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Bush Supporters or Conceptual Art?
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Emerging from the MOCA store on upper Grand Street in Downtown this Sunday, still buzzing from the miraculous and inspiring Rodney Graham Retrospective at the Geffen Contemporary on Central Avenue, total giddy confusion ensued. The Graham exhibit, which grinningly forces viewers to see differently, has a central motif consisting of various forms of loops (that and trees). From video to slides to records playing songs over and over. We’ll stop here at attempting to explain the show since Doug Harvey for the LA Weekly explains it best.
But emerging from this feast for the mind, this aesthetic, intellectual, quaintly inspiring jaunt through the mind of a singular Canadian artist leaves you seeing the world differently. Everything is a conceptual piece. And so, the tooting horns coming from the north on Grand seemed almost appropriate. Until the first SUV putted past with Bush / Cheney paraphernalia all over it. Then a BMW. Then a Mercedes. Suddenly a briskly paced parade of cars in single file was driving past the museum, most often with just one person inside, tooting their horns in what seemed to be support of the incumbent president. But see, it was Halloween. And too the head was filled with artistic trickery. Everything was suspect. And these presidential revelers seemed too absurd to believe. As we headed down into the parking structure, the steady stream of cars kept coming. Was this a joke? Some kind of subversive, progressive inversion? A spectacle designed to be so enraging, so baffling that anyone who saw it would instinctively vote the opposite? We’ll never know.
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