The opening of NeueHouse Hollywood on the West Coast—their second location—would warrant our attention regardless of any new piece of art attached to it. After all, since its first location opened in Manhattan in 2013, NeueHouse has been a hub for celebrities, artists, and creative types to mingle, brainstorm and collaborate. Expensive and exclusive, it is a marker of the city’s preeminence in the increasingly intersecting worlds of art, fashion, design and commerce. Similarly, the opening is compelling due to the iconic building NeueHouse chose for its site—the 1930s CBS Columbia Square space, right on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Connections between the Golden Age of Hollywood and Los Angeles’s current centrality in the spheres of contemporary art and culture are manifest.

Sam Sharit and Drew Heitzler

Along with the notability of NeueHouse’s mission and the cultural significance of the site chosen is LA artists Sam Sharit and Drew Heitzler’s site-specific video titled, The Professor’s Long Windy Tail, that was projected on the façade of the building the week of October 14. Just three minutes long, it honors the heritage of the Hollywood building by using old film reels and animation of Felix the Cat, one of CBS’s most cherished cartoon characters.

The white façade of the building and its windows demarcates the two-dimensional space, much like an archaic video game level. In the center the Professor stands holding a large book that partially obscures his face. Throughout the video he rips pages out of the book, which then float and flounce across the screen/wall. These pages feature inscrutable words and phrases, such as “Arcane and Occluded,” “Loving Grace Machine,” “Leaving the Plane,” “Universal Perpetuity,” “Fantastical Anagrams” and “Taking the Torrent.” Meanwhile, Felix the Cat plods along the bottom, opens up a sack and lets a balloon float up to the top, featuring his likeness. He grabs on and ascends with it, jumps to a black bar, walks insouciantly across, and then parachutes back down. He then proceeds to use a paintbrush to uncover small figures, such as another version of himself as well as a more naturally rendered black-and-white cat. An escalator goes up the center of the wall, Felix rises up, and sees another version of his face pop up. The original Felix explodes and is reconfigured, a nod to what is happening more generally with the character’s recrudescence for NeueHouse in 2015. Another Felix carries a bomb across the wall but vanishes without us seeing the results, while the original continues to stroll confidently into the void as the video comes to an end.

Heitzler and Sharit’s choice of Felix the Cat for their projection isn’t just a nod at the building’s past fecundity but a reference to the character’s popularity among contemporary artists. Silent, sly, and usually operating in surreal circumstances (Aldous Huxley, for one, lauded the cartoon as something that brought us the “fantastic”), Felix is appealing to artists looking to use pop culture to make a commentary on current culture and technology. Turner Prize-winning Mark Leckey has rendered Felix as a gigantic inflatable object and animated him again; he told Rhizome that “Felix is a stand-in for my fascination with moving images. For me, he embodies the magical properties of technology.” Similarly, Raymond Pettibon has used Vavoom, a wide-mouthed but mostly mute denizen of Felix’s world, in his amusing but disconcerting cartoons and drawings. Even Maurizio Cattelan cannot resist evoking Felix, naming his looming skeleton of a cat after the icon. These artists are no doubt attracted to Felix’s irreverence and arch knowingness, as well as how the cartoon represented a moment in time that was also a moment in flux—a moment when sound was superseding silence, when what was once alluded to was now made plain by words.

Just as the Professor disseminates provocative, ambiguous, and allusive statements in Heitzler and Sharit’s animation, so too will NeueHouse eventually yield the work of its various collaborators. It is worth hoping that some of it will be as culturally incisive and memorable as Felix the Cat.

The animated projection will be visible to the public nightly from 7PM–1AM on the exterior of NeueHouse’s first West Coast site at the historic CBS Radio Building at 6121 Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, CA.