LA Art - Photo: Hedi Slimane.

art
3/10/2009

Hedi Slimane: LA Art.


by Dean Mayo Davies


As a natural follow-up to his documentation of the art scene in New York, featuring names that moved to become icons - Banks Violette, Dash Snow, Dan Colen, Terence Koh and Ryan McGinley; Slimane has set about capturing the effervescent developing scene on the West Coast of the US. It’s time for LA Art to move into the spotlight.

Los Angeles is, of course, a city with unique dichotomy. It’s a metropolis that splits the urban and the natural. Fixated on the new with a desire to move forward, the area’s art schools, which often feature reverential American artists as part of their faculty, will prove a breeding ground to keep feeding the expanding, vitalic art scene. 

For this project, Slimane has taken a series of portraits that unite a group of individuals with diverse practices - Justin Beal, Whitney Bedford, Jedediah Caesar, Brett Cody Rogers, Emilie Halpern, Drew Heitzler, Patrick Hill, Vishal Jugdeo, Elad Lassry, Jed Lind, Shana Lutker, Carter Mull, Kori Newkirk, Anna Sew Hoy, Mindy Shapero, Paul Sietsema, Ricky Swallow, Mateo Tannatt and Lesley Vance. Celebratory of a moment within a creative scene, the project is open-ended as a result; a snapshot in real-time of a movement evolving.

Dean Mayo Davies: What was it that motivated your LA artists project, Hedi?

Hedi Slimane: I did a previous project on New York-based artists few years ago, but I now spend most of my time in Los Angeles and observed how so many artists were moving to California, rejuvenating the LA art scene. I decided to begin documenting chosen groups of artists, and posted it on my Diary online, as an ongoing project.

DMD: Are you fascinated by the fact Los Angeles still has a developing - rather than firmly established - art scene? I guess this is a quality that fits with your work, the idea of youth and the documentation of journey...

HS: I spend most of my time in Los Angeles. I have seen the evolution through the years, and how quietly, a rejuvenated art scene started to emerge; spreading and attracting more and more artists, giving them the possibility to expand - just like Berlin has done for about a decade now.

DMD: How did you select the artists involved? Are you a collector or did you treat the curation as a word-of-mouth project? Were you interested in portraying these artists as a collective - what you feel they represent - or shining a light on them as individuals?

HS: No, I am not a collector at all. I wanted to do this portrait series for a long time really, a couple of years, given that I’ve taken portraits of artists for quite some time - in particular the NY scene, which I was really familiar with a couple of years ago. I had a couple of friends with whom I talked when I made a decision about how to start this ongoing LA project. Jessica de Ruiter, who lives in Los Angeles with artist Jed Lind, and Brian Phillips. I decided to document the generation around the Culver City area and shot the whole thing within the Mandrake bar, which belongs to artists Justin Beal and Drew Heitzler, representative of this art community.

DMD: What do you admire about the artists involved?

HS: I am always interested by the sense of cohesion, or a group within a creative space. The sense of community is an interesting perspective above all at this day and time, and is following a tradition somehow within southern Californian art.

DMD: You’ve been shooting a lot of other stories in Los Angeles recently - Vogue Hommes Japan for the American issue, Courtney Love with Panos for LOVE, Lindsay Lohan. What enchants you about the West Coast? Have you tapped into an energy that you feel is as exciting as your Berlin or London moments?

HS: I have places in both Los Angeles and Paris. I live between the two, really, but I am mostly interested in London and Los Angeles. They strangely complement each other. In Europe, London, without any doubt, is my favourite place of experimentation.

DMD: It’s exciting to see how your Diary and Fashion Diary are becoming more and more conceptual spaces. Your ambitious LA Art project is the most recent example of this. Last time we spoke, we discussed how you use the internet as a democratic, pure method of communication. Now, you seem to be pushing and pushing that further with exclusive, web-only editorials - the huge Jethro story shot with Nicola during Paris menswear was the start, and since you’ve continued. Is this a pattern you intend to maintain? It’s a great complement to your print work...

HS: Yes it is totally what this is about really, and a pattern and instant dialogue I am now experimenting with. I am using my Diary as a direct platform; immediate in term of content. I produce some of of my projects for the purpose of immediacy and really this is why I started the Diary in the first place. It is a perspective I always had in mind, also because the delay of producing a publication makes the content somehow irrelevant, in terms of idea, or as "news".  I sometimes forget how long it takes to have my photographs published. What is broadband really is information, and information is immediacy. I guess publications now should be a materialisation of a digital content, with a sense of ‘rarity’ for the object itself, something like a special printed edition, just like what has happened in the music industry; the first to be hit with the internet revolution. But not the other way around. It is eventually an outcome for press. On a different note, I have the same feeling about fashion and the archaism of the seasonal calendar. Six months of producing the designs were far too much for access in a digital world. I always thought that system was gone, one of the reasons why I had to step out. 



DMD.



http://www.hedislimane.com

http://www.hedislimane.com/diary

http://www.hedislimane.com/fashiondiary

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