Public Fruit Theater, Los Angeles
By Fallen Fruit (David Burns, Matias Viegener, Austin Young) in collaboration with La Loma Development (Marco Barrantes, Michelle Matthews).
November 7th 2010 June 30th 2011, daylight hours.
Corner of S. Fairfax Avenue and W. 6th Street, Los Angeles CA 90036
Come visit our Public Fruit Theater at LACMA! Sit in the theater and watch the fruit tree perform for you.
Sit long enough and you’ll see a whole cycle of growth, or create your own performance.
Fruit theater can be many things.
The Public Fruit Theater is at LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and is a collaboration between Fallen Fruit and La Loma Development. A circular amphitheater sunk into a lawn, you’ll find it near the corner of Fairfax and 6th street. It’s constructed of urbanite, reclaimed concrete sidewalks – an echo of the city around us. Much of Los Angeles was a citrus orchard before it became a city, concrete displacing trees with people in place of orange blossoms.
At the center of the amphitheater you’ll find a single orange tree, in memorial to the endless groves erased by time. We think of this as a different kind of theatrical site, one where the slow time of the natural growth cycle meets the fast time of urban life. Come sit with us, watch the tree, and watch ourselves as we gather around a symbol of vitality.
The Public Fruit Theater is a garden which features an amphitheater in the round constructed of reclaimed concrete sidewalks curving around a single citrus tree. Located on the corner of Fairfax Ave and W 6th St on the campus of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the piece comments upon the neighborhood’s history as a one-time site of extensive citrus groves. It is also a meditation on today’s prevalence of concrete and the lack of publically accessible or shared fruit trees. It is a nostalgic monument to the orange trees that covered much of Southern California’s landscape for decades and were an integral part of our economy, agricultural history, and identity.
As the last part of Fallen Fruit’s year-long residency at LACMA, the installation is a collaboration between the artists (David Burns, Matias Viegener, Austin Young) and La Loma Development (Marco Barrantes, Michelle Matthews). Bringing into focus our precarious and often domineering relationship to nature, the dry-stacked broken concrete is a reminder that the streets and sidewalks of our neighborhoods cover what were once orchards. La Loma Development often designs with broken concrete. Recycled concrete is perhaps the most local, sustainable, renewable resource at our disposal, says Marco Barrantes, though instead it often collects in landfill or piles up at recycling facilities. Instead, La Loma used different forms of recycled concrete for the retaining wall, the base, and for the drainage gravel.
Public Fruit Theater- looking toward 6th and Fairfax:
Rather than looking at fruit trees as simply a source of food, Public Fruit Theater highlights the tree as a durational performance. Viewers complete the story through observation, witnessing the tree’s leafing out, blooming, and ripening of its fruit. Fruit trees that exist in public space present us with a question of ownership. Whose fruit is this, and who is the public? People usually think of fruit and trees as static, but to the artists they are a kind of durational performance, one that unfolds over time according to the logic of the seasons: growth, dormancy, fruiting and ripening. The collaborators wanted to give the public a way to relate to this cycle over time.
photos of ‘Public Fruit Theater’ by Fallen Fruit, 2011
EATLACMA.org
LACMA.org
lalomadevelopment.com