WESTSIDE STORIES

“Ever since Del Vaz Projects moved to Santa Monica in 2020, I’ve been thinking of a program that would put contemporary art into a dialogue with the historic homes in this area. For ‘Against the Edge’, I have drawn on Norman Klein’s History of Forgetting [1997], in which he uses the idea of the ‘anti-tour’ of places that don’t or no longer exist. I’m interested in Klein as a guide to a kind of style: both as an author and a teacher at CalArts, Klein practiced a form of storytelling in which history and possible fictions merge into this kind of mythmaking, for which he uses the psychological term ‘imago’. ‘Against the Edge’ only features sites that still physically exist, however, and even if some of their histories have been ‘forgotten’, there is active effort in keeping them alive.

So, the purpose of bringing these artists into relation with these sites is to create new stories that, like Klein’s narrative, live somewhere between fiction and fact. For example, bringing the work of Kelly Akashi, as the daughter of imprisoned Japanese-Americans, into the home of the Feuchtwangers: exiled Jews escaping death camps. Did Isamu Noguchi, who electively selfinterned in the Japanese-American camps, and in 1951 had a tea ceremony at the Eames House a short drive away, ever meet the Feuchtwangers and their circle? Nicola L. didn’t really live in LA until she was close to passing away, but using her work to queer the Thomas Mann House, also raises a kind of ‘what if ... ’. Thus, the program is about weaving these new, partly fictionalized stories, out of the record.

We are staging a performance in the Santa Monica Pier’s Merry-Go-Round Building to, in a way, kick off the ‘Against the Edge’ program. This building was the site of the first proper exhibition Walter Hopps curated, ‘Action 1’, in 1954. Hopps covered the carousel in tarp and hung art from it: a kind of inverted anticipation of the rotunda of Guggenheim, where he would later make major exhibitions. Was it almost a premonition?

The piece we are staging is John Cage’s Speech [1955], which formed part of ‘Action 1’, and is scored for five radios, each tuned to different stations. Operators shifting the radio dials, creating an unorganized, unthreaded sound event. Again, it’s about that disjunctive overlap of sources, that mingling of real information and partial accounts, that produces an imago of the city.”