Flow Control

For a century, the waters of the Los Angeles River have only flowed to two places: the intake infrastructure of LA’s Department of Water and Power and the Pacific Ocean—until this past fall, when artist Lauren Bon’s Bending the River officially claimed the first individual water rights on the fifty-one-mile waterway. Bon’s twenty-year quest to use river water to irrigate Los Angeles State Historic Park, where her 2005 Not a Cornfield sculpture led the reclamation of the former rail yard, grew from a simple waterwheel concept into a major civil engineering project: a 300-foot clay pipe requiring seventy-five permits across two dozen agencies. (The process, largely invisible, is documented in an interpretive center at the Lincoln Heights outpost of Bon’s Metabolic Studio.) The paperwork is itself an essential part of the piece, as Bending the River serves as both a working aqueduct and as scathing criticism of the bureaucratic forces that have disconnected Angelenos from their own water supply. During the tunneling, Hurricane Hilary barreled north through the watershed, the first tropical storm to make landfall in LA since the Army Corps of Engineers encased the river in its channel in 1938. The rare August downpour required the temporary evacuation of the entire worksite and also provided an instructive real-world endorsement of the endeavor. “Wouldn’t it be great, instead of all that wastewater going out to sea,” said Bon, standing on the freshly scoured concrete while giving a tour in September, “if we could find a way to keep the good parts of the flood control channel, like the way it keeps us safe from massive flood events, but at the same time would allow water to be brought back into the drainage basin of Los Angeles?” As the region wrestles with the shortcomings of a flawed LA River master plan that doubles down on concrete chutes, Bon’s work forces Angelenos to look upstream: What collective bending must we all engage in to keep more of LA’s water local, saturating our own parched neighborhoods?