Kimberli Meyer No Place Like Home

What does it mean when humans claim a delineated portion of the earth’s surface? For any given plot of soil, what is its real-estate story? At what point was it ‘owned’? How did that ‘ownership’ shift over time? Who are the players? What is at stake in the claims? These are some of the questions prompted by a close reading of Fiona Connor’s works, in particular, those that are structurally connected to real property. Color Census (2017) is a portrait of a Los Angeles street in the immediate vicinity of the gallery where Connor’s work is shown. Signs that change buildings (2014) reproduces the rental signs outside apartment buildings in the Los Angeles neighborhood where the artist lived at the time of making the work. Both works diagram a time and place from an articulated subject position. Each exposes coordinates that can reveal information that helps us approach our world critically.

A critical thinker must formulate a method of differentiating fiction from fact, analyze the power gradient, and account for the analyst. As we interpret Connor’s work, it is worth keeping a few questions in mind: What is our agency over real and intellectual property? Who are we the reader, the art-follower, the cultural consumer? For this essayist, “we” means me, other white people, gentrifiers, colonizers, capitalists, those who have more. It also happens to mean queer, gender playful, feminist, multi-generational. As a white interpreter of art, how can I use my privilege to undermine/take down/neuter the forces of white supremacy and patriarchy? And when I do, how do I know that I am successful?

There are three parts to any fiction: the storyteller, the narrative, and the audience. In Color Census, Connor embodies artist-as-storyteller, choosing to reveal narratives so naturalized that we have forgotten that they are ideologically constructed. The work is composed of a set of document-sized pages, each with one black-and-white photograph of a house, a grid of color swatches that represent the interior colors of the house, and a stamp with the location of the house, the name of the photographer, and the artist. The houses share a street called Warner Drive in the Carthay Circle neighborhood of Los Angeles. Warner Drive is the closest residential street to Connor’s Los Angeles gallery, 1301PE, where this work was shown. As each house on Warner holds its sovereign identity on the street, each page of Color Census is presented on the wall of the exhibition space. The top half of the page is a view of a house, a vista available to anyone on the street, and so in that sense public, captured. The bottom half of the page is a representation of a survey defined, conducted and documented by the artist.

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It is a private, assembled view. With both views brought together on a set of pages, Connor is creating a portrait of a street.

Her private performance of gathering the data is a social act and part of the story. Looking at the residues of this interaction, we are left to imagine each encounter between the artist and the inhabitants of the house. The interior colors have been revealed by virtue of the artist knocking on the door and asking to enter and gather data. That the artist is a Caucasian woman no doubt helped the process. As such, viewers are invited to ride the coattails of the artist’s privilege. What does the incursion reveal?

The title, Color Census, is already a clue. The pairing of these words conjures what? Color: aesthetics and/or race. Census: counting a population. It evokes many associations—among them, the rising apprehension that the upcoming 2020 U.S. Census can potentially be hijacked politically; the history of corralling people of color to certain areas as a form of disenfranchisement; and fears over immigration law enforcement and deportation. The title seems to beg for a reading that accounts for race and systemic power.

Following the artist’s lead, let’s have a closer look at the patch of earth she has defined. Before the Europeans arrived, the land in what is now called the Los Angeles area had been human-inhabited for an estimated 12,000 years, most recently (and still) by the Tongva people. The basin supported fifty major villages, hosted a diverse and significant population of animals, fish, birds, and plants, and its tar pits provided material for sealing boats used for fishing and transportation. Over the centuries, the Indigenous inhabitants calibrated the management of their environment in order to maximize yields for hunting and gathering.1

This way of life came to an end after the Spanish arrived in the eighteenth century. The Spanish turned what had been food-bearing grasslands into pasture for herds of cattle, parceling up patches of land and disconnecting them from one another and from the larger local ecosystem. Rivers, streams and wetlands were altered to control water flow and make irrigation systems for agriculture. The Spanish were beginning to transform into Southern California real estate the wilderness that the Tongva had tended for generations.

European contact was catastrophic for Indigenous Americans. Members of the native population were steered either into the missions, where they were converted to Catholicism and subjected to colonial education, or to the ranchos, where they worked as laborers, all while their lands were coopted for colonial use. Massacres were routine. Between 1846 and 1873, the native people lost eighty percent of their population at the hands of the State of California mandate, which directly supported the massive violence aimed at the annihilation of the native people.2

This history would not have been possible without an accompanying story. Connor has cited her interest in fiction, and real estate has been one of the great arenas for fiction. Stories about violence in the name of controlling territory fill history as well as songbooks. Whoever owns real estate wields power, whoever does not is subjugated. The claiming of land is accompanied by a morality story concluding that the reigning occupiers deserve it. Cultivated righteousness removes any lingering sense of guilt over the brutality of conquest. Once the targeted space is secured, the violence is pushed under the surface of public narrative and left to corrode inside the body politic of the newly transferred land. This subverted violence is exerted

1 Benjanmin Madley, ‘Chapter 1,’ An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).

2 Madley, ‘Introduction,’ An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873.

Fiona Connor Color Census, 6211 Warner Drive, Los Angeles, 2016–2017 digital print on photo paper, painted color samples 750 x 565mm

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physically, materially, and socio-psychologically on the subjugated, and socio-psychologically on the ruling culture.

What does a real-estate narrative look like? It looks like Carthay Circle. The houses in Color Census are all on Warner Drive, named after John J. Warner, who came to California as a trapper in the 1830s. He served as a U.S. consul in Mexico and, when the border changed, as a California state senator. He was the owner of Warner Springs near Agua Caliente, a site which later became the subject of a major 1901 Supreme Court case in which the treaty rights of the local Cupeño were denied by the U.S. Government and they were expelled from their ancestral land (Warner himself was considered a pro-Indian activist while in the senate).

Carthay Circle is considered a historic district in Los Angeles. It was founded in 1922 by J. Harvey McCarthy, a wealthy, politically connected man who had a fascination with the conquest of California and wanted to be a pioneer himself. His vision was to build the “ideal upper middle class residential area of Los Angeles.” 3 He hired architectural firm Cook and Hall to design it, inspired by his view of California’s early heritage. Stylistically the houses are mainly Spanish Colonial Revival, Tudor Revival, American Colonial Revival, and French Norman. Styled from notions of old-world architecture, the single-family houses uphold patriarchy and white power by establishing intentional colonial markers. They are examples of design as heritage-making, if heritage is the story told by the dominant group. A story can be a form of violence, stage-managed into fiction and popularly distributed.

Spanish Colonial Revival is popular in Carthay Circle. It’s a style that celebrates the aesthetics of a powerful ruler, and in Los Angeles shows up as California Mission Revival. This is appropriate, as missions did a lot of groundwork in the land grab and were key to the colonization of the basin. Plus, the Mediterranean geography and climate of Spain is similar to that of California. Tile roofs and terraces, stucco walls, arched windows, year-round blooming gardens, hail from an environmental type. It’s an easy shift to make for the orchestration of indoor and outdoor space. Familiarity reassures the colonialist.

When Carthay Circle was subdivided in the 1920s, deeds were issued for 60 years on the condition that no buildings would have flat roofs, property was owned by Caucasians only, clotheslines had a three-foot setback, and things had to be kept tidy. All new structures had to be submitted to the Homeowners’ Association for review. The inclusion of a race requirement in the deeds was not uncommon at that time, and these conditions were intensified by underfinancing from Savings and Loans. For example, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) was born in 1933 under Franklin Rooselvelt’s New Deal. Its purpose was to refinance home mortgages that were in default or at risk of foreclosure due to the 1929 crash and the collapse of the housing industry. This made it possible for working people to stay in their houses. In 1935, the HOLC conducted its City Survey Program, in which it gathered data from cities nationwide, and compiled the findings into a color-coded rating system that ran from desirable to hazardous. Green was most sought after, then blue, yellow was getting into undesirable territory, and red was hazardous. The term redlining comes from this codification. Neighborhoods were valued higher if they had wealthier, whiter people, and low if they had people of color, working class, and/or activist communists. Bankers checked the maps in making loan decisions.

Fiona Connor Color Census, 6212 Warner Drive, Los Angeles, 2016–2017 digital print on photo paper, painted color samples 750 x 565mm

3 Hadley Meares, ‘Politics, and Punches: Dan the Miner, Carthay Circle, and Dirty Dealings,’ KCET, May 3, 2013.

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The practice had vast repercussions: people of color were literally unable to buy into the only viable strategy for working-class wealth accumulation. Along the way, their neighborhoods were written off and neglected.4

Is Carthay Circle what white supremacy looks like? In Connor’s Color Census, we can see that California Mission Revival is heavily represented, embodied in the house at 6221 Warner with tiled roofs, balcony, light-colored stucco, and cylindrical stair tower. Also in attendance is Tudor Revival style, exemplified by the house at 6212 Warner. This house’s exaggerated roof peaks, arched and pointy fenestration, and whimsical meandering walk are quaintly cartoonish, torn from the pages of a story book, almost Disneyland-ish, safe for the children. The house at 6227 Warner presents an East Coast Colonial Style, a reliable image for projecting a narrative of well-behaved entitlement. All of the houses perform the trick of assuming a naturalized dominance.

The documents presented in Color Census are inconclusive in what they communicate. There is so much to know, and so little revealed. What we do discover is mostly what we could find out by driving or walking down Warner Drive, if we bothered to pay attention. What we don’t know is vast, and only slightly diminished by the presented color scheme. In order to discern what those color swatches can tell us, we have to ask ourselves what is it that we want to know, or are supposed to want to know. A certain assessment of taste can be attempted—one house may have very few and neutral colors, from which we assume the inhabitants prefer a calm and understated environment, or at least a background that recedes to let the furnishings take the spotlight. We can decide whether or not we think the exterior style matches the interior colors. We can marvel that overall, all along the street, the palette is pretty consistent, evoking the kind of community design covenants that normally regulate exterior choices. Such uniformity implies that conformity has been internalized and integrated. We are tempted to make meaning where there may be none: 6130 Warner has only two colors, and a stump of a palm tree, so one visually connects the absence of the tree with the dearth of colors. Number 6201 Warner seems quite dashing compared to its neighbors, with its use of bold red in addition to the earth tones; one wonders what function or inhabitant insisted upon red. But ultimately we are left with only a little more information than we would have had we just taken a stroll down the street. The work prompts us to realize that we know less than we think we do. The more you look at the documents that make up Color Census, the more you think Connor is pushing us to see that we don’t see.

Signs that change buildings is a set of photographs of rental signs in front of apartment buildings, and a set of sculptures that are full-scale copies of those signs. The territory in which the signs are located is in the neighborhood adjacent to that of Warner Drive, and the district where Connor was living at the time of making and showing the work. The area is called Miracle Mile, founded in the 1920s with the goal of becoming a high-end commercial district to rival that of downtown Los Angeles and an upper-middle-class residential area to go with it. It was the brainchild of real estate developer A. W. Ross. Since the area was covered with active oil pumps, bean fields, and an airport, and was inaccessible via the electric rail line that then connected some Los Angeles neighborhoods, most investors rejected Ross’s plan as pure folly. Such resistance bolstered his sense of being a visionary, and eventually gave him a marketing angle, which gave rise to

4 Ryan Reft, ‘Segregation in the City of Angels: A 1939 Map of Housing Inequality in L.A.,’ KCET, November 14, 2017.

5 Nathan Masters, ‘How the Miracle Mile Got Its Name: A Brief History of L.A.’s Unlikely Retail District,’ KCET, April 11, 2012.

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the name Miracle Mile. He achieved his goals; large department stores and retailers of the time, including Desmond’s, Silverwood’s, Coulter’s and the May Company, set up shop on Wilshire Boulevard, all with grand parking lots directly behind them. It was an early version of Los Angeles as a city built around the automobile.5

When these signs are replicated in the gallery, the effect is vaguely uncanny. Connor thrusts an identity mode shift upon the signs, moving them from bland sales devices for apartments, to sculptural copies of said devices. The look-alike sign objects are no longer functional, they are pulled out with their roots exposed. Though they are the same size as their counterparts in the real world, their scale changes with the shift of the ground line. It points to perception and the construction of the notion of horizon line: what is big and small, over or under a line, is relative. In refashioning the original signs, Connor has recast snippets of information gleaned from the outside world into art.

Up for scrutiny, the artist gives us the opportunity to read these communications visually and semiotically. In Signs that change buildings, the leasing signs are markers of the trans-activity of retail real estate, existing for the sole purpose of dealing in private dwelling space. The signs represent the very tip of the historical and systemic iceberg of conquest and capitalism. The aesthetics of it all—the buildings, the landscaping along the sidewalk, the layout of the signs—is banal, transactional. The graphic communication of the signs is as dull as a Microsoft Word template, and the apartments they are hawking were never designed to be good. The sign for Wilshire Museum Towers (page 89) is better presented than the one for 601 Cloverdale, reminding us that fonts matter. It is more tasteful, possibly professionally designed. Someone in the leasing office perhaps understood that design could be heritage-making, which is profitable.

Isolated as part of the artwork, the signs provide language prompts that can serve as an inventory of what is operational here in real estate. Taken apart by Connor’s artistic act, the words help remind us of the power gradients in play here and now. Let’s interpret the language as it appears in some of the signs on view, starting with ‘601 Miracle Mile’ (pages 28, 85):

601 Los Angeles city street address.

Miracle Mile Apartment Group The representative of the landowners of addresses in the neighborhood known as Miracle Mile. The identity Miracle Mile remains a current selling point in the market.

11 Historic Buildings We believe in our noble and just occupation of this land, and have the historical narrative to back it up.

Spacious Art Deco Studios We identify as artistic and modern and popular, and so do you.

1 & 2 Bedrooms Families

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Modern Conveniences We are burning down the planet but gosh, it’s convenient, feels good, so we can’t stop, we can’t even slow down. Sorry not sorry.

Laundry Facilities Who’s doing the washing up? As a general question.

Controlled Entry Controlled by what? And how? To what extent? To whose benefit? And to whose detriment?

Professionally Managed and Maintained Who is doing the work? Who is getting compensated?

Leasing Office Landowners’ retail representative. Because of the way multi-family-dwelling property ownership works, you may never know who actually owns the land, which will not stop the owner from collecting your rent.

601 S. Cloverdale Ave Suite 100 Los Angeles address.

Open 7 days a week Workers are always here for you.

(323) 931-6640 Heed the call, make the call.

Moving on to ‘318 Brighton Villas’ (pages 28, 90):

318 Very ugly Word template-looking design.

Brighton Villas Both an aspirational and nostalgic nod to the motherland, in Brighton, England.

Fitness & Leisure Apartments We know that Angelenos care about their bodies. A lot.

Living Modern Do you like Dwell magazine? You are so chic.

Studio One Two Bedrooms People and pets.

Fireplaces Warm and cozy times at home. Domestic pleasure can be purchased and/or stolen.

Source material, Signs that change buildings, 2014. Photographs: Andrew Gohlich

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Roof Top Pool You live in paradise. You may not be rich but you can take selfies that make you look like you are and post them on social media.

Gym You are fit, or at least you aspire to be fit.

Central Air The planet is warm, you are cool, the two facts are not unrelated.

930-2213 Just call.

Things are not made invisible because they’re not there: we do not see things because we’re distracted by another story. Fictions are a vital currency in the pursuit of power. Narrative plays a major role in conquest. These fictions are not always acknowledged, but always visible if we stop and look. Connor’s work helps us do that. From the vantage point of art, it seems urgent to look at the ethics and the aesthetics in play in visual and constructible space. It seems crucial to ask how an earnest art worker is to reconcile the complex wonderfulness of art we see, and the toxic wave that carries it. It is an aesthetic question as much as an ethical one.

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