Curators take on L.A. Art Scene/Digital Art

L.A. "Rediscovered"


Rex Bruce
Director
Los Angeles Center for Digital Art
107 West Fifth Street
Los Angeles, CA 90013
323 646 9427
http://www.lacda.com

My mind resides in Los Angeles. In my day to day existence the massive amount of sensory material I am exposed to renders my mental constitution abstracted. For myself there is not much distinction in the value of most ideas generated by the cognitively interferential world I live in. Each concept becomes equally unemphasized–a balanced kind of ideological atonality.

L.A. is a cacaphonic shimmering silicon wafer, a vast crust of technologically generated business, transportation and imagistic exchange. It rushes at high velocity through an endless grid of infrastructure that has become a hub for the global. This is a seemingly infinite source of material that runs by my senses–garish and uncontrolled. Most of it I rather like, but of course, so much is toxic and destructive. We need changes. Art that recombines itself in an oblique complicity with the momentum of mechanically produced chatter can be like a hammer that breaks the wafer or makes a crack. Such a breach constitutes a humorous and pleasurable possibility of "re-routing" for change without dictating to others what that change should be.

Something is only "original" and propulsive in that it brings together two or more disparate elements and generates an unexpected meaning from the combination. So from my perspective I live in a high energy (and hilarious) landscape because in California and L.A. most everything I see or experience is a wildly disparate combination. Many recombinations are propelled by the requirement for newness and growth in types of products, media programming, fashion, technology, communications, art and professions compulsory to generate the economic activity that is the lifeblood of our world. The gargantuan collision of multiple cultures that flow into our surroundings mix and mingle. They separate off to "rediscover" themselves and recombine again to create Kosher Burritos and Thai Pizza, or Picture Phones and Net Art (as more obvious examples of very deep reverberations echoing to create the flavorful surface of our existence).

The lack of any purity indicates an inherent propensity for change. I see little primary source or elemental structure in cultures, knowledge, eras, communication, technology or meaning but rather a rootless dynamic of combinations and random mutations. Purity is problematic (and also was the goal of Nazis). Existence is almost predicated by the capability to recombine. Sperm, eggs and DNA. Whipped up things ( L. A. being the ultimate in all things fabricated). The success of a moment can be measured by its sheer variety, quantity and "inter-marriage" of cultural material. The simultaneous representation of differing cultures is concurrent with the crossing or interconnection of their borders.

So it is natural and vital for many artists to reify artifacts from his or her surroundings containing a vision peculiar to that persons unique recombinant constitution from their proximate culture–as well as a culture at large–that denotes a personal narrative or "self." In my case Los Angeles electrifies life into me as its own Frankenstein's Monster constituted by parts of what were perceived as discontiguous bodies: the faces of its population, the products, and landscape. Its worldwide broadcast. Its mobile connectivity. My face and my body.

I produce and exhibit objects (of my own and others) that are the dissonant cross dressers of a city and its relation the international. 'Its/my' mind projects 'its/my' identity. This is not just an expression of identity (or as it turns out the absence thereof) it is also about the momentum inherent in cultural activity and the power that gives an artist or curator to create flux in the energy field that vivifies the necrotic and partially frozen body parts at the core of a large society (in my case a dilapidated downtown Los Angeles and the supercharged art scene there). It is a meltdown, or shock treatment. "De-petrification." "De-putrification." It is a cultural laxative. Everyone knows that there is an incredible quantity of things-that-are-wrong-in-the-world, but most everyone has the feeling of being stuck, or overpowered by the colossal claim on control made by obese economic and political interests.

My agency in being a curator and artist revolves around the instinct I apparently have to lubricate the thought processes of an incredibly multitudinous culture by adding more "mish" to the "mosh" through the products of artful recombination. This could be in the form of a single work of my own, a schedule of exhibits, or a group show. The interpretation of cultural material is always variable and dubious. The final upshot of my activities is like lighting an aesthetic backfire by presenting images, sounds, data, words, and whatever summing up into a hefty quantity of weightless "possibles" or "uncertainties" and injecting it to the best of my ability into my surroundings.

In our era our surroundings have spread into the electronic space of contemporary digital networks, mobile communication, interdisciplinary computer media and their reproduction and dissemination. The "white box" of a traditional gallery can be subsumed as a peripheral component to these technologies.

Art can be a self replicating virus to crash systems of closed mindedness. My goal is to open minds or keep them open. An open minded culture is a viable situation. It is a paradox that a lack of focus (or presence of ideological unclosure) becomes a focal point for cultural ignition.

===========
2005 © rex bruce