September 20, 2009 – Often regarded as a city without a center, Los Angeles can be a strange fit for public art. The city demonstrates the difficulty from any vantage point, whether you are on a streamlined, post and beam porch in the Hollywood hills or posted up at the sleek pool bar of the Standard Hotel downtown. Los Angeles’ complex vectors, the sheer multiplicity of its locations – Santa Monica, Culver City, Hollywood, Brentwood, Bel Air, South Central, Dowtown, Westwood, Beverly Hills – makes locating a spot of convergence, a place where people can come together and recognize their treasure and enjoy public art, almost impossible. There is no Piazza Navona, Trafalgar Square, Effiel Tower, Time Square or Central Park.

So I was excited when the Fall Art Season commenced, not just with openings, but with two exciting public projects, both attempting to bring a crowd together. Over the past couple of years, L.A. has done better with public projects – Chris Burden’s knockout sculpture of street lamps Urban Light at LACMA becoming sort of a L.A. Spanish Steps and Emi Fontana’s series of screenings, billboards and projects entitled Women in the City popping up all over the city being two strong examples. But on September 12th, amongst dozens and dozens of openings, L.A. native Doug Aitken was to display his much discussed Carnegie International piece Migration on the exterior walls of Regen Projects II in West Hollywood, a large bar and party center. Also, after thirty years, Bruce Nauman, with the help of Armory curator Andrew Berardini, would finally realize a skywriting project from 1969 above the skies of Pasadena. I looked forward to a good day and got started early.

Around 10 am in three locations, groups of people gathered to view Bruce Nauman’s project. I was at the home of Molly Munger and Steve English sitting under an umbrella on a beautiful Italian Villa inspired porch and lawn, sipping Mimosas and eating finger size quiche and fruit. Collectors, Curators, Artists, and writers mingled on the lawn, and after a short announcement from Scott Ward, director of the Armory Center for the Arts n Pasadena, we looked to the sky as a small plane scrawled out LEAVE THE LAND ALONE in small burst of mist in the sky. The message was clear, lingered but a few moments, and was repeated a total of four times by the plane over the course of a half hour.

The timeliness of Nauman’s gesture, even though it came thirty years after it was planned, could not be missed. As Christopher Knight, head critic of the L.A. Times observed, the message, directed both to a 1960s society suddenly awoken by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and to earth work artists taking to remote areas to make their work, perhaps takes on even more meaning today, when strong motions are being made to do what Nauman says in terms of the environment yet when so much more remains to be done. Like Knight also observed, however, the gesture was an elusive one and faded quickly. The crowd I was in was quickly back to its champagne flutes and nosh without much of a thought and when the sky cleared and the noontime heat started to brood, people were back in their cars. Such is L.A. Public Art.

The day, however, was far from over. After getting a sneak peek at about a dozen galleries in Chinatown and popping into 5 or 6 openings in Culver City, I made it to Regen Projects that night for Aitken’s Migration, and on arrival, I knew that I was in for something special. Projected on two large walls, the video work absorbed both the artworld gallery crowd as well as passing club and bar goers with its slow pans of vacant hotel rooms and its low hum of moody music.

In each hotel room, I found a different animal, inhabiting the space in its own way, cloistered and trapped in an oppressive space. The drama of seeing a cougar politely rip open a pillow with its claws or a bison simply standing in a Super 8 is hard to measure, but Aitken’s closely calibrated poetry, at least in my opinion, transcends most of his early work and sets a new bar for the artist. The work was even able to reach out and connect even in West Hollywood, with its flash and glitzy Saturday night revelry typically taking over and defeating many of the quieter virtues of life. After a long day of art, I was surprised that I was still capable of being charmed and went home reflective and centered.

Doug Aitken’s migration in New York