Post on 06-Apr-2018
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THE ARTISTS VOICE SINCE 1981
BOMBSITE
Allan Sekulaby Edward DimendbergBOMB 92/Summer 2005, ART
The Practice + Theory series is sponsored in part by the Frances Dittmer Family
Foundation.
Allan Sekula, Prayer for the Americans 3 (Disney Stockholders), 1997/2005, 16 medium format
slides, 3 minutes. All Sekula images courtesy of the artist, Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa
Monica, and the Gallery at Redcat, Los Angeles.
Allan Sekula is one of the most thoughtful historians, critics and practitioners of
photography working today. For more than three decades his images and writings
have shifted the terms on which the medium is understood and has influenced a
generation of artists and scholars. Whether articulating a semiotics of the
photograph in his classic study Photography against the Grain: Essays and
Photoworks 19731983 (1984) or investigating maritime space in the books and
exhibitions comprising Fish Story(2002), Sekula is always in motion. His extensive
travels to many of the worlds seaports are matched only by his enlightening
journeys across history, politics and aesthetics that through their consummateintelligence transform and connect domains usually considered separate. Thus it is
only fitting that in recent years Sekula has begun to make moving images
alongside his still photographs, producing an investigation of the Tokyo fish market
Tsukiji(2001) and The Lottery of the Sea, a densely woven work-in-progress on
globalization and its political and ecological discontents. The courage and
outspokenness of his interventions lend them an integrity that recalls the work of
Hans Haacke and Krzysztof Wodiczko. Sekulas generosity toward students and
younger artists has done much to mitigate the crasser tendencies of the Los
Angeles art world, just as his presence at local events inevitably instills debate and
leaves me feeling less isolated and bereft of community; the eternal Los Angeles
condition. We spoke in April and May shortly after the opening ofFacing the Music,
an exhibition he organized in the Redcat Gallery, housed inside Frank Gehrys Walt
Disney Concert Hall.
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Allan Sekula, Self-Portrait (Lendo, 12/22/02), 2002-03, cibachrome, 15!21. From _Black
Tide/Marea Negra, 2002-03.
EDWARD DIMENDBERG Lets begin with how you came to curate Facing the Music.
ALLAN SEKULA The invitation came through Cal Arts and the Getty Trust. Their initial
idea was to document the building of Walt Disney Concert Hall. As it turns out, the
Getty has sponsored several projects documenting Gehrys development as an
architect. Steven Lavine, President of Cal Arts, chose me as the principal
investigator, or likely suspect, as the case may be. In early December 1998 Steven
asked if I wanted to make a proposal. It was clear to me that it would be most
interesting to assemble a team of artists with diverse sensibilities to follow the
Halls three year period of construction. So I quickly came up with four
collaborators: filmmaker Billy Woodberry and photographers Karin ApolloniaMller, Anthony Hernandez, and James Baker.
ED What was it about these artists work that excited you and seemed relevant to
the project?
AS Baker made an impressive documentary project in the late 1990s that looked
at the northern edges of Los Angeles County where suburban housing tracts and
prisons are replacing orange groves and chaparral. A former carpenter himself, he
traced the new mass production logic of suburban tract housing, picturing white
subcontractors emerging out of a shrinking older generation of unionized
carpenters, often hiring young Mexican immigrant framers and drywallers without
papers or union cards, sometimes without housing themselves. These new
relations of production are endemic in the residential housing sector. The
complicated web of detail work serves to exculpate the big housing companies
which are increasingly integrated with mortgage lending and insurance services.
Woodberrys film Bless Their Little Hearts (1984) is a poignant neo-realist drama of
an African-American family seized by the deindustrialization of South Central Los
Angeles. The film combined sometimes ferocious psychological intimacy with an
ironic sense of the vast physical space of the city.
In the 70s, Anthony Hernandez had been photographing on Broadway, the main
shopping district for working class Latinos and in Beverly Hills, along Rodeo Drive,
marketplace to the rich. There was an intuitive and organic sense of social
contradiction and class relations in his approach to Los Angeles as well.
Mller was intriguing for what at first consideration might seem like wholly other
reasons, her fascination with the famous light and atmosphere of the city. We
joked that this was a local variation on her native German light, overcast but
brighter, and yellower thanks to the perpetual filter of smog. She discovered a way
of looking down from high vantage points on the horizontal streetscape.
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Our shared ground was obsessive curiosity about Los Angeles. But the feeling and
tone of our approaches varied considerably.
ED So how did you define your site of investigation?
AS Disney Hall was a given but we were already committed to a contextual
approach. We took the literal site, the corner of First Street and Grand Avenue, as
emblematic of the ideological challenges faced by the citys boosters and planners
who were trying to promote a vision of the citys newfound cultural sophistication.
Grand Street was to be the new axis of cultural and spiritual life, bracketed by
Arata Isozakis Museum of Contemporary Art to the South, and Rafael Moneos
Cathedral of Our Lady Queen of the Angels to the North. Modernism and anti-modernism alike in modernist guise. First Street is more complicated, inhabited by
older courthouses and by City Hall, police headquarters as well as those of the Los
Angeles Times. This was the axis of administrative, juridical and corporate media
power.
Until the 1960s, the Times was virtually the crypto-government of the city, making
and breaking politicians and policies. But the civic architecture of the epochs of the
New Deal and postwar California now seems shabby and neglected, even as the
courts process record numbers of cases. Most telling for me was the repositioning
of a melancholy bust of Abraham Lincoln that used to confront jurors as they
crossed the street. Now Abe is hidden in a shady nook between two ficus trees.
Jurors who are expected by the states prosecutors to continue to send the
descendants of slaves to prison in record numbers are best spared the baleful gazeof the Great Emancipator.
This retreat from civic memory is of course commensurate with our title Facing the
Music, which we kept under wraps for several years and which was intended to get
at this confused identity. In fact, the subterranean garage for Disney Hall provided
parking for jurors even before the construction of the Hall itself and continues to
do so to this day. So you might say that the contradiction between the loudly
trumpeted sphere of culture and the lurking presence of society with all its
troubling and embarrassing problems was at the foundation of our project. Beyond
that, each of us defined his or her own path.
ED Im struck by what I found to be the very non-territorial organization of the
exhibition. One never has the sense of the works competing with each other.
AS Id hoped for that. I learned that curating newly commissioned work involves
no small element of intuition, going forward on a mere hunch that something
worthwhile will result and that some ultimate complementarity will be achieved. It
is fashionable for artists to curate nowadays but one lesson is that curating is a
very different practice from art making in certain subtle ways. In the end I myself
had to back off as an artist and adjust my own project to the others.
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Karin Apollonia Meller, images from Tree Series, 2003-05, C-Prints. Top: Uprooting the Snowball
Tree, 2003, 40!40. Bottom: Daisys Dead Snowball Tree, 2003, 8!10. Courtesy of the Gallery
at Redcat.
ED How important was an element of investigative research, detective work, intothe location of Disney Hall within larger economic and cultural systems? For
example, where did Bakers concerns lead him?
AS He surprised me by getting bored with the construction project, which he
thought was receiving too much attention already, and headed downhill toward the
desiccated concrete ditch of the Los Angeles River, where he discovered strange
interactions between television and film crews shooting crime dramas and the
resident population of the homeless. Interweaving these riverbottom encounters
with views of the new cultural Parthenon on the hill, he introduces uncanny
correspondences. A homeless man dozes beneath the folds of a scavenged metallic
space blanket that easily stands in for Gehrys building. Baker chooses an entirely
new mode of presentation using high-resolution images displayed directly from a
hard drive, implicitly refuting the assumption that digitization is the repudiation ofall realism.
ED A different approach to dislocation is suggested by Mllers photographs of the
tree being moved. It seems to become an allegory for the impossibility of
successfully transplanting elements to the center of the city, and a gloomy one at
that, for the tree doesnt survive.
AS Gehrys highly reflective metal building had to be softened by tree planting.
The landscape scheme was symphonic, with trees chosen for the timing and hue of
their flower. Mller discovered that this entailed buying mature trees at bargain
rates from private homeowners. An elderly woman in Culver City habitually sat in
front of her modest clapboard bungalow and opened her mail under the shade of
her tree. Now her shade has been sacrificed for the civic good. A strange instanceof utilitarian aesthetics in the land of private interests. The whole sequence
exhibits a fairy-tale sadness yet evokes a Southern California populated by
ordinary folks and visionary schemers familiar to readers of Louis Adamic and
Upton Sinclair.
ED Whats more important, a tree in Culver City or a tree in front of the Disney
Concert Hall? It really does feel like people cutting out vital organs for transplants
and selling them to others. These ideas about memory and duration also come
across powerfully in Billy Woodberrys film, The architect, the ants, and the bees,
for it changes the way one views a construction site thanks to the diligence with
which it follows the workers at the Disney Concert Hall over a period of time.
AS Im delighted that this film could actually be installed in the Hall, because itmaterializes the memory of the buildings construction in a way that is
simultaneously methodical and lyrical. It proceeds in a disarmingly linear way,
following the day-to-day rhythms of the project but also achieving the abstract
musical effect of silent films like Joris Ivenss The Bridge (1928) or Rain (1929).
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But its sound track is pretty much direct sound, the discordant music of the
workers and machines that eventually make official music possible. Im reminded
of Jean-Luc Godards instructions to the projectionist ofBritish Sounds (1969):
Turn up the volume because most people in a film audience dont know what its
like to be in a factory. Woodberry achieves this effect more subtly and with far less
aggression.
His film evokes regret for the self-obscuring project of Gehrys design. Several
artist friends of ours observed that the Disney Concert Hall was most interesting as
a steel skeleton crazier than anything Richard Serra could have made. You can see
that Woodberry himself developed a real sympathy for the building. This turns on
an empathy with the people who built it. The workers are the missing term in histitle borrowed from Marxs rumination on the difference between the human
architect who conceives his project in the imagination and ants and bees that labor
by instincts alone.
ED By contrast, Hernandez does not include people in his photographs, yet the
feeling of human activity is nonetheless very strong.
AS With all this stillness, Hernandez is playing with a triple sense of human action
mapped out along the axis of First Street. To the East, on the other side of the Los
Angeles River he revisits the housing project where he grew up as it undergoes
demolition. Disney Hall under construction occupies the center of his path. And
the Belmont high school complex, an ambitious and scandal-ridden civic project
abandoned after it was belatedly revealed to sit atop a gaseous pool of methaneand hydrogen sulfide, marks the westward limit of his journey. Overall his
photographs are meditations on the life and death of the built environment. Even
his sledgehammer resting on its head encapsulates this vision, a tool useful both
for driving wedges and for demolition, briefly abandoned by its user.
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Allan Sekula, Gala, 2005, digital video transferred to DVD, 26 minutes. Director/camera: Allan
Sekula; Editor: Elizabeth Hesik.
ED What about your own video Gala? It strikes me as something of a watershed in
your relationship with digital technology.
AS I decided to slow the shutter speed just to see into the dark recesses of the
music center on opening night. It was a way of going behind the scenes or into
the wings.
ED And the opening shot with its vignette?
AS I was thinking of it as a silent movie device, a way of looking at the rehearsal
for the opening as a big experiment with images thrown onto a challengingsurface, a gigantic outdoor cinema screen. They were projecting videos, of Esa-
Pekka Salonen conducting, of Ed Harris painting in Pollock(2000), a veritable feast
of creative gestures. The only imaginable way to respond to such spectacle was to
regress to primitive film modes. But all in all, what Ive made here is an
ethnographic film of sorts, with the symphony audience as disoriented voyagers in
a potentially hostile environment waiting for their limousines at the corner of First
and Grand, fearful of being swept away by an invisible torrent into the Los Angeles
River. Its a view of the Los Angeles elite rather different from what we see at the
Academy Awards, for example. The carnival in Venice must have been like this.
While one waited for the gondola, everyone was drunk and wearing a mask but at
the same time feeling sort of miserable. The frightened West Sider downtown. I
think the discomfort of people waiting for their cars is a sign of how hard it is to re-
center this city.
ED Disney Concert Hall becomes a symbol of a failed centrality, something that
Los Angeles always has sought but never been able to attain.
AS Exactly. You cant have a center in a city without a heart, to quote the Lou
Rawls song about Chicago. Disney Hall itself radiates the merciless sparkle evoked
by Mike Davis in City of Quartz(1990). It has become the very symbol of the new
downtown, endlessly appearing as a backdrop in television commercials, especially
for automobiles. One of the things the building celebrates is the automotive
impulse, the metallic contours of automotive design, elevated to mannerism. The
building itself is a gift to commercial photographers who use its reflective surfaces
to bounce light onto fashion models and skateboarders. Given Gehrys increasingly
frequent self-presentation as a sculptor-architect, I sometimes think that this
building and the Guggenheim Bilbao can be traced back to the spirit of Laszlo
Moholy-Nagys Light-Space Modulator(1930).
ED This would be one way of inserting Disney Concert Hall within a lineage of
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modernism. What about its function as myth in contemporary Los Angeles?
AS I was struck by how frequently the building has been described as a ship,
heading inland to the center of the city, as if returning from a world voyage. Gehry
himself acknowledges the billowing sails of the Dutch merchantmen and warships
painted by Hendrick Vroom in the seventeenth century. Here we run up against the
nonidentity of Los Angeles as a maritime city, a city that acknowledges its beaches
but denies its port, one of the biggest in the world. The triumphalism of the
building obscures a more embarrassing lesson about Californias history in the
development of world capitalism. Outbound ships of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, loaded with hides and gold, and then oranges and oil, are
replaced by inbound vessels of the present carrying toys from China.
ED So has Disney Hall then become an allegory for our collective voyage as
inhabitants of Los Angeles?
AS Perhaps its a reworking and reversal of an older, modernist allegory of
Southern California; think of Louis Kahns Salk Institute (1965) with its central
linear trench bearing out into the Pacific, starkly perpendicular with the horizon.
This suggests a voyaging quest, the buildings existential project propels it
outward. The biologist as modern day Odysseus. But the Southern California coast
itself is dry and forbidding, lacking even the siren song of the gold rush further
North. So the myth would have it, Disney Hall finally brings the quenching liquidity
of music to a heartless and dry commercial center. Gehrys gift to the city, the
blinding brightness and reflective heat of the buildings surface, a property shared
to a degree with Richard Meiers Getty Center (1997), may be too much of a good
thing.
ED A certain material hyperbole, everything taken to a point of exaggeration and
excess.
AS Very characteristic of Los Angeles culture, but also something satirized within
the local social realist tradition. Think of Arturo Bandini surviving only on oranges
donated by a kindly Japanese fruit monger in John Fantes Bunker Hill novel,Ask
the Dust(1939). A sickening surplus toxifies the very symbol of Californias
invigorating bounty. I think Gehrys aggressiveness as an architect is encoded in
that manner. Despite sophisticated design software, no one seems to have
calculated that Disney Halls complicated lenticular surfaces could momentarily
blind bus drivers or elevate by 20 degrees the interior temperature in adjacent
buildings. Los Angeles is a city of sunshine and bright reflective surfaces, so lets
give people more. Lets give people more oranges.
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Allan Sekula, Gala, 2005, digital video transferred to DVD, 26 minutes. Director/camera: Allan
Sekula; Editor: Elizabeth Hesik.
ED Is Disney Concert Hall a building that fundamentally does not want to
acknowledge its location?
AS Bakers piece quotes Gehry as saying in retrospect that he would have
preferred to build the Concert Hall on the westside and not downtown. Despite the
lineup of famous architects along Grand Avenue the downtown story is a clear case
of subordination of artist-architects to the larger schemes of development
companies.
ED This legacy of dashed hopes dates back at least to architect Arthur Ericksons
1980 California Plaza Masterplan. A curtain wall granting visual access to theexhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art and expansive outdoor plazas were
eventually sacrificed to the maximizing of rentable commercial space.
AS So we end up instead with Arata Isozakis little jewel like MOCA (1986) flanked
by nondescript high rises. Ironically, if the real estate bubble doesnt burst,
Gehrys building will one day also be hemmed in and thus shaded by a forest of
new skyscrapers.
ED This also confirms that architects and urban planners have lost any effective
control over the design of the built environment.
AS Definitely. Baker pointed out to me that although the City of Los Angeles is
looking for a chief city planner, this has generated shockingly little publicdiscussion.
ED It is revealing if we contrast this with the situation in local museums, for
articles about the director searches at the Los Angeles County Museum and the
Getty Museum frequently appear in the Los Angeles Times. The city planner
position goes virtually unmentioned, while selecting new heads of art museums is
thoroughly debated.
AS The overall shift is toward a highly visible institutional culture and invisible
civic affairs corrupted by the pressure of political fund-raising.
ED How does one rethink the practice of social documentary in such a setting?
AS Facing the Musicstarts with this question, calling both the genre and the social
milieu to account. It shares this imperative with a few recent independent non-
fiction films. James Bennings Los (2001) insists on sustained looking at the
physical environment of the city in a way that challenges the prevailing narrative
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codes of documentary and actually comes close to the cataloging embraced by
many photographers but with a different temporality. We need to acknowledge
that there was a great period of social documentary in Los Angeles stretching from
the 1930s through the early 1960s. The key figures are few and mostly forgotten.
Perhaps now is the time to rehistorcize the work of photographers Leonard Nadel
and Max Yavno, who gave us distinctive Los Angeles versions of Lewis Hine and
the Ashcan School. We could also place figures as disparate as Weegee and Ed
Ruscha within this West coast lineage.
We can also reassess, as Thom Andersen does in his film Los Angeles Plays Itself
(2004), the importance of neglected figures like Kent McKenzie and his films
Bunker Hill(1959) and The Exiles (1961). Partly this is a question of culturalretrieval, but I think the current drive to re-center the city on the part of its elites
calls for timely and dialectical counter argument. Just as people were and are
evicted, and buildings demolished so also genres have been discredited and
neglected. Los Angeles becomes the graveyard of documentary.
ED Does Los Angeles really present unique obstacles to a documentary sensibility?
AS The prevailing ideas are that everything is a mutable palimpsest, that social
identity is dissolved by the endless masquerade of self-improvement, that there is
no layer that can be designated as truth. The very mutability of the landscape, the
sense of its ceaseless change and false facades confounds classic documentary
notions of correspondence between the look of the place or thing or person and
essential economic reality such as we might find in Walker Evanss SharecroppersBoots (1936). This is what makes Ed Ruschas book Real Estate Opportunities
(1970) so shattering in its marriage of bleakness and sunny optimism. So things
can be visible but they can also be occluded at the same time.
ED This seems to be one of the main techniques of Los Angeles, to occlude
precisely by making something spectacular.
AS Hyperbole is the main stock in trade of publicists, boosters and even anti-
boosters in some artists. Yet redemptive hyperbole and apocalyptic hyperbole
amount to the same thing. We should be alert to the way to booster discourse
circles back into apocalyptic foreboding and vice versa. The prosaic and often
boring reality of the grimy present moment is always excused either by imagining
a better future or an even worse one.
ED What is most elusive is what we might describe as an honest materiality.
AS Right. Here we are now and this is the situation we face.
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Allan Sekula, Dripping Black Trapezoid (Lendo, 12/22/02). From _Black Tide/Marea Negra, 2002-
03.
ED Then what about the politics of the exhibition? Is there a possibility that Facing
the Musiccould trigger a process of repressive tolerance in which it reads as
confirming the intrinsically open and democratic character of Los Angeles culture
and politics?
AS At this point its hard to say. A favorable article on the show appeared in the
Los Angeles Times, and a writer for the Downtown News, which by and largereflects central city business interests, expressed similar views. Both pieces
emphasized the critical stance of work in the show but found the playfulness and
sometimes deliberately absurd attention to neglected details disarming. Maybe we
have stumbled upon a Trojan horse strategy. People from the Philharmonic are
actually visiting the Redcat space for the first time, which fulfills some of our
ambitions for new audience relations. Overall, what I would like to see is a
dialogue among artists, musicians, architects, planners, neighborhood activists and
ordinary citizens about the future of the city. At the very least, I hope that Facing
the Musicwill disrupt the uncritical celebration of the new downtown.
ED What about your latest film project, Lottery of the Sea?
AS Actually, Im working on two film projects, the other of which is a collaborationwith my friend Nol Burch. That film, called The Forgotten Space, begins and ends
with questions about the maritime imaginary in the work of Frank Gehry, and asks
what we can make of the connection, or disconnection, between this sci-fi neo-
baroque space of architecture and the space of the cargo container, linchpin of the
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global factory system. But that project is not as far along, since we are still looking
for final production money. Lottery of the Sea was a way for me to continue my
apprenticeship as a filmmaker, working slowly with material I filmed myself
between 2001 and 2004. At this point it is nearly done, and since last November
Ive been showing it as a work-in-progress, for example at the Vienna Film
Museum.
ED How does Lottery of the Sea extend the project ofFish Story, your earlier
inquiry into contemporary maritime life? And how does the notion of risk conveyed
in its title, which is taken from Adam Smiths Wealth of Nations, relate to the films
geopolitical investigations?
AS It struck me that Smith introduces the concept of risk entirely through
examples drawn from seafaring and sea trade: the sailor who risks all for meager
pay, incommensurate with his skills; the wealthy ship owner who insures himself
against risk by funding a fleet large enough to offset the inevitable loss of
individual vessels. The concept of risk emerges with a measure of human
sympathy and understanding, based no doubt on Smiths own life-world at the
edge of the North Sea, that is completely absent from the musings of our
contemporary apostles of the free market.
As is the case in Fish Story, I follow a meandering path from ocean to ocean, and
from ocean to sea, but with different landfalls and departures. The film begins in
Japan, moves to Panama and concludes in Spain, stopping first on the oil-fouled
Atlantic coast of Galicia, and ending with the redeveloped Mediterranean littoral ofBarcelona. Along the way, there are a number of detours, to the ancient agora in
Athens and to the port of Piraeus, to a millionaires fair in Amsterdam, to a
number of demonstrations in different cities against neoliberalism and then against
the war in Iraq. In each of these contexts, risk takes on new meaning, is
refracted differently by circumstances. The narration asks a question: What does
it mean to be a maritime nation, to harvest the sea, or to rule the waves? This is
posed for the inherently unstable power relations of the western Pacific, but
applies less literally to choices faced in Panama and Spain, choices having to do
with sovereignty and our fragile dominion over the sea.
ED In what way does the scene of the cleaning of the oil spill in Spain suggest a
new form of global activism? The human chain presented a powerful allegory for
the nature of cooperative struggle in the twenty-first century.
AS I was invited to Galicia in December 2002 by the Barcelona newspaper La
Vanguardia, to make a project about the Prestige disaster for their weekly cultural
supplement. Given what was already evident about the indifference, callousness
and mendacity of the response to this calamity by Spains ruling party at the time,
the right-wing Partido Popular, it occurred to me yet again that Spain was a
breaking point in the hegemony of neoliberal ideology. What I produced for the
newspaper was a sketch for a libretto for an imaginary opera, Black Tide,
accompanied by photographs. I invited readers to contribute lyrics, and even wrote
one brief verse in Gallego myself. While in Galicia, I also shot film. The idea
emerged, for both the newspaper project and the film, that here was a new kind of
popular resistance to the neoliberal disavowal of risk, a collective Sisyphus. The
oil rolls in on the tide, and people work and work again, often without even the
simplest of tools, their thumbs and fingers glued together into crude trowels. Of
course the inner circles of a government influenced by Opus Dei might well have
cynically celebrated the baroque beauty of this collective mortification of the flesh,
but that was not the sort of thing that could be expressed openly in Spain at the
time, although it was implicit in many press photographs. In fact, people worked
with a resignation that was angry rather than submissive. And in time, that anger,
fueled by even more official lies, brought down a government.
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