‘Made in L.A. 2025’ Gets Points for Irony

Many years ago an editor made a note to me in all caps: ‘STOP REHASHING IDEAS FROM THE ’70s!,’ highlighting something about a panopticon, or a spectacle, or in any case a felt sense that the obscure academic terms I was so excited to discover were, by the time of my discovery, becoming reified as everyday life.

I was jolted back to that memory at the press preview for ‘Made in L.A. 2025’ while listening to curators Essence Harden and Paulina Pobocha describe John Knight’s 1974 minimalist-to-the-max sculpture Quiet Quality as a framework for the entire exhibition. Positioning that work in this way seemed less a rehash than an appraisal of its prescience, one that cast a pallor over a show that risks communicating a vision of what the art landscape of Los Angeles actually is, instead of making a self-congratulatory proposition. There’s no stated theme of utopia, community or restitution. There’s no theme at all, actually. There were giggles during the preview when Pobocha said, ‘We truly had no ideas,’ slant rhyming with what my first writing teacher said he loved most about this city: ‘Oh, you know, open minds, empty brains…’.

The result, Pobocha clarified, ‘is an exhibition that is in fact brimming with ideas’.

Displacement is one of those ideas. Quiet Quality features a short wall text taken from a real estate advertisement. The title describes a California suburb – but also evokes the current term for the colourless, bourgeois-cosplay fashion known as ‘quiet luxury’. In the centre of the otherwise empty room is a white, plugged-in electric blanket, folded to about human size and radiating useless heat. The blandness of the installation is key to its theme of gentrification. As a topic, gentrification is fascinating; as a reality, it’s murder – the removal of a city’s guts in order to transform a place into an idea of itself. To centre this un-optimistic work felt lightly cynical, piquant. Patrick Martinez’s crumbling breeze-block sculpture Battle of the City of Fire (2025), which is sliced through with Aztec imagery and neon tubing, looks quite like the murals on my block in Highland Park. It undermines the sharpness of Knight’s critique by attempting to pile the guts back together and into the museum, a site of cultural production often responsible for the kind of displacement being obliquely referenced by Quiet Quality. Points for irony, I guess.

My feelings of cleverness were touched by despondence at the recreations of Alonzo Davis’s Eye on ’84 murals, originally painted along the 110 South freeway in 1984 as part of a broader Olympics mural project that included Glenna Boltuch Avila’s LA Freeway Kids and John Wehrle’s Galileo, Jupiter, Apollo. When I was a child, this trio was a landmark of the commute to my grandmother’s house, a sign that we were nearing her Boyle Heights bungalow and would soon peel off the freeway. Looking at the Davis reproductions, I realized I’d never pinpointed the moments when each of the originals disappeared. But they all did. I nearly cried at these staid stand-ins.

Hanna Hur’s installation of five creamy grid paintings (Suspension, 2025) explicitly references the Rothko Chapel (1971) in Houston in both form and configuration, but the hazy lines carry the phenomenological quality of an Agnes Martin canvas. The genteel, contemplative effect is shot through, for me, with sadness. The orderly grids are interrupted not by the quivering hints of the artist’s hand but by little clumps of circles that recall abstracted flowers, the kind you might find on bathroom tiles in a dingy dingbat apartment. It’s a beautiful installation that nonetheless makes me wonder at the functional difference between meditative stillness and zoning out on the toilet. The secular spirituality of modernism can always be brought closer to the earth. Another Rothko riff materializes in David Alekhuogie’s Pull_Up w/o/b, a 2017 photographic print of a young man’s torso, blurred to abstraction save the soft locks of colour formed by his falling boxers and even lower sweatpants. According to the wall text, the work is a riposte to Barack Obama’s 2008 call for young Black men to pull up their pants, though Obama was far from the first to do so.

Amanda Ross-Ho, whose work grasps the disparate vectors of art across humour, craft and conceptualism, created four giant doors that replicate the door to her father’s nursing home room at an uncanny 170% scale (Untitled Thresholds [FOUR SEASONS], 2025). Festooned with enlarged party decor evoking the gamut of holidays, the doors suggest frames of a mixed-up sculptural film about how the task of caretaking bends time into a looming object.

Another of the show’s ideas is implication, and Knight also offers a framework. I once complained to the aforementioned editor that I wasn’t sure I could review a show at a gallery given that they had previously commissioned a text from me. ‘Are you kidding?’ he said. ‘If you open up any art magazine, John Knight probably has a review of his work, a review he’s written and an ad for his gallery, all in the same issue.’ In addition to being a critic, I make my living as, among other things, an actor, a comedian and a television writer. For this reason, Scott Cameron Weaver of O-Town House – a gallery whose programme also includes ‘Made in L.A.’ artists Peter Tomka and Bruce Yonemoto – introduced me via email to New Theater Hollywood’s Max Pitegoff and Calla Henkel in 2023, when they decamped from Berlin to Los Angeles. We held off, mutually suspicious. I had shadowy notions of the theatre as a front for a larger, conceptual project based on documenting the work of their collaborators within, and wondered if the work being documented would be subordinate to the document. It wasn’t until I attended Where the Souls Go (2024), a play by Diamond Stingily and Colin Self, with puppets and a musical number that had the front row wiping their eyes, that I realized they had successfully created a pocket of air where artists can earnestly experiment with making original theatre. My shoulders relaxed. I was cast in a later play, where I portrayed, improbably, a Hollywood bitch.

For ‘Made in L.A.’, Pietgoff and Henkel have assembled THEATER (2025), an episodic film about a woman (played by filmmaker Leilah Weinraub) who uses an unexpected windfall to buy an old theatre. The scripted parts are spliced seamlessly with the documentary footage captured during rehearsals of unrelated productions. I am credited with an appearance, though I don’t remember anyone filming me. I was in my process. Shot on 16mm and scored with sparse cello, THEATER is a darkly romantic view of long-lost kind of creative life, bordering on noir. The vintaged footage and ink-black backdrop recalls the 2001 documentary Uta Hagen’s Acting Class, showing the famed German actress, silver and aged, holding court with nascent Hollywood elites. Her 1973 book Respect for Acting is a primary text for unborn stars.

Again with the ’70s… Of course, that is an oblique and subjective reference, but carrying Knight’s coda with me throughout the exhibition, it was difficult not to home in on the works that contained gestures of loss or invoked change as a false marker of progress.

I’ve been vindicated of my former editor’s comment, I suppose – but at what cost?

‘Made in L.A. 2025’ is on view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles until 1 March 2026

^{Main image: Patrick Martinez, Battle of the City on Fire, 2025, stucco, cinder blocks, neon, acrylic paint, spray paint and latex house paint on scorched panel, three elements, each: 3.7 × 9.3 × 2.2 m; 2.3 × 3 × 2.2 m; 1.2 × 1.5 × 2.2 m, installation view. Courtesy: the artist, Charlie James Gallery and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; photograph: Sarah Golonka}