Re-arranging chairs in the L.A. river
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The Los Angeles River has made cameo appearances in movies such as ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day,’ ‘L.A. Story,’ ‘Grease,’ ‘Transformers 2’ and ‘Point Break.’ Last weekend, the river took a lead role for a change, in a public art project created by the Outpost for Contemporary Art.
On Saturday, the collective mounted a project titled ‘This Here and That There,’ in which artist Vlatka Horvat continuously rearranged a series of 50 chairs in the river over the course of eight hours. The performance took place near Silver Lake, below the Fletcher Bridge in Elysian Valley.
According to the Outpost for Contemporary Art, each chair arrangement ‘implies a set of possible relations between their imagined occupants, evoking a range of possibilities related to human interaction: dialogue, encounter, communication and conflict.’
Horvat, who was born in Croatia and is based in New York, realized a similar project in Germany in 2008 at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.
The L.A. version of the project comes at a time of renewed national attention on the mostly concrete L.A. River. The Environment Protection Agency recently declared that the river is ‘traditionally navigable,’ which may strike local residents as laughable but in fact will facilitate the river’s restoration since it now falls under the Clean Water Act.
In case you missed Saturday’s event, you can view more photos after the jump...
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-- David Ng
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