The House by the Sea
I watch clusters of watchers form and dissipate and listen to their voices floating and buzzing like an installation of an installation. There is subtle variance in the crowds from one space to another, the differing ages and fashions, attitudes and conversation. Everyone knows, or will know, or maybe wants to know or is avoiding knowing or is attempting to get to know, everyone else as the city hosts an invisible exhibition, curated by the juxtaposition of freeways, analyzed by stars in the pavement. And then, after a while, I want my quiet Thursday again. And the shuffle continues.
In a metropolis that likes to call itself a town, a city where we travel in cars and neighborhoods are strung together like colored lights along a twisted cord, the small town familiarity found in the art community seems rare. Maybe I am just in a sentimental frame of mind, but it is something to be appreciated. On any given night, you can gather, like I imagine kids doing in small towns in Iowa or Oklahoma or Minnesota at the mall or the pizza parlor, and go to an opening and meet up with friends. There is a minimalist drama to the scene that is endearing, rendering our clichéd image of distance and vacuity a little further from the truth of the day-to-day.
Driving from Santa Monica to downtown, Silverlake to Culver City to look at art, makes the city smaller than it is. The boundaries are less clearly drawn and a new one posed, artists and others trace circles orbiting the smog. The seemingly vast chasms between recent immigrants selling t-shirts near MacArthur Park and Hollywood executives having drinks in Hancock Park, play-dates in Brentwood and families picnicking in Griffith Park, seem less vast through moments of coincidence and common ground. Certainly all professions and groups have their gathering places, their TGI Fridays or meetings for drinks. But while briefcases or peanut bowls have little relevance to those other meetings, the objects are key in gatherings about art. The objects are both pivot and reflection.
Several years ago, maybe a decade now, I was invited with a small group of artists to go to Tijuana and work on a piece of art along with a group of Mexican artists in an event was organized by the Department of Cultural Affairs. I was worried that most of us from Los Angeles were younger and less experienced than our Mexican counterparts. But one of them, Margi, was an American living in Mexico. I remember how she told me about moving there to escape the city. She had lived downtown in a huge loft (when lofts were huge and artists lived in them) filled with materials and equipment, canvases and the stuff-for-making-art so easily accumulated and difficult to shed. She explained that she grew weary of the crowds and the smog and she rarely went out. In Mexico, she lived in the most beautiful little one room shack on the edge of a peak over the ocean in Tijuana. It wasn’t far from the border in literal miles, but it was a lifetime away. Another artist and I slept on the floor of her pretty, crooked, little home and listened to the ocean as we slept.
I’ve had studios in the crumbling basement of an Echo Park house, the extra room of a Silverlake apartment, the huge five-car garage of a friend’s home, and, like Margi, a crowded loft downtown. Always in the back of my mind, there has been a crooked, little cottage at the end of a row or on the edge of a cliff. It sits there like a bubble of somewhere to go when things get hard. In some ways, it is not unlike the suburbs might be for families or retirees, but it is distinctly different. I try to recall an artist whose paintings look something like the place in my head and surf the web in a virtual quest for the work. Synchronously, I recall his work is also on this site. The first time I saw Andre Yi’s paintings, they seemed familiar, structures suspended like memories amidst tiny waves and on flat surfaces, painted with colors that look like they’re pulled from a dream. Scratch the shiny surface of our city and you have a web of relativity.
Recently, there was an auction for the work of artist Margi Scharff. The funds were to help her with treatment for ovarian cancer. She is living in India now. I think, but am not certain, it is the same Margi from Tijuana. Life draws lines around memories until particulars like surnames and street signs disappear. But images and smells and sounds meld into something like understanding, if not fact, and in my memory, the two are linked – Margi by the sea and Margi in the East. She’s connected to this city of facades. Through conversation and hearsay, painting and video, colleagues and friends, we still hear the sound of the ocean.
Annie Buckley is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles, CA
(Copyright Annie Buckley, July/August 2006)
