Lone Pine Salon de Fleurus

This may be pushing the envelope of "plaques," but here is a cool window display in Lone Pine, California, at the foot of the Eastern Sierra and close to the road that leads up to the trail to Mount Whitney (highest point in the Lower 48).

 

The display is the work of a collaborative of Los Angeles creative people working with local folks in the Owens Valley -- the crucial source of the water that allowed L.A. to grow to the behemoth it is. The Salon de Fleurus is a self-conscious recreation of Gertrude Stein's early 20th century Paris salon (see painting at upper left), and it's part of a much bigger artistic-historical project (Lauren Bon's Metabolic Studio, meant to preserve memories (and enrich the present) of the Owens Valley, Los Angeles, Southern California and the West). At least that's what some of it is about.

 

The Owens Valley slice of this is called the IOU Series, and the salon is described thus:

 

The IOU Salon is a beautiful, unexpected delight of a place, constructed in the image of Gertrude Stein's Paris salon that was contemporaneous with the 1913 opening of the LA Aqueduct. It is open to local people to host meetings and gatherings and to be used, like all the IOU initiatives, as a springboard to connected, creative, shared, and supported ways of life in the Owens Valley."

After all that, here's the text of the "plaque" in the image:

 

Salon de Fleurus: When systems (or, for that matter, eras) collapse, freak occurrences begin rising through the cracks. This mutant, "authoress," iconic and iconoclastic space/time warp has opened just east of Sierra, conflating past and future. It is and isn't art, and only the aesthetically intrepid should consider a visit (Walter Hopps, Artforum 1913)