BETWEEN A ROCK & HARD PLASTIC: AESTHETICS OF THE ANTHROPOCENE with Sylvère Lotringer, Heather Davis, and Etienne Turpin

Thursday 3 April, 2014, 7:30PM

In 2008, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power dumped 400,000 black plastic balls into the the Ivanhoe Resevoir to block out the sunlight, which was said to be causing the formation of carcinogenic bromate in the water. Although bromide is naturally present in groundwater and chlorine is used to kill bacteria, sunlight created the conditions for potentially lethal consequences for the 600,000 customers in downtown and South Los Angeles served by the resevoir. With the addition of 3 million more black balls in the following months, the LADWP battled against the sunlight as it undertook a new, massive earthwork-a 55 million gallon underground reinforced concrete tank, stretching over 7 acres, and hidden by a landscaped park-as a buried replacement resevoir to eliminate bothe Silver Lake and the Ivanhoe Resevoir, which, as “open air” water storage sites, were said to be obsolete. Covering the resevoir with millions of polyethylene balls as a stopgap measure to prevent the production of carcinogenic compounds while hastening to reduce whole ecosystems to mechanical, subterranean tanks suggests a few of the unintentional aesthetic maneuvers revealed in the Anthropocene. How does our understanding of human “intention” change as we enter the era of Anthropocene? What does the shift demand from contemporary artistic and curatorial practices? What conceits does the this transformation demand from our aesthetic regimes? Art in the Anthropocene editors Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin will discuss the aesthetic implications of the Anthropocene with Sylvère Lotringer by considering the relative mineralogy and plasticity of recent installation, video, and literary works.