It’s a commonplace of the current cultural moment that we have trouble tearing ourselves away from our screens.  (Some of us anyway; and for some of us that screen is basically an extension of our desk.)  But actually I think it’s a bit more complicated than that.  The problem is more about negotiating the space between screen and actuality – the distance implied and enabled by the screen; the denial we invoke and enter into on any number of levels in our address of actuality.  Walk down a street – any street – with your eyes and fingers off your phone, and fully engage visually, aurally – I dare you.  Your guard goes up in direct proportion to the neutralized visual/mental filters.  It’s a mean world out there, mitigated only by aesthetics that go from surreal to ridiculous and back about every other second.  There’s a lot of talk lately about the resurgence of comedy (which I don’t entirely buy); but you can see the possibilities just by walking down the street.  It’s a laugh-fest or a choke-fest depending upon how visible or invisible, hungry or desperate you are.  

If you were at the eastern end of Sunset Boulevard over the last few weeks, you might have noticed a multi-unit structure that seemed to be getting ready for the wrecking ball (which in fact I believe it is).  It probably barely registered initially, but if you walked or drove past it often enough, especially in the last couple of weeks, you would have noticed it gradually being white-washed.  At a certain point, you would have noticed that the entire structure and property – every nook and cranny, every outcropping, all devices and signage, landscaping and even the trees closest to the buiding – was covered in white paint.  It’s been a shambles for the last five or six years, maybe a decade; so chances are this is the first time you have noticed it – which is part of the point. 

This was the Sunset-Pacific Hotel, known informally to many of us in or around this neighborhood, as “Bates Motel” (after Bates Street, which faces one side of the hotel).  Vincent Lamouroux had the idea of making this garish bit of local blight, which, in spite of its dimensions, had no more visual impact for most of us than a discarded gum wrapper, into an art installation.   Goddess only knows the actual “Bates Motel” of Hitchcock’s Psycho would be considered an art installation by now (those Messager-like taxidermied birds against that Oldenburg-esque setting!), so why not?  And he was onto something with this.  It’s a kind of erasure that makes the thing visible; not a real absence or removal, but, as his title suggests, a locus for ‘Projection.’  At first, I wondered if some sound-and-light installation or film projection might be planned for the site; but when I went there to inspect it, I learned that this was not the case.  In fact, it might simply be a promotion for a downtown design emporium, Please Do Not Enter (which itself is located in a building that will never be torn down – the Pacific Mutual building, a gorgeous Beaux-Arts structure). This is just a bit off-putting; but then, as I have myself pointed out, commercial/design, retail and fashion collaborations have also become quite common nowadays. 

We’re starting to confront the fact of disappearance, of invisibility on many levels:  the earth’s other species, the biosphere itself (which would ultimately mean the disappearance of our own species); for those of us of a certain age or in compromised health, our own disappearance; the obsolescence or simply impoverishment of a vast portion of the working world; the disappearance (or at the very least transition) of civilization itself.