‘Made in L.A.,’ at the Hammer, Excavates Hollywood’s Past
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Version 0 of 1. GUADALUPE, Calif. — Daniel R. Small climbed the sand dunes here as carefully as a tour guide scaling ancient Egyptian ruins. “Up there,” he said, sidestepping a scrap of wood and motioning to a pile of rubble in the distance, “was where the temple once stood. To the right, half of a sphinx is still buried in the sand.” Yet this stretch of land along the Pacific Coast, known as the Rancho Guadalupe Dunes, proves a novel sort of archaeological site. It’s where Cecil B. DeMille filmed the Exodus scenes of his 1923 silent spectacle, “The Ten Commandments,” building an elaborate set that he later buried so that no competing director could use it. And Mr. Small is not a student of Egyptology but an artist whose interest in the excavations of this biblical proxy has shaped a major project in the new Hammer Museum biennial exhibition, “Made in L.A. 2016.” On a site visit this month, he pointed out some shrapnel scattered across the dunes, likely from steel cables used to buttress the temple facade. He also spotted some concrete chunks that could have been used, he speculated, for stairs or risers. “But now that these pieces have been wind-whipped or sandblasted for nearly 100 years, they look like tablets from Egypt,” he said. “It’s so bizarre: The longer the set is exposed to the elements, the more authentic it seems somehow.” Filling an entire room at the Hammer Museum with artifacts from Guadalupe, Mr. Small’s work plays with current notions of the artist as archaeologist. It’s also one of several projects in the biennial digging into the early history of Hollywood, seeking some insight into today’s image-obsessed culture. In one gallery, Martine Syms nods to early Hollywood as a wild frontier with her remake of the 1907 Edwin S. Porter film “Laughing Gas.” In another, Margaret Honda puts the raw materials and the mechanical processes of Hollywood filmmaking in the spotlight, creating intense perceptual experiences out of celluloid and light that unexpectedly recall ephemeral works of the Southern California installation pioneers James Turrell and Robert Irwin. The curators, Aram Moshayedi and Hamza Walker, said they did not seek out a Hollywood focus for the show, the Hammer’s third biennial devoted to emerging or underrecognized artists in Los Angeles. But Mr. Walker said the theme “makes sense, given the porous nature of the artworks we were thinking about — where music, fashion, film and poetry all rub shoulders with visual art.” Rubbing shoulders suggests a friendly encounter. The history of video art especially can be read as a critique of the dominant — some would say repressive — Hollywood entertainment complex, starting with anti-narrative artists like Nam June Paik and Bruce Nauman. But the artists in “Made in L.A.” treat Hollywood’s image bank and its technological achievements as source material, no better or worse than their friends’ Instagram feeds. Their interest seems earnest, not satirical. Ms. Syms’s work especially is a sponge: A related video in the New Museum’s 2015 triennial was praised by The New Republic as a “25-minute hopscotch through the history of representations of African Americans in sitcoms.” At the Hammer, she now celebrates the fluid, anything-goes inventiveness of early Hollywood with her homage to “Laughing Gas,” which featured Bertha Regustus in the comedic lead role. Her character leaves the dentist chair still under the influence of nitrous oxide, and her raucous laugh infects everyone she meets. “I liked the idea of a black female body with autonomy, moving independently through a public space,” said Ms. Syms. She drew on her own absurd experience at the dentist for her version, set in present-day Los Angeles. The video begins as Ms. Syms, playing with her smartphone, learns only moments after receiving anesthesia that insurance won’t cover wisdom-teeth removal — prompting her to get up from the dentist’s chair and stumble home. (All real-life events, the artist said.) Ms. Syms incorporates a big-laugh snippet from “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and even turns a clip from the original silent film into a GIF, ripe for endless looping and recycling. In the “Made in L.A.” catalog, the Los Angeles critic-curator Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer writes about the impact of today’s hyper-accelerated visual culture on the individual, arguing that it’s “more than just ‘too many images too fast’” — it’s resulting in a full-body change. “All is a play of surfaces. All is flow. We digitize ourselves; we circulate and broadcast,” she writes. Ms. Honda’s films in “Made in L.A.” attempt to suspend the flow, with what Mr. Moshayedi, the curator, calls “a denial of imagery.” Ms. Honda, a sculptor, recently began making abstract, cameraless films. For “Color Correction,” she used a Hollywood feature’s timing tapes — rolls of hole-punched paper designed to correct a movie’s colors — to create a feature-length sequence of hues, offering visual rhythms without a story. In “Spectrum Reverse Spectrum” she exposed 70-millimeter film stock to different colors. The 70-millimeter wide-format medium, popularized by lavish Hollywood productions of the 1950s and ’60s (and recently revived by Quentin Tarantino for "The Hateful Eight") was “originally a way to get people out to the movies,” Ms. Honda said, adding, “It gave films like ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ a way to compete with television, as you couldn’t possibly see anything this big at home.” Ms. Honda uses the stuff of escapism to opposite effect — an investigation into our own patterns of attention and perception. “If anything, my work is meant to push you back into your body,” she said. “You hear your own breathing, your chair squeak, someone’s stomach gurgling.” She said the extra-wide, hard-to-take-in-at-one-glance format also appeals to her: “There’s something about the impossibility of seeing things whole — and the pleasures of only seeing things in your mind.” Her films will be projected on scheduled dates at the Billy Wilder Theater, inside the Hammer Museum. Cases containing film reels are arranged on a pedestal in the galleries, as sculpture. Mr. Small’s work also has a sculptural element: It consists of glass cases displaying plaster fragments of sphinxes, odd Roman coins and other artifacts from the Guadalupe site (many are on loan from the town’s visitor center). On the walls hang large Technicolor-hued Egyptian-themed paintings once made for the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas. His project operates like a museum within a museum and an intricate restaging of an elaborate stage set, creating a hall of mirrors where visitors can see old Hollywood reflected in the eyes of today’s new artists. |