You get a brief shot of Matinée, a new project space thought up by Los Angeles-based artist Andrew J. Greene, at around minute one of a video posted by a daredevil urban explorer YouTuber, Davy, titled “EXPLORING THE ‘WARNER BROS’ THEATRE IN DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES.” In March, Davy and a companion (who goes by moodygabe) snuck into the Jewelry Theatre Building’s side door on 7th Street, and over the course of the upload ended up somewhere inside the vaudeville house-turned-movie palace-turned-jewelry market’s ceiling, behind a cascading strip light chandelier and the disintegrating art deco murals that decorate the theater’s dome.
In the video, as the boys move deeper and deeper into the long-unseen depths of the theater, each minor archeological trace of the building’s earlier life is received with the sincere, revelatory tone of a public broadcasting documentarian, tinged with the monotone affectation of an only slightly fried content creator. Their finds range from an aluminum soda can from the pre-pull tab era to obsolete production equipment from the theater’s many lives over the last century. This doesn’t mean Davy and moodygabe necessarily have the technical or historical context to form language or proximity to these periods. Davy’s age is somewhere between younger Gen Z and older Gen Z, though his duo-toned shoulder-length hair—split blue and fuchsia down the middle (mildly reminiscent of the bisexual pride flag)—makes it hard to tell. Upon finding old 35mm movie canisters, the pair attempts to decipher their markings, coming into new informational literacies in real time. “Is this for like, the films?” “Yeah. Film canister. Kodak. Company.” “That is cool, dude.”
In Matinée’s inaugural staging, two works from Gretchen Bender’s TV Text & Image series are encased in the corner storefront roughly where stage right used to be. Two boxy monitors are tuned to local broadcasting stations, with black vinyl text reading “REVOLUTION” and “PUBLIC MEMORY,” in a plain, sans-serif all-caps typeface. Greene has been working, unassisted, on gallery-izing upgrades to Matinée’s vitrine-like space for a while, with a two-year program lined up focused on reintroducing work from the 80s and 90s. It’s an ambitious, one-man-show project, and a minor infiltration of the theater, still a semi-functional jewelry mart with security guards who enforce a strict no-photos policy. Behind the curtain, there’s implied trickery undertaken to make the Bender piece work on the clunky CRT monitors, as the last analog broadcast signals in the United States that would have been able to be picked up by the monitors ended in 2009.
Bender’s work was keenly oriented toward the future, though it stops short of being prophetic. There’s something a little out of sync about the piece in an era when classic network TV has become an odd assortment of game show reruns and ads for life insurance or prepaid phones for senior citizens. The images behind the text—a mash-up of vintage ads and dated new broadcasts—at times feel less like Pictures Generation MTV-style mass media, and more like what you would be forced to watch during an extended hospital stay. And admittedly, encountering a news channel or commercial from today on a tube TV from 30 years ago feels adjacent to the eerie Frankenstein-feeling I get when watching a 35mm screening of a movie that was shot on digital to begin with, when great lengths are taken to meet the needs and expectations of an incredibly specialized audience. Perhaps the endless loop of resuscitation through invisible telecine is what makes the work perfect for the Jewelry Theater Building in the first place.
One is left wondering what the future holds for the various iterations of the piece. What role does a TV stream play in an era where analog signals have been replaced by literal streamers crawling in the ceiling? Do visitors to Matinée share the same “public memory” as Davy and moodygabe? It’s unlikely. Still, Greene and Davy both embark on an earnest reach toward a historicity that has become all too remote for the artists, thrillseekers, and jewelry sellers among us. Through these minor forms of trespass, Bender’s project could, in theory, regenerate indefinitely.
