LA><ART

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