Word for Word: Décor for Distance, 2017
LACMA Los Angeles
"Word for Word: Decor for Distance" was commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in partnership with the Getty Foundation PST LA /LA initiative for "A Universal History of Infamy" curated by Jose Luis Blondet, Rita Gonzales and Pilar Tompkins Rivas.
"Word for Word: Decor for Distance" is a series of works inspired by artists-authors emulating other artists-authors and on the replacements they do within their work and the work of others.
The title references "Of Mere Being", a poem by Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955), in which the word "decor" was later replaced with the word "distance". The poem is installed next to the facade intervention and on the first floor of LACMA's BCAM building, next to a Spanish version of it done by the artists.
Description of Works:
- A two-layered large-scale collage covering the Wilshire Blvd. LACMA's BCAM facade and featuring depictions of palm trees around cutouts framing existing palms.
- "Of Mere Being". Poem by Wallace Stevens.
- "The Palm at the end of the mind, Beyond the last thought, rises
- In the bronze decor..." *
- *Selected Poems and a Play/Edited by Holly Stevens.
- "As printed in Opus Posthumus (Alfred Knopf, New York, 1957), the last word of the third line is "distance" .
- "Decor" is the word appearing in the original typescript and has been restored for this exhibition.
- The model of "Word for Word: Decor for Distance" with poem.
- "Word for Word: Disolución for Extension – Borges for Twain". Pencil drawings 30 x 30 cm each.
Based on the description of the Mississippi River by Mark Twain in "Life on the Mississippi": "the mud deposits gradually extend the land" and on that by Jorge Luis Borges in "Una Historia Universal de la Infamia", where he emulates Twain; "los despojos de un contintente en perpetua disolución".
