Symposium: Remapping Los Angeles / Excavating the Future
Brussels, Beursschouwburg, Friday the 23th of March 2007 - 14u00 - 17u30
Initiated by Martijn Hendriks and Maarten Vanden Eynde
Guest speaker: Tobias Zielony
Virtual guest: davidkremers
In the framework of 'Namiddagen van de Topografie', initiated by Dirk Lauwaert
Los Angeles is a city that divides people: there are those who love it and those who hate it;
those who cannot get used to the place’s never-ending sprawl and those who revel in it, who fare well in its anonymity and the city’s ongoing flux. What both experiences point to is that the city works in its own specific way, and works on you in a strong way. How does Los Angeles work on us? What does it mean to work in Los Angeles? Do you have to work in Los Angeles to work on Los Angeles? Does Los Angeles change the kind of works that are made? Is there a common concern or aesthetics when a group of artists, writers and researchers from divergent backgrounds produce works informed by the place and time we call Los Angeles?
It is our starting point that this strange way in which Los Angeles works and works into you also has its effects and leaves its traces in the way we work there and the kind of works that are produced there — whether they be films, texts, or art works. So in a way, Los Angeles doesn’t only divide; it also unites. An investigation.
REMAPPING LOS ANGELES - Martijn Hendriks
It is a much repeated refrain when Los Angeles is discussed: nobody walks in Los Angeles.
Walking is something you do between your front door and your car, your car and your work, from your car to the store and back. As a way of getting to know the city, walking is too slow, traverses only small distances, and excludes us from one of the most important spaces of the city: the freeway. ‘I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original,’ Reyner Banham wrote in 1971 in one of the most cited books on the city, entitled Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. To understand Los Angeles, to inhabit the city, to use it, you take the car. Nobody walks in Los Angeles. It’s a cliché with some truth in it.
What if you do walk? Does walking in Los Angeles make one into a nobody? What does it mean to walk, against all odds, in Los Angeles? Who does it? Does it make Los Angeles into a different space? Remapping Los Angeles is an artistic and theoretical research project by Martijn Hendriks that looks at the space that is produced, revealed, and crossed when one walks in a city like Los Angeles. The project is still in its initial stage of research, which will be followed by a work period in Los Angeles, and is part of the collaborative project Los Angeles Works. Theoretically, the project is rooted in Martijn Hendriks’ current research about the experience of place and urbanity in the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. As a visual arts research project, it builds on previous work done in Las Vegas, Nevada.
EXCAVATING THE FUTURE - Maarten Vanden Eynde
In Los Angeles, the first real Megalopolis, personal identity or presence is hardly noticed. It
is hard to stay human in LA and make your mark in the city. Its magnitude and standardization are overwhelming. In the history of visual expression, the first manifestation of human presence and expression of individual touch was the creation of hand-marks; negative prints of hands, left behind in caves or mountain slopes by spitting white chalk over one’s own hands, pressed against the wall. This territorial behavior or expression of individuality is transformed into graffiti and tags in the modern urban environment. In contrary of the contemporary graffiti and tags, the hand-marks leave an empty space, a negative being, a void of humanity.
Maarten Vanden Eynde went to LA to spot modern caves, like bridges, abandoned parking lots and train yards, to leave his mark. The same kind of iconography as the early hand marks was used to re-introduce the use of basic signatures to delimit territory and preserve personal presence forever. This time, the marks were made with white spray paint instead of chalk. As traces that only work as signs of an absence, the traces left by Maarten Vanden Eynde question originality and authenticity while at the same time, by gradually spreading over the city, visualizing the quest for eternal fame in the city of the famous.
The work is part of a long research project investigating the significance of Genetology, a self invented science investigating the Science of First Things –the opposition of Eschatology, the Science of Last Things- How does the future past manifest itself? What will be left over? From where do we start again?
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THE HIDDEN - Tobias Zielony
Based on a text by Jutta von Zitzewitz
'I love America' – On the adaptation of reality in the photographs of Tobias Zielony
‘The route into the centre of Tobias Zielony's imagery is via the periphery. Periphery meaning, on the one hand, the suburbs in which Zielony locates his photographic scenarios, and, on the other, a category of the peripheral that plays a central role in his aesthetic experimental designs.
Tobias Zielony's new series, The Hidden, is set in Los Angeles.
As utopian locations of longing, Los Angeles and California have, in particular during the 20th century, created projections that still exist today in the positive clichés of a carefree life in permanent sunshine, in television series such as The O.C. or in the poolside images of David Hockney. In parallel, an equally clichéd darker counterimage has been established, which, with motifs of earthquakes, race riots, gang warfare, police brutality and permanent smog, has occasionally become apocalyptic. In his 'hardboiled' detective novels, Raymond Chandler gave written form to this darker L.A. that seems to permanently provoke its own destruction. The film equivalent was film noir, and directors like Michael Mann and David Lynch have transferred its aesthetic strategies into the present time. The shots in this series, taken at night and with artificial lighting, follow in the tradition of the neo-noir and seem saturated by the film and photographic models that have sped up the process by which Los Angeles has become an image in public consciousness. All the typical setpieces of an iconography of Los Angeles are there that make up the basic repertoire of a utopian promise, but they are presented as in a darkened, distorting mirror that threatens to become dull.
The global mainstream of images has greedily assimilated the local manifestations of youth subcultures; new variants of the subcultures are absorbed, in an inexhaustible cycle, and regurgitated in advertising images, video clips, podcasts, series and films.’
'Today, Los Angeles is everywhere.' (Bret Easton Ellis)
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VIRTUAL LOS ANGELES - davidkremers
stops on the tour of virtual los angeles
july 1993
abstract
given we are already living in virtual reality
method an audiotaped guided tour to three locations in los angeles where the sensori stimuli of artificial and real confuse the perceptions of the viewer in actual spacetime.
-nature walk by car along mulholland hwy
-the ‘citywalk’ attraction at universal studios
-visit to an outdoor movie location
q e d rather than nature becoming technologized, technology is nature, a nature in which the
boundaries between subject and environment have collapsed.
© davidkremers 1993