by Alex Wells
According to the wall text, OPEN is Olafur Eliasson’s “first major solo exhibition” in Los Angeles. This is shocking. Not because he is so interesting that any decent curator or gallery director in America’s second art city should’ve imported him by now (he’s not), but because everything in the show will look incredibly familiar to everyone in Los Angeles.
That is: it looks like stuff you see at a rave. Or, to be more precise and less charitable, it looks like what things at a rave look like while the nerd about to do the wall projections is still hungover and setting his gear up in his rubber pants. Look: a rainbow. Not just a rainbow, though, a rainbow projected on the wall. Thank heavens for Mister Eliasson, without him and whatever combination of nepotism, investment capital and/or international rich person party introduction brought him to the MOCA when and wherever could we expect to see a rainbow projected on the wall other than in every single day in every bar in West Hollywood west of La Cienega? Where could we expect to see an expensive-looking geodesic fly-eye with some bad Star Trek warp-gate graphics except maybe Universal Studios and like eight places in Vegas? What experience could compare to Eliasson’s funhouse-like mirror rooms centered around banal geometric abstractions (aside from, maybe perhaps, one of our nation’s hundreds or thousands of funhouse mirror-rooms)?
Is the snobbery of the art world so snob it can’t admit that sometimes even art people look at things that are not in museums? And that many of these things are far trippier than the domesticated reflections, projections and “prismatic experiences” that Olafur Eliasson and his millions have brought us.
Real people like these shows, go to them, and say they are good. They probably just miss doing drugs.
Image: Photo courtesy of MOCA.