serial consign

On contextualizing the several years I've spent on the west coast, I've often remarked that while you can take somebody out of Los Angeles, you can't get the Los Angeles out of them. More than any other city I've spent time in, Los Angeles gets under your skin and alters your perception.

I spent two years studying architecture in Culver City at the beginning of the decade and a variety of internships, research projects and a fellowship at USC have pulled me back to the city time and time again. I used to joke about L.A. being the cultural black hole at the centre of the universe, and while I can't speak for everybody I can certainly attest to the mysterious force the city exerts on me. To define my relationship with the city in terms of love and hate is far too simple. Binaries are altogether inadequate for describing a city clouded by ambiguity and characterized by veneer.

I've recently been challenged to come up with my own personal "Los Angeles aesthetics" and in thinking about this daunting task I've returned to 74 nights, a photo essay tucked away in the depths of my archives and covered by a fine layer of dust. This project (and this post for that matter) is as close to autobiography as you'll ever see here so please excuse this divergence from my usual fare.

In the summer of 2005, I accepted an internship at an architectural firm in Koreatown in midtown Los Angeles. In hindsight, accepting this gig was sort of a golden parachute, a means of escape from a dysfunctional relationship that I was involved in at the time. So that June, I checked into the first of a series of Mid-Wilshire temporary residences with little more than a camera and a copy of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project.

Some combination of my chronic insomnia, post-relationship emotional detritus and a fascination with Benjamin's "indexing" of Paris inspired me to take a stab at archiving my summer. At the time I thought I was simply trying to capture my exploration of the city. In retrospect, I can really see melancholy tattooed all over the vast majority of the shots. Regardless, it was great to get beyond the whitewashed idiosyncrasies of my earlier life in West L.A. and the obligatory archi-tourism demanded by my vocation to get a broader understanding of the urban fabric and texture of the city. I went through two pairs of shoes that summer and my legs perpetually ached as each night after work I often would just pick a direction and walk for six hours straight or until my camera ran out of batteries. I named the project 74 nights, the precise duration of my sojourn, and built a flash interface to share the ever growing body of images with my friends over the course of that summer.

I recently decided to upload 74 nights to my flickr account, so I invite anyone who is interested to give it a look. I have no pretensions of aptitude in photography, and a lot of these images are completely unremarkable. That said, given the personal nature of this work I still consider this project one of my favourite undertakings. A lot of these photographs are burned in my retinas and serve as constant frames of reference in thinking about (my reading of) the essence of Los Angeles. Since I'm looking at this material at the moment it only seemed appropriate to share it here.

[grégory chatonsky / dislocation III - 003 / 2007]

Although I've been aware of his work for a while, I had never had really combed through Grégory Chatonsky's portfolio until yesterday. Networked Performance tipped me off about an upcoming NYC solo show by this multimedia artist that seems rather intriguing. The Invention of Destruction will take place at Galerie Poller this spring/summer (May 8th through July 5th) and is dedicated to exploring "the increasing aesthetization of destruction."

Grégory Chatonsky was born and educated in France and has up until recently been splitting his time between Paris and Montreal. His body of work is quite varied, but he seems rather dedicated to producing stark, provocative imagery across a variety of mediums (including sculpture, photo collage and web based work), he is also a founding member of the net.art collective incident.net.

The image above is from the third iteration of his Dislocation Series, which features an entire suite of "disintegration studies" of decaying asphalt and pavement. These works find a tension through the conflicting geometries of cracked pavement and arrhythmic swaths of negative space which creep in from the edge of each frame. While the subject matter of Dislocation III is urban, Dislocation II investigates the decay of office furniture and domestic objects. The content and tone of this work reminds me of Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Smithson and Felix Schramm. Fans of infrastructural and architectural snuff art should also note the excellent archive of Paul Virilio's Unknown Quantity which was hosted by the Fondation Cartier in 2002-2003.

Chatonsky has also dedicated a significant portion of his artistic output to recontextualizing the narrative of iconic films. The above image is a still from a deadpan 2007 video piece called Vertigo@home which reimagines the infamous Vertigo Tour of San Francisco as taking place through Google's Street View.

This image is from 1=1 which riffs off the abundance of doppelgängers in David Lynch's Lost Highway. The interactive piece takes the fractured narrative of Lynch's dark reading of Los Angeles and expands it into an outright double feature.

Grégory Chatonsky's work is most certainly worth examining and if you find yourself in NYC this summer check out The Invention of Destruction.