• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

JANUARY 2017 Art Los Angeles Reader ACID INTERIORS | Nº 3 | JANUARY 2017 Pool The new fragrance by Sean Raspet Available for a limited time at reader.la/pool ART LOS ANGELES READER Art Los Angeles Reader ACID INTERIORS | Nº 3 | JANUARY 2017 Lost Enchantment From the Editor Interior designer Tony Duquette was known for bedazzling style. A short-lived Malibu ranch would have been his crown jewel. Kate Wolf Every single scene in Rainer Werner 1970s black artists’ interventions into public Fassbinder’s newly rediscovered World on a space, to see what rituals and reorientations Wire features two central colors: burnt or- were required for making the city a place ange and emerald blue. Made in 1973, that they could inhabit. And Travis Diehl digs into Infrastructure Sketches era’s cybernetic systems thinking (everything the history of the New York Times’ coverage In the late 1970s, Barbara McCullough and Senga Nengudi exited Ed Ruscha's is related) found an exquisite analogue in the of LA art, diagnosing a host of antipathic, freeway and claimed land under the off-ramps. conspiracy theory of simulation, which mo- boostered biases. Aria Dean tivates the film’s science fiction plot (we’re The theme acid interiors is inspired by stuck in a virtual reality, we just have no idea). William Leavitt’s theatrical obsession with The colors of the interiors seem to prove the mid-century design, his installations of ge- protagonist’s suspicion: in his apartment, his neric sets that deal with the drama of stuff. Pool office, the restaurant, his secretary’s jacket, I am thrilled to present a work Leavitt made A new fragrance made with synthetic compounds. The perfume is available for notes of orange and blue appear again and specifically for this publication—an artist a limited time at reader.la/pool. again, as if to betray the uniformity of pro- project that both begins and ends in news- Artist project by Sean Raspet gramming. When (spoiling apologies) he print. For about three years, Leavitt has been thinks he’s escaped the simulation by the drawing real estate advertisements pulled feature’s end, the color consistency leaves from the Los Angeles Times. This is the first me unconvinced: the blue carpet, his savior’s place he’ll show this work. Transmogrifying Hell Heats Up orange skirt. Is this just the auteur’s aes- the details of those few inch squares with his How the New York Times covers LA art — and why Angelenos should care. thetic (film-as-simulation) or does it leave us quirky, sprinting hand, Leavitt catalogs Los Travis Diehl haunted by recursion—how many orange and Angeles homes as a vocabulary of forms— blue matryoshkas before we’d ever see the an a-frame, a dingbat, a sloping driveway, hues of the only, truly, final outside? a palm tree—elements whose repetition and Some of us woke up on November 9th variation play out across these pages like Domestic Trips wondering if it was the real world we had wo- found visual jazz. What is real estate adver- In a wide-ranging conversation, Samara Golden discusses the influences and ken up in. Some of us woke up on November tizing but an attempt to transform place into a processes behind her psychedelic, room-sized installations. 9th more sure that the programs our world set, a springboard from life to lifestyle? Interview by Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal runs on (capitalism, white supremacy, patri- Smell’s connection to memory is now a archy) were working just as they had been Proustian cliché, but Sean Raspet uses scent designed. The artists, writers, and thinkers to evoke future experiences rather than past collected in this issue were animated by the ones. In the scent Raspet designed as an art- A Few Houses in Los Angeles theme of “acid interiors”—how spaces live, ist project for this publication, the molecules For the last three years, William Leavitt has redrawn the real estate how they change us, what they say about our and compounds he composed (and composed advertisements in the Los Angeles Times. lives. In centering techniques and practices with) are not found in nature. Here, synthetic Artist project by William Leavitt that make spaces unreal, or too real, that use is not as an ersatz repetition of what does fiction, imagination, and ritual to show us exist, but a demonstration of what can exist what reality really looks like, acid interiors is through chemical synthesis. Raspet positions now more relevant than ever. the artist as product designer, or manufac- Last Rites What do I mean by acid interiors? turer of experience. Beyond the first hint of The Scottish Rite Masonic Temple is an impressive, isolated place, built to Perhaps I mean that interior architecture sweetness in the scent lingers a technique like celebrate power and solidarity. This year, it reopens as a private art museum. comes to shape perception, as I discuss with sci-fi—the familiar, made strange. Catherine Wagley Samara Golden, whose psychedelic illusions According to Freud, the German word help us look sideways at the home. Maybe I heimlich, meaning home-like, familiar, mean that ideas have a way of forcing them- known, and comfortable, “develops towards selves into physical spaces, as Jonathan an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with Father Figure Griffin shows us in male artists’ use—and its opposite, unheimlich,” foreign, strange, A white, middle-aged artist cohort plays out anxieties of modern American abuse—of little girls’ bedrooms as forms. unfamiliar, unknown, and unsettling. The manhood through the bedrooms of little girls. Maybe it’s just the depths that emerge when word contains within it its own haunting op- Jonathan Griffin you look at a place with the x-ray vision of posite. What better place to study the freaky time, as Catherine Wagley tracks the evolu- parallax of interior space than Los Angeles, tion of the Scottish Rite Masonic Temple, a city best known for playing itself in the soon to house the Marciano collection of con- movies? What better time to question the Centering the Margins temporary art, as Kate Wolf revives interior disorientation of staying put than under the Michelle Dizon explains how conversation, mentorship and research are designer Tony Duquette’s legacy through the impending presidency of Donald Trump? integral to her nomadic institute. prismatic lens of his destroyed Malibu Ranch, Maybe we should take acid interiors to mean Interview by Suzy Halajian or as Courtney Stephens and Micah Silver ecstatic interiors, for the root of ecstasy is take us to three Los Angeles control rooms, “ex-stasis,” that is, standing outside. This to show how these windowless sanctums both issue—and I hope this publication, generally— power and exercise power over the world be- asks what happens when we stand in our own Behind the Curtain yond their walls. home, beside ourselves. Underground and out of sight, Los Angeles' control rooms house hidden Of course, interiors are only constituted nodes of power. by their outsides. Suzy Halajian and Michelle —Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal Courtney Stephens and Micah Silver Dizon discuss how Dizon’s free art school centers LA’s marginalized communities, and gives us insight into whose voices we need to lift up and how. Aria Dean doubles back on PUBLISHING DIRECTOR SUBSCRIPTIONS Tim Fleming Please send SASE to: Fair Grounds Associates, LLC EDITOR 1154 N. Western Ave. Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal Los Angeles, CA 90029 MANAGING EDITOR For advertising inquiries call +1 323 851 7530 or visit us online at reader.la. Sam Bloch THANK YOU PRODUCTION MANAGER Alex Couri, Marc LeBlanc, and Shira Podolsky of Fair Grounds Associates; Gina Alysia Alex Clyne, Frances Cocksedge, Michelle Dizon, Preston Dyches, Thomas Erben, Samara Golden, Kelly Graml, Isabelle Hogenkamp, Honor Fraser Gallery, Bruce Jarring, COPY EDITOR Shaun Johnson, Alexis Kerin, Zach Korol-Gold, Alile Sharon Larkin, Clark Rocket Caleshu Mizono, Austin James Smith, Christin Markmann, Irwin Miller, Xiomara Rios, Missy Whitaker, and Hutton Wilkinson. DESIGN David Knowles The Reader is available online at reader.la and at select locations in Los Angeles and beyond. WEB Silas Dilworth FRONT COVER: Installation view of Samara Golden: A Trap in Soft Division, March 11, 2016–May 29, 2016 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, courtesy of the museum, Art Los Angeles Reader is published by Fair Grounds Associates, LLC. photo by Charlie Villyard JANUARY 2017 ART LOS ANGELES READER Lost Enchantment Interior designer Tony Duquette was known for bedazzling style. A short-lived Malibu ranch would have been his crown jewel. by Kate Wolf As one of the mid-century’s preeminent first American ever to receive a show at self-expressive spheres meant to delight ABOVE_ Garden entrance interior decorators, Tony Duquette was prac- the Louvre. In all his projects, Duquette ap- and entertain. Of course, Duquette’s great- view of Sortilegium, tically obligated to make his own homes proached design as a radical refashioning est influence was probably Hollywood. Malibu, 1990, photo by extraordinary: what could have been better of materials from across the hierarchy of Having designed sets for films such as Tim Street-Porter self-promotion? But Duquette’s personal production. But nowhere reflected this idea Vincente Minnelli’s Kismet (1955), he built residences also presented an opportunity as much as his Malibu ranch. Christened Sortilegium on the magic-making, illu- for embellishment unhindered by his clients’ “Sortilegium” (which Duquette translated sion-rich techniques of film and theater. He tastes or prosaic concerns. While restraint liberally as Latin for “land of enchantment”) erected facades, mixed the ersatz with the could never be considered Duquette’s trade- and set in the shadow of Boney Mountain in authentic (indeed, he included many ele- mark, here was where he could fully indulge Ventura County, the property was consid- ments of his own past sets in the property), in the fantastical maximalism, textural del- ered by Duquette to be among his greatest the mass produced (skateboards, garden HAD IT SURVIVED, uge, and theatrical interiors that would make achievements.

Load more

  28

Copy Link