Vincent Ramos

Art brut aside, alternate meanings of “outsider” resonate widely in Vincent Ramos’s latest project, “Outsider Art: Others from Elsewhere Doing Something Altogether Different . . . Sort Of,” an evolving installation that is at once a studio, archive, laboratory, and headquarters for the artist’s research into performance activities of significant neo-avant-garde figures who passed through LA in the 1960s and ’70s. Not only were these artists strangers to a city ostensibly outside the mainstream art world, but the work produced and documented in this show stretched the boundaries of their practices. Ramos’s findings and responses to them demonstrate that notions of center and periphery were already slippery back then (thus his project constitutes an intriguing prequel to the Getty Foundation’s “Pacific Standard Time” initiative premiering this autumn).

Ephemera, objects, audio and video recordings, interviews conducted by the artist, and a wall-size, makeshift map chronicle well-known events by Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jean Tinguely as well as lesser-known projects by Niki de Saint Phalle, Alison Knowles, George Brecht, Claes Oldenburg, Hannah Wilke, and Agnes Varda, among others. In the work Tinguely via Sidonie, 2011, an audio recording accompanied by a takeaway postcard, we hear a woman haltingly improvise a translation from French into English of an LA letter from Tinguely to Pontus Hultén. While the reading represents a desire to reconnect with the past, the woman’s mistakes and restarts, as well as the underlying din of the café where she sits, register her unbreachable distance from it. Far from presenting a neat art history, Ramos highlights informational gaps and the subjective nature of his methods: Display cases are left half empty, and photographs of significant sites are redrafted as drawings––appropriate to an installation-in-progress conceptualized as an expansive, three-dimensional sketch. Crucial to one’s navigation of the material, therefore, is the presence of Ramos, an inveterate storyteller who is regularly on hand to explicate his findings.