‘Envisioning Eden’ Takes Refreshing Look at L.A. History

There’s a persistent and widespread impression that Los Angeles is, at bottom, just the world’s largest movie set--in other words--an artwork. Most people think this notion grew from the city’s reputation as the cradle of the motion picture industry, the 20th century’s most original expressive form.

As if to remind the public that Lotusland’s roots in illusion go back even further than the flicks, the Huntington presents an engaging small exhibition called “Envisioning Eden: Water and the Selling of Los Angeles, 1880-1930.”

Housed in the institution’s hallowed library, the display is not technically an art show. However, in a region where fiction and reality are so closely blended, it plays just like a conceptual installation.

The story is told by the kinds of nostalgia-provoking images beloved of assemblage artists like Alexis Smith--orange-crate labels, vintage photographs and faded fliers promoting real estate schemes. One of these promises to give away a free house worth between $600 and $4,000 for every 11 lots sold. In many ways the exhibition is a rumination on the power of advertising art to cajole people into building a very convincing impersonation of actuality.

Like the artist Hans Haacke, “Envisioning Eden” deals with facts. They concern how this vast megalopolis came rather miraculously into being. The place was geographically unfit for anything better than rudimentary human habitation. There just wasn’t enough water. Even before the turn of the century, the Los Angeles River was so dry that most of the time, “Coyotes had to carry canteens to cross it,” as the locals used to say.

All the same, civic boosters--prominently including this newspaper--trumpeted the little trickle as comparable to great city rivers like the Seine, Thames and Tiber, promoting an outlandish swath of semiarid desert as the “American Eden.” This ballyhoo was so effective that by the turn of the century a land boom increased the population by 500%, dramatizing the paucity of water to drink, bathe, irrigate and--eventually--generate electricity.

Undaunted by the facts, entrenched movers and shakers cast about to find a river they could beg, borrow or more-or-less steal. The city’s water engineer William Mulholland settled on the Owens River to the north. By 1913 a 233-mile-long aqueduct was finished. After a brief decade it proved inadequate. L.A.’s seemingly unquenchable thirst fastened on the Colorado River.

Voters were saturated with political propaganda to float bonds to extend the aqueduct to the Mono Basin. One flier appropriated James Montgomery Flagg’s famous Uncle Sam recruitment poster pointing at the viewer. This time the motto reads, “It’s Your Move--I Am Building Boulder Dam to Save the Water You Need--You Must Build Your Own.” In 1931 Angelenos voted for some $260 million in bonds to keep their sprinklers turning. Today the Colorado remains our principal source of water.

Nobody denies that in real terms Los Angeles’ appropriated wetness involved a great deal of nasty politics, self-serving intrigue, ecological damage and human suffering. Even as polite a historian as Kevin Starr sees tragedy in the formation of this artificial paradise. Roman Polanski’s fictional version in his film “Chinatown” suggests something as dark as evil.

The exhibition concentrates on the sunnier mythic reality that grew from all this. It’s impossible not to sympathize with the simple aspiration for a good, ordinary life that springs from Carlton E. Watkins’ 1880 photograph “Pasadena From Brooks Hill.” It shows a cozy, unpretentious little wooden house sitting among low hills and cultivated fields without another dwelling in sight. Other pictures show a baroque fountain in Exposition Park, big ponds in Westlake and Echo Park.

Intimations of overdevelopment are still visible in a panoramic 1929 photo of the opening of a Monterey Park tract. There are streets and a central mall but no houses. Ranks of cars lining the empty avenues suggest plenty of prospective buyers. The apogee of establishment elegance is suggested by a Wallace Neff design for a Doheny mansion in Beverly Hills.

Among the most charming and pithy illustrations are those emphasizing grandiloquent fantasies of fecund abundance. A 1926 issue of a magazine called “Growth” has a cover photo of a pretty girl festooned with avocados as big as pineapples. Colorful citrus crate labels show genies and goddesses straddling hill, valley and geyser bearing fruits the size of planets.

The exhibition was organized by guest curator Claudia Bohn-Spector and Jennifer A. Watts, the Huntington’s curator of photography. They put no ideological spin on their work, but there’s a refreshing aura of curatorial exploration of turf that makes a fruitful blend of popular art and local history.

* The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino: to Aug. 31, closed Mondays, (818) 405-2141.