Fallen Fruit of Silver Lake

We began this project by mapping our neighborhood, Silver Lake, going street by street to identify untapped public resources and cataloging their location. We set out to only mark sites that involved no trespassing. Right away we began to speculate on the ethics involved, both on the part of residential growers and local harvesters.

Free food is available at every time of the year on the streets of Los Angeles. According to the law, if a fruit tree grows on or over public property, the fruit is no longer the sole property of the owner. Fruit trees in particular are highly decorative, and often demand no greater care than any other landscape ornamental. Los Angeles is particularly rich in this respect: bananas, peaches, avocados, lemons, oranges, limes, kumquats, loquats, apples, plums, passion fruit, walnuts, pomegranates and guavas, just to name a few, grow year round in every neighborhood in the city. These fruits ripen at different seasons, so free food is available year round in Los Angeles

Some communities have plantings of decorative fruit trees, such as sour oranges, which look charming but have little use. Public plantings almost never incorporate edible fruit trees, with one exception being the guava trees that shade parts of the Rose Bowl parking lot. Echo Park is known for the quantities of walnut trees at its northern end. Many parks and wild spaces have prickly pear cactus plantings, which yield both young cactus pads for nopales and prickly pear fruit. Accidental fruit trees arise from stray seedlings, an echo of Johnny Appleseed's mission to populate the American frontier with apples, native to Eurasia. One of the most common street trees in California is the carob tree, source of a nutritious flour that can be used as a cocoa substitute, or the pods can be chewed whole.

Often a resident is reluctant to plant fruit trees because of the litter, fallen fruit that has to be disposed of; likewise, locals are often reluctant to pick food within their grasp because they perceive it to be private property. The slow, "natural" processes of growth and fruition dramatize the shadowy nature of private property. Who does the sun belong to, and rainwater? Why is this lemon in our public space? Is this my banana?

It is no small irony that most Americans eat less than the minimum recommended amounts of fruit and vegetables, even though they are all but free for the taking. Supermarket produce is quite expensive if you count it by caloric content, but the cost of processed food is ridiculous once you factor in the nutritional debit it incurs. Public fruit is more efficient to grow than farmed fruit because it eliminates the cost of transport. Since it is not a mono-crop, as in an orchard of a single variety of apple, there are far less pests and less chemicals required. A further irony is that most of the public fruit in Los Angles is organic, blessed by neglect. Is it safe to eat? Absolutely. Should you worry about car exhaust fumes? No. Those molecules are too large to penetrate the fruit and any smut that lands on the fruit can be washed off.

We call upon the city and urban planning groups to begin plantings that yield edible goods to be shared by the city's citizens. How can these resources be developed to the benefit of all parties? What ethical or contractual obligations are incurred? It has been observed among early hunter-gatherer societies that when people "have more of something than they immediately need, they should carry out their moral obligation to share it out."

All property owners with suitable sites should be obliged to plant edible trees, or else be taxed to provide food for the poor. Most European cities have communal gardens, which often provide up to half the food of poor families. We need city fruit parks that open their fields to anyone who is hungry. To discourage profiteering, individuals could be limited to taking only as much fruit as they can carry in their hands. This way everyone could give according to their capacities and receive according to their needs.

The utopian promise of California always pictured orange trees with snow-capped mountains in the distance. The new California should have oranges planted between office buildings and bananas in parking lots. Silver Lake is full of the ghosts of old Hollywood: James Dean, Rock Hudson, Judy Garland, Norma Talmadge and Buster Keaton lived here. Their ashes and discards filter through the soil to this day. Dead illusions feed the carnival of fruit that lines our streets.

Over time, we hope to involve more people, especially local activists best equipped to map their own neighborhoods; the life of such a map is quite long, since fruit trees live for decades. While the Internet would seem to be the likeliest venue for such a project, a printed form is essential; the most disenfranchised Angelenos have no access to a computer. Maps must be given to them in person.

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all the way to the edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not pick your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger. Leviticus 19:9-10

Matias Viegener is a Los Angeles based writer who teaches at CalArts in Critical Studies and the MFA Writing Program. His criticism appears in the anthologies Queer Looks: Lesbian & Gay Experimental Media (Routledge), and Camp Grounds: Gay & Lesbian Style (U Mass). He has fiction in the anthologies Men on Men 3, Sundays at Seven, Dear World, Abject, Suspect Thoughts, and Discontents, edited by Dennis Cooper. He has shown work or performed at ArtCenter's Windtunnel gallery, Mess Hall in Chicago, The Silver Lake Film Festival, The Whitney Museum, The Kitchen, and The Drawing Center in New York, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Highways, Sushi, Beyond Baroque, New Langton Arts in San Francisco, the L.A. Museum of Contemporary Art and the LaJolla Museum of Contemporary Art. He is the editor and co-translator of Georges Batailles' The Trial of Gilles de Rais. He has most recently published fiction and criticism in Bomb, Artforum, Art Issues, Artweek, Art in America, Afterimage, Cargo, Critical Quarterly, High Performance, Framework, Oversight, American Book Review, Jacaranda Review, Fiction International, Paragraph, Semiotext(e) and X-tra.

Dave Burns is an artist who currently teaches at CalArts and lives and works in Los Angeles. He is a graduate of California Institute of the Arts 1993 and has received an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of California, Irvine in 2005. His recent video work has shown around the world in festivals and galleries including; InsideOUT, ADD-TV, Pressplay, Mix Festival and NEWFEST. Recent art projects have been shown at Track 16 Bergamot Station, OTIS, ArtCenter, Machine Gallery, WORKS gallery, REDCAT, MESSHALL in chicago, and at Artists Space in New York. Publications about his recent works can be seen in FAB magazine, SCOOP!, The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, SUPERSONIC, Rhizome.org, PLOT magazine and Metropolis Magazine.

Austin Young, photographer and videographer, lives and works in Los Angeles. He studied painting at Parson's School of Design in Paris before launching a career in photography. His work can be seen regularly in Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine, and has appeared in Surface, Flaunt, Vogue, Spin, Rolling Stone, Q, and many others. His portraits include photos of Leigh Bowery, Lypsinka, Siouxsie Sioux, Nina Hagen, Diamanda Galas, Debbie Harry, Jimmy Scott, Margaret Cho, Sandra Bernhard, Ziyi Zhang, Skinny Puppy, Mark Almond, Ann Magnuson, Amy Poehler, etc. His recent video work has shown around the world in festivals and galleries including; InsideOUT, Mix Festival , Framline, and Reeling. "The Stroke" won best short of 2003 on ADD-TV. The feature length documentary, "Queen of The Boogie," about torch singer, Hadda Brooks, will be shown at festivals next year. Recently he has been collaborating with artists Dave Burns and Matias Viegner on video and gallery projects. Reviews about his works are published in Tachen's 1000 Favorite Websites, The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Elegy, and Premonition.