It will be a decade at the end of this year since the Matthew Marks Gallery in West Hollywood was completed. The gallery features a façade-mounted sculpture by Ellsworth Kelly and is located in West Hollywood. It is nearby Fairfax and Santa Monica's intersection, next to a Jewish Orthodox Mortuary in Little Odessa, a neighborhood that is part of the most populous Russian-speaking community in the US outside of New York.
To commemorate, I am revisiting the project and including an excerpt from a self-published booklet, 101 Stucco Façades, that documents generic commercial buildings on LA’s east-west corridors. I’ll be posting a selection of the booklet’s photographs over the course of the year.
I plan to reissue 101 Stucco Façades, with drawings, an update to this essay, and a few conversations with artists as part of a forthcoming monograph about my buildings and paintings.
On Blankness
Blankness, empty signification, minimalism, seriality, and other post-Pop movements peaked some fifty years ago. If these concepts might be a tad over-baked in the art world today,1, they have popped up again in the form of a renewed architectural interest in radical post-modernism, dumbness, and “the boring.”
My essay on Amir Zaki’s digitally manipulated and hyper-naturalistic photographs of Californian skateparks referenced artist Ed Ruscha’s serialized photographic studies of the Los Angeles streetscape. Those photographs addressed the ordinary, the banal, and the quixotic in the Southern Californian urban landscape. As I noted, the architects Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi may have picked up on some of Ruscha’s urban documentarian instincts when they photographed the architecture of the Las Vegas Strip. Later, they tested out what they discovered there— the ugly-ordinary and the super-flat— in some of my favorite projects, like this unbuilt competition entry for the National Collegiate Football Hall of Fame in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Around the same time, the British architectural historian Reyner Banham made it a point to spend time with Ruscha, fascinated as he was with Southern California’s environment(s.) Watch the BBC special Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, which he produced based on his seminal book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, to catch him hanging out with Ruscha at a drive-in burger joint. It’s quite weird. Former Angeleno, and long time New York artist/art critic Peter Plagens wrote an ungenerous review of the book in Art Forum. He also managed to lay into LA architecture, stating, “It’s amazing that for all its newness, L.A.’s architecture generally stinks; the good stuff is limited to residences, creaking Victorian houses, the small buildings of European expatriates like Neutra, a few old buildings like the Bradbury and the L.A. Public Library, or, painfully, free-way architecture.” Presumably, the “bad stuff” was what the unenlightened had to make do with, even if they actually enjoyed it.
Nonetheless, by the mid-1970s, but perhaps as early as the 1960s, an apparent fascination with ordinary materials, standard forms, and unassuming profiles had consciously found its way into the work of many Los Angeles architects, notably Frank Gehry, whose early blank stucco projects like the Danziger Studio and the demolished Faith Metal Plating building on Melrose are, I think, now icons of his pre-Santa Monica house style. In an email to Curbed Los Angeles in 2009, Gehry noted that “…the Faith Plating Building…preceded the Danziger building which is on the corner of Sycamore and Melrose…Faith Plating was done for William Kerman, and we helped him reorganize it – it’s a bumper plating shop. They did chrome plating of car bumpers. We did the façade, which is still there… I haven’t been inside in years."
Those chrome-plated visions of LA absolutely impacted me when I began my work on the Matthew Marks Gallery. I was also thinking about Luis Barragan’s ‘pre-lyrical’ early works, Irving Gill’s Dodge House in West Hollywood as captured by Thomas S. Hines in his excellent survey, and maybe less consciously, the restrained work of Kai Chen, who I worked for, in Melbourne, and various projects by Kerstin Thompson who was my thesis adviser at RMIT, also in Melbourne. In retrospect, my influences had quite a lot to do with shaping the building I completed in collaboration with the artist Ellsworth Kelly for the New York art dealer Matthew Marks in West Hollywood.
But I would offer, too, that growing up in Southern California had something to do with a self-conscious selection of an ordinary form, like a box, and a familiar, poor material, like stucco, for the project in place of new forms and “cutting-edge” construction methods. I’ll admit that I love stucco. I still bear the scars on my knuckles that I earned playing handball at Sherman Oaks Elementary against a rough dash, very gritty, shotcrete stucco wall on a simple single-story boxlike classroom. The way the Southern Californian sun hits rough stucco, drawing all its grain into high relief, reminds me of rare smog-free summer days in the 1970s. That’s why the stucco on the gallery is sprayed on and not hand-troweled. When I see large expanses of “freeway-architecture,” I don’t wish I was far away, maybe sipping a coffee inside the Ringstrasse. That’s a world my family fled as refugees. Instead, I recall a childhood spent on the 405, shuttling between the Valley and San Diego on trips to visit my grandparents, the hours in traffic marked not by time but by familiar landmarks like the near-identical, cylindrically-shaped Holiday Inn towers next to the 405 in Los Angeles, Long Beach and San Diego.2
If I digress here, the point I am making is that the more time I spend thinking about myself in relationship to my work, the more I realize that many of my preoccupations at mid-life are increasingly about validating what shaped me growing up. Instead of seeking validation in ideas that are utterly foreign to my own experiences, many of my creative interests are progressively becoming about framing a response to, and a recollection of, growing up in the San Fernando Valley and beachside suburban San Diego. My newer artistic instincts are about discovering an authentic voice for my experiences as a child of immigrants raised in a multi-lingual, multi-generational household. So much of what I am trying to un-learn now— everything that I uncritically consumed about the cultural superiority of European architecture— gives no meaning or value to the suburban, ordinary environments that formed me. So, if it is not obvious, I don’t just love LA’s shitty architecture because, per Plagens's nasty dig at Venturi, I am “…actually demented enough to like that crap.” I love it because it is imbued with meaning for me.
This interest in revisiting my personal history through my work might seem nostalgic. It is not. It is about making the ordinary seem somehow strange, permitting a building to be engaged as both a familiar and an unfamiliar object simultaneously. This is the “defamiliarisation effect,” Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, that drives my continuing interest in the work of architects Edmond and Corrigan and designer-architect Ettore Sottsass. It requires considering a created thing in its physical, emotional and social contexts instead of seeing it as a stand-alone creative gesture.
I also have a specific idea about what the art in my architecture might be about. It has something to do with an ongoing and perhaps oblique attempt to find a regional tradition to hold on to within a city so famously obsessed with eschewing tradition. I have never quite bought into the idea of LA’s radical newness; that everything here is made out of nothing as if by divine inspiration, creatio ex-nihilo. That obsession suggests an unexamined attitude about LA’s history and a violent erasure of context, culture, and audience. This idea of making things new is, in fact, quite traditional. It is a retrograde idea about architecture as an avant-garde pastoral, delivering the gospel of the future to a hopelessly backward flock. This inevitably demeans the present and postpones the idea that all things must age.
When the Matthew Marks Gallery was completed, it was well-received in the art community and reviewed by Christopher Hawthorne, then The Los Angeles Times architecture critic, who declared it “…one of the most conspicuous architectural debuts to appear in Southern California in a number of years,” but was a bit “…ambivalent about the nostalgic vein that so clearly runs through the design… [but could] see the appeal of celebrating, even valorizing, the relationship between stucco facades and Southern California mass culture.” Mimi Zeiger wrote an insightful piece about it for Domus, and it received an award from the local AIA. In 2018, Andrew Atwood, one-half with Anna Neimark of the promising LA-Bay Area studio First Office, featured a drawing made of the gallery in his book Not Interesting: On the Limits of Criticism in Architecture.
Since it opened, Jasper Johns, Katharina Fritsch, Charles Ray, Vija Celmins, Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, Reena Spaulings, and many other artists have exhibited there. Generally speaking, most artists have told me that they love the building because it “gets out of the way of the art.” Not quite the point, but I don’t mind the suggestion. More than a few architects have been bothered by it because I let the art overtake the architecture—also quite a bit off. The project was, by definition, a collaboration with an artist. I really have never quite understood the attitude some architects take towards art— the idea that architecture is de facto art somehow. Therefore, why collaborate with artists when we are the artists, etc. That conceit seems tribal, naive, and frail.
Usually, though, it’s either faint praise from other architects (“well, it’s handsome”) or some befuddlement (“I don’t get it”) or both (“it’s nice, but I don’t get it.”) I can see how its blankness can be mistaken for dumbness, which is, again, a bit amusing to me now that making dumb, lo-fi, or so-called boring work is fashionable. Younger architects tend to appreciate it more easily than my peer group, given how bored they have become with geometric tricks and capital-A architecture.
101 Stucco Façades
A small booklet, made with a big wink in the style of Ed Ruscha, was a research project about context. Darin Vieira spent the better part of a month driving along LA’s major corridors with a camera and a tripod while working with me in my studio one summer. His assignment was to record and capture “every” blank, stucco façade on Santa Monica, Melrose, Olympic, Pico, Washington, and Adams. We packaged the results, turning the photographs sideways and towards the gutter in landscape format, making for a flipbook that could be quickly scanned in either direction. Almost all of the buildings included are generic commercial buildings. Many no longer exist today. They seem designed anonymously or designed by builders or engineers but without an architect. This situation seems to account for easily half of everything built in Southern California, where fully one-half of the State lives.
Normcore?
In 2014, Christopher Hawthorne suggested on Twitter that the building was a late-period (revival?) version of architectural normcore, the on-again, off-again fashion trend in which ordinary clothing is deliberately worn as a statement.
I prefer the notion that what the gallery is about is inverting the usual architectural logic in Los Angeles— the way that the anonymous background-architecture atmosphere that makes up most of LA is the stuff that looks like art but isn’t art, and artful stuff that is the architecture always seems a bit melodramatic. I love that the gallery features a significant piece of art but is often mistaken for a generic building. 3
What is interesting about the building is that it is a little peculiar and slightly disturbing without being anodyne or spectacular. I like that it is pretty well-camouflaged by its standoffishness, its odd proportions, and its blank one-eyed stare. It is a foreground-object that looks like ordinary background stuff, but it isn’t every day, maybe only because of its use and the famous artwork, not its appearance.
For me, reencountering the Matthew Marks Gallery is like seeing the forest for the trees in the rearview mirror and then realizing the tree is a cellphone tower: authentic but only tree-like at a distance and with speed.
It’s not what you think it is, and I think that is a pretty good thing.
Notes
See Michael Pepi on Joseph Havel, Seven Variations of Nothing (2008-10) at Yvon Lambert Gallery 2011, A Short History of Blankness.
These were designed for the Holiday Inn group by Texan mid-century architect Leonard Lundgren of Lundgren Maurer, first built in Austin (13 Stories, 1964) then repeated along the 405 in Long Beach (13 Stories, 1968), Los Angeles (17 Stories, 1969), and San Diego (15 Stories, 1970). Other versions were built in Acapulco and Panama.
While I was standing in front of the gallery as it was nearing completion, I was approached by an elderly Russian neighbor who wanted to know the building’s use. I told her was an art gallery. Then she asked me what the empty sign at the top was going to say. I told her it wasn’t going to say anything because it was a piece of art, at which point she shook her head and walked off.