French artist Pierre Huyghe transforms an exhibition space at the L.A. County Museum of Art (pictured) into a quirky biosphere; the winter TV season has arrived; a new public radio show/podcast is about the invisible forces that control human behavior.
'Pierre Huyghe': A living, breathing museum exhibition
A man in a tuxedo stands at the entrance to the Pierre Huyghe exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He asks for your name, and once you tell him, he shouts it into the gallery space, seemingly to everybody ... or nobody.
Inside the gallery, things only get stranger. The dimly lit space plays host to a Kafka-esque video of tribunal members whose faces are obscured by lighted binders, another video of a monkey moving around an Asian restaurant while wearing a little girl's mask, and ants coming out of a wall into their own habitat. And there's much more ...
Huyghe calls the gallery space a "non-knowledge zone," the walls of which reach up to the ceiling and jut out at odd angles. Even the more off-putting aspects of the show, like a video of maggots shots close-up, prove weirdly engrossing. Which is kind of the point.
"Part of what the exhibition deals with is the format of the exhibition itself," explains Jarrett Gregory, the show's curator. "Pierre has taken the last 25 years of his work and installed it as one immersive environment. His approach to his work is very non-precious."
The piles of fur coats on the ground aren't just decor — they're used as bedding by a dog. The dog's name is "Human," one of her legs is painted neon pink, and she roams the gallery with her handler. The handler doesn't speak, but sometimes he does wear an LED mask.
Another source of light in the mostly dark gallery comes from a few glass doors, which lead to an outdoor patio where an ice machine drops shavings into a nice pyramid, a fog machine adds atmospherics, and a beehive has taken residence on the head of a reclining sculpture.
As a member of the relational aesthetics movement, Huyghe constructs time-based situations in which live events unfold according to a program or score. So this isn't an exhibit where a museum can just hang some pictures on a wall. A permit had to be secured for "Human," and the insects can be a little finicky, too.
Gregory says various issues have popped up during the show, such as figuring out "when a bee will build a hive, or how much time ants need to acclimate and come out of the wall. The ants won't come out if the [air conditioning] is on too high — little things like that."
But when asked if there have been any issues with the bees now living at LACMA, Gregory says with a laugh, "We haven't had any yet, so we're optimistic."
"Pierre Huyghe" runs until February 22 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
3 new TV shows to watch this winter
More than a couple dozen new TV shows will debut this winter. Margaret Lyons writes about television for our partner Vulture.com and she has tips on three new shows to cozy up with.
"Hindsight" (Wednesdays on VH1)
The show centers around a woman as she nears 40 who — on the night before her second wedding — wakes up in the '90s on the eve of her first wedding. She's back in her old life, neighborhood, with her old clothes, her old best friend and her former ability to smoke in bars. She essentially gets a do-over.
Margaret's take:
It's sort of whimsical and charming, but also has a real attitude about what you would do different and how that might seem really appealing. But the danger of knowing too much can also be a lot of pressure. It's sort of this tonal shift of shows, especially when you think about how many bleak and intense dramas we've had in the last couple of years. This sort of quirky dramedy is a breath of fresh air.
"Man Seeking Woman" (premieres Jan. 14 on FXX)
This new comedy show stars Jay Baruchel as a single guy trying to find love, but it's audaciously strange. It's written by Simon Rich whose work you might recognize from The New Yorker and Saturday Night Live, and it's being billed as a surreal comedy. Baruchel goes on a date with an actual troll and his girlfriend starts dating a guy named Hitler. Yes, Adolf Hitler.
Margaret's take:
It's so bizarre — and confidently so. It's impressive to see a show decide to be that different right out of the gate and really nail this strange, surprising tone.
"Fresh Off the Boat" (premieres Feb. 10 on ABC)
It's a family comedy based on an autobiography of the same name by Eddie Huang. This is the first Asian-American family sitcom in 20 years, since Margaret Cho's ABC show "All-American Girl" debuted in 1994.
It's about a kid who moves from D.C.'s Chinatown to Miami and has culture shock about his new town. He's really into rap and hip-hop culture and stands out because he's the only Asian kid in his class.
Margaret's take:
It combines real, actual human life problems with this very sweet — without being saccharine— sensibility. It's a wonderful show.
You can read more of Margaret Lyons' suggestions on what new shows to watch this year at vulture.com
HBO GO, Amazon, Sling TV: Which will be successful in 2015?
Fox made a huge gamble with Lee Daniels' new show “Empire,” and it looks like it could pay off. Nearly 10 million people tuned in Wednesday night for the first episode of Daniels’ hip-hop melodrama, making it the highest debuting show on Fox since 2012, and the first surprise hit of the TV season.
But there’s still a lot of uncertainty in Television Land. Josef Adalian is the west coast editor for our partners at Vulture.com and we asked him how the popularity of streaming platforms — including Netflix and Amazon — will change the TV industry in 2015.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
This year, the non-HBO-subscribing public will get what they want, and that is the ability to stream HBO shows via HBO Go without paying for cable or satellite coverage. What does that mean?
It means it's a further step in an "unbundled" world, where you don't have to subscribe to big cable in order to get programming. And, for people who are happy with having Netflix and maybe HBO Go, this is an alternative, though it's going to be interesting to see how big of a success this is.
There's been a lot of Internet hype over the last couple years with people demanding this, but there are also a lot of people who are very happy right now stealing or sharing someone else's passwords or BitTorrenting shows. Are those people necessarily going to step up and pay $12 a month? Maybe not, but it's symbolic more than anything in that it signals that one of the big legacy companies in media is willing to break the traditions of how TV is sold.
The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas just had a big announcement from Dish. They announced SlingTV. How does that compare to what HBO's up to?
Well, it's a more comprehensive sort of offering. Instead of wires, instead of having a satellite dish or a cable box, you can get a package of a certain number of networks that's delivered directly to your tablet, your computer, and your smart TV. I don't think the Dish package is that attractive right now — it's $20 and there are no broadcast networks, no AMC, no FX — but you can get ESPN and Disney.
What we're going to see over the next year or two is a lot of experimentation — people are going to by trying different things. That's what CBS did last year. CBS was the first broadcast network to offer one of these standalone packages that allows people the flexibility of watching stuff. I don't think it's been a big success and I don't sense a lot of buzz about it, but it's an experiment, it's a foot in the door to see, Alright, is this the future? Is this what people want?
What does it all mean? Is this part of the step of unbundling, where people are tired of paying $120 for their cable bill when they're only watching five or six channels? Is this the future of "a la carte" TV viewing?
This is an experiment to see how much appetite there is and how much the Millennials, who have been screaming for this, represent a real segment of the viewing audience, or if most people are going to be happy to keep paying their cable bills, extraordinary as they are.
But nobody's happy to pay them!
No, nobody's happy and they keep going up, and it'll be interesting to see if this competition forces rates down. It probably won't, but big cable got greedy over the years, and they may pay the price for that. But again, these are unanswered questions and I don't quite know what will happen, though I do know that there's going to be a lot of activity around this in 2015.
There are a number of cable channels — you talk about A&E, USA and TBS — that all had double-digit declines last year. What's happening within cable and original programming?
Now we've reached a sort of saturation point, possibly a bubble. There are so many hours of original cable programming now, so many scripted and unscripted shows, that viewers can only watch so much. As a result, you're seeing cable networks pay the price, and it's harder than ever for them to break through with a big hit. "The Americans" on FX, for example, is one of the most critically acclaimed shows out there, but it didn't do all that well.
It's a combination of factors. Cable is still very strong as a force of programming — some of the biggest shows on TV now are on cable, and "The Walking Dead" is the biggest show among adults under 50 — but the big story of 2014 that will continue into 2015 is that cable is no longer immune, and they're facing the same troubles that everyone else is.
2014 ended with Amazon making a big splash with "Transparent," one of the most acclaimed shows of the year. As you look forward in the streaming world, what do you think the future is going to be for streaming sites like Netflix, Amazon, and even Vimeo?
In essence, streaming networks have arrived. A couple years ago, right before "House of Cards" debuted, no one really took the idea of streaming video seriously. That's changed, so now when a big project goes out to the marketplace and agents take their clients around town, they stop at Amazon, they stop at Netflix.
However, they also are going to have some growing pains. This week it was announced that a Chris Carter project, which Amazon had [introduced] at TCA last summer and which they said would be debuting within the next month or two — it turns out they never even shot another episode.
This is the man who made "The X-Files," this is no ordinary Joe.
And it's sort of embarrassing that somehow through this whole process, that [show] went away. Netflix renewed "Marco Polo" for a second season, but there's a sense that it didn't quite live up to the Netflix standard. And if you look back at 2014, even though Netflix's past original shows continued to do well and "Orange is the New Black" got even bigger perhaps, they didn't launch any new hits. They're going to have the same pressure. Now that they've proven they can succeed in the marketplace, people are going to be saying, What's next?
You can answer my biggest unanswered question for 2015: what is the one show or series that Joe Adalian is looking forward to in the new year?
I am excited about the final season of "Mad Men." Other than that, there's just so much. [laughs]
You can read Josef Adalian's full article at vulture.com.
Radio vets team up for 'Invisibilia,' a new podcast on human behavior
Despite the success of popular titles such as "WTF" and "Comedy Bang! Bang!," it seems like it's NPR's "Serial" that has pushed podcasts fully into the mainstream as one of the newest, most exciting media for storytelling.
Hot on the heels of "Serial" comes a new radio show/podcast from NPR News called "Invisibilia." Its creators, Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller, are no strangers to the radio world: Spiegel was one of the original producers on "This American Life" while Miller spent five years working on "Radiolab."
When the creators of "Invisibilia" came by The Frame, we asked them about crafting their own voice in the radio world, and about the differences between radio and podcasting.
Interview Highlights:
What was the idea behind the show, and how long did it take you to define what you were trying to do?
Alix Spiegel: It's an interesting question. I've been covering human behavior for a very long time, and I've also been a fan of Lulu Miller, who worked at Radiolab for a very long time. Lulu's got a whole bunch of stuff that I covet in terms of her abilities. [When] we met two years ago, I was thinking about a story and I asked her to work on it with me, and she said, "Yes." I did that so I could learn what she has to teach. It just kind of evolved from there and we essentially just created all these stories by asking ourselves, What is the unifying theme? It seems like we are drawn to stories which allow you to look at these kinds of invisible forces that shape human behavior and all of the kinds of frames that hold us in place that we're not aware of.
Do you consider your show a radio show or a podcast? Is there a difference in your mind?
Lulu Miller: We are a radio show that will also be available as a podcast. There are a bunch of differences between a podcast and a radio show — you can go longer, you can go deeper, and you don't have to observe certain language things that I think we all know about.
But so much has happened in the podcasting world over the last couple of months. How many times did the "S" word come up in your conversations?
Spiegel: [laughs] Serial? It [came up] in the sense that we were both fans, and when we were supposed to be working, occasionally we would be doing things like listening to the Serial theme song ...
Miller: Or the parody.
Spiegel: [laughs] The work that they've done is very impressive and it just makes clear how, in my mind, podcasting is almost a new medium. All the different things we can do with it aren't clear yet.
Because of what? What is the newness, and what does it give you?
Spiegel: I think you can go more intimate than you can do, even in radio. I've heard some podcasts, particularly out of California, that have really gone narrowly personal in a way that I think you probably wouldn't get away with on the radio, because the audience on the radio is so broad. I think you can go deeper. The truth is that there is a lot to explore still in terms of how flexible this medium is. For me, that's what makes it even a slightly different medium.
Miller: And the difference too is that, with radio, one of the most beautiful things is how serendipitous it is: you turn it on, and whatever's on is on. With podcasting, the user has so much control that you could try out something more extreme that maybe wouldn't be for everyone, but those people who make the choice to have it and listen to it really love it. And then they can take it into perhaps more intimate spaces, they can take it with them as they commute. It's audio and they share the beautiful qualities of audio, but there's a different infrastructure that I think allows for a more intimate experience, maybe because the user has more control? I don't know, I'm sort of making that up.
I want to follow up on this idea of intimacy and going personal. In your first show there are two people that you look at, one of whom has incredibly violent and dark thoughts, and the other person has a horrible form of cryptococcal meningitis. They've both struggled mightily with their different ailments, and it's a very personal story that you're telling with both of these people. Does the format of the show intentionally try to use what you're saying — that podcasting or radio can do, in terms of the stories you're going to select?
Miller: I don't know if it does yet. When we both started, we were thinking about the radio audience more than the podcast audience. We came out of the traditions of hour-long episodes that go out on the airwaves, and I think we were both imagining those two stories in that place.
Spiegel: But at the same time, I think both Lulu and I are drawn to stories which really go deep, psychologically, and allow you deep into the head and the heart of whoever it is that we're talking to. And that's one of the great things about radio, right? That's one of the things that makes it so appealing.
The first episode of "Invisibilia" will be available as a podcast on Jan. 9. The radio show premieres on KPCC on Jan. 19.