‘Paradise Oasis Real Estate Office’ Sees Artifice of Greed
With real estate so central to the California experience these days, it seems only natural that art should grapple with the phenomenon.
In an installation titled “Paradise Oasis Real Estate Office” at SPARC, German artist Christel Dillbohner; her husband, Gero Leson, an environmental consultant, and three American friends take a semidocumentary look at the ill-fated master-planned community California City.
Aggressively marketed as a dream location for real estate investment in the 1960s, the 90,000-lot private development languishes north of Los Angeles on 100,000 still-arid acres of Mojave Desert. Its current population is about 7,200, the artists said.
Using collage, photography, video, documentary displays and a full-scale composite of a vaguely seedy real estate office--complete down to the business cards--that takes up one end of the SPARC gallery, Dillbohner and friends set out to explore some of the fundamental dreams, contradictions and ironies of American society as manifest in the profit-driven booms and busts of real estate.
Leson first came upon California City three years ago, when he got lost in a maze of dirt roads that led nowhere while on a drive to Red Rock Canyon. He and Dillbohner became fascinated with the sparsely inhabited settlement and its historic analogies to the headlong development of Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. Dillbohner said they were also intrigued by “the American dream to own real estate and make fast and easy money--and how that’s taken advantage of.”
?? As foreigners, Leson said, he and Dillbohner were surprised to see the birth of such a large-scale community left entirely to private developers. “It’s a form of development you don’t find much in Europe, where there are more stringent government controls and less availability of space,” he said.
Dillbohner said, “And people still fall for the dream--nothing has really changed.” Indeed, with prices for homes there in the $70,000 range, and lot prices one-third that and less, according to the exhibition, California City could look positively alluring to Angelenos.
“Paradise Oasis Real Estate Office, a Parable for the American Dream,” through May 27 at the SPARC Gallery, 685 Venice Blvd., Venice. (213) 822-9560. Open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday. Artists’ lecture on the exhibition at 11 a.m. May 19.
BURKHARDT REDUX: Jack Rutberg Fine Arts is extending through May its extensive show of recent pastels, paintings and mixed-media constructions by Hans Burkhardt.
Burkhardt, 85, has never received the notice some feel he has deserved, partly because he moved away from New York to Los Angeles in 1937--before the Abstract Expressionist movement, with which he is generally associated, reached full flower. Once a protege of Arshile Gorky, Burkhardt taught at Cal State Northridge and other Los Angeles art schools.
Recently, interest in the artist has intensified. Last year, Burkhardt’s work was brought to the attention of the influential New York art critic Donald Kuspit, who offered to write the catalogue essay for a recent solo show of Burkhardt’s work at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania.
Lamenting the “decades of neglect” that have befallen this artist--some of whose techniques predate by 20 years the well-known work of Anselm Kiefer--Kuspit points to “his major achievement, the creation of an authentic tragic modernist style, that is, an abstract style that could articulate a tragic sensibility.”
Kuspit also calls Burkhardt, who has tackled the issue of war during various historic conflagrations, “a master--indeed the inventor--of the abstract memento mori .”
“Hans Burkhardt, Paintings and Pastels 1988-1989” through May at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, 357 N. La Brea. (213) 938-5222. Open 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday. PACIFIC RIM PAST: Emma-Louise Hayley’s shop on Melrose Avenue--which sells late 18th- and early 19th-Century hand-colored engravings--isn’t technically a gallery. But its clearly arranged wares hung on well-lighted white walls make it more suitable for looking at art than many print venues.
On display now, amid more predictable botanical offerings, is a small collection of 18th-Century curiosities documenting Capt. James Cook’s voyages of discovery.
Hand-colored engravings, transcribed from drawings by an artist aboard the Cook vessel, realistically portray the Pacific Island natives of the 1770s in portraits that miss no detail of hairstyle, facial marking or headgear. Also on view are water scenes showing the natives’ sometimes surrealistically elaborate boats.
“At that time, this was the way people found out about faraway places,” said Hayley. “The artist could have made the natives look pretty and much more European, but instead they look bizarre. And I’m sure they did look bizarre when you came upon them out of the jungle.”
Emma-Louise Hayley, 8642 Melrose Ave. (213) 657-9580. Open 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Friday and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday.
