Hammer Blog

Lunchtime Art Talk: Edmund Teske's Kenneth Anger, Topanga Canyon, 1954


with Leslie Cozzi
Hammer Curatorial Associate Leslie Cozzi discussed photographer Edmund Teske’s Kenneth Anger, Topanga Canyon (1954) in the Vault Gallery on August 14. In the work avant-garde experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger is photographed standing contrapposto, as Leslie noted, in a dark and dapper suit. He stands atop Topanga Canyon in the foreground of the photograph, whilst wrathful horsemen and trumpet-blowing angels bring forth disaster—illustrating a scene from Milton’s Paradise Lost—all around him. To create composite prints such as this one, Teske “takes two different negatives, overlays them, and then develops them as one,” Leslie explained. The superimposed images were Teske’s portrait of his friend, Anger, and an 1866 Gustave Doré engraving of a passage from Milton that illustrates the revolt of the rebel angels, an association that Anger himself suggested.
Leslie described how the commonalities between Teske

Irrational · Transcendent | Li Zhenwei Solo Exhibition | Telescope Beijing | April 6 – June 2, 2013

Telescope opened April 6 with its second exhibition, Irrational . Transcendent; an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Beijing artist Li Zhenwei. This is Li’s first solo show and features his newest large scale 600cm x 200cm painting, None, #20.



Li Zhenwei uses various mathematical systems to create his work. The paintings in his exhibition at Telescope, Irrational · Transcendent, are based on Pi, a mathematical constant that is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to it’s diameter. Its decimal representation never ends and never settles into a permanent repeating pattern. In mathematical terminology, it is an “irrational” and a “transcendental” number, it never repeats and never ends. Li uses Pi to determine the numbering, spacing, color, and densities of the points of paint he applies to the canvas. Although mathematics is involved in

A couple of friends initially said to me, why bring this conversation to the Hammer? Either it is “preaching to the choir” or everyone that goes to contemporary fine arts museums are so privileged they don’t even think about their housing.

I am vindicated. The conversation did indeed go differently than expected. Many more people that visit the Armand Hammer Museum are tenants than I realized. Now the statistic is 66% of all Angelinos are renters. Actually, many of the people that work at the museum are tenants. Folks are commuting from as far away as Boyle Heights, Rampart District, Highland Park, San Fernando Valley and Lincoln Heights. Many staff of the museum are living in the very same neighborhoods as the artists living and working in their studios, although myself and many of my friends fit that category, these people are living with their families in multi-generational households.
I

Dream Home Resource Center, Olga Koumoundouros’s most recent investigation into the realm of home ownership, addresses the immateriality of real estate transactions and the shift from home as emblem of the American dream to house as commodity. Inspired in part by the Hammer Museum’s exhibition A. Quincy Jones: Building for Better Living and Jones’s vision of modern architecture, Koumoundouros fast-forwards more than half a century to the present, a moment filled with far less optimism about housing in the United States.

Today was a pretty nice day, clear air ahead and to the sides, if you keep your eyes on the ubiquitous construction walls. These sites all seem to promise what no one else has been able to provide, a beautiful future with clear blue skies, and dreamy fields. But even so, there is always a fly in the soup, even on these scenes from their perfect new world.