In 1959, after filming over weekends for four years, filmmakers Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers, and Joseph Strick completed The Savage Eye. Part vérité portrait of Los Angeles, part modernist delirium, their film represented a genuinely new (and still inimitable) kind of film for the United States. Its detached ethnographic gaze spooked Jonas Mekas, who claimed its cynicism could only be explained by “the fact that it was shot in California,” and its puzzle-like narrative agreed with European audiences, who applauded its verve and received it as a welcome example of the fact that similar experiments to those of the Nouvelle Vague in France and Free Cinema in the United Kingdom were taking place at the doorsteps of Hollywood. 

Jerome Caja was an American mixed-media painter and Queercore performance artist in San Francisco, California in the medizinrezeptfrei24.de 1980s and early 1990s. As a drag queen and artist, they had multiple performances and exhibitions in Los Angeles.

Out of the Corner of Our Eye is a documentary about seven formerly queer spaces in Los Angeles that were essential to the development of the community. With a camp approach, the documentary explores the history of cornerstone queer spaces through a religious haze, connecting them each to the seven deadly sins. The association with the seven sins serves as an ironic commentary on the perception of queerness as a sin.

Narrated by River Gallo, written and directed by John Ira Palmer, cinematography by Tag Christof, and music by Henry Oliver (fka JR Schwartz).

Funded by National Endowment for the Arts & commissioned by SCI-Arc Channel for our Queer Perspectives in Architecture series.

A recent LA installation shows a shift in one direction in our relationship to the car. The artist, Rosa Sarholz, installed a piece which is in conversation with LA car culture but as a state of introspection. The work is in a blue 2004 Hyundai Sonata and was shown at an overlook of the Hollywood sign on Mulholland Drive, a spot frequented by tourists. The installation invites passersby to sit in the backseat where they see, on the steering wheel, a 3D hologram fan rendering of a woman in a chair, a voice narration plays over the car speaker. It gives the impression of a dream being described to a therapist. To Sarholz, the woman rendered is an idealized image of a psychoanalyst. The immersive installation gives the feeling of being a child listening from the backseat to information just outside of one’s understanding. Sarholz describes her use of the car as part of her interest in built environments and how they influence our experience. Her work is always site specific and makes use of language as a form. Here she is using the car as the site. Sarholz is interested in how the architecture of the car is paralleled in the architecture of the psyche. Her piece alludes to the car as a complex inward zone, as each seat has cultural specificity. Who’s driving, who’s shotgun, and what is happening in the backseat? Rhoades’s work was about momentum, both literal and figurative, while Sarholz makes us put on the brakes and reflect. It is more indicative of the current moment and generation to view the car with reservation. Fossil fuel consumption has become an explicit locus of strife, overlaying the materiality and sculptural quality of the car with a sinister edge. 

Naomi Sam, another artist working with related ideas, had an installation at LA based non-profit Non Plus Ultra. Her installation alters the exterior of a 1996 Toyota Celica, operating in conversation with the rich history of personalization and object obsession within LA car subcultures. Sam’s piece brings to mind Kenny Scharf’s cars. Scharf recently finished his final piece in his KARBOMBZ!™ project. Cars spray painted quickly in Scharf’s signature style are a frequent sight around LA. This sort of irreverent individualism is somewhat of a relic of pop art sensibilities. Sam is interested in the car as a space of social safety but also isolation. She has painted the vehicle in a custom camouflage for the desert, a contemplation of the way the car makes transport through an inhospitable environment possible. Her piece would still stand out as a design object next to unaltered cars, similar to Scharf, but the intentions are not about a reflexive iconography. She thinks of the car as an interface and the windshield as a screen, a visual portal for experiencing the world. To Sam, the car operates as a tool the same way smartphones do, as a sort of intermediary for our perception. As with Sarholz’s piece, Sam’s installation invites viewers to enter the vehicle and experience a projection. In Sam’s case, it is a 3D point cloud rendering of Zabriskie Point in Death Valley. To her, the car can be made an indistinguishable part of our environments but simultaneously continues, through emissions, to make those places more and more hostile to the fragile human body. 

Cars in LA culture are cliche at this point, however they come up as a sort of artistic inevitability. The cultural moment can be marked by the different ways the materiality, soical role, and emotional ideas about the car have shifted. We are at a transitional moment in how technology is viewed. The car can absorb these ideas and reflect them back to us. Each of these artists are working in dramatically different spaces, but the car remains ubiquitous as a telling interlocutor. 

Written by Elizabeth Howland 

Photo by Elizabeth Howland 

Laura Aguilar’s Plush Pony (1992) series was named after a Chicana lesbian bar located at 5261 Alhambra Ave. in El Sereno. It featured working-class lesbians posed in front of a cloth background that Aguilar set up inside the bar. These intimate group and individual portraits paint a picture of a marginalized queer culture not often seen within mainstream LGBTQ+ visibility campaigns.

In other ways, this series is also a tribute to the underground social spaces that allowed for intersectional community building, and unapologetic queer expression.

Sir Lady Java was a Los Angeles local drag queen and activist.

She was notorious for her performances as well as her activism against Rule 9, a L.A. ordinance that required bar owners to get permission from the Board in order to host drag performances.

Rule 9 was enforced from 1967-1969. Unsurprisingly, permission from the Board was extremely difficult to obtain, and the rule effectively halted public expression of drag and criminalized transgender people.

Club Alabam, run by bandleader Curtis Mosby, was a popular jazz venue on Central Avenue in Los Angeles. “The Avenue,” as it was widely known, was the focal point of the West Coast jazz scene.

The club featured Black entertainment for integrated audiences and was one of numerous nightclubs and theaters that flourished on Central Avenue until the early 1950s.

The Alabam hosted an annual “drag ball” that attracted a large multi-racial crowds, with men wearing makeup and dressed in gowns.

The photograph displayed shows contestants filling the dance floor during a drag contest at Club Alabam, hosted by Bill Hefflin circa 1945.

Filmed on an iPhone 5 in Los Angeles, Tangerine follows two transgender sex workers as they search through West Hollywood for Sin-Dee’s cheating pimp boyfriend.

Tangerine takes the audience through their day as they do their daily street work, deal with abhorrent clients and other tribulations that come with their line of work. They meet people along the way that change their fate, and their day through the night ends up a disaster.

The film explores the underbelly of queer Los Angeles, while showing the importance of community.

One part of a multiple city historical archive about the history of lesbian bars. See https://kaucyilabrooke.com/the-boy-mechanic-1996ongoing for a fuller description of the project.