DIFFERENT KINDS of WATER POURING This book was published by the Roy and Edna Disney / CalArts Theater (REDCAT) on the occasion of INTO a SWIMMING POOL the exhibition Different Kinds of Waters Pouring into a Swimming Pool, Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation, curated by Ruth Estévez and on view from September 21 through November 24, 2013 at REDCAT. Texts: Andrés Jaque Editor: Ruth Estévez Translation: Sarah Demeuse Book Design: Jessica Fleischmann / still room Cover Image: Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation Andrés Jaque/ Water Illustrations: Florian Brozek Proofreading: Sohrab Mohebbi and Ruth Estévez Office for Political Innovation Printed and bound in the United States by Maskell Graphics REDCAT 631 West 2nd Street Los Angeles, California 90012 ISBN: 9780982539040 Copyright ©2013 by the California Institute of the Arts, 24700 McBean Parkway, Valencia, California 91355. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be produced in any matter without permission. INDEX Prologue 7 PART I I. Urbanisms of the Common 12 II. Small Laboratories of Desire 17 III. Jacuzzi Riots in Pasadena 24 IV. The Mental Life of Objects 32 V. The Politics of the Bancal (Parcel) 38 VI. Four Kids in a Tree House 45 VII. Pan Am at the End of the Garden 50 VIII. Suddenly we are here immersed in a beach community 56 PART II I. The Interior and the Polemic: Re-Arranging the Tele-Urbanism of Some Moderns 67 Biography 90 P ROLOGUE Different Kind of Water Pouring into a Swimming Pool is the book that accompanies the exhibition of the same name that opened on September 20, 2013 in REDCAT. This project by architect Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation problematizes the importance of domestic space and architecture in the construction of the collective. The architect chooses as case studies models that come from California’s garden-city, usually a symbol of disconnection and a recurring metaphor for the height of indi- viduality and comfort. This publication consists of two parts, first, a compilation of stories that tell the daily life of certain families in California, based on interviews conducted by Andrés Jaque during his many visits to LA. These stories were recorded and are mixed with articles, pictures and histories from other decades to illustrate the everyday architecture of these backyard gardens. The selection of stories is intentionally random and doesn’t respond to any individual preference for a particular case, but rather to the synergy that surrounds them. Far from providing a sociological study, there is an almost literary interest at play in the description of the situations, the shapes of the objects, the atmosphere generated in the spaces and small-scale conversations. These stories occur simultaneously or separated by time and distance, rescuing common problems and situations. The second part contains a text written and developed by the architect based on various conferences he gave from 2005 to 2013, summarizing his reflections on architecture. In this essay, Jaque forms an open hypothesis in which he compares several examples, disconnected in time, with the aim of understanding how the architecture derived from the experiments 7 of modernity has become embedded in the processes of social construction. to help shape their private gardens into social spaces, the painting shows a To do this, the architect investigates certain historical architectural prec- series of simple pipes pouring water into a swimming pool that can’t be edents from their empirical heritage, beyond intentions or preliminary seen. Although the material quality of water is elusive, its representation statements, recognizing the forms of citizenship and political interaction reaches a quasi-architectural dimension, without losing its ephemeral and that once characterized them. dynamic aspect. As such, each waterfall becomes an exclusive portrait of a The relationship between the two parts of this book is defined by the common situation. This might read as a metaphor for the everyday stories small details that occur in the interior spaces, the attitudes of the characters, that the great narratives of urbanism have left out, but these are certainly and similar ways of solving problems. What other relationship could there places where certain forms of citizenship and interaction, essential to be between a textile worker in a small town, a prime example of gartens- architectural processes occur. tadt in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century, and a retired, fully contemporary Uruguayan who plants seeds in his garden under the hot Ruth Estévez California sun? For Andrés Jaque, it is in these interior spaces in which decisions are made, where the heterogeneity that underlies the garden city is casually discussed, where changes are decided, and the conflicts and negotiations of domestic space are established. These are almost invisible architectures, hidden between palapas and high hedges, conceived from the rhythms of the human body and its daily choreography. Thus, in many of the images that illustrate this publication, the body appears as a key figure that creates a radical contrast. On the one hand, idealized, motionless bodies that have always dictated to us how to live and have defined our living space, as seen in fashion magazines. In this case, it would seem that many modern buildings have been created as effigies of these desired bodies. In contrast to this stasis, Jaque takes stories in which space is defined by the everyday, com- monplace need for movement. This is a dynamic architecture, one that is in constant tension, one that prioritizes its performative quality to engage daily transformations and conflicts. The performative quality to which Jaque refers, both in the exhibition and in this book, is represented symbolically by water—one of the main actors in the Californian backyard gardens. It is not arbitrary that this exhibition take its name from David Hockney’s drawing, “Different Kinds of Waters Pouring into a Swimming Pool, Santa Monica,” 1965, made during his first years in the city. Fascinated by the way people in Los Angeles used water 8 9 PART 1 I. URBANISMS of the COMMON The grand narratives of urbanism leave little space for everyday histories. This happens in the case of LA. The rise of the suburbs, highways, neigh- borhood segregation, conflicts between North and South about water supply, the doubling between the everyday world and the world of film and TV fictions, the chase of celebrities, the dislocated industries, migratory movements between Latin America and the US, or the evolution of a real estate market in parallel to the invention of new financial frameworks: all of these are phenomena that emerge and are experienced in an interscalar way—as simultaneously happening at different scales. They are at once transnational and territorial and, not less so, they are also everyday and domestic phenomena. Each relevant process takes place in these spaces in which interaction is experienced from up close. Common interactions such as receiving a magazine in the mail or making puzzles in the laundry room—common actions that are usually unacknowledged in the history of a metropolis, and, in this particular case, of LA. In actual fact, the collec- tive is received and constructed in these situations. Archives preserve ‘big’ episodes such as WWII, but not the daily flight of warplanes over the Pasadena suburbs or the subculture idealizing aeronautic technology to which it gave rise. They also preserve the history of the streetplan of Malibu, but they forget how the gardens of the houses that are constructed along the beach substituted an immediate sense of neighborhood for a fiction of Pan-Pacific harmony. How should one understand LA’s urbanism? It is an urbanism that constantly needs new retellings. Harold Garfinkel, Reyner Banham, 12 13 Roman Polanski, David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, David Lynch, Mike Davis, These forms of the political, made with picture albums, wall-to-wall Kim Gordon, Raymond Pettibon, Thurston Moore, Paul Graham, Sofia carpeting, interior decoration, mortgages and agreements explain the Coppola, The Raveonettes: LA always needs another approach. Perhaps everyday urbanism of LA. This work aims to include the presence of such there is a way to speak about the metropolis without speaking about it, by urbanisms in the archives. bringing out a series of ordinary stories, without a direct connection between them. In a way, this relates to Boris Groys’s reading of Duchamp’s readymades—precisely because they are everyday objects and facts which rarely achieve value, a small part of them have the power to repre- sent an entire level of production of daily reality, from a new and surpris- ing perspective.1 The histories that are compiled here nevertheless explain often unad- dressed ‘issues’. How, for instance, does desire work at the intersection of fictions and lived experience? Or in what way is power activated as part of a fabric of domesticities? Each one is an urbanism, but an urbanism that can only be explained as a performance of the everyday. What interests me in this book are these performances, in which different entities (houses, people, landscapes, webs, cultures, desires, technologies, institu- tions or sensibilities) enable frames of association and dispute. Orson Welles once complained about how many honorable people during WWII became informants to save their own lives or that of family or friends, and that, during McCarthyism, in Hollywood, people did the same to save their pools. The private pools of LA have been seen throughout history as artifacts of accelerated consumption, opposed to the political. Welles was right in part, but there is much more to it. There are ‘issues’ that are never addressed that cross through pools and jacuzzis, puzzles and fundraising parties, souvenirs from Easter Island and tin toys. There are also other spaces for the political, where the apparent banality of certain objects and spaces is reconstructed in their social reception as frames of control, subversion, protest, submission, dispute, hegemony, and emancipation.