From Los Angeles: Made In L.A.

Made in L.A. 2012, featuring more than three months of performances, talks, and installations scattered across the county, is the latest emblem of the reflexive turn in contemporary Californian art since the closing of Pacific Standard Time, the Getty-led but Southern California–wide celebration of thirty-five years of contemporary art in Los Angeles. Between P.S.T.’s launch in March 2011 and the closing of Made in L.A. in September of this year, almost seventy galleries, museums, and art houses in the region will have exhibited hundreds of L.A. artists whose work spans the better half of a century—and one audience-elected winner will walk away with the Mohn Prize of one hundred thousand dollars.

The festival includes a range of aesthetic approaches, from monumental clay sculpture to photography to interactive film, but one of the more striking pieces is Camilo Ontiveros’s El Pedón (2012). Rooted as much in minimalist aesthetics as in social practice methodologies, the piece is primarily about failure. Viewers are invited to gaze upon an empty wooden platform, positioned diagonally to a video monitor showing assistants removing one cubic meter of soil from Mexican land, and a shelf holding a thick stack of papers. These document Ontiveros’s attempts to move soil from Mexico and to the United States as if it was an immigrant. Ultimately, the

Camilo Ontiveros. El Pedón, 2012 (still); cube of soil; one meter. Courtesy of the Artist.

attempts failed: Ontiveros could not get past the governmental red tape. El Pedón is particularly interesting when considered alongside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA) recent acquisition of Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass. The publicly funded LACMA raised ten million dollars in private donations to move three hundred forty tons of granite from Riverside to Los Angeles, according to Heizer’s design. That massive piece of land art throws into relief Ontiveros’s consideration of the forces far greater than capital that control movements across borders.

Made in L.A. is on view at the Hammer Museum, LAXART, and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery through September 2, 2012.

As a performer, video artist and writer, Anna Martine Whitehead explores the intersections of queer identity, blackness, historical trauma and desire. Since completing her MFA in Social Practice at California College of the Arts, she has presented work in San Francisco, New York, L.A., Ann Arbor, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and Gothenburg, Sweden, and is currently based in Los Angeles, where she is investigating temporality and embodied experience, citizenship and economies of queers and people of color.