First, Mauricio Duk unveiled his installation, The Un_Invited, on the lawn of the Schindler House, where it remained on view through April 14th. This was a structure designed as a temporary extension of the Schindler House through the continuation of “frames and spaces” derived from the original scheme for the house. Building upon the “ruins” of a former Martin Kippenberger installation—a subway shaft from the artist’s “Metro-Net” series—a fifteen-foot bamboo and canvas tower arrived without invitation.
The tower was linked to the Schindler House by an artificial green wall that formed a new patio through a continuous “folding” of the existing courtyards. Inspired by concepts of defragmentation and reinterpretation both philosophically and architecturally, Duk made the viewer aware of the shift from the intimacy of the horizontal-private scheme to the exposed vertical-public one whose exterior elicited a response to Hollywood’s estrangement. Dualism was invoked by a semi-buried chamber for meditation in the interior and a showcase to screen images of the former inhabitant’s life and metaphors of the “unhomely” in the exterior. It was a place where Schindler shook hands with Sigmund Freud, Ludwig, Wittgenstein, and Arnold Schoenberg.
On February 26th, Jose Pérez de Lama presented Some ideas for an anarchist / zapatista urbanism, a video screening and debut of his website (http://home.earthlink.net/~osfavela2002) at Flor y Canto, an autonomous community center in the Highland Park section of Los Angeles. The project was based on research into the new ways of being in space and time that he perceived were taking place in Los Angeles. Approaching the city as a “post-metropolis” urban laboratory, global, digital, and multi-cultural in aspect, Pérez de Lama utilized his website to present a rhizome of interconnected writings, images, and maps. Among his texts were an exchange of e-mails about Los Angeles, an essay entitled Los Angeles, Sunshine or Cyberpunk?, which discusses ambivalent perceptions of the city, and From the Rear Mirror, a discussion of cultural-urban critiques, by critics such as Reyner Banham, Mike Davis, Norman Klein, and Edward Soja. Other essays considered architectural innovation in Los Angeles, spatial issues in films about the city, “cyberpunk“ fiction by author William Gibson, and an exploration of “Anarchist Geographies,” a concept based on the protests during the 2000 Democratic National Convention. Pérez de Lama also screened his video The E.Z.L.A. Takes Rudolf Schindler’s Kings Road, or Whatever Happened to Rudi’s Promise for America? produced by El Retorno de la Columna Durito (Jose Vergara and J. Pérez de Lama, 2002).
On weekends in February, Richard Hoeck and Kobe Matthys continued their ongoing series of events, Lobby in Rear, in the Mackey Apartments garage, which they turned into a “lobby” for activities focusing on the uses of architecture and urbanism. In the weeks leading up to the exhibition, this space became the site of such events as: a birthday party; garage sale and barbecue; lecture by architect Marie-Paul MacDonald on rock-and-roll spaces; lecture by homeless activist Ted Hayes; documentary screening on the game of cricket as it was played on the Trobriand Islands; video screenings by artists Raymond Pettibon and Bruce Yonemoto; live concerts by Strange World Carnival and Rebel Rebel; screening of political films that paralleled the demonstrations at the European Summit in Brussels; fund-raiser for Zapatista party projects in Mexico; screening of Ed Ruscha’s 1975 film Miracle; and electronic sounds from La Paz, a hip-hop collective and m.signe of NY-based Soundlab, which were broadcast live through the Mountain Radio Project.