Mel Chin garden design is all yours
The city of Los Angeles’ first public art biennial “Current: LA Water,” organized by the Department of Cultural Affairs, kicked off last week with art installations all over the city, from San Pedro to downtown to Canoga Park. It’s impossible to visit it all in a day or even a week. One good place to start: Mel Chin’s “The TIE that BINDS: the MIRROR of the FUTURE” at the Bowtie Parcel, a spit of land along the L.A. River in Glassell Park.
Here, Chin has planted a native plants garden, whose design he has made public, to encourage others in L.A. to plant this work of land art on their properties too.
At the Bowtie Parcel, overgrown with weeds and invasive species, Chin’s garden blends right into the landscape. In fact, you’ll have to keep your eyes carefully peeled to find it, obscured by other scrub.
Still in its infancy, the garden is no breathtaking work of land art. But as wry activism, it is quite charming — even subversive.
Chin has explored the idea of the garden as art before. In the 1990s, as part of a residency at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, he conceived of a garden that could leech lead contaminants out of the soil.
The more intriguing aspect of Chin’s piece at the Bowtie Parcel is that he is encouraging others to plant the same garden, in the same configuration, in their own backyard spaces (socalled mirror sites). Already, a number of area home owners have done so — and the L.A. County Museum of Art will install a mirror site on its grounds this week.
The biennial has as its theme the question of water. And Chin’s gesture nods to the ongoing drought and the dryer landscapes all Angelenos will likely eventually be forced to embrace out of necessity. (Hence the word “future” in the title of the piece.)
As far as art goes, Chin’s individual garden may seem small, even inconsequential. But if he manages to persuade a bunch of grass-addicted Angelenos to rip out their lawns in a collective gesture of high art, then its effect will be multiplied. It may also be long-lasting — more so, perhaps, than anything he could have carved in the cement.
Mel Chin’s “The TIE that BINDS: the Mirror of the Future” is on view through Aug. 14 at the Bowtie Parcel, 2780 W. Casitas Ave., Glassell Park, Los Angeles. Info: currentla.org and the-tie-that-binds.org.