Allan Sekula by Edward Dim End Berg

8/3/2019 Allan Sekula by Edward Dim End Berg

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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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