On View | Why You Should Visit a 13-Foot-Long Art Museum in Southern California New York Times T-Magazine
By KAVERI NAIR JULY 17, 2013, 1:00 PM 4 CommentsLike the courtyard houses of Marrakesh, Los Angeles’s residential architecture turns inward, away from the busy boulevards. The result is a lot of inhospitable public space, but it can also produce a special kind of pleasure. There’s a thrill, specific to L.A., in finding an amazing restaurant in a strip mall, or venturing down an alleyway past a chain-link fence to encounter the Los Angeles Museum of Art.
Not to be confused with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the gleaming institution on Wilshire Boulevard, 10 miles to the west, this museum, known as LAMOA, is a hand-built, 13-foot-long wooden structure. It sits in a paved yard near a small cluster of art studios in Eagle Rock, a neighborhood where many artists live and work. When visitors arrive, the museum’s founder and sole staff member, the sculptor Alice Könitz, greets them with a friendly wave.
“There’s a scale difference” between LAMOA and other L.A. museums, Könitz explained, with considerable understatement. “It’s, like, me running it, instead of hundreds of professionals.” As a result, Konitz adds, though LAMOA is public, “it’s also really private.”
Könitz came to L.A. from Düsseldorf 15 years ago to attend Cal Arts, and her work reveals a sensitivity to her surroundings that perhaps only a transplant could have. LAMOA is not her first crack at redefining public space: since 2001, she has been intermittently working on a scheme to build an elevator to an abandoned section of the Glendale freeway overpass, so that visitors can experience its vast, concrete emptiness. (The project is still in need of financing.)
While it may be an art piece in itself, LAMOA is primarily an exhibition space for Könitz’s artistic community, a way of “stepping away from art making and just seeing what other people are doing; seeing if I offer this to the community, what ideas would generate.”
One member of that community is Katie Grinnan, whose sculpture “FYI” is on view at LAMOA until early August and will travel to the Print Center in Philadelphia in September. The work consists of a lime-green steel structure that holds a collection of hanging files filled with all kinds of printed matter. Grinnan asked her personal contacts for “information” that they would like to share and created a filing system around their contributions. Visitors are invited to add their own information or simply browse what’s there already.
As a constellation of niche interests and a display of free association (one sequence of files includes “Crafts,” “Trucker’s Hitch Knot,” “Jacknifing & Iron Lungs,” “Building & Machines” and “Noise & Capitalism”), “FYI” evokes social media or Web surfing. The floor, in fact, is tiled with pictures pulled from YouTube. But in an aggressively bricks-and-mortar gesture, the screen grabs are printed on concrete. “I wanted you to stand on those images,” Grinnan explained. “I didn’t want to mirror the space of the computer.”
To Könitz, “FYI” is “a little bit like Facebook but completely different. It’s like an archaic version of it.” So archaic that in order to share, you have to show up: “You have to walk down this alley,” she said. “You can find it on the Internet, everyone can come, but you don’t really come as an anonymous guest. You sort of have to deal with me, and you will deal with the art.”
The museum is open Sundays from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. and by appointment; “FYI” is on view through August 11. 4328 Eagle Rock Blvd., Los Angeles; losangelesmuseumofart.blogspot.com
- Exhibitions
- Black Holes - In Front Of at LaLoma Projects 2023
- Substrata at EPOCH Gallery
- Domestic Pavilion 2019
- DS #7 2018
- Pavilion of the Present 2018
- Pavilion of Coveted Goods 2017
- Das LAMOA präserntiert: Mülheim/Ruhr und die 1970er Jahre, Museum der Stadt Mülheim/Ruhr 2017 Part 1
- Das LAMOA präserntiert: Mülheim/Ruhr und die 1970er Jahre, Museum der Stadt Mülheim/Ruhr 2017 Part 2
- Circle Chairs Triangle Chairs, Main Museum 2017
- Knowledges, Mount Wilson Observatory 2017
- Pistachio Concern, DXIX 2017
- Beton, Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg 2016
- Commonwealth at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles 2016
- Dr Gundula's Office at Nächst St Stephan, Vienna 2015
- Made In LA UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles 2014
- Alice Könitz, Nicolau Vergueiro. Tyler Vlahovich at Wharton + Espinosa, Los Angeles, 2013
- The Wall House Mystery, Groningen, 2012
- A Leash for Fritz & Kale for Stray Bunny, with Stephanie Taylor in Berlin at Motto, 2012
- Familientreffen, with Peter Könitz at Kunstverein Norden, 2011
- WDF Long Beach City College Art Gallery, 2011
- Dr Gundula's Waiting Room/Matryoshka, New York 2011
- High Desert Test Sites Swapmeet, Yucca Valley 2010
- Icon/SUNZOOMSPARK at WPA, Los Angeles 2010
- The Premonition at Lax with Arthur Ou, Los Angeles 2009
- Whitney Biennial, New York 2008
- Hug Fu, Collaboration with With Stephanie Taylor and Kathryn Andrews, Daniel Hug, Los Angeles 2007
- Circle Lamp, Table for a family of three Smokers, Circle Lamp at Bellwether, New York 2007
- Laying Bricks: Banana Peel Rug, Double Table, Wallpiece at Wallspace, New York 2007
- A leash for Fritz and Kale for Stray Bunny, video collaboration with Stephanie Taylor 2006
- "Two Proud Society Spouses Are Reclining on Contemporary Furniture." Hudson Franklin, New York 2006
- Public Sculpture, at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects and 24 Hour Donut, 2006
- About
- Texts and Reviews
- Andrew Berardini: Pieced Together: Alice Könitz and Kim Fisher, Mousse # 45, 2014
- LA Forum/ Delirious LA 2014
- Kaveri Nair Critic's Picks Artforum.com 2013
- Travis Diehl Artforum.com/ 500 Words 2013
- Interview with Alyse Ronayne and Lee Delegard Make--make 2012 (excerpt)
- Michael Ned Holte Openings Artforum 2008
- Brian Sholis, Artforum.com, October 2006
- Chris Balaschak, Frieze 2006
- Michael Ned Holte, Artforum.com, 2004
- Bruce Hainley, Artforum, April 2001
- Civic Art Commissions
- Books and Editions