Well it might be a stretch.  She must think those people standing and walking around are looking.  She’s kind of still there.  All those people thinking she’s got something — just looking straight ahead.  That long dress.  That little plinth she’s standing on.  That kind of white greasepaint.  That pharaoh getup.

Wait a minute.  No plinth — no greasepaint and no getup and she’s seated at one of two opposing chairs at a plain wood table about in the center of the atrium — not standing in front of the building — lit by the kind of lights behind scrim you might see on a movie set.  There are people standing and walking in the space — the event space.1  One by one someone sits in the chair she is not sitting in and looks at her — what — make her blink — crack up.  Something juvenile going on in their heads — faint hope — or some nominally higher delusion.  Some kind of transmission says the Museum.  Shit you not.  Check the site.

Check the photo stories high — looks like cinema — you got to see passing into the balance of the show.  We know she looks to sources.  She hears back in Belgrade about Chris Burden driven up and down the streets of Los Angeles nailed to a VW bug and hauled in by the cops.2  Well one hears what one wants to hear and knows what what wants to know and uses those things as one chooses.

From Belgrade in 1974 she for sure knows Volkswagens but what does she know of the alleys of Venice and Santa Monica then or the sound of the bug — engine redlining without a doubt —  pushed out into that light in front of the garages and in back of the storefronts — or the artists and other sorts of garage tinkerers inside about to mess with your head.3  Guy nailed to a car.  Process the image.  Dude — did I really see that — not dude — did he really do that.

Misreadings are what they are.  So from her we get all that meaning — all that blood and guts and pain and tears and its all so heavy.  What she does is just absent those southern California artists’ spectacular indifference to those — what — themes — institutional fodder really.  More.  If someone’s supplicating here damn straight its not her.4  The implementation of hierarchies is staggering.  Scary scene.5  Title of the whole show might read like a bad joke if things didn’t matter.

1. Robert Smithson, Some Void Thoughts on Museums, 1967:  “Museums are tombs, and looks like everything is turning into a museum.  Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit remains.  Art settles into stupendous inertia.  Silence supplies the dominant chord.  Bright colors conceal the abyss that holds the museum together.  Every solid is a bit of clogged air or space.  Things flatten and fade.  The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.”

2.  Marina Abromovic interviewed by Janet Kaplan in The Art Journal, 1999

3. Mostly post-war  LA enthusiast.  Heard described in conversation with  non-native former LA critic now relocated to London.  Burden, Robert Irwin, Michael Asher, Maria Nordman on to Charles Ray, Jason Rhodes, others.

4. Michael Asher on his work in Spaces, the Museum of Modern Art, 1969 / 1970: “The various constituent elements and functions on the space were made accessible to the viewer’s experience.  This was in contradistinction to an installation that would insert a predetermined object between the viewers and their perception of the space, while, at the same time, attempt to control the viewers’ perception, eventually creating a hierarchy between the object and the viewers where the viewers subsequently become subservient to the object.”

5. Lawrence Wiener, 1989: “Art that imposes conditions, human or otherwise, upon the receiver for its appreciation in my eyes constitutes aesthetic fascism.”