Lily Simonson and Catherine Wagley, contributers to art:21 Blog -- have a new bi-weekly dispatch about art in Los Angeles.
For our first dispatch from the LA art world, we visited the exhibition Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples, on view at LACMA until October 4. The show features sculptures, paintings, and tapestries that adorned the private villas of the Roman elite, and is accompanied by Eleanor Antin’s The Last Days of Pompeii (Season 2), a project that brings ancient decadence to SoCal. Thoughts about aged culture, contemporary art and the City of Angels prompted the following conversation:
Catherine Wagley: Here in LA, even authentic antiquity feels like faux antiquity. That’s why I avoid shows like Pompeii. I feel so limited as a viewer–I have no concept of Pompeii as a place that occupied a past era; instead, when I look at the artifacts on exhibit, I start thinking about decorations on the Getty’s fountains. But I actually enjoyed the LACMA show because it addresses this very conundrum.
Lily Simonson: Yes, there is virtually no history embodied anywhere in Los Angeles, and that is very unsettling. My neighborhood in Hollywood is overrun by European tourists taking pictures of the Walk of Fame and trying to get to the Hollywood Sign. Is that our Eiffel Tower? Yikes! Our history is all about cultural production and artifice, so everything begins to seem inauthentic or reproducible.
Anyway, I agree that LACMA gracefully embraced the incongruity of a show like this in Los Angeles, especially by juxtaposing the exhibition with Antin’s Pompeii series. In fact, the Antin piece at once underscored this cultural “mismatch” while highlighting the parallels between the opulent Hollywood Empire and the dangerously extravagant Romans. I’ve been thinking about the inclusion of the Art21-like video that documented Antin’s process making the Pompeii photographs. It made the work feel like a Hollywood production.
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