The art gallery is called Country Club and it is in the Rudolph Schindler designed Buck House on the corner of Genesee and 8th, near LACMA. I turned a corner near the house and ran into a traffic jam, and a throng of people conversing outside. The place was packed. I parked about two blocks away and walked up to the house dreading the echoing chamber with no seating and too many people that I was expecting. Even as I approached the front door I noticed that the ceiling was extremely low and thought, how typical of architects at that time. Then I stepped inside. I was in a tiny room crammed with people, a pile of old boxes to my right, a beam running horizontally across the room at shoulder level directly in front of me, and a narrow hall to my left. Everything was trashed. The walls looked drab, the paint on the ceiling was peeling, and the carpet was thrashed. My first thought was that I had walked in on a party at an abandoned house.The crowd was the typical art crowd, but maybe a little younger, and people were chatting and coming in and out of the house like your typical art gallery. This gave me some assuredness that I was in the right place so I glanced around deciding which way to go. There were people passing under the beam in front of me, but I thought the low height might be a clue that I was to go down the hall to the left, so I started down it. It took me around a corner to a dead end, but there was a big hole in the wall, big enough to step through and I could see people on the other side. By now there were people behind me in the hall as well, so I had to go for it – I stepped through the wall. On the other side was a fairly large room with a high ceiling. It was dark and the walls were covered in a collage of magazine pages. The beam from the foyer came through the walls into this room and ended in the center of the room. The end was open and people were looking through it. It was mirrored on the inside like a giant kaleidoscope.
Not knowing what to think I went back toward the front door and found the friend who had invited me standing near the door talking to some people. I said hello and then immediately asked “what’s the story with this place?” Then she explained it all to me. The installation is called Bright White Underground and it is by a duo name Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe. It is the second full immersion installation that they have done. The first was in New York and was based on a meth lab. From what I came to understand this installation is much larger and has a much fuller story. The house is the physical manifestation of a fictional narrative. In summary it’s the life of a mad scientist who develops a controversial drug called marasa. The story line is strikingly similar to the story of LSD (You can read more about that in a recent Vanity Fair article), with an inventor that intends the drug for medical use, but discovers interesting side effects, later there is secret government involvement, and eventually the drug finds its way to the hands and mouths of the glamorous Hollywood elite. Ultimately the inventor is pushed out and goes into hiding, and the drug is banned. What the viewers are left to contemplate are the decaying remains of a life lived for marasa. The various halls and rooms are a sort of living collage of all that happened in the story of this drug. Some are dark, some are bright, one room has radio equipment, another is a library where the artists have painstakingly made hundreds of prop books that all relate to the subject matter in the narrative. They even went so far as to stage an elaborate period photo shoot of the marasa hay day, so everywhere you go in the house there are black and white photos of people that are presumed to be characters in the tale having a great time at a 1950’s cocktail party. Many of the photos have a central character who is obviously experiencing the effects of marasa.
Needless to say I was very impressed with the installation. Freeman and Lowe put it together over the course of a couple of months, but clearly had some help (nothing wrong with that). There was evidence of years of man-hours involved in the making of this experience. And every detail was thoroughly fleshed out. It was art taken to a whole new level. In a world where media moves quickly, it was enjoyable to have an experience where you were immersed in a world that played to all of your sense at once. The experience was frightening, nostalgic, and fascinating all at the same time. Freeman/Lowe were not trying to impress us with a technical know how. They simply took their two hands and told a story that the rest of us could live through. And each viewer could take something different from it. You could go through quickly just getting an overview, or take your time and see each detail.I highly recommend taking some time to see this exhibit. Its not like any other that you will come across for a long time. The exhibit is running through October 30th. The gallery’s website is a little sketchy about their hours, so I recommend calling ahead.
