles basin; running freely across the floodplain of modern-day Los Angeles and Long Beach, the rivers path was unpredictable, and its mouth moved frequently along the coast from Long Beach to Ballona Creek. The basin did not exist as a static, pristine place, but rather as a locality in constant flux. As Nigel Thrift argues, places are best thought of not so much as enduring sites but as moments of encounter, not so much as presents, fixed in space and time, but as variable events; twists and fluxes of
30

The dye employed by the Eliasson team was a variation of Uranin a tracer chemical used by biologists to track turbulence and underwater flows. 31 Speaks, Michael. From the Red Desert to the Green River. Olafur Eliasson. New York: Phaidon, 2002. 32 Michael Speaks expands on this thought in his essay, From the Red Desert to the Green River, in the publication, Olafur Eliasson, 2002. 33 Here I take the idea of place-making from: Jones, Owain and Paul Cloke. Non-Human Agencies: Trees in Place and Time. Material Agency. United Kingdon, 2008.

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interrelation.34 While the river is now encased in concrete, and while it maintains little of its historical flows, Los Angeles and the L.A. River are nevertheless in constant, relative motion.35 The question of non-human agency is one that can be traced to Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law who framed Actor Network Theory (ANT). ANT posits that there are mutually constitutive and related actants which together serve to form and hybridize agency. In his seminal work Reassembling the Social, Bruno Latour argues that ANT is a fluid model that allows us to study networks between humans and non-humans, beings and things. Latour defines an actant as something that modifies a state of affairs by making a difference.36 The agency that the L.A. River performed across time, so poignantly highlighted by Olafur Eliasson in Green River, is not the kind of reflexive agency exercised by humans.37 However, in ways too numerous to detail here (including its modification of the landscape of the Los Angeles basin, its hosting of a myriad of native and exotic species, and its understudied impacts on the ecologies of the beaches) the L.A. River possesses the ability to make differences it exercises agency. The political potential in Eliassons work lies in the fact that the artist made the agency of the river explicit. By adding his non-toxic green dye, Olafur Eliasson gave the river a means of expression. Staring into the complexity of pattern, one was impressed by the hue and tone of the green water, the rivers internal dynamics, the incomprehensible logic of water and mineral. The ability of this body to make a difference in its surroundings a trait it had possessed all along was projected from its depths to the retinas of curious observers. Olafur Eliasson did not

34

Thrift, N. Steps to an ecology of place. Human Geography Today, ed. D. Massey, J. Allen, and P. Sarre. Polity Press, Cambridge, pp. 295352. 35 Thrift, Nigel. Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. New York: Routledge, 2008. 36 Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory. Oxford University Press, Oxford: 2005. p. 76. 37 Latour 2005, p. 77.

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augment or change the rivers natural capacity to act or make differences; he simply provided it with the element of surprise. The element of surprise was achieved through the use of a color that engaged with themes of ecological disaster and social justice as well as natural beauty a color that exerted its own (highly political) agency.38 The green chosen by the Eliasson studio was startlingly vivid, and immediately suggested something toxic or synthesized.39 Yet the overwhelming responses to the artwork were exclamations of its beauty (Figures 3 and 4).4041 The political weight of the artwork was also mobilized by the fact that the neighborhoods surrounding the river in L.A. are some of the citys poorest: the banks are industrial (including several of the citys major rail yards) and unlike West-L.A. neighborhoods are conspicuously lacking in vegetation (noticeably not green).42 The startling color of the dye at once suggested a violation of the citys most destitute areas, but also a phenomenon of surprising beauty in the last place one might expect it. Still, in a private interview, Eliasson observed that the level of interest in the project in L.A. was low: [unlike in Stockholm] in L.A. nobody cared, nobody stopped, nobody looked.43 Despite its beauty, the Green River project may have gone unnoticed in Los Angeles due not only to the

38

The dye employed by the Eliasson studio was a variation on Uranin a chemical used by scientists to trace and measure currents. 39 Miriam Schaub discusses the importance and weight that Eliasson gives to shades of light and color in: "The Logic of Light: Technology and the Human Turn." Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary: The Collection Book. Cologne: Walther Knig Verlag, 2009. 40 Spears, Dorothy. Thinking Glacially, Acting Artfully. The New York Times, (2007, September 2). <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/arts/design/02spea.html?pagewanted=all> 41 This claim is made according to several of Olafur Eliassons studio assistants, whom I met at his studio in East Berlin. The statements are supported by later remarks, notably by art historians and critics. When Klaus Biesenbach, a prominent art critic, witnessed a test run of the Green River project in Berlin, he told a reporter at the New York Times, It looked phenomenal, just stunningly beautiful. 42 This political and environmental justice oriented aspect to the project was not as evident when the artist repeated the intervention in the rivers of Berlin, Tokyo, and Stockholm. In the latter cities, the river banks often hosted some of the most lavish and wealthy neighborhoods, and in Tokyo, Eliasson timed his project to intersect with the falling of cherry blossom petals. The difference in reaction to the project among these various cities underscores Eliassons engagement not just with spectacle and display, but with urban ecologies. 43 Eliasson, Olafur. Personal Interview. 16 April 2009.

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structure of the city as a whole (Banhams Autopia) but also due to the industrial and marginalized social nature of the river (and artworks) location. Recalling Olafur Eliassons brief description of the Green River, I would like to draw attention to one resonant phrase: hyperreal.44 To understand his meaning, it is useful to consider the artworks geography. Los Angeles is somewhat peculiar as a metropolis since throughout its history, the place has been represented as somehow removed from reality a land of leisure, hypnotic sunsets and doing your own thing.45 Indeed, it took a great deal of technological manipulation for the basin to become livable for humans. The politics of water transport and storage an especially contentious topic in this city magnify the contradictions inherent in this spectacular urban project. Reyner Banham argues that L.A. thrives not on a freshwater body, but on the Pacific Ocean: its ideals are symbolized not in its canals but in the democratizing space of its beaches.46 Jean Baudrillard would take the argument further, saying that it is through chasing a specific image of itself that Los Angeles becomes ever more intertwined a virtual ideal of sun and sand and therefore more addicted to the consumerist tendencies that uphold this postcardimage.47 The phenomenal distortion or dramatization of the river, especially as it flows through L.A.s most destitute regions, is immediately stunning, threatening and political, as it is a gesture that confronts and penetrates the coherent dream of Los Angeles. In drawing a hyper-awareness to the L.A. river, Eliasson momentarily shakes up the hierarchy of relations in the physical and virtual city.
44

Olafur Eliassons use of the term hyper-real is related but not equivalent to Jean Baudrillards hyperreality. Hyperreal for Eliasson refers to a dramatic uncovering of history, and a breaking through what Jean Baudrillard would call the hyperreality of Los Angeles (its attempt to fulfill a certain idea of itself). In other words, for Eliasson, to create something that is hyperreal is a gesture that can break through the homogenizing images (Baudrillards hyperrealities) which societies create. 45 Banham 54. In his book on Los Angeles, Reyner Banham analyzes the art of Doing Your Thing as endemic to Los Angeles. 46 Banham 34. 47 Los Angeles is no longer real, but belongs to the order of simulation. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan, 1994.

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Nevertheless, as Eliasson proposed earlier, the Green River is just a catalyst: the artwork is less about the marginalized body of the river than about the dance of action and response in the urban landscape.48 In dropping a pocketful of green dye in the L.A. River, Eliasson makes the urban artery hyperreal not only by briefly unmasking its internal dynamics, but also by emphasizing the fluid relations among humans, nonhumans, ecological conditions and cultural visions at work in the urban landscape.49 This is not to say that Eliassons project is to juxtapose the reality of the river with the unreality of the city but rather to show that the space of Los Angeles is produced by human and nonhuman engagement with a very specific and culturally resonant vision of place.50 In a sense, what Eliasson has done is to highlight and politicize both ecology and dream. V. Art and Oikos The Green River is hyperreal since it dramatizes the agency of a river (the product of both an existing watershed and human infrastructure) in the context of a magnificent city still grappling with its imagined symbiosis with the sea. While Reyner Banham proved that a systems-based attempt at urban geography could reveal the variety of dispersed agencies at work in the space of Los Angeles, Eliassons Green River not only displaces agency to an entity seemingly masked by human technologies, but shows how both river and city are influenced by the agency of a cultural vision. Moreover, Eliassons framing of agency extends not only to

48

As Manuel Castells argues in his essay, The Space of Flows, the interplay of action and response in a given environment can also extend into virtual spaces. While Castells primarily studies flows of information and data in the internet age, his argument is important for this essay as it presumes that unseen or invisible forces (the virtual, the imaginary) are both products of societys modes of production as well as actors in physical localities (especially cities!). 49 Eliasson discusses his interest in the fluidity of the urban landscape, and of returning a sense of negotiability of space and time to the viewer in: Your Engagement Has Consequences Experiment Marathon: Serpentine Gallery. Rekjavik Art Museum, 2009. 50 It is relevant to note that scholars like Manuel Delanda, Manuel Castells and Gilles Deleuze have argued for the penetration of the virtual into everyday life and spaces. A cultural vision might be considered a virtual element of a specific landscape like Los Angeles.

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materials, conditions and actors, but also to colors and images: his is an agency of the ephemeral and the imaginary. The work of Reyner Banham and Olafur Eliasson is cosmopolitical in nature, scope and design. Banhams Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies is more map than list, more tool than manual, more phenomenology than history: it is truly a vehicle for understanding the city in all its organic and synthetic dimensions. In Banhams work the ecology of Los Angeles extends, as Richard Rorty would say, all the way down to language itself, and to the performance of reader and/with book.5152 Furthermore, if Banhams writing is cosmopolitical to the level of language and experience, Eliassons Green River is cosmopolitical all the way down to the minutiae of colors and ephemera, and all the way up to the resonance of visions and dreams. What both Banham and Eliasson have done so effectively is to assert and perform a definition of ecology that is physically and virtually democratic, encompassing not only humans and technologies, but also immaterial affects and sensations. Their works are expressions of an ecology that trades boundaries for connections, planes for axes, and structure for fabric. If Political Ecology is to practice an increasingly inclusive and dynamic study of networks and assemblages in the world if, as Bruno Latour argues, its status as a discipline requires a more liberal and moving conception of agency then perhaps it can derive instruction and inspiration from creative gestures which are actively stripping away the walls of the house to reveal its ubiquitous and generative systems. The works of Olafur Eliasson and Reyner Banham are not unique in their reevaluation of the urban geography of Los Angeles, and of the changing relationships between humans,

51

Allen, John. A Question of Language. Using Social Theory: Thinking Through Research. London: Sage Publications, 2003. 52 Here I am quoting John Allens citation of Richard Rortys remarks on language and the performance of questions.

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nonhumans and technologies. As our climate changes in unpredictable dimensions, collaborations between artists and scientists may prove useful in representing and understanding shifts in both human and nonhuman agency, in addition to creatively proposing future scenarios and solutions.53 As a discipline that is in essence interdisciplinary, Political Ecology and its academic proponents may be leaders in proving the relevance of dialogue between the arts and sciences, and of advancing creative studies as a more fundamental component of scientific and sociological investigation.

53

Gabrys, Jennifer and Yusoff, Kathryn (2011) Arts, Sciences and Climate Change: Practices and Politics at the Threshold, Science as Culture, First published on: 14 April 2011.

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Figures Cited

Figure 1: Olafur Eliasson, Double Sunset, 1999.

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Figure 2: Olafur Eliasson, The New York City Waterfalls, 2008.

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Figure 3: Olafur Eliasson, Erosion, 1997.

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Figure 4: Olafur Eliasson, Yellow Fog, 1998/ 2008.

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Figure 5: Olafur Eliasson, Green River, 2000.

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Figure 6: Olafur Eliasson, Green River, 1999.

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References

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