Not Los Angeles
http://notlosangeles.tumblr.com/
Los Angeles is a city that has struggled to find any kind of solid identity in large part because of its size. There are about four million inhabitants in the city of Los Angeles and about six million more in the county. The racial, economic, and religious diversity—among other categories—of the city makes it difficult to deal with artistic aesthetics without ignoring other important aspects of the city. Not Los Angeles tackles the city with a different focus (according to the website): “Not Los Angeles suggests a new way of thinking about the city…[by] focusing on the individual perspectives and intimate interactions that constitute this inhabited general space”. The intimate quality of the gallery space—even if the choice of the space was for lack of alternatives or financial concerns—furthers this focus on the individual in Los Angeles by creating a more one to one relationship between the viewer and the works of art. This is as opposed to a larger space where the message of the exhibition might get lost with more artists and works of art. Particularly illuminating was the presence of one of the artists whose work was on display, Joel Kyack.
Mr. Kyack certainly seemed to exude the kind of frenetic energy that may very be the end of the city of Los Angeles in the form of Earthquake. Kyack said that one of the most exhilarating experiences was being in an earthquake that one could feel. He seemed most interested in works that are on the edge between working and breaking. He incorporated this into his work on display in the gallery Errquake. He has a broken fan on top of come cement blocks with parts of the box holding some random dirt, rock, ball bearing combination that constantly shifts while the fan is on. In addition to all this, the electricity for the fan comes from a rather precarious looking set-up that comes from hole in the ceiling. There was plenty of duct tape and a sense that something could go wrong and just burst into flame. Perhaps that specific thought is not running through the minds of the viewers of the work but there is a patch work quality to the work that imbues it with a sense of uncertainty. When one watches the work in progress this uncertainty continues in the work itself. Kyack mentioned that sometimes the dirt combination would take the shape of California or it would not really form anything. He continued to say that sometimes the ball bearing would stay in one section and not move at all and sometimes it would end up just moving uncontrollably. There was another interesting aspect of his talk regarding his work because he talked about some of the jobs that he had been employed in over the years and mentioned that he had been a construction worker. He marveled at the process of making something and would find works of art in some of the construction pieces that he was only partially finished with. This anecdote highlights the continued shift in the “work” of an artist from merely a finished product—which in some ways Errquake is—to the process of the work and, in this case, the performative qualities of the work. It seemed like we were almost encouraged to possibly move the dirt around and see what that does to the design of dirt. Kyack seems most interested in making the average Angelino think about the “big one” that we are overdue for. Perhaps he is also pointing our thoughts towards thinking about how the people of Los Angeles mix within this shaking box that is Los Angeles.
The other work that I thought was interesting is Brian Boyer’s A New Atlas. The viewer is presented with a wall sized map of Los Angeles and a series of different colored lines with various names listed by them in an accompanying guide. This is a reimagining of Los Angeles via various bike routes. What was particularly sad—at least for this native New Yorker—was the small area that the bike routes covered. It almost makes it seem impossible to undo the hold that the individual car has on the city. This seems to be less a series of recommendations for inhabitants of Los Angeles that happen to be bikers than an indictment of the smog-causing car culture that has a hold on all of us.
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