Introduction by Martijn Hendriks
Los Angeles Works is both an exhibition, a program of events and a publication. Its focus is the city of Los Angeles. It is a program that wants to do more than showcase current art and ideas about Los Angeles: the aim of Los Angeles Works is to initiate artistic research, collaboration and dialogue on the city of Los Angeles and to take those processes as the foundation for an international public program.
Why Los Angeles? Why Los Angeles in Europe, in the Netherlands? Why now? Los Angeles is the most photographed and least remembered city in the world, critic and historian of mass culture Norman M. Klein has written. We all ‘know’ Los Angeles somehow.
Los Angeles has become a kind of brand name, a myth, a recurring presence and background in film, television, video games, news media and visual art. Many of us have seen thousands of images of Los Angeles before we have ever visited the place. The city has become a symbolic place. Los Angeles has become part of our social imaginary, and is a vehicle for both cultural dreams and nightmares. At least in our imagination, it is still the home of the stars, the glamorous and the beautiful. On the other side, Los Angeles is destroyed in novels and films again and again, as if the city has to endure, in fiction, some kind of punishment for Western culture’s decadence. When Los Angeles theorist Mike Davis took stock in 1998, the city had been destroyed 138 times in novels and films since 1909. Today’s most popular ‘terrorism television’ series like ‘24’ and ‘Sleeper Cell’ are set in Los Angeles. There is no other city that is as globalized as the city of dreams.
But what about being ‘least remembered’? Does the city have its own identity, or has it become a mere stand-in in its own movies? Architectural critic Michael Sorkin wrote that Los Angeles may be the most mediated town in America, but also that it has become ‘nearly unviewable save through the fictive scrim of its mythologizers.’ For people who come to Los Angeles and look for the mythic city, this can be a sobering experience. The feeling many people have at first, is that somehow, the city isn’t there. Hollywood Boulevard shows nothing of its glamour when you walk around there, and the whole city feels too big, too dispersed, and looks nothing like you thought it would. Nothing spectacular happens, and you almost wish for one of the movie disasters. Until you find out how the city works, it has a stronger presence as an image and a myth.
In their research projects, the participants in Los Angeles Works take the city’s global image and myth back to Los Angeles and consider them from their particular perspectives in the context of the city. They start out in Los Angeles, but their projects have a resonance beyond that: they touch on the issue of what it means to live in a city today, when important developments such as urban growth, sprawl, edge cities, rising surveillance of urban space, immigration, spatial segregation and privatization of public space challenge existing myths and images of cities worldwide. For the presentation in Stroom Den Haag, The Hague, Los Angeles Works seeks to address that aspect of the program in particular, explicitly asking the question what the issues raised in Los Angeles Works mean in the Dutch and local context. After all, The Hague, like Los Angeles, exists both as a media image and as a physical place, and raises similar questions about discrepancies between the two.
The city as a subject in contemporary art has in recent years seen considerable interest. Programs that addressed the subject of the city include Mapping a City (Hamburg, Kunstverein and Galerie für Landschaftskunst, 2004), The Urban Condition (Museum De Paviljoens, Almere, 2006), Street: Behind the Cliché (Rotterdam, Witte de With, 2006, including work by Los Angeles Works participant Tobias Zielony), and Mapping the City (Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, 2007). What those programs showed is that traditional approaches of the urban landscape increasingly fall short in addressing the urban condition. Los Angeles Works is an attempt to take the issues raised by those programs a step further by on the one hand focusing on one particular, culturally significant city, and on the other hand, by organizing discussion on the contemporary city through the program’s publications, exhibition, screenings and symposia.
Los Angeles Works is an artist-run program, initiated and organized by Martijn Hendriks and Maarten Vanden Eynde in collaboration with Marjolijn Dijkman, within the framework of the organization Enough Room for Space. It is supported by the Jan Van Eyck Academie and the Royal Embassy of the Netherlands. Los Angeles Works’ final exhibition is scheduled from March to April 2009 at the Los Angeles based LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) on Hollywood Boulevard. Although it is a Dutch program, its scope is international: the aim of Los Angeles Works is to bring an international perspective into the Dutch context and a dutch perspective into the international context. Participating artists include Dutch, Belgian, English, German, Swedish and American people: Anthony Auerbach, Marjolijn Dijkman, Martijn Hendriks, davidkremers, Charlotte Moth, Eva Moulaert & Jens Schildt (Tomorrow Book Studio), Jonas Ohlsson, Maarten Vanden Eynde and Tobias Zielony. They bring a number of institutional contacts and backgrounds with them into Los Angeles Works, such as with Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Jan Van Eyck Academie and Universiteit Maastricht (Maastricht), the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Outpost for Contemporary Art, the Mountain School of Arts, UCLA and CalTech (Los Angeles). Their work covers different disciplines, such as photography, video, installation, drawing, sculpture, sound recordings, text and design.
For the exhibition we plan to work closely together with the staff of LACE and will discuss the possibilities of also including work by other artists whose work has a relevance for Los Angeles Works. The publication series’ content will similarly be open to contributions from guest speakers from the symposia, invited artists and writers.