How does Las Vegas prevent catastrophic floods? The answer is in this exhibition
In 1917, Marcel Duchamp turned a urinal on its back, signed it “R Mutt” and presented it as a work of art. The public was outraged. Even today, people believe that the Frenchman was making fun of artistic pretensions and that his work mocked old-fashioned ideas about tastefulness.
That’s true. But I also think that Duchamp was impressed with America’s plumbing. It’s just as interesting to think of his sculpture as an invitation to look at the ways cities in the United States channel water — pumping, flushing and dumping it, through pipes, aqueducts and rivers — to make modern life clean and safe.
That’s what “Desert Ramparts: Defending Las Vegas From the Flood” does. At the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Culver City, the eye-opening exhibition takes visitors on a trip through the desert around Las Vegas, where the Regional Flood Control District of Clark County has, during the last 30 years, overseen the construction of about 650 miles of concrete, rock and gravel channels and more than 100 detention basins, each the size of a small lake.