LA: Lost or Found?

by

Itza Vilaboy

 

You might know the story: "Hollywoodland" refers to the famed hilltop Hollywood sign, an advertisement for a tract of homes in those same hills. This unabashedly illusionistic scripted space marked the letter head of a real estate venture banking on the promissory note commissioned by the proximity between the movie industry and the trim, argyle-lawn dream of the suburban enclave. Once the neighborhood was finished, however, the neglected sign slowly rotted away. Eventually, a resident movement saved the sign, chopped "land" off the end, and a landmark was steeped out of its own self-absorbed legend.

    As the tradition would have it, certain noir-ish aspects tend to usurp the sunnier aspects of the Los Angeles landscape. For the cover of LA Artland, Contemporary Art from Los Angeles (2005), the Hollywood image of Hollywood has been translated into the digitized master code of an image. Concerned with updating the terms a bit, it is a rogue attempt to pen a place-name onto a moving void – the art world – in its own foxy moment. The entrepreneurial possibilities, like many other of the enduring clichés about Los Angeles – surf, palm trees, laissez-faire DIY slackerese – are seemingly endless. In other circles, the manner of living along with making one's living might just be an even bigger deal than the one you pay for. With "[sun], sand, great surf, a climate usually allowing a smooth shift from beachwear to cashmere pullover and until recently – "recently" thanks to no major earthquake in more than a decade and brutalized New Yorkers' finding respite here – relatively cheap studio and living spaces, all with easy access to the materials of the film, television, and porn industries, explain why anyone, not just artists, would wish to live and work here."

    Part roadmap, part yearbook, and part index – all supplementary structures brought to the fore – LA Artland attempts to provide a visual analog to the often mystified and mystifying phenomena that is the Los Angeles' art scene. The intended focus of the book is "an extensive visual documentation of contemporary artists working in LA now, ranging from well established international names to emerging talent" and features writing by Chris Kraus, literary writer and critic, Jane McFadden, art historian, and Jan Tumlir,
art writer.

    From Kraus' clipped and conversational first-person peregrinations, through Chinatown, to Tumlir's furrowed and measured musings on a generation of art production practices and the artists that practice them, and finally to McFadden's subtle engagement with art historical concerns and the tools it is measured out with and thus extrapolated out of – each text grinds up against one another like continental plates, recalibrating the fault lines running along expectations, assumptions, and contexts. Curated under a number of shared themes and concerns, each artists' profile is accompanied with some brief text and a photographic representation of an indexical piece of work.

    Knowing that art production in Los Angeles is concentrated around the nexus of art schools and not museums might make a new arrival feel more at home, in spite of the considerably higher admission prices. That several of these programs also offer writing/art criticism programs – to varying degrees of independence to the MFA programs – might also lead one to wonder about the increased presence, yet somehow absconded, role of secondary texts/materials attributed to art production in Los Angeles. Not all of the artists present in this survey were matriculated in Los Angeles, but the majority of them were. Lacking a more concrete methodological understructure, absences on the roster – William E. Jones? Mario Ybarra Jr.? – are left unaccounted for. But there's always someone missing on a guest list, I guess.

    Speaking of parties, here's the hangover for the initiated: the first SoCCAS Publication, Recent Pasts: Art in Southern California from the 90's to Now (2005), comes from the symposium of the same name held on June 13, 2004 at the Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles, in collaboration with MOCA. The essays in the book range from reprinted interviews, minor reworkings to considerable reconsiderations of themes discussed at the inaugural symposium.