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. “The house in town and the rakes, satellites dishes, rags) with the hand- SORTILEGIUM MIGHT his style famous. other houses were just houses," he said. made (often by him), and relished in extreme A dropout of the Chouinard Art Institute, "But this was in a sense a kind of artistic ornamentation. His penchant for exoticism HAVE BEEN DUQUETTE’S Duquette had worked designing the floors of fulfillment.”(1) resulted in his own version of Shangri-La, WATTS TOWERS, A PLACE department stores and freelancing for other Sortilegium was situated on about 150 a loose amalgam of Orientalist influence, notable decorators like William Haines and acres and consisted of 21 individual struc- devoid of authentic counterpart. He even AS ALL ENCOMPASSING James Pendleton before being discovered by tures, each given a name and theme, and went so far as to imagine a lost civilization AS NOAH PURIFOY’S the grande dame of interiors, Elsie De Wolfe, each built around Duquette’s collection of named “Chu-chin-chow-mash” that had at during World War II. In 1949, when he was far-flung materials purchased or salvaged one time inhabited the ranch, and in partner- OUTDOOR MUSEUM: 35, he had achieved enough success to build from across the world. Drawing from his ship with the Fashion Institute of Design and AN ADMIXTURE OF a first house for himself. At Dawnridge, the travels, he named structures after countries Merchandising, invited graduate students to ASSEMBLAGE, OPEN Hollywood Regency-inspired, 900-square like “Ireland” (it was made from 19th century come and dig for the culture’s “artifacts.” foot cube set on a ditch in Beverly Hills, Dublin shop fronts), “China,” and “Ghum,” Nodding to the readymade and antici- SPACE, AND FAR- Duquette riffed deliriously on a style his for the town in India. He also conjured pating some of the binding characteristics RANGING INSPIRATION. client, the heiress Doris Duke, called “Chow Los Angeles with “The Bullocks Wilshire of postmodernism, Sortilegium was to be Fun.” Visitors to Dawnridge were greeted House,” appropriately replete with a collec- Duquette’s most pronounced and sustained by an explosion of ornate, eccentric chi- tion of art deco, and the “Star Barn,” which example of assemblage, the one in which noiserie, from outdoor pavilions constructed stored a series of decommissioned props he showed the seams of his work and grew from cast off corporate office materials and from MGM.(2) Other Southern California bolder in his gestures toward sculpture and scraps of Thai temples to lamps assembled relics integrated into the property included architecture. After almost thirty years, in from metal fruit pickers covered in Siamese the elevator cage of the infamous Hollywood the late 1980s, the Ventura County Planning silk. Duquette, who always favored effect Hotel, reworked as a outdoor metal pavilion; Commission finally began to object to him over provenance, hung a Venetian-glass stained glass rescued from Victorian homes building habitable structures without per- chandelier he designed in the drawing room from the by-then demolished Bunker Hill mits; he argued that he was making a lasting alongside golden snowflake screens he con- neighborhood; windows from Greta Garbo document of his art. However, the document structed, in part, from hubcaps. His wife, and actor John Gilbert’s love nest, installed didn’t last. On October 26, 1993, six months an artist née Elizabeth Jonstone (but known in a guesthouse called “Horntoad” that was before Duquette’s 80th birthday, Sortilegium as Beegle, for half bee, half eagle), painted once part of a moving van; and a score of burned to the ground in the Green Meadow murals of 18th century aristocratic life in deer antlers taken from Hearst Castle before fire, which torched 44,000 acres in all. A 1_ Mack Reed, “The the entranceway. A verdant mesh of exotic it was given over to the state, and made into group of pro-surfers came to Duquette’s aid Southland Firestorm: One plants and trees grew outside. In 1956, while sculptures or follies. to try to help put out the blaze, but little of Year Later: Sculptor’s Dawnridge was being rented out to social- The Duquettes began constructing the ranch was saved. A true aesthete to the Phoenix Struggles to ites and celebrities like Marlon Brando and Sortilegium in 1957. Little could have end, Duquette was able to find beauty even Rebirth,” Los Angeles Zsa Zsa Gabor, Duquette and Elizabeth con- been more in opposition to the prevail- in the destruction of what he had hoped Times, 26 Oct. 1994: A18. verted an old silent film studio on Robertson ing design of the decade, modeled by Arts would be a monument to him as an artist. "It Boulevard into a teeming showroom, work- & Architecture magazine’s Case Study was extraordinary,” he said. “The top of Mt. 2_ Tony Duquette, place, and living space. Under a ceiling Program, which promoted houses for effi- Boney was all flame, the colors of black and Inc., “Tony Duquette’s covered with hundreds of painted egg car- ciency, cutting-edge technology, economy, mustard and white. The sky was the most Sortilegium”
5 ART LOS ANGELES READER Nº 3
LEFT_ Tony Duquette, blaze, and Duquette lost almost thirty Museum: an admixture of assemblage, open throw in a bit Disneyland as well). Before n.d., photo by kitschy yet commandingly intricate large- space, and far-ranging inspiration. More the fire, he planned to leave it to the state, Tim Street-Porter scale fiberglass and steel phoenix sculptures effete than either Simon Rodia or Purifoy, so anyone could visit and experience a bit he had begun making in response to the Duquette was also campier, effectively of both. ■ RIGHT_ Sortilegium work he lost in the synagogue. For someone queerer, and connected to a whole other tra- interior, 1990, photo who was so adept at recycling, after the fire dition of decorative art making. KATE WOLF is a writer in Los Angeles. by Tim Street-Porter he found himself unable to rebuild from the In some descriptions, Sortilegium can ruin. almost sound like a modern-day Hameau But he did what any other fabulous de la Reine, the farmhouse Marie Antoinette Hollywood decorator and fiercely deter- commissioned to play at peasant life. mined artist would do. Following a month Duquette kept a dancing “pet cow named working and recuperating in Bali and Beaumont,”(4) and invited society over 4_ Wendy Goodman and Indonesia, he started a jewelry line for for a party called “Spa Ma Ma,” “a kind of Hutton Wilkinson, Tony Gucci. Eventually he also rebuilt the phoe- love-in for rich hippies” as Wendy Goodman Duquette (New York: nix sculptures he had lost and was given a and Hutton Wilkinson, Duquette’s former Abrams, 2007) 257. show at the Hammer Museum in 1995. Had business partner, write.(5) Duquette ac- it survived, Sortilegium might have been knowledged the property’s contradicting 5_ Goodman and Duquette’s Watts Towers, a place as all en- aspirations, referring to it a cross between Wilkinson 316. compassing as Noah Purifoy’s Outdoor Tobacco Road and San Simeon (one might
Infrastructure Sketches
In the late 1970s, Barbara McCullough and Senga Nengudi exited Ed Ruscha's freeway and claimed land under the off-ramps. by Aria Dean
1_ Reyner Banham, The freeway slices up Los Angeles. Its seem- urbanism. Banham wrote in Four Ecologies, neutrality sounds absurd. As any Angeleno Los Angeles: The ingly inert stretches of concrete, which his celebratory 1971 treatise on Los Angeles, knows—or probably anyone who has spent Architecture of Four maintain a facade of self-determination and that “the freeway system in its totality is now more than twenty-four hours here can Ecologies (Berkeley: freedom of movement for those riding across a single comprehensible place, a coherent gather—the freeway is hardly a slick, speedy University of California it, selectively connect some and isolate others state of mind, a complete way of life.” network rushing us to and fro at our leisure. Press, 2009) 23. below. These infrastructural boundaries cre- Banham’s vision of a freeway-centric Rather, the city on the whole is gridlocked ate borders, constitute insides (and outsiders). Los Angeles enables a thoroughly liberated, and unpredictable. It looks and feels more 2_ Claudia Springer, These borders have a tendency to change at modern subject who can map his own course, like the dusty nightmare of the 1993 movie “Black Women their designers’ discretion—as the apparatus beholden to no one. This Los Angeles looks Falling Down, where a regular guy, played by Filmmakers,” Jump Cut 29 of government colludes with developers. As something like the Los Angeles that we find in Michael Douglas, finally snaps one day on his (Feb. 1984): 34-37. time passes, they seem to crumble, becoming Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip morning commute. The city denies him the more and more permeable. Money can always (1966). It is no surprise that Banham links privilege of movement he expects. He aban- 3_ Jacqueline Stewart, find its way through concrete. The freeway up with Ruscha on his tour of the city in the dons his car in traffic on the 110 in favor of “Water Ritual #1: becomes a pressure point—or assumes the role book-to-BBC documentary Reyner Banham traversing the city on foot. An Urban Rite of that it was always meant to perform. It is no Loves Los Angeles. Sunset Boulevard is a sur- Los Angeles looks quite different once Purification,” UCLA neutral body, no gift of freedom to all. The face street, surely not a freeway, but Ruscha’s you hit the off-ramp. The freeway criss- Film & Television Los Angeles freeway pulses with the pressure treatment of it figures into the same effort as crosses through neighborhoods, sectioning Archive
6 JANUARY 2017 ART LOS ANGELES READER
ABOVE_ Senga Nengudi, Ceremony For Freeway Fets, 1978, C-print, courtesy Dominique Levy Gallery, New York, London, Geneva, and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, © Senga Nengudi
BELOW_ Production still from Barbara McCullough, Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification, 1979, black and white, 35mm
an influx of neo-yuppies who demand more on Pico Boulevard near the Los Angeles all of this, is some kind of pressure point, a and more of this rapid development to meet Convention Center, brought together Nengudi, place where tensions can boil over. The same their “needs.” artists Maren Hassinger and David Hammons, overpasses and swaths of land across LA used Leave the man-made island of Downtown alongside a band of musicians known as by the likes of McCullough and Nengudi now by freeway and one version of the city bleeds Studio Z. There is little documentation of the host whole makeshift neighborhoods of tents into another. Make the transition on foot, performance aside from a small collection of and temporary shelters set up by the homeless. and trek under the 110, the 5 or the 10, and photographs, but it is known that, at the site, Certainly, these have always existed, pop- the disjunction is even more apparent. Artist Nengudi and her collaborators performed an ping up as night falls due to city ordinances and filmmaker Barbara McCullough’s Water improvised dance and musical performance prohibiting such structures during daylight Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification in costumes designed by Nengudi. The per- hours. But in the last two years, the number (1979) approaches this dissonance. The video formance was centered around a series of of encampments has almost doubled.(7) The depicts a black woman (played by Yolanda sculptural works that adorned the outdoor city responds aggressively, regularly trashing Vidato) in a desolate landscape, placing a space—Nengudi’s signature nylon and mesh temporary shelters and seizing belongings. series of objects into a circle and performing forms were wrapped around freeway support Perhaps its anxiety is that what’s underneath some sort of ritualistic act, the final rite of columns, both costuming the urban landscape LA’s freeways will spill over onto the surface, which is her urinating on a pile of rubble. and tethering the body to its context. exposing the city for what it actually is. McCullough speaks of the work’s commit- Nengudi later spoke of these sculp- In physically considering the vertical, ment to the experiences of displaced people tures as “fetishes,” and said during the Nengudi and McCullough present a sort of the world over,(2) situating the construction performance that it was as if her body became subaltern narrative of Los Angeles, a history of the freeway within a legacy of destructive “possessed.”(5) Like McCullough, she was from below. In this version of the city, unlike colonialism. attempting to “renew an urban area through Ruscha’s antiseptic view from nowhere, the Though not immediately apparent when ritual movement.” Rather than engaging the body is always in the frame. Here, we are hy- one views the work, the video was shot on freeway—or its underbelly, really—in any per aware of the body in these spaces and its location in Watts, at the intersection of 118th sort of beautification effort, Nengudi and entwinement with them—McCullough urinates and Main, where the urban and rural seem McCullough insist on a different method of on the ground, purifying the land with her to overlap. The site had been designated for retrieval, a more conceptual reconfiguration own bodily waste, fertilizing it even. Nengudi freeway construction. The city razed homes of the use of space, one that begins with a wraps the freeway’s supports in biomorphic 6_ Rebecca Peabody, and businesses only to abandon the project. perspectival shift (and does not end with an sculptures. Rather than competing with the “African American Avant- (3) Claiming this space, McCullough’s work invocation of Africa). The shift makes the in- likes of Banham and Ruscha to catalog and Gardes, 1965–1990,” questions representations of the city—images frastructure of Los Angeles central to the city’s objectively document a different view of the Getty Research Journal 1 like Ruscha’s and Banham’s—asking who the story and its inhabitants’ experiences, ac- city — one seen from the margins— these artists (2009): 214. city is designed for, who it neglects, who it knowledging that for every surface there is an employ another toolkit entirely, one imbued outright rejects, and how those neglected or underside. Of course, to frame the city as dou- with magic and spirituality. Their work cen- 7_ According to reports rejected might come to re-inhabit or take up ble-sided is essentializing in some way. But in ters perspective, and their perspective is one by the Los Angeles space in new, even mystical ways. Reimagining their departure from practices like Banham’s that looks past the literal, joining mundane Homeless Services ritual within African diasporic spiritual and ar- and Ruscha’s, Nengudi and McCullough push and spiritual ritual to transform the city’s Authority. Christopher tistic practices, she explores the violence that beyond the modernist, horizontal narrative of infrastructure from just a conduit for individu- Hawthorne, “What those is required for the realization of the modern- Los Angeles and consider its verticality, liter- als, molding their movements through the city, homeless camps along ist, here neo-colonial, project and ultimately, ally and figuratively. to an active element in shaping a sense of (un) LA’s freeways mean for a suggests, through this “rite of purification,” In our time, the freeway’s ability to belonging. The freeway, touched by those on public space once above that “sites of urban blight can be activated as concretely structure the horizontal land- the topside and the underside, births a strange it all,” Los Angeles consecrated ground.”(4) scape of Los Angeles seems to have waned. symbiosis, crackling with the energy of the Times 26 Dec. 2015 Senga Nengudi, a friend and collaborator Those neighborhoods that were cordoned power and bodies that circulate along and
7 ART LOS ANGELES READER Nº 3
1_ Roberta Smith, “A Bit “Boyle Heights Gallery of Hollywood, Minus the Scene in Los Angeles Tinsel,” New York Times is Still Growing,” New 30 May 2011. York Times 30 Mar. 2016; Edward Wyatt, “Economic 2_ Roberta Smith, “Made Realities Press on in Space,” New York Artists’ Outdoor Eden,” Times 1 Aug. 2013. New York Times 11 Aug. 2008; Solomon Moore, 3_ Los Angeles “Some Respite, if Little incorporated in 1850, Cheer, for Skid Row the New York Times in Homeless,” New York 1851. Times 31 Oct. 2007.
4_ Conrad de Aenlle, 20_ “Ms. Maccarone Hell Heats Up “Los Angeles Art Scene was tipped off to her Comes Into Its Own,” building by Laura Owens, New York Times 11 Mar. an artist involved How the New York Times covers LA art — and why Angelenos 2016; Jeff Gordinier, with 356 Mission, should care. by Travis Diehl “Los Angeles: City of a neighboring joint Breakfast,” New York venture with the New Times 23 Feb. 2016. York gallerist Gavin Brown and Wendy Yao, 5_ Bruce Hainley, whose book and design “Artquake,” New York shop is just inside the Times Magazine 1 Oct. entrance. That art space 2006. By virtue of its was an early outpost in sheer competence, this Boyle Heights, a part piece transcends the of the district that genre. still has an anything- goes feel. “It still “Basically, this show seems to have blinked,” the center of the gallery world, and galler- 6_ In her 2016 has a dangerous quality writes Roberta Smith, senior art critic at the ies are the bedrock of any truly thriving exhibition “Ten — I kind of like that,’ New York Times “when it came to the risk art scene.”(9) In 1948, Los Angeles “art- Paintings” at the CCA Ms. Maccarone said. ‘I of showing New York something it didn’t ists exhibit locally but keep weather-eyes Wattis Institute in San like that we spent a already know.” The camera-shy show? on Fifty-seventh Street,” and the uptown Francisco, LA-based fortune on security.’” “Greater LA”—“a sprawling survey of recent money.(10) An unequivocal state-of-the- artist Laura Owens Melena Ryzik, “New art from Los Angeles arrayed in an immense, city address, appearing a year ahead of incorporated a list of Art Galleries Enjoy a unrepentantly raw SoHo loft.”(1) Los Angeles’s second Olympic Games in particularly laughable Los Angeles Advantage: But does Smith’s paper likewise blink ev- 1984, states that “New York City's position quotes from recent LA- Space,” New York Times ery time it gets an eyeful of Klieg light? as the capital of the art world seems, at the boosting scene pieces, 16 Sep. 2015. Smith notes in her 2013 review of an- moment, even more invincible today than including several from other LA coterie effort, “Made in Space,” it has been in the last 25 years.”(11) Again the New York Times. 21_ Activists have that, in Los Angeles, “studio space is cheaper and again, the Times rushes to reassure its directly protested and more plentiful” than in New York. (2) readers that what makes an art capital isn’t 7_ Bryce Nelson, “If galleries in Boyle Her take on the title’s joke nearly encapsu- art, but capital. In this regard, “Los Angeles This Is Hell, Why Is It Heights. In July 2016, lates the Times’s outlook. Yet for those of is still,” and will always be, “a far cry from So Popular?” New York one group demanded that us living in this always-second city, “Made New York.”(12) When Downtown LA gentri- Times 2 Mar. 1991. The the galleries “leave in Space” is also a coy rejoinder to boost- fies, it’s “much as New York’s SoHo has.”(13) article notes that the immediately.” The LA erish exhibitions like “Made in LA,” the “Like a nascent Chelsea, in New York,” one author is a professor Times and others have Hammer Museum’s biennial since 2012, writer notes of Culver City, “white-box art of journalism at the followed the story; the which hungrily claim artists fresh from the galleries are sandwiched between industrial University of Southern New York Times has not. grad schools that drew them here. There’s supply stores and auto-repair shops, includ- California. See Brittny Mejia and also lots of space, as in spacing out—as in ing one that only repairs classic Mustangs.” Steve Saldivar, “Boyle outer. But, like, totally whatever. Even as (14) When another reverses the formula, 8_ Smith, 2011. Heights activists blame Angelenos wince at beachy, baked clichés, it’s not meant as a compliment: “Big, the art galleries for enough of us throw them on like fun outfits whitewashed art galleries in low industrial 9_ Roberta Smith, gentrification,” Los for them to pass fact check. buildings, their garage-style doors giv- “Boldly Go: A Gallery Angeles Times 4 Aug. Thus the rhetorical symbiosis: New York ing onto broad, sunny streets that are dead Guide By the Art Critics 2016. is. Los Angeles will be. But it isn’t, yet. quiet except for the fit-for-life types in-line- of The New York Times” A survey of one and a half centuries(3) skating westward toward the water. Is this New York Times 3 Apr. 22_ Montgomery Schuyler, of NYT articles on LA art indicates that the a description of the latest art district in Los 2014. “Westward the Course of tics of recent coverage—such as, days apart in Angeles? In fact, it is West Chelsea.”(15) Empire: A Panorama of spring 2016, “Los Angeles Art Scene Comes These articles often come padded with 10_ Aline B. Louchheim, Our Country, in Eight Into Its Own” and “Los Angeles: City of quotes from former New Yorkers, confirming “Art in California: Daily Tableaux, as Seen Breakfast”(4)—follow reams of dedicated, the biases of current ones. Jori Finkel, eas- Patrons and Painters in by a Passenger on the wary, and sometimes lofty appraisals of our ily the best LA-based arts journalist on the Los Angeles,” New York Los Angeles Limited,” perpetual coming-of-age: Times roster, calls “Made in LA” “the West Times 29 Aug. 1948. New York Times 21 Jan. “Art in California,” 1948; “Art on the Coast answer to the Whitney Biennial.”(16) 1906. Los Angeles Front,” 1956; “Making Like Ann Philbin, now director of the Hammer 11_ Michael Brenson, Competition in LA,” 1965; “Los Angeles Museum, describes her town as “like New “City’s Position Secure 23_ Williams. Now the ‘In’ Art Scene,” 1971; “Art in a City York in the ’80s.”(17) “This could be our As Focus Of Art World,” of Angels,” 1979; “Artful LA,” 1986; “For West Village,” says Peter Frank, a local critic New York Times 28 Feb. 24_ Hainley. Art, Coastal Convergences,” 1989; “The and one-time writer for the Village Voice. 1983. Los Angeles Art World’s New Image,” 1992; (18) 25_ At press time, “Chinatown Reborn as a Bohemian Outpost,” Lost in this refrain is the question of 12_ Grace Glueck, De Aenlle’s Twitter 2001; “Artquake,” 2006;(5) “The Art’s Here. why gallery districts on both coasts tend to “Artful LA,” New York profile read, “Financial Where’s the Crowd?,” 2007; “Southern flare up and move on like the burning edge Times 23 Nov. 1986. columnist and feature California Stakes Its Claim as a World of a newspaper, leaving neighborhoods writer for The New Art Center,” 2011; “Art Scene Heats Up in transfigured. Few Times articles mention 13_ Suzanne Slesin, York Times Reuters and Downtown Los Angeles,” 2016.(6) gentrification in Los Angeles; fewer link the “Downtown Los Angeles: MarketWatch.com, among NY thrills to style LA as a golden-hour trend to art. The most damning, a review of The New Settlers,” New other organizations.” dreamland that never quite wakes up; LA Hauser Wirth & Schimmel’s inaugural show, York Times 12 Apr. 1984. gladly concedes to NY the status of the over- ends with a warning: “For some years now, 26_ De Aenlle. bearing and immutable reality it rejects. we’ve seen the same kind of growth in New 14_ Andrew Yang, “A As with any good rivalry, each sustains the York,” admits a Times critic, “where money New Art Scene in Los 27_ De Aenlle. other. Even complaining about the New York drains art of blood, and slow death by gen- Angeles,” New York Times Times has become an LA standard—as slight- trification is far advanced.”(19) Far more 3 Apr. 2005. 28_ Manohla Dargis, “In ing LA (and indeed, any city that’s not New plentiful are pieces that gloss LA art as the Studios’ Shadow, an York) must be for the aptly named New York merely a bonus of the abundant, magic-lit, 15_ David Colman, Avant-Garde Eye,” New Times. But who does this dynamic really and (relatively) affordable “space” available “Welcome to the New Los York Times 8 Nov. 2004. serve? Who are these articles for? And—for- on the city’s industrial fringes. New York Angeles: It’s on the get the scene—what about the art? dealer “Michele Maccarone, in a flowy black Hudson,” New York Times 29_ Cecelia Ager, The Times titles its review of Mike jumpsuit, was striding across the cement 15 Nov. 1998. “Antonioni Hero in Davis’s cynical LA history City of Quartz floor of her cavernous new gallery here last Hollywood,” New York with a haunting question: “If This Is Hell, week,” ledes a 2015 article. “‘There’s just, 16_ Jori Finkel,“Artists Times 5 Feb. 1967. Why Is It So Popular?”(7) Maybe LA is lucky like, this endless amount of really incredi- Named for Hammer that the paper sees fit to fly over its best writ- ble space,’ she said. . . . In true Los Angeles Museum’s Los Angeles 30_ Julia Chaplin, ers as often as it does, if only to reiterate the fashion, the broker drove prospective clients Biennial,” New York “Art Scene Heats Up in problem. From our coast, the question may around from the front door to the back, judg- Times 18 Feb. 2014. Downtown Los Angeles,” be just as hard to face. When top critics and ing it too big simply to walk through.”(20) New York Times 12 Feb. arts reporters cut their copy with little snubs, 17_ Alex Williams, “Los 2016. or when the Times’s Travel or Style sections HELLO TO ALL THAT Angeles and Its Booming run condescending trend reports, or when Creative Class Lures New 31_ Chaplin. all its contributors hold up LA’s art scene to Abstract districts redeveloped without Yorkers,” New York Times Manhattan hotspots and to Hollywood, why fallout,(21) a discourse as breezy as the 1 May 2005. 32_ Adam Nagourney, does it bug us so much? Why should LA art- hillsides, and hot new galleries teeming with “Lights! Cameras! (and ists care? artists (never mind the art): no wonder they’re 18_ Frances Anderton, Cheers) for a Rock all slouching West. “It was an old friend … “Out There: Chinatown Weighing 340 Tons,” New SELF-CENTERED TIMES who, happening to visit the coast last year, Reborn As a Bohemian York Times 10 Mar. 2012. fell an unresisting victim to its charms,” read Outpost,” New York Times It’s understandable that an interna- a 1906 special to the paper, “and now declares 3 Jun. 2001. 33_ “‘Culturally we’ve tional but New York-based newspaper of that he is not going back to New York ‘until he always been overshadowed record would consider its home city the one has to.’”(22) Fast forward a hundred years: 19_ Holland Cotter, by the film industry, to beat. The terms of the contest, however, “The wagon train mentality, it seems,” reads “Are All-Women Shows and now the art world is have shifted—from merit to market. In her the Style section, “is taking hold among the Good or Bad for Art?” at a weird parallel with “Greater LA” review, Smith ventures “that L train set: Go west!” New Yorkers “grumble New York Times 16 Mar. it,’ said Sterling Ruby, New York long ago accepted [Los Angeles] that their own city is becoming a sterile play- 2016, See also: Anderton one of Los Angeles’s as an equal in the production of art.”(8) But, land for the global-money set (Dubai with 2001; Randy Kennedy, most bankable artists, she qualifies in 2014, “New York remains blizzards, basically),” while “Los Angeles
8 JANUARY 2017 ART LOS ANGELES READER
Correction: February 21, 2016 Correction: February 1, 2016 An article last Sunday about the rise of art galleries in An earlier version of a picture caption with this post mis- downtown Los Angeles misstated the age of the painter stated the provenance of a rock sold at the Paramount Sojourner Truth Parsons. She is 31, not 27. Ranch art fair. It was reimagined by the artist Emily Mast, not sourced from Quartzsite, Ariz. by the artist Correction: May 10, 2015 Andrea Zittel. An article last Sunday about New Yorkers who move to Los Angeles described incompletely the Los Angeles Correction: August 3, 2013 living arrangement of a former New Yorker. Christina An art review on Friday about “Made in Space,” at the Turner shares her bungalow with a roommate; she does Venus Over Manhattan gallery and Gavin Brown’s not live alone. Enterprise in Manhattan, misstated the given name of one artist in the show and misspelled the given name Correction: July 18, 2013 of another. They are Josh Mannis, not John, and Laeh An earlier version of this post misstated the title of the Glenn, not Leah. The review also omitted a co-owner of artwork by Katie Grinnan. It is "FYI," not "TMI." Night Gallery in Los Angeles, where the show was first seen. Besides Davida Nemeroff, the gallery is run by Correction: October 14, 2011 Mieke Marple. Because of an editing error, an article on Thursday about the Pacific Standard Time art festival, at 130 mu- Correction: July 19, 2016 seums and galleries in Southern California, misstated at An earlier version of a map with this article misiden- one point the name of the Los Angeles museum where tified the location of the Farmers’ Market in Santa Jeffrey Deitch is the director. As the article correctly Monica. As the article correctly notes, the market is at noted elsewhere, it is the Museum of Contemporary Arizona and Second streets, not Main Street and Pico Art, not the “Los Angeles Modern.” (There is no mu- Boulevard. seum by that name.) Correction: February 10, 2008 Correction: June 7, 2011 A Style article on Jan. 27 about Emi Fontana, a Los An art review on Wednesday about “Greater LA,” at 483 Angeles curator and gallerist, misidentified the type- Broadway in Manhattan, misidentified the city where face used in collages by one of the artists, Barbara an organizer of the show, Eleanor Cayre, is based. It is Kruger, featured in Fontana’s new production. It was New York, not Los Angeles. Futura Bold Italic, not Helvetica. Correction: February 19, 2011 Correction: November 22, 1998 An earlier version of a map with this article misspelled A picture caption on Nov. 1 with an article about the part of the name of a street in Los Angeles. It is Cesar changing art scene in the Chelsea section of Manhattan Chavez Avenue, not Sezar. misidentified a gallery with an interior described as ''antiseptic and awkward.'' It is Leslie Tonkonow Artworks and Projects, not the Andrea Rosen Gallery.
is enjoying a renaissance.”(23) As early “Ferus-Pace,” where he’s curating a show with As early as 1927, a Times columnist ABOVE_ Recent corrections as 2006, “thanks to no major earthquake Dennis Hopper.(29) “A glittery film premiere chides a man dissatisfied with Los Angeles from the Arts and Style in more than a decade and brutalized New this was not,” reports Julia Chaplin, taking culture. “Instead of the busy, young, healthily sections of the New York Yorkers’ finding respite here,” LA stalwart stock of a video screening by New York art- growing town which has hardly had time to Times Bruce Hainley foresaw the doom of objec- ist Maggie Lee at 356 Mission Rd.(30) The think about the arts as yet,” says the NYT, “he tively cheap rent.(24) “booze-soaked openings” at nearby Night would have a city pervaded by an atmosphere Climate is a metaphor for ease. You’re Gallery, a former warehouse, “are like pop- of Greenwich Village ‘artiness.’” Never mind not likely to freeze to death in your giant LA ulist galas.”(31) And when LA bureau chief that California-style salons do exist. The Los studio. Nor, the thinking goes, is LA’s local Adam Nagourney covers the procession Angeles art scene’s biggest worry is that we art market likely to freeze out your abstract of Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass from might (or already do) subscribe to New York painting. A hapless 2016 feature by Conrad Riverside to LACMA, the piece bears the Times values. As that paper’s city gentrifies who has a four-acre de Aenlle not only combines unqualified headline: “Lights! Cameras! (and Cheers) for beyond thaw, one critic sends up a flare: studio complex in Vernon, bicoastal rivalry with voyeuristic clips of a Rock Weighing 340 Tons.”(32) “The news media dotes on the idea of Los Calif., an industrial blue-chip lifestyle; it also offers a uniquely Granted, LA artists and institutions seem Angeles and New York as cultural rivals,” city just south of the unsubtle clue as to its target audience: De to crave the role.(33) LACMA’s Art + Film writes Holland Cotter. “But Los Angeles can Arts District.” Chaplin. Aenlle is a financial columnist.(25) “For art Gala, “billed as the West Coast’s version of do much better, look much higher, by tak- to flourish in a city,” he begins, “it helps to the Costume Institute Ball at the Metropolitan ing New York as a cautionary example and 34_ Peter Haldeman, have well-off individuals and institutions Museum of Art,” has proved irresistible to paying close activist attention to itself.”(39) “In LA, Art + Film + with a desire to keep and exhibit it. Diverse, Times party hounds.(34) (“‘Gucci,’ said Sometimes a critical eye is the most needed Fashion,” New York Times lively, colorful neighborhoods also come in Michael Govan, the museum’s director, when correction. 30 Oct. 2012 handy, and if they have plenty of room for asked about his black tuxedo.”)(35) Randy So forget the Times. Past that codepen- . reasonably priced studio and gallery space, Kennedy describes a taping of General dent striving, we’d need to face the question 35_ Haldeman. See also so much the better.” His sources include a di- Hospital at MOCA PDC: “Jeffrey Deitch, a that rises in the East each morning, and Finkel, “Kanye West-Steve rector of Art Basel and the head art advisor at small, trim man in a double-breasted navy each booze-soaked Western evening sets McQueen Video to Have Citigroup, a bank.(26) suit with a little makeup dabbed on his cheeks unanswered: What goes on, exactly, in these American Premiere in Los “Los Angeles has not taken as firm a hold and forehead, stood encircled by television sweltering neighborhoods of ours? Without Angeles,” New York Times on [artist] Jordan Wolfson,” offers De Aenlle. cameras, preparing to play a character called the Times to get it nearly wrong, we’d need to 19 Jul. 2015. “‘Being from New York and also traveling, I ‘Jeffrey Deitch, director of MOCA’ — a role he have a look ourselves.■ don’t feel like LA has culturally arrived yet,’ had just taken on in real life...” Fair is fair: 36_ Randy Kennedy, said Mr. Wolfson, who is 35 and single.”(27) “The sprawling soap-at-the-museum opera- TRAVIS DIEHL lives in Los Angeles. He “Museum Role Fits a This article appeared in the international edi- tion was Mr. Deitch’s idea.”(36) subscribes to the New York Times. Former Art Dealer,” New tion, and (despite Wolfson’s and the author’s The Deitch tenure, it bears repeating, is York Times 30 Jun. 2010. hedging) is the latest to announce LA’s arrival what happens when art takes its cues from as a serious city. That an artist’s dating sta- Hollywood: museum directors emphasize the 37_ Chaplin. See Wendy tus made the cut insults the intelligence of director and forget the museum, artists be- Yao, “1000 Words: Maggie readers far and wide. Yet more notable is the come stars, and the whole production makes Lee,” Artforum 54, no. 8 implication that, while Los Angeles hasn’t dazed concessions to patrons and paparazzi. (April 2016): 211. “culturally arrived yet,” it will—and you’ll Chaplin thrills at 356 Mission’s barbed wire want to buy in before it does. and passing trucks; she seems less curious 38_ Steffie Nelson, “The about the content of Lee’s “art film.”(37) Distinct Californication SUN, SHADOW; LONG TAKE Yet for all these oversights, the Times none- of Paris Photo LA,” T theless registers our fears about what LA art Magazine 1 May 2015. At least De Aenlle describes Wolfson’s can be: a gentrifying force, an investment work—albeit, in the light-and-spacey terms of prospectus, and, worst of all, just another 39_ Cotter. To this the Southland’s two major exports, as “proj- entertaining product. end, a few hopeful ects combining elements of film production examples: LAist revels and aerospace technology.” Even though just PAPER MIRROR in cataloguing the New a tiny fraction of Angelenos work in film, York Times’ awkward West the Industry nonetheless provides an easy The three iterations of the Paris Photo Coast coverage; Carolina metaphor for our city’s ongoing aspiration. art fair’s LA franchise garnered mentions in Miranda of the Los “Hollywood casts a long shadow,” writes the no less than five articles in the Times and in Angeles Times demolishes Times, “and nowhere does that shadow seem T Magazine, the paper’s style supplement. De Aenlle’s fumbling darker, more enveloping and inescapable, It’s not hard to see why. “Dozens of exhibi- accounting on Genius, than in Los Angeles.”(28) tors have traditional booths inside some of the annotation website; The paper rarely argues otherwise. You Paramount’s biggest soundstages,” reads Even The Source, a blog won’t find much about Ferus Gallery, midcen- one report, “while others set up shop in the published by the Los tury’s most famous “LA Cool” art clubhouse, storefronts of the legendary ‘New York Street’ Angeles Metro, disputes a until it’s gone. Yet a 1967 celebrity profile backlot. . . . It is an art fair that feels like en- Times piece about the new of film star David Hemmings mentions tertainment,” says the New York Times.(38) Expo Line.
9 ART LOS ANGELES READER Nº 3
Domestic Trips
In a wide-ranging conversation, Samara Golden discusses the influences and processes behind her psychedelic, room-sized installations. Interview by Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal
ABOVE_ Samara Golden, In I spent most of my adolescence sitting on a I used to talk about my stuff through this SG: I’ve been thinking about cinéma vérité, Studio, 2007, continually pink leather sofa my mother had thrifted, idea that more than one thing could be hap- this idea of controlling in the editing room, changing mixed media staring at a television embedded in a faux pening in one space, which is related to but not directing during production of the installation, view from rosewood cabinet, resting my feet on a psychedelia. You could also think about it as film. You could argue that you become so 7-foot loft, photo Memphis-style coffee table of primary col- equal or parallel with film, in terms of how manipulative by creating the frame and ed- courtesy of the artist ors and geometric shapes. That living room it can make you feel, make you relate. It’s iting, or that you don’t, you just make what (and the Manhattan apartment) no longer ex- amazing how many different perspectives you get into its own thing. Sort of a magical, OPPOSITE_ Samara Golden, ists. Yet it does exist, as a barometer of scale can be shown in film, how many conflicting witchy situation, getting to a place you didn’t The Flat Side of the when I enter a home anywhere else, in my things can be happening at once, how you know existed through the process. For me, Knife, 2014, mixed media inherited taste for the borders of tacky, and, can end without an answer. I both am pained by, but also love, the fact installation at MoMA of course, in memory, which itself is often that just to physicalize the idea you go out PS1: video projection, metaphorized as a house—as a set of rooms, In The Flat Side of the Knife (2014) there is a for a walk and wind up in a country you never live video feed, video where we can re-inhabit our experiences, or white room at the bottom which is really the heard of and the people speak a language mixer, CRT monitor, leave them shuddered, collecting dust. reflection of what’s on the ceiling. For me, you don’t know. three soundtracks, photo In The Poetics of Space, Gaston it ended up being an escape, or a vacation, courtesy of the artist Bachelard tells us that the house we grew or maybe death—the fantasy that we have of TJR: Does your use of “cheap” materials, up in continues to house our psychology, things being different later. I liked the way like polystyrene, help relinquish this idea that architecture shapes perception. In that the white room becomes an impossible of control—in that you can see the seams Samara Golden’s work, domestic space gets space that doesn’t exist on earth that nobody and yet the magic works anyway? this metaphysical due. Golden makes hu- can ever actually access—this idea that mak- man-scale rooms, furniture, and household ing art, that anything I make will never be SG: That’s a beautiful thing if it’s possible. objects, often from home building materials, as good as I really want it to be, that it will A trick where you see no seams has no hu- like polystyrene insulation. She takes control always be pale. manity in it. It’s like brainwashing. I’ve only of our vantage points, building platforms to been to Disneyland once but the thing I love orient us into her work, which then works to TJR: Sometimes you make spaces that most about it is you could see all the ways it disorient us—mirrors make spaces double or aren’t spaces, they're images. was made. Even in the Small World, it was objects tacked to the ceiling appear below; just stuff. It’s stuff anyone could have or use. live-feed video reveals hidden texts. When SG: Not to be a riddler, but I also make This is going to make me sound like I’m full Golden and I met at her studio on a too-hot images to make images. I do all my own doc- of myself but I think of it as fighting for a August night, she told me she wants viewers umentation. They are completely different more low-class or middle-class way of being WOULDN’T ART BE SO to see themselves in her work. What might mediums, installation and photography, but in the world. MUCH BETTER IF ART this mean when her spaces would only be in- I always make the image have the same kind habitable if we could enter a mirror, or walk of life that I wanted the piece to have. My TJR: Disney’s trick for the town square WEREN’T DEADENING? IF on the ceiling, or exist in multiple places sister and her husband used to be retouchers was just making everything three-quar- ART WERE THE OPPOSITE at the same time? When her spaces are sat- and color reps for magazines in New York, ter scale. I wonder if this relates to the urated in unlikely hues—kaleidoscopes of so she taught me a lot. I want to represent the perspective you achieved from your OF WHAT WE’RE DOING TO silvers, pinks, and whites—as if we’re look- actual place, but the photo itself can’t really seven-foot loft and how that has come SURVIVE ALL THE TIME. ing at them through the hazy glasses of capture anything close to the real experience. through in your more recent work. memory, fantasy, or a dream? Perhaps here, In order to give it the feeling that being there architecture shapes perception by letting us does, you have to go back in and create this SG: Yeah there’s some inception—I talked hallucinate. other thing that isn't there, but was. about those early works as physical Moments from our roving, four-hour Photoshop. All of the objects you saw from conversation that didn’t make it into this I always loved just making anything but I the loft were actually cutouts of photographs. final cut: the ethics of optical illusions (do never felt like I had the intellectual rigor or And when you're in this certain place at the you have a reason?); Lacan (see the mirror ability to back up what I was making, espe- top of the loft, the pieces lock together as stage, if you must); that time Golden almost cially in painting. In the second part of my kind of an image—although the camera can died of pneumonia, and a nurse told her she life—I applied to grad school when I was like never get it, because the camera doesn't have had to decide if she wanted to live (despite 35—I started taking photographs of paint- two eyes. some reservations, she did); that when we ings in a way where you couldn’t really tell met I was Berlin>LA jetlagged, and she had whether it was a painting or a sculpture. TJR: Do the mirrors in your work function been melting plastic all day. What’s here is When I got into Columbia, I built a seven-foot similarly? Mirrors are strange materi- a much-condensed version, one that moves loft in my studio and made all these installa- als—they both create space and create through her psychedelic (my word), riddling tions where you looked at them from the loft, images at the same time. (her word), cinematic (our word), hand-made and I took photos of them. The conversation (!), large-scale installations, and the small- was about where the experience is. Is the ex- SG: I like the way that through mirrors, scale ideas about contradiction, fragility, and perience you having the perspective, or is it things become more clear. They almost be- control that go into making them. the photograph? I was frustrated that you had come—I don’t know if I want this printed, but to pick one of those. I did my share of psychedelic drugs when I was younger, and I always found it fasci- Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal: Do you think I do really think in terms of cinematic fram- nating that on certain drugs, it’s almost like your work is psychedelic? Not in a cheesy ing of a shot. When there’s no peripheral your eyesight is wider, and the amount of topsy-turvy way, but in terms of how vision on the situation, no breaking the color you see and the clarity is just totally psychedelia was about transforming per- illusion. The first thing I said was I’m not different. If it were possible to take a picture ception, hacking the nervous system. interested in manipulating people; I’m con- through your mind—we’re not talking about tradicting myself. saturation or psychedelic colors or anything, Samara Golden: I talk about it as creating we’re talking about a really clear something. a psychological space, but I don't think I TJR: Well if you say you want things to be It’s not exactly an aesthetic thing—it’s just could ever really know what anyone else is cinematic, then you're engaged in a his- a different world kind of, and you can see really experiencing. tory of manipulating people. that you're in that. And I feel that there’s
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11 ART LOS ANGELES READER Nº 3
something about the reflection in a mirror I’m totally emotionally connected to those ways of being in the world, or different that convocates some of that kind of clarity. weird structures that we made. When I was in classes. You came in and you were on a kind high school, my friend and I had this saying, of mezzanine and down here you would see TJR: Convocate? "only the loonies have clear glasses.” I used all of the vaults, but in reality everything was to scribble it everywhere. above you. When I first saw the space, I just SG: I’m not sure if it’s the right word, but saw the work. I saw eighteen vaults in this re- convocate is summoning a spirit or creating I had a couple friends—let’s say their sanity ally scary idea of the future—everyone living this thing that’s otherworldly. I made a stupid was pretty loose. In a way, they were too in their own little space, like a hotel room, joke to [my partner] John that the best kind sensitive for this world. If you really were with no entrance or exit. of artwork would be this weird hovering able to see everything that was happening jelly blob that would become whatever you without creating a critical format to protect TJR: Thinking about cinema and you wanted it to become, that doesn’t have any yourself from it, you would go crazy. It’s just working and living in Los Angeles, this relationship to gravity or the physical prop- too much to hold on to. reminds me of sunshine noir; the way erties we have to deal with. But then, the joke these gritty narratives play out in com- is on me, because I’m always making stuff TJR: Survival is actually a deadening plete contradiction to the location. Could that goes against gravity, that’s impossible of perception and not an enhancing of this be analogous to the things that only for everyone to install. Everything that looks perception. appear in your work through surveillance draped is actually stiffened and tethered so it video, or on monitors that use this sur- doesn’t fall. And it needs to be light—because SG: Wouldn’t art be so much better if it veillance video? I’m small. I want to do it myself instead of weren’t deadening? If art were the opposite EARLIER ON I HAD A sending it to a fabricator. It’s just everyone’s of what we’re doing to survive all the time. SG: This goes back to your question about SPECIFIC CREDO THAT I’M nightmare. how I put myself in my work. For the monitor TJR: You have a really romantic view of in the MoMA PS1 piece [Flat Side], the text FRAGILE, SO MY WORKS [The work] doesn’t actually belong in the what art can be. that is color-keyed behind the bed is literally ARE FRAGILE. BUT IN world in a permanent way. This sounds all the work and labor and emailing that went crass, but often people can’t help support SG: I mean, I have a pretty naive and ro- into the piece, all my worries about how it’s ORDER TO MAKE BIG these ideas, because if they want to collect mantic idea about both the world and my going to come out, all my anxieties—almost IDEAS HAPPEN, YOU NEED the objects themselves, it’s always this long life and what art can be. But sometimes a labor log along with a psychological log. conversation about, well, is it going to last? it’s sort of a bit of a setup, like a setup for And in Bad Brains, there was a black sash A LOT OF RESOURCES. Earlier on I had a specific credo that I’m disappointment. across the whole installation (in the monitor MAYBE I THINK OF IT AS fragile, so they're fragile. But in order to you could see this scrolling writing on it) DOING WHAT I CAN WITH make big ideas happen, you need a lot of re- I feel very untethered to the earth in a way like an insanity script—some of my thinking sources. Maybe I think of it as doing what I and I think it’s something I’ve always strug- and “insanity tests” you take online to see if WHAT I HAVE NOW. can with what I have now. gled with. I think it’s a gift and a curse. I do you're crazy. tend to see all of everything all at once. I TJR: I’m thinking about places you put guess one effort of making stuff is to try to TJR: Do the monitors provide clarity in the yourself or your labor into the work— make sense of that. same way the mirrors do? like in The Fireplace (2013) your face is projected. TJR: Maybe another way to think about SG: Both of them are kinds of mediation. At the politics of your work besides this idea one point I felt like the pieces in the installa- SG: I don’t want it to be about autobiography, of perception is through domestic space. tion were all in service to the image into the though I’m in it. I want it more to effect the This idea that architecture is so over- mirror, but it’s actually truly sculpture and person, as a space where they can feel the coded with how we’re supposed to live, alive as its own thing. At one point I decided themselves in it. how we’re supposed to be. I’m thinking the work was what was mediated in the tele- about utopian feminist design to elimi- vision screen, and that all the other parts of TJR: Like at the movies. You go to the nate housework, about queer spaces. it were in service to that image. I feel pretty movies and there’s a projector and what unsatisfied with all those ideas as the final you do is project. SG: But maybe it’s not utopian. Maybe this is terms, or final thoughts around the piece. For too much info, but part of what’s in the work me it’s more interesting if every take on it and SG: Right. You project yourself all over the is actually negative stuff that I’m trying to ex- every final attitude is wrong. characters and stuff. And other types of pro- orcise. Say I’m more traditional than I really jection. I heard this thing on the radio today think I am—say I’m a person who did used to TJR: Rather than every perspective is about jet plane fighters. At the certain level want to get married, or that I love clothes or right? of g-force that makes people pass out, the pi- fashion. When you realize that some of that lots would have these experiences, and often stuff is actually really bad crap being fed SG: Those words don’t really mean anything they would feel like they were outside of the to you, and then you try to change it, your anyway. Everything is both wrong and right. plane looking back at themselves flying the aesthetics don’t necessarily match with your Or maybe it can’t really be right or the whole plane, until suddenly they would realize that own politics. A really harsh example is high thing until it’s all of it at once, and there’s no they were that person in the plane. This kind heels. They are basically torture devices way to actually take that all in. In that way that of astral projection or being outside of your- but at the same time I still think they can be mimics life more clearly. ■ self actually happens. sexy...it’s a contradiction. Contradiction is something I'm always thinking about. TRACY JEANNE ROSENTHAL is a writer TJR: It takes you out of the cliché. based in Los Angeles. She is writing TJR: I don’t get to say this much, but we’re a book about the Americana at Brand. SG: Yeah, the psychedelic is cliché now. I both under five feet tall. Do you ever think grew up right after the hippies had lost their about your size in relation to the work you idealism—the future they thought was possi- make? ble was not happening, but at the same time I was surrounded by books and stuff that SG: I have to laugh at myself because most of said it could happen. I remember my dad my installations have been about having an telling me he wore upside down glasses for overview or looking down or having power a week as part of a military study that they over something. I always love being high were doing on conscientious objectors of the up in the air. Of course I like high vantage Vietnam War— points, because in a normal life, I don’t have that way of having power. TJR: Upside down glasses? TJR: That wheelchair on a staircase SG: One possibility is that I’m really gullible, in Flat Side is really haunting to me in so I don’t know if that’s a true story. But re- demonstrating that it’s really the built gardless my imagination went crazy. It was environment that makes you disabled, supposedly a trial where you’re locked into not you. If you’re in a wheelchair and the ward and everyone wears glasses with there was a fucking ramp, you could get lenses that make everything upside down. across, but instead there are stairs. My understanding is that your actual mind starts flipping upside down after a while. SG: It’s about control. We’ve created a world You don’t notice, you start interpreting it, you where only one kind of person can be the start to know when right is right and left is most in control. left. In the upside down world your body ad- justs. It you take off the glasses you're totally It’s also about class. I think there's a deep un- screwed up for a while, but then it flips back. der part of my work that is about class. I’m not saying I know anything, but at one point TJR: That’s also a potent example of the I was homeless, or really more of a “tran- militarization of perception—perception sient,” and I have deep connections with my as something that has been structured friends who maybe are still in that situation. by power. I can’t get a hold of them, I don’t know if they died or what. SG: I will always be a teenager in the way that I just always believe everything we are To me the ceiling vaults at Yerba Buena living in is a kind of fabrication. Even though Center for the Arts were like 18 different
12
William Leavitt, A Few Houses in Los Angeles, 2016
14
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Last Rites
The Scottish Rite Masonic Temple is an impressive, isolated place, built to celebrate power and solidarity. This year, it reopens as a private art museum. by Catherine Wagley
ABOVE_ Scottish Rite "We were like the Rock of Gibraltar," said Herculean Pillar serving as a beacon, draw- Maurice Marciano bought the Scottish Rite Masonic Temple, Los Gaylord Roten in 1994, speaking of the ing strong men—would-be Masons—toward Masonic Temple for a reported $8 million. Angeles, 2016, photo by five-story, 90,000 square foot marble tem- it. When he made the reference, Roten did The brothers, who co-founded the apparel LA Drones for Art Los ple on Wilshire Boulevard that his fellow not yet know that the building wouldn’t sell company Guess! with two other siblings, Angeles Reader Freemasons had occupied for over 30 years. for nineteen more years, and that the upscale planned to renovate it to house and display Roten, the manager of this Scottish Rite Westgate Square neighborhood surrounding their expanding collection of contemporary Masonic Temple, was about to put it on the it would keep the Masons from renting it out art. Their foundation is scheduled to open to OPPOSITE_ Temple market. Operation costs had grown as Mason for revenue. So he probably was referencing the public—by appointment—in the first half interior, 2012, photo by membership fell. The building, a strange and legend over the history of Gibraltar, the land- of 2017. Irwin Miller majestic structure, had a windowless exte- mass Spain and Britain keep fighting over. Millard O. Sheets designed the Scottish rior decorated with double-headed eagles, Still, it does make sense to think of the tem- Rite Masonic Temple in 1960. He was, ac- BELOW_ Ryan Trecartin, murals, and statues celebrating an eccentric ple as contested territory; it is an impressive, cording to his own recollection, the only Temple Time, 2016, HD mix of fabled men, from Persian emperor isolated place built to celebrate old notions non-Mason considered for the project.(2) video, 54:32, © Ryan Zerubbabel to George Washington. Inside, of power and solidarity that would become A well-liked artist, academic, and architect Trecartin, courtesy of the temple had a 3,000-seat auditorium, endangered as new ones took their place. who had by that time designed a number of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New where the Masons would perform pageants As Sergeant Ron Batesole of the LAPD’s mosaic-adorned Home Savings and Loan York as members moved up in rank, and a 1,500- Wilshire Community Police Station told the banks, Sheets knew the director of the tem- seat dining hall, as well as special lounges Los Angeles Times, the cops were especially ple in Los Angeles, a local judge named and meeting rooms where Masons of various sad to see the Masons go.(1) The tem- Ellsworth Meyer. Meyer invited Sheets to a degree-levels would congregate and volun- ple had hosted weapons and tactical team dinner at the Athletic Club downtown, where teers would provide free speech therapy, exercises. During the 1992 Rodney King ri- a number of doctors and lawyers joined the Scottish Rite’s chosen charity, to chil- ots, the National Guard had used it as their them. The men, all Masons, told Sheets they dren. Now, all this space would have to be base. Imagine cavernous halls walled with wanted to build a cathedral. “The important repurposed. epic mosaics depicting presidents and cru- thing is why do you think you need a tem- Perhaps, by comparing it to Gibraltar, saders housing men in riot gear, awaiting ple?” Sheets asked them. “Maybe the idea of Roten simply meant the temple loomed deployment: government-employed enforc- Masonry isn't even practical today."(3) large—a physical place that lent strength ers, inhabiting an aspirational homage to The history of the Scottish Rite is hazy— to the organization as an idea. Perhaps mastery and lawmaking. In 2013, after al- or “hidden in mist.”(4) Masonry, which he meant, as in the myth, the temple was a most two decades of limited use, Paul and originated with stonemasons, based its
18 JANUARY 2017 ART LOS ANGELES READER
1_ Jake Doherty, “Masons Forced to Put Scottish Rite Temple Up for Sale,” Los Angeles Times 19 Mar. 1994.
2_ Millard Sheets, transcript of oral history interview conducted by George M. Goodwin, in Los Angeles Art Community: Group Portrait, UCLA Library, Center for Oral History Research, 1977.
3_ Sheets.
4_ S. Brent Morris, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Freemasonry (New York: Alpha Books, 2006). One initial rank system on craft guild rankings: W Magazine in for an “art meets fashion” story, the temple contains a national park, has to start somewhere. apprentice, journeyman, master. In Masonry, shoot.) The brothers gave the artists free which is there to give refuge to comput- as with Scientology, one’s relation to the se- reign, with one exception: “Don't destroy er-generated creatures and preserve certain 5_ Condensed History of crets of the order, as well as the divine, are the mosaics.”(7) It’s a “strange building,” notions of “the natural.” As the videos go the Ancient and Accepted mediated by attaining higher levels; in con- Trecartin noted in a 2016 interview with on, it seems less a park and more a quaran- Scottish Rite Masonry servative sects, no women are admitted. In Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, one “that has the tined disaster zone. from Its Introduction to 1761, a French wine dealer named Stephen logic almost of a convention center and of “It’s a violent claustrophobic reaction the United States to its Morin decided to “establish perfect and all the spaces in a hotel that aren't hotel to the idea that the world is a finished piece Present Time (New York: sublime Masonry in all parts of the world,” rooms.” (8) of work,” writes French theorist Camille Drummond & Neue, 1887). starting with the Caribbean.(5) He invented The artists inhabited the building with de Toledo, commenting on the impulse to a series of higher “Scottish” degrees that its furnishings and decorations largely in- revolt among young people coming of age 6_ Condensed History. influenced the current 33-degree system of tact, as if it had been suddenly abandoned after 9/11, in the midst of economic collapse. the Scottish Rite. Individual chapters, called decades before and simply left to decay. (9) Fitch, Trecartin, and company perform 7_ Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, lodges, operate independently, miniature In the three grainy, frentetic, horror-in- this kind of claustrophobia, but show us “Ryan Trecartin,” BOMB kingdoms that appoint and promote their spired videos Trecartin and Fitch shot what happens when a response to the world 135 (Spring 2016). own royalty from within. there, the temple is a character as much as is not reaction but inaction. Stunted by the A few months after their initial meet- a set, party mystery land, part squat. They structures they revolt against, the charac- 8_ Lehrer-Graiwer. ing, Judge Meyer invited Sheets to another and their actors smash mirrors and set up ters behave as undirected activists. They dinner. The Masons told him they wanted tents in empty rooms. They use hand-held are occupiers riding on impulses rather than 9_ Camille de Toledo. their cathedral to function like a Gothic cameras and employ parkour practitioners mission. They have cameras but not plans. Coming of Age at the End church, serving as a book for people who to do stunts, flipping in stairwells and Certain characters were Anticipators, in- of History (Berkeley: can’t read, allowing them to feel part of a beneath worn chandeliers. As in most of dividuals with access to everything but no Soft Skull Press, 2008). grand historical narrative. Sheets took the Trecartin’s videos, the dialogue moves agency to do anything but boast about their job, and relayed the Mason’s self-image fast. Viewers who took the time to watch access. They, like the contemporary subjects 10_ De Toledo. through decorative opulence and epic imag- Site Visit (2014), Temple Time (2016), and they index, are trapped in a place built to ery. He sourced travertine from Italy so that untitled work in progress, when they ensure that an established history contin- 11_ Ian Lovett, “A Bigger the temple, though rectilinear and formalist screened at Regen Projects in Los Angeles ues; they can’t see outside of it, even though Closet for Their Art,” in design, would reference classical history and later at Andrea Rosen Gallery in New they’re dismissive of what it represents. New York Times 25 Aug. in its materials. The multiple recreation York could just begin to unravel the frenetic In Trecartin and Fitch’s videos, the 2013: C1. spaces, upstairs lodges, and library were all narrative. In Fitch and Trecartin’s multi-part characters always have the sense that comfortable and thoroughly ornamented. He 12_ A blog called Free used mosaics, his forte, to relate the current to Find Truth uses era to earlier times. The mosaic on the east numerology to connect exterior wall depicts the stonemasons who the Rodney King beating built King Solomon’s temple, crusaders in the to a purposeful race Holy Land, and King Edward VII, himself a war organized by the Masonic grand master. “I’m not a Mason,” “international masonic Sheets said in 1977, “but I do feel that it's a network,” and a book tremendous attempt toward the freedom of called The Truth about man as an individual.”(6) Freemasons, Illuminati In 2012, a year before the building sold and the New World Order to the Marcianos, Irwin Miller got inside and connects the Masons to photographed. He finds a lushly carpeted earlier unrest, including gathering room with velvety curtains cas- the Watts uprising. cading down the wall and sconces dangling Zachary K. Hubbard, “Race from the ceiling. The seats in the auditorium War Needless Division,” have floral patterned upholstery that echo Free to Find Truth 6 July the wallpaper appearing elsewhere in the 2016
19 ART LOS ANGELES READER Nº 3
ABOVE_ Daryl Gates, chief “some big event happened” in the temple. said, neutrally, of his motivations.(11) Marcianos, helps make the transition literal. of the Los Angeles Police Said Trecartin, “It’s like big history fold- Conspiracy theorists don’t need to know A rendering by architect Kulapat Department, eulogizes ing back on itself and becoming this niche that police used the Scottish Rite Temple Yantrasast shows the temple’s auditorium officers who perished in thing.”(10) Perhaps Trecartin forecasts the in the 1990s to argue that the Masons in- turned into a large main gallery, the deco- a car crash, 1988, photo “niche thing” the temple will become when cited the race riots in the first place.(12) ration stripped away to create an adaptable by Chris Gulker the Marciano Art Foundation opens in 2017. Of course, there are other, lighter theories: environment.(13) Trecartin and company Shorn of much of its interior ornamentation, about the Masons rigging NFL games and did some of that physical stripping. And, in the building will reopen as a museum with James Cameron’s films conveying Masonic spite of themselves, their probing and anx- mostly white walls. Ostensibly, it will reflect messages. It’s easy to blame an organization ious experiments facilitated the transition the aesthetic tastes of the two men, although, with prominent buildings and old-fashioned between one individualistic, solidarity-cen- if recent Los Angeles history repeats itself, it ideas of mastery and rank-climbing for con- tered idea of power to another streamlined, will probably show work by the same few fa- temporary injustices. They’re more tangible possession-centered idea. Their videos cap- mous artists, like most museums opened by as culprits than newer corporate and political ture a space between these ideas that, in this collectors. Indeed, the foundation is part of forces that proliferate in a global, diffuse, context, no longer physically exists. ■ DURING THE RODNEY KING a larger trend in Los Angeles by which power and virtual way. But it’s these forces that RIOTS, THE NATIONAL is codified in cultural, rather than religious make windowless, mosaic-covered buildings CATHERINE WAGLEY writes about art and GUARD USED THE TEMPLE or even governmental centers. “There is such better suited as semi-public showrooms than visual culture in Los Angeles. a vibrant, vibrant art community with so private headquarters. Perhaps the temple’s AS THEIR BASE. many artists living here,” Maurice Marciano change of hands, from the Masons to the
Father Figure
A white, middle-aged artist cohort plays out anxieties of modern American manhood through the bedrooms of little girls. by Jonathan Griffin
“A crock of shit” is how Mike Kelley once a vision of “a pimp-like man whose smile described what he called the “modernist revealed an infinity of sharp teeth.”(4) She cult of the child.”(1) He was talking about is immediately motivated to redecorate her the idealization of children—of childhood, room, switching from girly pink to austere rather—over the past two centuries, since modernist black and white, from pictures Romanticism exalted it as a pure state, uncor- of horses and heartthrobs to Malevich and rupted by the mores and hang-ups of culture Bridget Riley. Kelley’s installation was not and society. In visual art, this was manifested even really a fabrication of a bedroom in- in the self-consciously childlike styles of terior. An enclosed space was lit with black Picasso, Miró and Klee, and the later affec- light, empty except for one leaning sculpture tation of children’s art by Dubuffet, Jorn, and and a picture of the lasciviously grinning countless others who, for associated reasons, pimp over the door. In his narrative, the also fetishized the “primitive” and the “in- prospect of adult sexuality impelled the girl sane.” “Where do the children play?” asked to put away childish things, to embrace mas- Cat Stevens in 1970, testifying to the per- culine “advanced culture.” She is left with sistence of that myth of purity even through little more than a schematic shelter, virtually late ‘60s counterculture, the era of the Flower all her furniture and possessions displaced Children.(2) from the room and turned into minimalist ci- By the end of the 1970s, the youth had phers—cold comfort, indeed. In this equation, turned nasty. In Los Angeles, there emerged abstraction is desolation. a now-canonized cadre of artists that cen- In 2011, Richard Jackson created an ters (in the myth, at least) around Kelley installation for an exhibition at David and Paul McCarthy, but which also includes Kordansky Gallery also called (with an unac- Richard Jackson, The Kipper Kids, Raymond knowledged nod) The Little Girl’s Room. As in Pettibon, Tony Oursler and Michael Smith, Kelley’s piece, innocence, puberty and sexual aka Baby Ikki. An overwhelmingly male, initiation are allegories for cultural indoctri- straight, white group, they wrestled with nation. The girl, here, is a fiberglass cartoon (amongst other things) the anxieties of mod- with a smiley yellow face who grasps an up- ern American manhood, often through the side-down pink unicorn. Her bedroom walls figures and spaces of adolescents, children (actually stretched canvases) bear a confla- or babies, particularly young girls. tion of clouds and stars overlaid with copies These artists roundly rejected the two of Frank Stella Protractor paintings. Before most pervasive clichés about childhood—the the exhibition opened, Jackson activated the idealized view that childhood is a prelapsar- installation, pumping buckets of paint out of ian time of piety and purity, and its antithesis, the pink unicorn’s ass, in a rather distasteful the view that childhood is a time of savagery demonstration of defilement as imagined by and violence, of unsocialized ignorance that a naughty little boy—defilement of Stella, can (and must) be remedied by acculturation. of Modernism, of tacky consumer culture, Instead, Kelley and his peers adopted a third of the little girl herself. The creepiness that line, strongly informed by psychoanalysis, in lurks within Kelley’s work is fully unleashed which childhood is by no means innocent, but by Jackson’s fantasy—a fantasy that is both is the wellspring of adult fears, desires and knowing and ironic, but also more than a aggressions. little gleeful about the violence that it en- In 1980, for a show at Los Angeles acts. The abstraction of symbols such as the Contemporary Exhibitions alongside Oursler cartoon girl and unicorn, and the ostensibly and Syrop, Kelley made his first installation, innocuous substance that Jackson splashes titled The Little Girl’s Room. The installa- over them (it’s only paint, people!)(5) give tion, Kelley later claimed, was prompted by him license to transgress in a way that reveals a “dream within a dream.”(3) A little girl has more about latent masculine desires than he
20 JANUARY 2017 ART LOS ANGELES READER
OPPOSITE_ Richard Jackson, The Little Girl’s Room, 2011, fiberglass, steel, stainless steel, MDF, acrylic on canvas, wood, rubber, motor, acrylic paint, 190 x 288 x 312 in., courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Zurich, photo by Fredrik Nilsen
LEFT_ Charlie White, Patrimony, 2006, chromogenic print, 47 x 52.25 in., courtesy of the artist and Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles
BELOW_ Martin Kersels, may have ever intended. Tumbleroom, 2001, Both Kelley and Jackson’s Little Girl’s installation, courtesy of Rooms have nothing, in fact, to do with lit- the artist and Mitchell- tle girls. “All this stuff is produced by adults Innes & Nash, New York for children, expressing adult ideas about the reality of children,” Kelley later commented on the stuffed toys that he often used in sculp- tures and installations.(6) Perhaps Kelley and Jackson reveal a deeply sublimated adult fantasy: our culture invents girls in order to defile them. and a bruise.) The sense of giant clumsiness, they have inherited. In doing so, they cast In his installation Tumbleroom, first of parental inadequacy and potential harm, themselves both as victims and aggres- created for an exhibition at Deitch Projects is allegorized by Kersels’ large frame as it sors. There are generational differences in in 2001, Martin Kersels takes a girl’s bed- collides with—and is potentially harmed by— their approaches, however; whereas Kelley, room and smashes it to smithereens. The the child’s environment. Pink Constellation McCarthy, and Jackson hurl themselves, work was inspired, in part, by the scene in takes a less depressing position than Kelley’s abjectly, into the depths of their own ids, 1_ Ralph Rugoff, the 1951 movie Royal Wedding in which Fred and Jackson’s works: a demonstration of the Kersels and White remain more circumspect, “Dirty Toys: Mike Astaire—newly in love and feeling lighter than devastating power that childhood—especially analyzing their anxieties about adulthood Kelley Interviewed,” air—dances on the ceiling of his apartment, female childhood—holds over grown men. rather than wallowing in them. Mike Kelley, ed. Thomas but it also pays homage to McCarthy’s night- It is too little noted that around the time A precursor to these works is Aktion Kellein (Basel: Edition marish Bang Bang Room (1992), a kinetic that McCarthy made his first mature work, mit Diana (Action with Diana), a 1967 per- Cantz, 1992): 87. sculpture in which walls of a living-like room videotaped performances from the mid- formance by the Viennese Actionist Günter move in and out, while their doors slam open 1970s in which infantilized characters (mis) Brus, who was an influence on artists such 2_ Cat Stevens, “Where Do and closed. used commercial foodstuffs, he too became as McCarthy. While his four-month-old The Children Play,” Tea Kersels replicated the steel gimbal set a father. Aside from the abject messiness of daughter Diana lay naked for an hour on for the Tillerman (Island that enabled Astaire’s apparent defiance of childcare (a messiness which children are a white cushion, Brus, painted from head Records/A&M, 1970). gravity, and decorated the room as the pink- blissfully oblivious to), one theme through to toe in white body-paint, manipulated walled bedroom of a teenage girl. When the McCarthy’s early work is the fragility of do- objects including a rattle, a breast pump, 3_ Mike Kelley, written room was rotated by a motor, at about four mestic space, which in his performances is nails, a corkscrew, and Diana herself. Given contribution to Under The revolutions per minute, its loose contents constituted by flimsy, temporary sets. the extreme nature of Brus’ performances, Big Black Sun, eds. Lisa crashed from corner to corner, gradually dis- There is a photograph by Charlie White, which often included real or simulated acts Gabrielle Mark and Paul integrating. The sculpture, Kersels has said, the final part of a trilogy from his series of violence, Diana’s presence must have lent Schimmel (Los Angeles: is “an entropy machine,” a grim visualization Everything is American, that echoes the the scenario an ominous atmosphere. By Museum of Contemporary of adolescent aging, the loss of childhood monstrosity of fatherhood, even to fathers the end of the performance, however, the Art and Munich: DelMonico innocence, and the upheaval of time.(7) He themselves. Titled Patrimony (2006), the im- baby gurgled contentedly while Brus cow- Books, 2011) 194. also saw it as a stomach, digesting its con- age shows a huge, hirsute man with baked red ered in a corner of the white space. Brus’ tents and occasionally spewing out small skin, more satyr than human, standing naked performance shares with all these works a 4_ Rugoff. flecks of debris. in the living room of a modernist wood-pan- fundamental narrative arc. The little girl Paired with Tumbleroom was a video ti- eled home. Behind him, white leather Mies leaves the male artist at a loss, as clumsy and 5_ See also Paul tled Pink Constellation (2001). In it, a fixed van der Rohe and Eames furniture is tipped helpless as White’s satyr, reduced to an angry, McCarthy’s oft-repeated camera recorded a young woman dancing over on the rug, and a vase is smashed. In his scatological man-child, impotently savage defense of his work: nimbly from floor to wall to ceiling as the thick-clawed fingers, the creature holds a tiny and transgressive in only the most pathetic “there’s a big difference room turned, and then Kersels himself, white baby girl. The baby may be at the cen- of ways. ■ between ketchup and careening and crashing into the fragile fur- ter of the scene, but her monstrous father is blood.” McCarthy, et al., niture. As with Kelley’s Little Girl’s Room, the subject with whom the viewer is invited to JONATHAN GRIFFIN is a contributing edi- Paul McCarthy (London: Kersel’s teenage girl’s room ingests, then spits ambivalently empathize. tor for Frieze magazine and the author Phaidon, 1996) 134. out, the adult male culture that would normal- White has said that he cannot conceive of of On Fire. ize or transform it. his subjects without their settings; the defiled 6_ Rugoff. By putting himself in the work, Kersels modernist interior (the grown man’s room) is told me he wanted the work to convey the as integral a symbol in this narrative of pat- 7_ Tumble Room, dir. idea of himself being shaken loose from the rimony as is the helplessly grotesque father. Peter West, perf. Martin center of his own universe. About four years (8) The work is not so much about the raw, Kersels, 2008. This before he conceived of Tumbleroom, Kersels messy, and confusing experience of father- video documentary was became a father. That experience of being hood as it is the raw, messy, and confusing shot on the occasion of displaced from the center of one’s own orbit experience of historical cultural dominance “Disorderly Conduct: Art is a feeling familiar to any parent. (The day I by white, Western, male figures, as perceived in Tumultuous Times,” an spoke to Kersels on the phone, I had just let by white, Western men in the present day. exhibition curated by my baby son slip from my grip and fall face- All these artists have chosen to reckon with Karen Moss at the Orange first onto the floor. He was sporting a split lip their own implication in the ignoble histories County Museum of Art.
21 ART LOS ANGELES READER Nº 3
Centering the Margins
Michelle Dizon explains how conversation, mentorship and research are integral to her nomadic institute. Interview by Suzy Halajian
ABOVE_ Michelle Dizon, Artist, filmmaker, and educator Michelle When Michelle and I met for this in- grounded in indigenous cosmology and devel- 2016, photo by Gina Clyne Dizon founded the nomadic pedagogical terview at her home, where many at land’s ops from indigenous peoples' understanding platform at land’s edge in 2015, attempting edge meetings have been held, issues around that the education offered by the state does BELOW_ Xiomara Rios, something new in Los Angeles. at land’s edge trust and ethics stirred to the forefront of the not teach their children how to contribute to “Jailhouse Orange is a free educational and mentorship pro- conversation, concepts that Dizon and collab- and sustain their communities. In this model— Chicken,” recipe from gram based in East and South Los Angeles orators have been thinking deeply about as at inspired by the work of Paul Goodman, John Incarceration: Commissary that doesn’t seem to follow the workings land’s edge evolves. Holt, Gustavo Esteva, and Ivan Illich—study Sanity, 2016, photo of any existing institution or educational is self-directed, self-paced, and led by prac- courtesy of the artist platform. By design, it does not require the Suzy Halajian: What was the impetus that tice. Another model from Latin America that costly tuition of MFA programs at accredited led you to initiate at land’s edge? And how has been important for at land's edge is Paolo OPPOSITE_ at land’s edge colleges, nor does it reproduce the worn-out has Los Angeles, the city where you were Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in which research fellows meeting, modes of knowledge production we’ve be- born and raised, shaped the development pedagogy is not just a method of education, 2016, photo by Gina Clyne come accustomed to in museums and cultural of the platform? but instead a reflexive process where teacher spaces—lectures, predictable Q&As, and panel and student, self and community, are both discussions that often fail to reach beyond Michelle Dizon: There are several points of involved in the liberatory process of over- Eurocentric biases. Rather, the project aims origin for at land's edge. coming the false perception of reality that has to offer individual mentorship for and focus been structured by power. at land's edge is also on the political struggles of underrepresented The Los Angeles where I grew up was an influenced by the Black Panther Liberation communities, which together anchor the immigrant Los Angeles. I was raised in Schools, whose curriculum centered the his- platform and put forth a deliberate model of a low-income apartment building where tories and experiences of African American institution building. Haitians, Pakistanis, Mexicans, Costa and poor people in the U.S. Not only do these The platform unapologetically invites Ricans, Trinidadians, African Americans, models teach us how state-sponsored educa- those who have not historically been granted and Filipinos lived next door to each other. tion can be a form of a violence, but they also access to art or educational institutions—peo- It was out of this context of an immigrant offer a genealogy of grassroots efforts that try ple of color, immigrants, indigenous and Los Angeles that I began to navigate the ed- to counter such violence and develop new ed- undocumented people, and those from a broad ucational system. The word that I would use ucative possibilities. WE OF AT LAND'S EDGE generational spectrum. Each year, fifteen to describe my educational experience from fellows participate in seminars, lectures, work- kindergarten through graduate school is During “at land's edge: Dialogues,” our cap- UNDERSTAND THAT YOU shops, and public events over the course of six "alienating" because all of the mirrors that stone event highlighting the work of our HAVE TO PRACTICE YOUR months, examining issues such as decoloniza- I was given did not reflect me or my history 2015-2016 research fellows, I began to bet- tion, historical and intergenerational memory, and were part of a logic of assimilation that ter understand the power of the pedagogical WAY INTO THEORY. YOU social transformation, and the broader inter- demanded the immigrant subject to forget her platform we were building. One research fel- MUST LEARN FROM WHAT sections of art and politics as they are situated history, disown her people, and take on these low, Xiomara Rios, presented Incarceration: within a global perspective. Based on a vol- Eurocentric mirrors as her own. Commissary Sanity, which comprised a pho- IT IS YOU DO OR HAVE unteer system, each fellow is paired with a tography series in which she explores how DONE AND DEVELOP THE mentor to develop a project in line with their In 2015, I had been teaching adjunct at a prom- prison commissary can function as a form THEORIZATION FROM independent research. Conversations form the inent art school in Los Angeles for seven years. of resistance. Xiomara (who worked with crux of the platform, centering the research When two permanent positions opened in the artist Gina Osterloh) collected recipes, such THAT LIVED EXPERIENCE. process over any final product. department, I applied and made finalist but as Jailhouse Orange Chicken (pork rinds, was not hired for either position despite four strawberry jam, peanut butter, Tapatío) and consecutive years of student-led petitions that Tamales (Doritos, Hot Cheetos, pork rinds, bore witness to my abilities and the fact that cheese spread, beef jerky), from people who my classes, which focused on race, ethnicity, had been to jail. Importantly, Xiomara situated feminism, postcoloniality and globalization, this project in the school-to-prison pipeline filled an important gap in the curriculum. Out and within her own incarceration experience of this event, a number of students asked if from the ages of nineteen to twenty-four. With they could continue to work with me. I knew great force and eloquence, she critiqued the the ways in which we both knew how to “work lack of rehabilitation in prison, its for-profit together” had been determined by that insti- system, and the seven-hundred percent rise tutional context, so my proposition to these of the prison population in recent years. She students was to build something different. explained that at land's edge was important for her on a personal level because it helped Finally, it is important to understand that at her to open up about her history of being in- land's edge developed in 2015 during a specific carcerated. Prior to at land's edge, being an moment in United States history. It developed ex-convict was something she wanted to hide during the student debt crisis, which revealed and not talk about. She said that at land's edge that the educational system that exists is provided her with a support system in other deeply broken. It developed during the Black artists, and it was this support that allowed her Lives Matter movement, the ongoing wars in to face her history and begin to incorporate it the Middle East, the deportation of women and into her work. children from Central America, the building of pipelines on indigenous land, the drafting of SH: at land’s edge does not operate out multinational treaties that control forty per- of a fixed physical space, and many of its cent of the global economy, and in the midst free and public discursive programs (pan- of a virulent racism and Islamophobia that has els, talks, screenings) have been held only escalated with the upcoming election. All in arts and community spaces through- of these elements influenced the development out Los Angeles, including the Women’s of at land's edge. Center for Creative Work, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, William Grant SH: Were there other models of experi- Still Community Arts Center, and the Los mental education and/or pedagogical Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Has this platforms that you were looking at when nomadic mode proven to be critical in formulating what at land’s edge would be, keeping one foot carefully out of institu- particularly with the mentorship model in tions while shaping the direction of the which the platform is rooted? platform?
MD: One model that has been important to MD: Initially, this nomadicness was borne the vision of at land's edge is Universidad de out of necessity. We had no money. We had la Tierra, an open university in Oaxaca that is no space. Yet, we wanted to initiate a public
22 JANUARY 2017 ART LOS ANGELES READER
programs series that could be accessed by a larger audience. When we started trying to find venues for our lectures, we approached the spaces with a high level of geographical intentionality. Our focus on East and South Los Angeles is a focus on Brown and Black histories of resistance and the fierce and loving communities that exist in these lo- cales. It was through a lecture organized by Suné Woods with Alile Sharon Larkin, an important filmmaker from the LA Rebellion MD: I’ve always had problems with those SH: How has your thinking about at land’s OUR FOCUS ON EAST AND movement, that I began to understand another two words. Part of my problem is that they edge shifted since its founding? Have you significant dimension of the work at land's re-center what they are trying to displace. found the need to redefine your project SOUTH LOS ANGELES edge does: transmit intergenerational mem- Thus, they’re limited by the center's terms. for yourself, or for your audience, and has IS A FOCUS ON BROWN ory. We screened two rare films by Larkin: Anticolonial and decolonial thought are in- it been feasible to remain flexible in your AND BLACK HISTORIES Your Children Come Back to You (1979), which tegral to our platform. On the one hand, they working mode without compromising the presents a child's perspective on wealth and are about understanding how the legacies of project’s content or intention over time? OF RESISTANCE AND inequality, and A Different Image (1982), slavery, genocide, and colonialism continue in THE FIERCE AND LOVING which is about an African American woman our present. On the other hand, they are about MD: The only way at land’s edge can survive contemplating self-identity, heritage, and per- seeking and centering cosmologies that aren’t is by growing and changing. In order to move COMMUNITIES THAT ception. After the screening, Larkin engaged possible to think of within the boundaries set into our second session, organizers, research EXIST IN THESE LOCALES. in a lecture and Q&A where she spoke about by Western knowledge. at land's edge is nei- fellows, and mentors engaged in an active memory and how, with the renewed interest ther alternative nor experimental. Instead, we group process. Together, we asked questions in the LA Rebellion filmmakers, she was be- seek ways of being and thinking in the world concerning what was produced by the last ses- ing asked to remember experiences that she that precede and exceed those cosmologies sion, how we can understand our work within had stored away many years ago. It was of in a way that neither term can even begin to the larger field of education, and what vision the utmost importance that Larkin's screen- account for. we have for the upcoming term. We of at land's ing and lecture took place at the Southern edge understand that you have to practice your California Library, an autonomous library in SH: How does your program connect ur- way into theory. You must learn from what it South Los Angeles that houses the archives of gent and day to day political realities with is you do or have done and develop the the- radical social movements, such as the Black the context of art making? orization from that lived experience. If you Panthers, the Labor Movement, the Chicano keep your vision frozen in a certain historical Movement, and the Women's Movement. at MD: It’s clear that we’re in a moment in Los moment, then it’s a fossil, it's not alive, and land's edge creates forums where essential Angeles when questions about art's involve- it can't be relevant to the present. Built into creative practices, like Larkin's, can have a ment in systems of development and profit at land's edge is the courage to undo what we new and different audience, an audience who is foregrounded. One sees that in the recent have done, to learn from this undoing, and to sees themselves reflected in her films and struggles that have been going on around the remake with an expanded perspective. The who in turn feel deeply inspired. galleries in Boyle Heights, which is only part process of learning and unlearning that is at of the larger violence of gentrification taking the heart of our platform is not only in the way SH: I’m interested in how the words “alter- place in our city. It’s impossible for any cul- that we engage with ideas, but is also embed- native” or “experimental” function when tural producer to not engage with these issues ded into the very structure and survival of the defining modes of knowledge production and to not question if their production either platform itself. For me, all of this is pedago- that operate outside of the traditional serves the logic of profit or struggles against gy—a responsibility to the future that is acted institutions—it suggests another possi- it. In this political climate, at land’s edge is upon in our present. ■ bility—and at the same time it points to a called to respond. At the core of our 2016-2017 lack of satisfaction with the possibilities organizing team are people who have been ac- SUZY HALAJIAN is a curator in Los present. Can you speak about how at tively involved in anti-gentrification struggles Angeles. land’s edge comes to understand what an across East and Northeast Los Angeles. These “alternative” or “experimental” project or questions will no doubt be a strong element of platform or space can look like today? the seminar that takes place this term.
Behind the Curtain
Underground and out of sight, Los Angeles’ control rooms house hidden nodes of power. by Courtney Stephens and Micah Silver
If you’ve hosted first-time visitors to Los multitudes of control facilities and broad- moviegoers, and archive fires that wiped en- Angeles, you’ve probably had the experi- cast suites dusted invisibly throughout the tire celluloid histories. ence of struggling to explain where “the region in all scales: a nondescript build- Up narrow stairs and into the dim pro- city” is. Its micro-regional enclaves and ing in Pasadena housing a rendering farm; jection room, Jess Daily greets two protégés, endless mini malls fit at odd angles into the four flights below ground, the Automated who will run the screening for the class. A re- expansive, paved, and falsely-flora’d county. Traffic Safety And Control Room (ATSAC) tired projectionist who worked at the Bridges American conceptions of power and control downtown guiding traffic flows towards Theater from 1973 to 2009, Daily oversaw derive from Hollywood’s riffs on the ar- the algorithmic ideal; the Jet Propulsion numerous overhauls and redesigns of the chitecture of New York and DC: mile-high Laboratories managing the mission to Mars; room, which was for many years the primary verticality, leather board rooms, penthouse cramped projection rooms full of abandoned screening room for UCLA’s immense motion parties. Where is the seat of this power in Los film technologies. picture archive (now in rotation at the Hammer Angeles? The Hollywood sign? Museum). Daily describes the many tools and In New York you can visit the Stock ■■■ objects of the room, everything from a state Exchange or the United Nations; in DC you of the art digital projector to drawers of sel- can visit the White House or Congress. In It’s approaching 100 degrees outside, and dom-used 16mm manual lens mounts. One of Los Angeles, you can visit Disneyland. You a UCLA summer film class has assembled the most unexpected items in the projection can visit the ‘80s LA-based Greco-Floridian to watch Antonioni’s Blow Up. The James room is the toilet that resides, discreetly but architecture at the Cheesecake Factory (or at Bridges Theater, located inside Melnitz Hall very much visibly, in one corner. Guarding any one of their 160+ locations nationwide). on the UCLA campus, possesses one of the against the dangers of nitrate requires not only You can visit an opulent 1920s Orientalist most sophisticated projection rooms in the a fireproof room, but a fireproof projector. cinema now retrofitted with Laser 3D. Power country, able to handle 16mm, 35mm, 70mm While a private toilet is often built to the side appears and disappears here. You might be and digital projection, and one of only a of a projection room, in a nitrate-approved at Petco grabbing some cat food and have handful of theaters equipped to legally show room, the toilet faces the projector: the opera- a murdered-out Lamborghini pull up next nitrate prints. Nitrocellulose was one of the tor’s attention must never waiver. to you, no big deal. It feels like a part of earliest forms of plastic film base. It has a Red velvet curtains hang over the screen. the smog, particulates we’re all moving characteristic and arresting beauty. It is also The lights are slowly and manually dimmed through, breathing, unquantifiably. The en- catastrophically flammable, responsible for from the booth. The projectionist cues the gines of power within this city are largely horrifying, fast-spreading theater fires, the digital projector, and the picture begins onto hidden. They are interior spaces of control, death of hundreds of engulfed, panicked the closed curtains, which then pull open
23 ART LOS ANGELES READER Nº 3
ABOVE_ Space Flight dramatically. “The audience should never see movie theater, we wonder if anyone is flying 1970s meant that the lights could be turned Operations Facility, Jet a white screen. It breaks the illusion,” Daily the plane or if we should take comfort in the up, and should be for insurance reasons, a Propulsion Laboratory, says. “That’s precisely why you had the MGM fact that it flies itself. nasty patina from cigarette smoke was visible 2016, photo by Courtney lion and other logos, to give a chance for the on the ceiling. (The original workspaces actu- Stephens curtains to open.” ■■■ ally had ashtrays built into the consoles). The An early movie projectionist was re- ceiling was painted black, and everyone kept BELOW_ Projection booth sponsible for controlling all aspects of this Driving up Oak Grove Drive towards the Jet smoking for another decade or so. at James Bridges Theater, illusion: audio levels, dimming and raising Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada, we pass Over the years, layouts and color schemes University of California– the lights at an appropriate pace, making ranch houses and horses, then the zig-zagging changed, and with the redesigns, the sense Los Angeles, 2016, photo quick repairs if a print tore, doing change- white balconies of La Cañada High School, of what was taking place on the ground also by Courtney Stephens overs of reels. The projectionist was charged alma mater of both Brian Behlendorf, de- changed. Notably, since its construction, the with managing the automated-seeming seam- signer of the Apache web server, and porn room’s design has always included a sec- lessness of the cinematic experience. Like a star James Deen. JPL sits at the foot of the ond-story observation chamber, where the one-man band, the “man behind the curtain,” arid San Gabriel Mountains. Deer freely roam public could (and does daily) gather to peer the projectionist, was the invisible shepherd the large campus, grazing alongside build- down at the scientists. The room had two pub- of the spectacular slippage into the cinematic. ings with names like “Regional Planetary lic purposes then, to both do science, and to Indeed, the work of the projectionist was to Image Facility.” The Space Flights Operation perform science (and scientific transparency), make the apparatus of the room disappear. Facility control room at JPL is a part of the by giving visitors the thrill of classified ac- Daly watched the human-controlled Deep Space Network, a lattice of facilities cess. The most recent remodel harkens back magic of the projection room become auto- and antennae that communicate with objects to the original 1960s design: “We discovered mated. A projectionist was no longer needed in space. Specifically, JPL monitors and is that, for the public, the wow-factor is the to change rolls of film, as all reels were essentially the communications hub for all un- darkness,” says SFOF operations manager LIKE A ONE-MAN BAND, joined onto a single giant “platter” that could manned NASA vehicles beyond the moon: the Jim McClure. In a case of Los Angeles playing THE “MAN BEHIND be loaded, started, and left to run all the way Mars rovers, and the probes that circle Jupiter itself, the room is frequently scouted by set through. “If the film ripped, or fell out of and Saturn, for example. The room has been designers when designing control rooms sets THE CURTAIN,” THE sync, no one was present to fix it, but the atti- in constant operation (24/7) since 1964. for movies. Most recently, it served as inspi- PROJECTIONIST WAS THE tude was ‘oh well, if they walk out, just refund There is a sense, when encounter- ration for The Martian. “It scared me to death their money, it’s cheaper than paying to have ing the room for the first time, that you’ve when I found out they were also making notes INVISIBLE SHEPHERD a projectionist in every booth,’” says Daly. seen it before in a movie: the dimly-lit for costumes,” said McClure. Of an engineer OF THE SPECTACULAR Complex lighting cues were programmed, semi-circle of desk monitors, the scientists seated nearby, looking beachy in a pair of curtains became motor controlled, never monitoring them, photographs of other plan- shorts, McClure says “he just sent a command SLIPPAGE INTO THE closed at all and then eliminated. Slowly, the ets and arcane data feeds under the names to Mars. It will reach there in a few minutes, CINEMATIC. INDEED, theater stripped down to become a self-driv- of space objects: Curiosity, Exploration, traveling at the speed of light.” THE WORK OF THE ing machine. With digital distribution, one Opportunity. Originally, the room was kept in In the 1960s, a series of lunar probes were individual can be paid to monitor the video near-total darkness because the cathode ray monitored from this room, in preparation for PROJECTIONIST WAS TO infrastructure of an entire multiplex. The tubes used to power computer monitors were the manned Apollo missions. The “Surveyor” MAKE THE APPARATUS OF man behind the curtain, the human guiding extremely hot. The dark room was, instead, probes provided humanity with its first the spectacle, becomes a button pusher. Like illuminated by its screens, a kind of mani- close-up images of the lunar surface, as each THE ROOM DISAPPEAR. a long flight in a 787 jet, itself a kind of in-air fold-movie theater. When upgrades in the was equipped with a television camera that could be panned and tilted from here at JPL. The data passing through the control room at JPL is analysed, processed, and broadcast into narratives that orient us in the universe, including the idea that space can be managed and controlled by people (namely Americans) on Earth. On the floor of the room, between desks, a plaque has been embedded that reads “This is the center of the universe”—a telling bit of Copernican humor, exalted—the control room is precisely where humans can discover just how multi-centered the universe really is. “Isn’t it amazing?” says McClure, whose father also worked in this room in its early days. McClure thinks that it makes sense that the aerospace industry is situated in close proximity to the movie industry, as so many scientists find their way to careers in science through an early love of fantasy and science fiction movies, like Star Wars and 2001. Cosmology, like cinema myths, possess the incredible, invisible power to tell us what we are. “Right here in Pasadena, lightweight, highly efficient robots are designed and built and flung out into the solar system, but every one of them has an electronic radio signal tethered to this room,” he beams. “It really puts LA on the map.”
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24 JANUARY 2017 ART LOS ANGELES READER
The elevator opens four stories below about intentionally controlling perception, street level in City Hall East. We exit into a about keeping drivers sane. “The public is quiet hallway full of cold war ruins. Below always complaining. The system can be timed ground were the secure floors, now mostly beautifully, but volume will simply break unused and peppered with abandoned of- that system. So we try to combat some of the fice furniture and old Xerox machines, frustration.” Apparently, nothing infuriates some with papers taped to them that say LA drivers more than not being able to take “salvage.” Tucked away nearby is ATSAC: advantage of a green light for fear of get- the Automated Traffic Safety and Control ting “stuck in the box.” Engineers will time room. A branch of the LA Department of the lights to account for this, going red even Transportation, the room looks something when it isn’t necessary, to let us live in the like a spacecraft dashboard. Two women sit temporary comfort that we are immobilized in darkness before the many screens, which by natural law. display about a dozen live-feeds from in- tersections across Los Angeles. The room ■■■ receives real time traffic information from 500 cameras and thousands of sensors below According to Jess Daily, showmanship in the street, monitoring a total of 4,600 traffic movie exhibition is dead, in part, because lights and all the major freeways in the city, “when you can watch the movie on your overseeing the most elaborate, longest run- iPhone, why would you care about a curtain ning, multi-camera shoot in LA’s history. opening and closing.” The movie theater as gym—really a performance grotto—Muscle ABOVE_ SFOF, 1964, The cameras are used as data streams, a hand-operated spectacle has been twice Beach. “I can put you on my shoulders, make photo courtesy of Jet but they aren’t recording. “Otherwise we’d be obsolesced, first by the television-centered you feel like a princess, like you’re royal,” Propulsion Laboratory in court all day long,” says engineer Suvimol living room and now by the laptop-centered says a man dubbed the Muscle Beach “Giant” Nilprapa. The cameras exist for the express lifestyle. What kind of theater do we find to an East Coast visitor. In societies of excess, BELOW_ Live feeds of Los purpose of watching traffic, and they can be ourselves in today? A control room without meaningless but profound displays of disci- Angeles intersections, commanded to pan, tilt, and zoom in on an walls, in which we are the operators? Our cur- pline are signifiers of control; the gym body, as seen in the Automated object fallen into the road and slowing traffic, rent interface with the world is overlayed by transformed into a series of quantities that Traffic Surveillance and or zoom out towards Catalina, as Nilprapa a gauze of reconstructions, from navigation can be measured and shaped, insulates our Control room, 2016, photo does periodically. “We don’t have any win- systems to targeted ads. What have we gained, vulnerable inner forms, but against no action- by Courtney Stephens dows in here,” she says. as Waze leads a woman to her murder, and able threat. Muscle Beach will likely be the The overall timing of traffic lights in Los Pokemon Go takes players off cliffs? When last control room left in Los Angeles. When all Angeles is fully automated, but has some the mechanisms of power were more tangible, the others have scaled down beyond the micro- room for manual adjustments, made on ac- did we feel less in control of our lives? scopic, when artificial intelligences are mixing count of everything from marathons to water The fading control rooms of the 20th cen- us perfume as we shower, when our cars are main bursts to presidential motorcades. “We tury not only reveal hidden nodes of power, dating each other, we’ll still be here. ■ monitored Carmaggedon from here” says they reveal something about how power Nilprapa, referring to the two-day closing of shifted in the age of mechanization, and how COURTNEY STEPHENS is a filmmaker in Los the 405 freeway in 2011. Lights can be re-timed it is changing in the age of the algorithm. Angeles and co-curator of the screening to more efficiently clear out an area that has Rooms like the ATSAC show us how “auto- series Veggie Cloud. become congested, or reroute completely for mated” systems were (and still are) tuned and an event like the Academy Awards. “We never monitored by living, thinking humans, who MICAH SILVER is an artist in Mexico and get to see the stars,” says Nilprapa. “I think can, we hope, intervene on behalf of human- the author of Figures in Air: Essays they deliberately planted that palm tree right ity (as well as err). Increasingly, however, this Toward a Philosophy of Audio. between the camera and the Red Carpet.” The model of human authority, along with the THE CONTROL ROOM room was built in anticipation of the 1984 rooms themselves, are becoming relics of an AT JPL HAS TWO PUBLIC Olympics, which put enormous stress on old order, replaced by a desire to eliminate traffic infrastructure, and has been utilized human intervention altogether. Power has be- PURPOSES, TO BOTH in other emergency situations, with the entire come thermodynamic—designed to grant us DO SCIENCE, AND TO team of engineers called in at five a.m. follow- more but smaller acts of agency, transactions ing the Northridge earthquake in 1994. ever-closer to a constant state of shopping, PERFORM SCIENCE Nilprapa describes managing traffic as umm, curating. While iPhones grant us sover- (AND SCIENTIFIC playing an instrument. She says it’s intuitive, eignty in our fiefdoms of one, Silicon Valley an enormous amount of math, geographical elites prepare for life on Mars, which, Jim TRANSPARENCY), BY data, and tempo that she has internalized. McClure muses, one day may be monitored GIVING VISITORS THE “You have to be creative with signal timing. from the control room at JPL. THRILL OF CLASSIFIED It’s an art that is about intuiting the rhythm of Some miles south of Baywatch, on the traffic.” But the work of traffic tuning is also boardwalk in Venice, is the famous outdoor ACCESS.
25 THE GEFFEN CONTEMPORARY AT MOCA
DOUG AITKEN: ELECTRIC EARTH IS ORGANIZED BY MOCA DIRECTOR PHILIPPE VERGNE, WITH WENDY STARK CURATORIAL FELLOW ANNA KATZ. LEAD SUPPORT IS PROVIDED BY THE ANNENBERG FOUNDATION, THE ELI AND EDYTHE BROAD FOUNDATION, AILEEN GETTY FOUNDATION, EUGENIO LOPEZ, LUMA FOUNDATION, MAURICE MARCIANO, CAROLYN POWERS, AND FONDAZIONE SANDRETTO RE REBAUDENGO. MAJOR SUPPORT IS PROVIDED BY MANDY AND CLIFF EINSTEIN, MIMI AND PETER HAAS FUND, AND PANASONIC. GENEROUS SUPPORT IS PROVIDED BY JILL AND PETER KRAUS, THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS, MARIA SEFERIAN, AND JULIA STOSCHEK FOUNDATION E. V., DÜSSELDORF. ADDITIONAL SUPPORT IS PROVIDED BY JULIET MCIVER, EILEEN AND PETER MICHAEL, AND DAVID AND ANGELLA NAZARIAN. SUPPORTERS OF THE EXHIBITION CATALOGUE INCLUDE 303 GALLERY, GALERIE EVA PRESENHUBER, REGEN PROJECTS, AND VICTORIA MIRO GALLERY. EXHIBITIONS AT MOCA ARE SUPPORTED BY THE MOCA FUND FOR EXHIBITIONS WITH LEAD ANNUAL SUPPORT PROVIDED BY DELTA AIR LINES, SHARI GLAZER, HÄSTENS, AND SYDNEY HOLLAND, FOUNDER OF THE SYDNEY D. HOLLAND FOUNDATION. GENEROUS FUNDING IS ALSO PROVIDED BY JERRI AND DR. STEVEN NAGELBERG, AND THAO NGUYEN AND ANDREAS KRAINER. IN-KIND MEDIA SUPPORT IS PROVIDED BY , KCRW 89.9 FM, AND .
Doug Aitken, twilight, 2014, cast resin, acrylic, responsive LEDs, 71 3⁄4 × 54 1⁄4 × 54 1⁄4 in. (182.2 × 137.8 × 137.8 cm), photo by Max Schwartz
100 DAYS OF FILM & PERFORMANCE SEPTEMBER 2016–JANUARY 2017
1 MUSEUM 10899 Wilshire Blvd. | hammer.ucla.edu Hammer Museum hammer_museum