UNEASY ANGEL/IMAGINE LOS ANGELES
UNEASY ANGEL/IMAGINE LOS ANGELES
September 14 - November 3, 2007
At Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers, Munich, DE
An exhibition on intersections between reality and fiction
“Once Upon a time there were the mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and there was a guilty party. Then there were the virtuous voices that accused the criminals. And Art (ah, what Luck!) offered alternatives, for those who were not prisoners of the mass media. Well, it s all over. We have to start again from the beginning, asking one another what s going on”.
Umberto Eco (1989), The Multiplication of the Media, in: “Travels in hyperreality”.
Uneasy Angel / Imagine Los Angeles is a thematic exhibition comprising a selection of works by contemporary artists, writers, and filmmakers living and working in Los Angeles. In light of Umberto Eco’s and Jean Baudrillard´s notions of hyperreality, the exhibition perceives Los Angeles as just such a place – with unclear boundaries separating reality and the imaginary. The city’s vast artistic production is an invitation to enter it on the grounds of an imaginary truth rather than a historical actuality. But discovering Los Angeles involves exploring both- its reality and its myth.
In today’s information society a city can no longer be perceived and marketed as a static, self-contained or isolated entity. Contemporary electronic and information interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village. Manuel Castells notes that the information technology revolution has induced a new form of society – a network society characterized by a culture of real virtuality constructed by a pervasive, interconnected, and diversified media system. Accordingly, in the age of globalization and simultaneity, coexisting information networks also dominate the geography of major cities (Castells 2004). To the extent that the methods of our time do not employ single models but rather interconnected, multiple models for exploration (McLuhan 1967), Los Angeles has to be seen as a highly contemporary environment. Considering the global or transnational Los Angeles of the next decade, means equally to think about dislocation and transformation. Any attempt to describe the local geography of Los Angeles entails a networked and global perspective.
The twenty-first century is defined by terms that resist a sense of place: globalization, multiplicity, information and dissemination. What, then, might it mean to consider cultural production in a specific location such as Los Angeles within this context? Perhaps it is to recognize that even as the cultural production within the arts market circulates around the globe, an experience of art in the majority of instances involves a communication between the material aspects of an artist’s work process and the physical and intellectual presence of the spectator, the visiting traveler. Equally, the participating artists are considered to be travelers who tell us stories between myth and reality, using the impact of the global information society as source material for inspiration. This image of the artist as a traveling passenger in a hyperreal, interconnected space between reality and fiction serves as a starting point for the exhibition. The culture of Los Angeles has expanded to that phenomena so much that it becomes an experimental laboratory for artists in their research and in their creation of “in-between” spaces.
L.A. is often described as the most mediated municipality in America, indisputably protected by the fictive scrim of its own mythologies (Davis 1990). The logical distinction between the “real world” and “possible worlds” has been undermined because here everything must be like reality. Surrounded by the sounds and persuasion effects of kind of media capitalism unseen in any other place on earth, the dazzling neon-logos of CNN, Capitol Records, and Scientology illuminate the orange full moon, blotting out the dark night sky. Is it real or representation?
In the Los Angeles landscape, there seems to be no cultural distinction between the authentic, the reproduced, and the false. Fictional environments seem to be a cultural foundation where both originals and copies serve as historical reference points. Reality occurs like a dream or a movie set and the results are startling and effective. The perennial quest for involvement takes many forms. Beyond classification, the forms of the old seem to be inflicted on the content of the new like a concocted disease (Eco, 1986).
Eco’s and Baudrillard’s earlier adventures in southern California form a basis for the exhibition’s underlying methodology: for Baudrillard our simulation of the real, our production of the real as pre-coded signs which operate as the real, leads to a phenomenon that he calls hyperreality.
Any attempt to impose a material reality upon the real implicitly involves the forced materialization of its own perfect image, and thus a hyperreality” (Baudrillard 1994, p.18).
Consequently, Los Angeles can be described as a hyperreal environment. In approaching the city as a fiction, simulation, and simulacrum it is important to realize that the myth of Los Angeles is based on fragmented, co-existing realities. Many of them are created by the local entertainment and media industry. At broadband speed, the simulated realities of Los Angeles develop their very own dynamic and begin to construct a concrete reality. It becomes difficult to discern which part of the city’s myth is reality and which part is fiction. The contemporary relevance of Beaudrillard’s postmodern visions may be to consider which contradictions are created by a highly mediated culture in terms of experiencing our own identities: if we live in a culture that worships desire, craving, sensation, and simulation, how can we passively observe “what is”? How can we acquire an internal consciousness to experience something as “real”?
Immersing into the artistic milieu of Los Angeles entails confronting multiplicity as well as selection and limitation. Like the multiple practices within it, artists from Los Angeles can teach us a lot about both contemporary life and history – about its ambiguities, its layering, its complexities, its contradictions, its chaos. With the multiplication of media, we became aware of the possibility of arranging the entire human environment as a work of art, as a teaching machine designed to maximize perception and to make everyday learning a process of discovery (McLuhan 1967/2001). Anti-environments or counter-situations made by artists establish the means and direct attention to see and understand this more clearly. In periods of transformation, the interplay between “the old” and “the new” elicits many ambiguities and contradictions.
The citie´s history emerges from its junctions between reality and fiction and challenges the forms and classifications that historians have chosen. Like the city itself, art created in Los Angeles could be described as “post-historical”. Similar to the multiple practices within it, artists from Los Angeles can teach us a lot about both contemporary life and history. About its ambiguities, its layering, its complexities, its contradictions, its chaos. In periods of transformation, the interplay of light and shaddow, of “the old” and “the new” environments creates many ambiguities and contradictions.
Attempting to classify the artistic production of a place like Los Angeles isn’t easy. This may be due to our deeply entrenched tendency of regarding all phenomena from a single, fixed point of view. However, if we choose to see Los Angeles from a birds-eye view, with its ever-shifting perspectives of artistic work, we see that the city coordinates the then and now, the here and there, into a real-time spectacle. When this becomes a genuine experience, the sensation behind it disappears. It is what it is, and from there can proceed without contradiction. In this way, Los Angeles and its art become something totally authentic.
References
Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan Press,, 3-45.
Castells, M. (2004). Informationalism, networks and the network Society: a theoretical blueprint, in: The network society, a cross cultural perspective. Eldgar, Massachussets, 65-69.
Davis, M. (1990). Sunshine or Noir, in: City of Quartz. Random House, Nyc, 15-24, 50..
Eco, U. (1986). Travels in hyperreality. Harcourt, Orlando, Florida, 3-53, 109-125.
Krishnamurti, J. (1954/ 2001): Truth and Lie, in: The first and last freedom. Krishnamurti Foundation of America, Ojai, California. 238-241.
McLuhan, M. (1994). Understanding Media. MIT Press, Boston, Massachussets, 33-58.
Mc Luhan, M., Quentin, F. (1967/ 2001). The Medium is the massage. Ginko, Corte Madera, 4-9.
Tags Hollywood Los Angeles