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    This conversation between George Baker and Tacita Dean marks the final program at LA><ART's Culver City location before reopening in its ne Hollywood space on January 10th, 2015.


    “It was a decade ago. I remember passing slowly through the unfamiliar but homey landscape, on a train from London to Cambridge, or perhaps it was the reverse, with only one book in my bag to read. It was the catalog An Aside: Selected by Tacita Dean, the artist’s first curatorial project, an exhibition at the Camden Arts Centre that I had just seen and that affected me immensely. In some way that I find hard to describe, it was this exhibition that I had foremost in my mind as I proposed and worked on bringing D.E. May’s constructions, abstractions, and objects to Los Angeles. It was the intensity that glowed from Dean’s chosen objects and reclaimed histories that I wanted to remember, to approximate. In my mind, at least, I imagined inserting D.E. May’s work, with all its found objects and materials, into the fabric of Dean’s exhibition, finding a place for it there. Next to Sharon Lockhart’s ikebana photographs, perhaps, or Paul Nash’s images of uprooted trees, or Eileen Agar’s rocks, or Kurt Schwitters’ painted stones.” 
     
    -- George Baker, Los Angeles, 2014
     

    “A show created through a meandering, ill-formed thought process…I described it as a process of objective chance, but I have been more the dilettante than the devotee…Nothing is more frightening than not knowing where you’re going, but then again nothing can be more satisfying than finding you’ve arrived somewhere without any clear idea of the route. I did not, and could not have, pre-imagined this show; it is not at all what I expected it to be, and that’s the point: I have at least been faithful to the blindness with which I set out…” 
     
    -- Tacita Dean, An Aside, 2005


    On the occasion of the closing of D.E. May: Half Distance, the art historian and critic George Baker, curator of the exhibition at LA><ART, engages artist Tacita Dean in a wide-ranging conversation on the found object in and beyond her own work and the work of D.E. May. Immediately following the program there will be a closing reception. 


    This program is organized with support from the Getty Research Institute.

    Discursive Programs at LA><ART is a multi-faceted initiative that generates opportunities for publics to engage with artists, curators, and other cultural producers through intimate conversations, group discussions, research presentations, workshops, and readings. This initiative produces one-time projects and ongoing programs that create unique conditions for intellectual exchange and public engagement. In addition to providing an independent curriculum, Discursive Programs serves as an open forum with partnering institutions, to pursue knowledge through artistic interests, curatorial activities, and interdisciplinary reflection on cultural production today.

    Founded in 2005, LA><ART is Los Angeles’ leading independent contemporary art space supporting and presenting experimental exhibitions, public art initiatives, and publications with emerging, mid-career and established local, national and international artists.
     
    LA><ART's programs are produced with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; The National Endowment for the Arts; The Los Angeles County Arts Commission; Nathan Cummings Foundation, with the support and encouragement of Roberta Friedman Cummings, Dashiell Driscoll and Clea Shearer; The Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation; California Community Foundation; City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs; Foundation for Contemporary Arts; Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; and The Anthony & Jeanne Pritzker Family Foundation.

     

    LA><ART 

    2640 S. La Cienega Blvd. 
    Los Angeles, CA 90034 
    Please RSVP for this free event at: rsvp@laxart.org 

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    Sunday, July 13, 2014, 3pm at LA><ART
    Nir Evron and Norman M. Klein in Dialogue


    Nir Evron will be in dialogue with cultural critic, media historian, and novelist, Norman M. Klein. Evron and Klein will discuss the relationships between sites of history appearing in the artist’s work and the historical nature of specific media used in the work.

     

    Image: Nir Evron, Oriental Arch (2009)

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    Saturday, July 12, 2014, 5pm at LA><ART
    Nir Evron and Orit Raff in Dialogue


    In conjunction with Nir Evron’s exhibition Endurance and Orit Raff’s exhibition Priming, the artists will be in dialogue at LA><ART to discuss their artistic interests and exhibiting work. This program will be immediately followed by the opening reception for the artists’ exhibitions.

     

    Image: Nir Evron, Oriental Arch (2009)

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    LA><ART 
    2640 S. La Cienega Blvd. 
    Los Angeles, CA 90034 
    Saturday, May 3, 2014 at 3pm

    Please RSVP for this free event at: rsvp@laxart.org

     

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    LA><ART 
    2640 S. La Cienega Blvd. 
    Los Angeles, CA 90034 
    Monday, April 7, 2014 at 7pm
    Please RSVP for this free event at: rsvp@laxart.org
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    Sunday, March 2, 2014 at 3pm
    Please RSVP for this free event at: rsvp@laxart.org
     
    Exhibitions, Agents, and Attention: In the Spaces of Ed Ruscha’s Books
     
    Curator, art historian and theorist Beatrice von Bismarck will give a presentation at LA><ART based on her catalogue essay for the exhibition Ed Ruscha: Reading Ed Ruscha at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2012). Her presentation will examine how Ruscha’s books function as an aesthetic, social, and economic spatial structure within which, and by means of which, the artist defines the relations and conditions for his work’s display, circulation, and consumption. For von Bismarck, Ruscha’s books are as much curatorial constellations and exhibitions as they are artistic works. John Tain, curator of modern and contemporary collections at the Getty Research Institute, will engage von Bismarck in a conversation following the presentation, further contextualizing Ruscha’s interests in public display, exhibiting practices, and meaning production.
     
    This program is organized with generous support from the Getty Research Institute and in partnership with the USC Roski MA Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere and MFA programs.
     
    Image Right: © Ed Ruscha
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    Saturday, February 15, 2014 at 3pm
    Please RSVP for this free event at: rsvp@laxart.org
     
    All the Difference in the World Inside a White Cube
     
    In a recent conversation, Raphael Montañez Ortiz, the artist and founder of El Museo del Barrio in New York, said that, at the time the Museo was founded, he thought all of its exhibitions should start with a rainforest. In her presentation at LA><ART, Chus Martínez will consider interpretations into this vision of the rainforest as the preface to every exhibition. For Martínez, Ortiz’s rainforest—as a principle that in its complete otherness and expansive life force defies the notion of a container—introduces what is a novel element to discussions around the politics of the white cube.  
     
    Born in Ponteceso, Spain, Chus Martínez has a background in philosophy and art history. Prior to her newly appointed position as Head of the Institute of Art of the FHNW Academy of Arts and Design in Basel, Switzerland, she was Chief Curator at El Museo del Barrio, New York, and dOCUMENTA (13) Head of Department and Member of Core Agent Group. Previously she was Chief Curator at MACBA, Barcelona (2008–11), Director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein (2005–08), and Artistic Director of Sala Rekalde, Bilbao (2002–05). For the 51st Biennale di Venezia (2005), Martínez curated the National Pavilion of Cyprus, and in 2008 she served as a Curatorial Advisor for the Carnegie International and in 2010 for the 29th Bienal de São Paulo.
     
    Chus Martínez’s presentation at LA><ART is part of the touring Curator’s Perspective––a free, itinerant public discussion series ICI developed as a way for international curators to share their research and experiences. The Curator’s Perspective series has been made possible, in part, by grants from the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation and by generous contributions from the ICI Board of Trustees and ICI Access Fund.
     
    This event is organized in collaboration with ICI, LACMA and LA><ART. 
     
    Presented with generous support from