Los Angeles
“Everything Loose Will Land”
MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Mackey Apartments
1137 South Cochran Avenue
May 9–August 4, 2013
Curated by Sylvia Lavin
What brings together Alison Knowles’s House of Dust, 1971; Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro’s 1971–72 Womanhouse; Jef Raskin’s cardboard “Bloxes”; the Studio Watts Workshop; Bernard Tschumi’s “Sanctuaries” essay; and Archigram’s Instant City Death Valley project? The answer: Los Angeles in the late 1960s and ’70s—a productively unstable environment, conducive to exchanges between artistic and architectural practices, processes, tools, sites, materials, and even audiences. Lavin’s exhibition and catalogue, under the auspices of the Getty Research Institute’s “Pacific Standard Time” initiative, celebrates such heterogeneity and mixing of artists, architects, media, and concepts as the very conditions for experimentation, recasting the valence of Frank Lloyd Wright’s derogatory quip, “Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.”
Travels to the Yale School of Architecture, New Haven, Aug. 28–Nov. 9.