A button York Chang designed for Arco Madrid. It quotes a Latin American artist Chang invented.

York Chang always wanted to be a Latin American artist. The complication with this was that he wasn’t: wasn’t from Latin America, hadn’t grown up there, didn’t have family from there. As he described Wednesday, at Paper Chaser’s X-Ten Biennial, an evening over which arts professionals talked for ten minutes each about their influences, he solved the problem in a fairly labor intensive, metafictional way, creating a Latin American art movement, making the work of its artists and working to convince others it actually existed. But, still, it’s the weirdness of the situation that interests me more than the solution. What can you do when you want, impossibly, to be something you can’t be?

Director Jason Reitman, of Juno fame, will be doing something impossible next Thursday (Oct. 20). He’ll be restaging The Breakfast Club with a collection of unannounced, perhaps unconfirmed, performers. Reitman’s “cast” will gather at LACMA, and then just do it, launch into the 1985 teen classic with no rehearsals to help them along. It’s the situation that audiences will come to see, and the potential is immense. Despite it’s seeming feel-good message–stereotypes don’t go past the surface, all people are deeper than they appear–the movie is almost like a piece of endurance theater, with amazingly absurd vignettes.

Still from "The Breakfast Club"

Molly Ringwald puts lipstick on with the tube between her breast. Emilio Estevez breaks glass like a mad man. And then they just sit in the library for hours on end.Who should play Allison, “the mute,” who puts chips in her sandwich and chews loudly? Aubrey Plaza? Maybe that’s too obvious. Winona Ryder, a troubled dark-haired beauty? And what if Estevez’s jock was played by someone not really cool or athletic at all? Fred Armisen? Somehow, I’ve got Mad Men’s John Hamm locked in my head as the criminal John Bender character. He doesn’t have the beady eyes, but I’d like to see him as the bully.

Another longer-lasting “situation” begins tomorrow, when the Museum of Public Fiction opens its California Hotel, a fully functional hotel suite that will operate out of its Highland Park space for a month. Artist collective Grizzly Grizzly will be the full-time residents and the public will be welcome on Saturdays, from noon to 6. There’s a mini-bar, a televised concierge and Wi-Fi.

Museum of Public Fiction's announcement for The California Hotel

Letter and brochure for Al's Grand Hotel, May 2, 1971, designed by Allen Ruppersberg.© Allen Ruppersberg. The Getty Research Institute, Gift of Michael Asher, 2009.

Allen Ruppersberg did something similar in 1971, and his “Al’s Grand Hotel” is the inspiration for Public Fiction’s rendition. Rupperberg used a house on Sunset Boulevard, decorating guest rooms according to themes (there was a Jesus-themed room and a bridal suite), and then presenting Saturday concerts by artist-musician Terry Allen. None of the stories I’ve heard about what happened there are outrageous. It’s just the fact that Al did it that remains interesting; he created a space for people to come and experience each other, where outrageous, memorable things could have happened. “I use my art to transform my life, I use my life to make my art,” Rupperberg wrote in his 1985 essay Fifty Helpful Hints on the Art of the Everyday. Neither life nor art always pan out to be something amazing, but they never stop having that amazing potential.

Mother Trust Superet Church's Prayer Garden

A mile and a half from where I live, close to downtown, there’s a strange treasure: a traditional white church with a tall steeple and prayer garden complete with a Jesus sculpture right next door. It looks like a place Anne of Green Gables might have gone to pray, except that the protestant Avonlea-worthy quaintness is turned upside down by a whole lot of neon. There’s a pink and purple neon sign above the church itself and a shooting neon rainbow above the Jesus in the garden. It would be gaudy it weren’t so grippingly uncanny, especially at night.

The Mother Trust Superet Church was founded in 1926 and purportedly combines a scientific study of light with Bible study. “Jesus’ Words were shining with and in a brilliancy of golden and purple Light,” reads the church’s website, which also alludes to the church’s belief in auras and reincarnation.

Asco, First Supper (After a Major Riot), 1974

I thought of Mother Trust and its weird spiritual whimsy Wednesday, when strolling through ASCO, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s soon-to-open exhibition of work by an under-exposed Chicano collective consisting of Gronk, Willie Herron, Harry Gamboa and Patssi Valdez. Active in L.A. in the 1970s and ‘80s and named after the Spanish word for nausea – as the story goes, one member of the group said “This gives me ASCO” after seeing a grating exhibition, and an idea for a new kind of art was born – the group had a lot to be nauseous about, including the war in Vietnam, which had killed a seemingly disproportionate number of young Chicano men.

The show largely includes video and photographic documentations of performances, one of which was the Stations of the Cross, performed in 1971 along Whittier Boulevard in L.A. A procession and a protest, the artists wore outlandish costumes (Gamboa was Pontius Pilate in a clown suit) and headed, with a large cross and skeleton in tow, toward the Marine Recruiting Station, where they would deliver the skeleton. Later, they interrupted a mass in Evergreen Cemetery and staged First Supper (After a Riot), dining on an island in the middle of a street  during rush hour. In these performances, they wore make-up and outlandish costumes—platform boots, or  home-made masks.

Asco, Asco Goes to the Universe, 1975

Always, ASCO looked reverently serious, no matter how riotous or disruptive they were being. Like the Superet church with its kitschy and over-the-top neon, their disruptions and eccentricities, even when motivated by disgust at the world around them, were full of conviction.

Vija Celmins, "Time Magazine Cover," 1965, oil on canvas, 22x16 in., private collection c/o Ms. Laura Bechter.

Sunday night, before we knew for certain Osama bin Laden had died, I was listening to the radio and reading an essay by Kamin Mohammadi. Called Lust, Devotion & the Binary Code (titles that rely on the power of threes—consider “Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire” or “Sex, Art, and Americn Culture”— make me worry an author can’t commit), the essay was published in VQR and nominated for an National Magazine Award. It begins with Mohammadi in her native Iran, with what’s supposed to be a foreboding line: “S and I arrived late to the hotel in the remote town” (S is a man, of course). It ends with her no longer in Iran, having had her love affair, and returned to the UK she’d adopted in childhood; she says, “I have lost my love and my country, and so have little left to lose.”

What comes between is a long-suffering realization on the part of the writer that restriction does not necessarily lead to naiveté. She worries that her soon-to-be lover has never been alone with a woman. (She’s wrong; he’s snuck up to girls’ windows before.) Later, she worries that their loose talk over phone lines could be picked up and lead to jail time, or worse. He laughs at her. Does she think she invented phone sex? (She does think so, actually, at least within the borders of Iran.) The essay’s ending, which I reached around the time Obama finally began his address, seemed stretched too easily to a point of lyrical closure. “I have lost my country.” It’s just hard to believe that she ever had it.

Vija Celmins, "Burning Man," 1966 Oil on canvas 20 x 22.5 inches. Private Collection, New York.

The most resonate part of Obama’s speech for me—it felt right on the whole, enough so that I began googling West Wing character Toby Ziegler, the main reference point I have for speech writing done too well—was when he asked all of us to remember that feeling of unity that blanketed us right after 9/11. He was asking us to recall just a feeling, something that had been emotional, in-the-moment and thus necessarily fleeting, not to lay claim to something bigger and broader that many of us would have never had.

Vija Celmins’ television paintings, made between 1964 and 1966 and currently on view at LACMA, may be far more underwhelming than Obama’s “bin Laden’s gone” speech. Still, they have a similar cautiousness about claiming too much. Many show disasters Celmins never experienced any place other than on the TV screen—red glow of explosions, cool gray of war planes, scenes from Vietnam and scenes from Watts, belabored but not rendered with the exquisite tightness she’d become known for later; instead, they have the looseness of a blurring screen. It’s all the opposite of an op-ed. This work doesn’t have a slant, just a sort of circumstantial being-there-ness that manages to hover between passivity and intention.

Judith Bernstein, "Cockman #1 and #2," Acrylic on canvas, 1966.

But, then, there may be another way to acknowledge how little you own beyond yourself. Intention emanates aggressively from Judith Bernstein’s current exhibition at The Box in Chinatown. Her paintings, so phallically gross and the oldest ones (made in the mid-60s) aged so unkindly that their bodily pinks and browns seem putrid, have titles like Vietnam Salute and Cockman. Their faux-edginess recalls the kind a middle schooler takes on when she realizes profanity can get a rise and lets out four-letter words like nobody’s business. This naive brashness has a kitschy humor to it, though—the “Cockmen” look like Babar, if he’d given up his ears and had a penis nose instead of a trunk. The whole show is Valerie Solanis meets Sarah Silverman: absurd, solipsistic anger that knows how to play a crowd.

I can’t even imagine Celmins and Bernstein’s work in a room together, but what it shares is a painful awareness of its own smallness, even if Bernstein finds that smallness enraging, and kicks at it with all her sass-filled might. Neither would be caught trying to pull the world together with a simple line like, “I have lost my love and my country, and so have little left to lose.”

Lorna Simpson, "1957–2009 Interiors #3," 2009

Human Nature is the remarkably, almost assaultingly, immense title of Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s current exhibition of art from its contemporary collection. But a walk through the galleries will quickly show you that immensity is actually far from the point. Unlike past exhibitions with similar sounding names—The Family of Man, MoMA’s 1955 paean to unity, comes to mind–the point of this show is categories. The images and objects in it, all made since ’68, are almost too tightly grouped. There’s body-centered, identity-searching work by Hannah Wilke, Carlee Fernandez and Ana Mendieta all in a row; a nostalgic assemblage by Betye Saar right across from an equally history-heavy sculpture by Saar’s daughter, Alison; pithy, politically charged text pieces by Mel Bochner, Glenn Ligon and John Baldessari hang together in the same room as Bruce Nauman’s neon pinwheel of weighty adjectives, also called Human Nature and the loosely the inspiration for this show.

When I visited the exhibition a week ago, I spent a particularly long time with a series of vintage portraits by agile, conscientious Brooklyn-based artist Lorna Simpson. The portraits dealt with categories in a way that seemed more compelling, and more human, then the show on the whole. They captured the amazing ability people have to become what they see in the world—to tailor themselves to categories—without making this proclivity for fitting in seem any less mystifying then it really is.

Daniela Comani, "Happy Marriage #02," Edition of 5, Archival pigment print, 20 x 24 inches.

Daniela Comani, "Happy Marriage," Installation view, Archival pigment prints. Courtesy Charlie James Gallery.

A few years ago, Simpson discovered some photographs from 1957, most of a woman, and some of a man. The couple posed in ways that recalled Hollywood pin-ups despite their modest domicile. Simpson restaged the images, playing the roles and adopting the poses of both man and woman herself. The resulting photos, on view at LACMA  and efficiently titled 1957–2009 Interiors #3, show the artist beside a chess board or wielding a guitar, wearing a plaid suit, an Elvis-worthy white shirt and rolled up slacks, or a cleavage-stressing blouse with tight black shorts and black heels to match. The “couple” looks like the mingling of sleek gorgeousness that could have resulted had Nat King Cole and Lena Horne become a thing. Hung interspersed with the originals, Simpson’s restaged photos don’t “reveal” anything about their subjects. Instead, they drive home just how posed and idiosyncrasy-free home-made images can be.

I thought of Simpson when, last Saturday, I saw Berlin-based artist Daniela Comani’s Happy Marriage project, a series of staged photographs on view at Charlie James Gallery in Chinatown. Like Simpson, Comani plays both male and female roles in digitally altered portraits of a marriage that, though cliché to extreme, feels wholly believable. If Simpson’s series channels 50s pin-ups, Comani’s channels present-day Bohemia. The couple reads classics in bed, wears plaid, buys wine and cheese and, I suspect, recycles religiously. That they are both women who have uncannily similar features is a surprisingly easy detail to overlook. Comani plays husband and wife so comfortably that what should be subversive—this happy marriage isn’t just queer, but practically incestuous in its self-involvement—instead feels perfectly predictable.

Alice B. Toklas (rear) and her lover, Gertrude Stein, in Venice, Italy, in 1908.

The fabulously mannish writer Gertrude Stein and her more-or-less wife Alice B. Toklas, delicate and domestic despite her thin black mustache, had a marriage that, by most apparent measures, should have been deviant or at least unconventional. But they didn’t see it that way.

When a young journalist named Robert Duncan asked Toklas whether she and Stein ever felt “set apart” (he was referring to their Jewishness, but Toklas’ response can safely be extrapolated), she replied, “Never. We never had any feeling of any minority. We weren’t the minority. We represented America.” And so they did, Alice with her French cooking tips (The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook preceded Julia Child’s first by seven years), Stein with her by-the-bootstraps wealth and both with their pioneering sense of intellectual entitlement.

Neither Comani’s nor Simpson’s projects feature “the minority” either. They portray people who, at least in the way the pose themselves, live at the center of cultural convention.

Peter Van Agtmael, "2008, Above Afghanistan" on the cover of "2nd Tour, Hope I Don't Die." Via Magnum Photos.

Clicking through TIME Magazine’s “Most Unforgettable Images” of 2010 feels a bit like watching a missionary slideshow at an Evangelical tent meeting. There are helpless bodies,  flames, sweeping gestures and unsettling blue skies, all tied together in concentric compositions. What’s more, each image seems certain its viewers will  intuitively understand why and how it matters; they will first feel bowled over by stark reality, then invigorated by that implicit hope for redemption that any good missionary hopes to pass on. The fact that these 48 images have made TIME’s cut means they’ve evangelized effectively.

A weird religious fervor has characterized photojournalism almost since its beginning, certainly since the Second World War. The “god’s-eye-view” (a term used by scholar Erika Doss, among others) so many photographs take suggests sweeping access to the world’s events and terrains—it’s like writing in the third person omniscient.

One omniscient image in TIME’s “Best of” list is by Peter Van Agtmael, a Yale graduate who worked as a photojournalist in China and Johannesburg before embedding in Iraq and later Afghanistan (“I knew these specific wars were intertwined with me, or at least I wanted them to be,” he told the New York Times in 2009). The images he’s made are quietly searing and rarely of action as it takes place; more often, they described moments before, after or in-between. The photograph featured in TIME depicts long rows of cement barriers flanking a street at Camp Liberty in Baghdad. It feels cool and utilitarian, but its dogged repetition lends to a sort of romantically melancholic, admirably well-composed vastness.

Another image by Van Agtmael, one I find even more compelling, has similar vastness. Called 2008, Above Afghanistan, it features on the cover of the book 2^nd tour, Hope I don’t die, and depicts a magnificent spread of desert terrain over which one lone white cloud casts a soft shadow. Even though it’s relatively small, the cloud recalls something atomic—like the billowing mushrooms of smoke that, post-Hiroshima, have come to stand-in for everything nuclear. The image also has a washed-out, blue-over-orange coloring that recalls the nostalgic aesthetic of William Eggleston.

William Eggleston, from Los Alamos, 1966-1974. Courtesy the Eggleston Trust.

I can’t look at Van Agtmael’s Above Afghanistan without thinking of Eggleston’s Los Alamos series, much of which is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through January 16^th. Completed in 1974, Los Alamos features a whole host of clouds and was loosely informed by the photographer’s visit to the atomic bomb’s birthplace (very loosely informed, actually, as Eggleston had almost finished the series when he first laid eyes on Los Alamos). Then-Corcoran curator Walter Hopps explained, “This title cloaks with some irony Eggleston’s ostensible subjects, found in a vast American terrain, yet acknowledges his belief in the aesthetic consequences of his private quest.”

Each time I visit the Eggleston retrospective, I leave in awe of one particular image from the series: a photograph of a cocktail on a plane. My awe makes me slightly self-conscious, as the image’s shimmery reflections have a sexiness reminiscent of a vintage cigarette ad. Or maybe, more aptly, they have both the brazen glamor of a James Bond flick and a veranda-worthy Southern gentility. Such lushness can’t exist anymore; it’s specific to a time when airplanes had leg room and air travel felt like freedom. Yet, despite the scene’s datedness, I can imagine the person stirring that cocktail leaning over and looking down onto a desert landscape like the one Van Agtmael portrays.

William Eggleston, from "Los Alamos," 1966-1974. Courtesy the Eggleston Trust and LACMA.

Van Agtmael’s images, like those of many photojournalists, adapt large public issues and render them for stirring private effect. While this public-made-private approach does not leave much room for moments like those Eggleston depicts, Eggleston’s images are gripping precisely because they leave room for a bigger world beyond their borders. They just doesn’t presume to take a god’s eye view of it.

John Baldessari, "Tincture of a Person Who Wants Everything," Mixed Media, 1996. Courtesy Jancar Gallery.

Alex Van Gelder had a rare privilege: he spent the last year of Louise Bourgeois’s life in her town house, photographing her. His opulent, raw images of the art goddess appear in the September issue of W Magazine, along with idiosyncratic tributes by artists and friends (Wendy Williams remembers a dinner of octopus and alcohol-soaked Klondike Bars, and Tracy Emin talks about how men peak early while women come and come). According to Van Gelder, Louise saw the photographs as an extension of her own work, and of course she did—despite its sensuous irreverence, her work has always been surprisingly holistic. It’s about being a whole package, about pulling psychology and body together seamlessly and forcefully.

In Van Gelder’s images, Louise always has props or accessories of some sort that make her appear “complete,” like  she did in the iconic portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe for which she brought her own sculpted phallus (she knew Mapplethorpe liked big penises and didn’t want to be anything short of well-endowed). One of Van Gelder’s photographs shows her in a black beanie, black sweater, and a sumptuous white fur coat with a collar that rises up around her head. You could disappear in a coat like that, though, naturally, Louise doesn’t. Wearing a dour expression, she looks like she could be a bear, a snow queen and the pope all at once.

Alex Van Gelder, portraits of Louise Bourgeois, 2010. Via W Magazine.

The coat reminds me of The Indian Uprising, a story by Donald Barthelme in which young rebels strategize about love and combat. One character, Kenneth, has a girlfriend of whom his friends are suspicious. “That girl is not in love with Kenneth,” says one to another, “she is in love with his coat. When she is not wearing it, she is huddling under it. Once I caught it going down the stairs by itself. I looked inside: Sylvia.” That Sylvia might be in love with both Kenneth and the coat, or that loving the coat might be a way of loving Kenneth, doesn’t seem to occur to either of them. People who love, or want, too many things at once are confusing.

John Baldessari made his Tincture of a Person Who Wants Everything in 1996, but it hadn’t been shown until last month, when it appeared in Jancar Gallery’s Supernatural exhibition, a show of “objects produced to understand the larger world and control one’s position within it.” It’s a red, blue and white, wall-mounted medicine bottle that looks very official. Purportedly from Midas Welby Pharmacy at 777 King Street, New York, NY 10014–an address that, a friend informed me, doesn’t exist and, if it did, would be in the Hudson River–, the bottle explains that to become the “Person Who Wants Everything,” one drop of the tincture should be added to seven ounces of water. This should be repeated daily until the tincture is gone. No refills are permitted, and patients may experience swelling of the head.

It’s been Baldessari’s summer. His work has been all over Los Angeles, at Jancar Gallery, Thomas Solomon Gallery, Margo Leavin Gallery, Gemini G.E.L. and, most notably, in Pure Beauty, a retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Contemporary Art (Rebecca Taylor wrote in detail about Pure Beauty for Huffingtion Post). If wanting to be everywhere, think about anything and be anyone is the same as wanting everything, then Baldessari has taken, or simply is, his own tincture. Bucking rules and making new ones, breaking down and building up, comparing and recording, co-opting, inhabiting,  measuring, reveling and intervening: Baldessari does all of this while maintaining a formalist’s fixation on composition.

John Baldessari, "Brain/Cloud (With Seascape and Palm Tree)," 2009.

Walking through Pure Beauty feels like walking through Baldessari’s brain, and it’s the brain of someone who’s curious and insatiable and badly wants to be smart and agile–he is smart and agile, of course, but it’s the wanting that drives the work.

In the retrospective’s final gallery space, insatiability hits an unfortunate stand still. Baldessari has installed his Brain/Cloud, a large white brain that protrudes from the wall against the backdrop of a blue sky. It’s as if there’s been a bit too much swelling of the head. As visitors walk past, a time-delayed live video feed catches their movement and plays it back to them seconds later, so they can watch themselves watching the brain. Like Louise Bourgeois’s matronly Maman sculptures,  the brain embodies all Baldessari has probed over his decades-long career. But Baldessari is not holistic like Louise. His wants contradict each other, and wandering endlessly around in the crevices of what a brain can be, do and desire should mean never actually seeing that brain as one unified thing.

Andy Warhol, Dennis Hopper, Screen Tests Reel #4, 1964-65.

I spent Sunday looking at boys. It began at LACMA, where I saw Catherine Opie’s quarterbacks, linebackers and surfers  followed by Thomas Eakins’s rowers, wrestlers and athletic but stationary nudes. It continued at the Egyptian Theater, with ten of Andy Warhol’s four-minute screen tests: Buffy Phelps with delicate, defiant eyes and blondish curls; John Giorno of Sleep, darker and rougher than Buffy; Kip “Bima” Stagg, equally dark but not as rough; Dennis Hopper, twenty-eight but looking younger; Hopper again, still near twenty-eight, but suit-clad and looking older; Gregory Battock with Clark Gable jauntiness; Richard Schmidt and Paul Winterbottom; Kenneth King and Richard Markowitz, who, along with Giorno and Hopper, would appear in the compilation The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys.

Because Warhol’s tests are meditative and slow, I lost myself in their static silence, and didn’t think about gender until the reel played out. “They were all men, weren’t they?” I said to the friend sitting next to me. He’d noticed before I had.

Collier Schorr, "Jens F.," 2005.

Three weeks ago, when Catherine Opie’s unprovocatively titled Figure and Landscape opened, Opie talked about her work in LACMA’s Bing Theater. She mentioned comparisons often made between her sports photographs and the work of Collier Schorr, which depicts, among other things, young male bodies posing and sparring. “Collier wants to be her boys,” said Opie. “I don’t . . . I’m not interested in seeing my butch body through them.” What she’s interested in is bearing witness, and she’s been witnessing a precariously in-between generation, some of which has gone to Iraq, some of which has died.

Being versus bearing is not so simple a distinction, of course–Opie’s boys, as poet-critic Eileen Myles has pointed out, tend to adopt the Opie expression, which resembles a “scary duh.” Even so, it’s possible Schorr wants to be her boys while Opie wants to be aware of her boys; certainly, Eakins wanted to be with his boys while Warhol wanted to collect them.

Thomas Eakins,"The Champion Single Sculls," 1871. Courtesy LACMA.

It’s Warhol and Schorr who most prominently prefer male subjects. Warhol’s Screen Test Reel #5 includes only two women and, like Reel #4, Reel #6 is an exclusive boy’s club. Schorr, when asked why she doesn’t photograph girls, has said she does; she just uses boys to do it. But the strange, sports-focused mannishness of the paired Opie-Eakins exhibitions is even stranger in light of both artists’ genuine interest in women. Opie’s girl-only Girlfriends series showed at Gladstone Gallery in New York last year, and Eakins consistently included women in his work, and even in his controversies. It was his uninhibited disrobing in front of female students and his insistence on the removal of a male model’s “loin cloth” during a drawing session women attended, not his obsession with his “beloved” (as one wall label reads) young men, that forced him to resign from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1886.

Catherine Opie, "Untitled #10 (Surfers)," 2003. Courtesy Regen Projects.

In Manly Pursuits and Figure and Landscape, Eakins and Opie, both realists, show themselves to be exquisite technicians with a virtuosic, if predictable, eye for poetic composition. In Eakins’s The Champion Single Sculls, a burnt sienna scull cuts smoothly across royal blue water and its inhabitant looks elegantly, if illogically, casual as he turns to look back. In Opie’s portraits, skin, eyes, pose, gaze, the position of the football helmet, have all been carefully considered; royal blue makes frequent appearances in her work as well. But both artists render the trappings of a conventional masculinity and gender-play to which neither quite belong–to which no one quite belongs–and it’s the work that revels in inaction that seems most gaping and honest.

A room at the back of Figure and Landscape features only surfing images, and, though Opie has made striking portraits of surfers she’s shadowed, none of those portraits are included here. Instead, there’s just expansive gray rectangles in which far-off bodies float, largely unmoving, waiting for a chance to resume their sport. They’re certainly skilled surfers; everyone Opie photographs seems to be good at what they do. They’re also like little pawns or bobbing black buoys. They don’t look volitional but they do look comfortable; like the artist who made them, they’re virtuosic and yet awkward precisely because they’re virtuosic.

Stan VanDerBeek with his Movie-Drome, Stony Point, NY. Courtesy Yale School of Architecture

Making films is not easy. Most people know this and almost as many find the difficulties of movie-making enthralling, which explains the proliferation of articles, TV interviews, and radio specials on the subject. Just last week, I nearly pulled off the freeway to better concentrate on radio host Elvis Mitchell’s interview with Oren Moverman, the directed of The Messenger (who, apparently, had 3 different directors, including Sydney Pollack, walk away from the picture before he took the helm himself), and I don’t think I’ll ever tire of Quentin Tarantino’s story (told most recently on Tuesday’s Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien) about how his hands, and not the hands of Nazi Colonel Hans Landa, came to strangle Diana Kruger’s character in Inglourious Basterds.

This fascination with filmmaking has something, if not everything, to do with the fact that, while the production process may be a tangled mess of misplaced funding and last-minute game-changes, the watching process often feels effortless. Well-made mainstream features are meant to pull you through a seamlessly self-contained fiction that twists and turns, periodically threatening to derail but never actually doing so. They’re meant to leave you strangely satiated, even if you just witnessed an apocalyptic blood bath. Video art and art films, on the other hand, tend to be neither seamless nor satiating; and sometimes, watching them feels like it must be at least as difficult as making them.

On Tuesday night, in a crowded basement auditorium at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I listened as Tate Modern curator Stuart Comer talked about, among other things, organizing experimental film events at a museum that has practically obliterated its film budget. Snaring potential backers can be difficult, since Comer’s programming has a reputation for being “aggressively avant-garde”—which is another way of saying films at the Tate require a bit too much of their viewers.

Stan VanDerBeek, March 22, 1969. Inside the Movie-Drome. Courtesy Black Mountain College Museum.

Before Comer took the podium, art historian Gloria Sutton spoke at length about Stan VanDerBeek, a graduate of 1950s Black Mountain College who built the infamous Movie-Drome, a grain silo turned multimedia screening room, in his Stony Point, NY, backyard. He filled his Movie-Drome with an assortment of projectors, so that multiple still and moving images could occupy the curved ceiling at once. VanDerBeek’s films, which resemble fugitively animated Wallace Berman collage, champion what he called the “aesthetics of anticipation.” They ask their audience to stay alert, trace connections between fragments and look for meaning that they will never quite be able to find. They’re demanding and rigorous, but, really, once you’ve decided to submit yourself to them, they’re mostly exhilarating.

In one of VanDerBeek’s best, Poemfield No. 2, a series of pixelated words punctuate the screen then disintegrate into blurs of light and specks of neon color.  At first, you try to read the words for meaning, then the film starts to resemble a sort of absurdest nightmare in which the text becomes unreadable before it’s even materialized. Yet the constantly foiled desire to decipher still propels you through, and you’re always anticipating the moment at which the flickering screen will become legible again–it’s more suspenseful than anything Hitchcock ever made, because the suspense lasts indefinitely.

Note: LACMA will host two more panels on experimental film, one in March and one in May. The dates should be finalized and posted to LACMA’s website in the near future.