Installation view of Everything Loose Will Land. Photography by Joshua White, 2013.
Everything Loose Will Land was an exhibition exploring the cross-pollination that took place between architects and artists in Los Angeles in the 1970s, a time when the autonomy of art forms yielded to convergences, collaborations, borrowings and more. The exhibition was curated by Sylvia Lavin, Director of Critical Studies and MA/PhD Programs, UCLArchitecture, and featured projects by Peter Alexander, Carl Andre, Eleanor Antin, Archigram, Billy Al Bengston, Larry Bell, Denise Scott Brown, Judy Chicago, Peter de Bretteville, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Environmental Communications, Frank Gehry, Gruppo 9999, Victor Gruen, Craig Hodgetts, Andrew Holmes, Nancy Holt, Robert Irwin, Ray Kappe, Robert Kennard, Allan Kaprow, Ed Kienholz, Alison Knowles, Leonard Koren, L.A. Fine Arts Squad, Morphosis, Ed Moses, Bruce Nauman, Maria Nordman, Peter Jon Pearce, Cesar Pelli, Jef Raskin, Ed Ruscha, SITE, Robert Smithson, Paolo Soleri, StudioWorks, Bernard Tschumi, Venturi & Rauch, and others.
The exhibition presented wide variety of both well known and never before seen works of different media, including Untitled (Equilateral Triangle), a large-scale outdoor sculpture by Bruce Nauman from 1980; an interactive installation of Bloxes by Jef Raskin; a portion of Curved Space Playground Structure, an elaborate cellular crawl structure made from polycarbonate plastic with aluminum struts by product designer Peter Jon Pearce from 1980; and a selection of models and drawings from the Gehry Architects archive.
Taking its name from the notorious Frank Lloyd Wright quip, “Tip the world on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles,” the exhibition argued that L.A.’s infamous “looseness” provided a medium for exciting developments in art and architecture. Breaking out of the traditional strictures that governed their practices, artists and architects mingled freely and adopted methodologies from one another. Artworks increasingly came to resemble architecture, and architects began to produce objects independent of the building process. Artists and architects alike explored commercial tools, industrial materials and new photographic processes, extending the realm of possibilities for both fields. Audiences became active participants in art and design and the city itself, made increasingly volatile by both social upheaval and environmental crisis, became an essential material in cultural production of all types. The exhibition presented drawings, photographs, media works, sculpture, prototypes, models, and ephemera, seen throughout the Schindler House and its grounds.
Everything Loose Will Land was part of Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. This collaboration, initiated by the Getty, brought together seventeen local cultural institutions from April through July for a wide-ranging look at the postwar built environment of the city as a whole, from its famous residential architecture to its vast freeway network, revealing the city’s development and ongoing impact in new ways.
Related events
Major support for the Everything Loose Will Land exhibition and catalog was provided by the Getty Foundation. The catalog was made possible by the generous support of Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown.