In this extensive exhibition at Centre Pompidou in Paris, Los Angeles is presented as the final bastion of the 20th-century avant-garde. Multi-layered and versatile, art from Los Angeles spoke the appropriate language for a contemporary, multicultural metropolis where life could be as hard and as cynical as it could be free and uninhibited. Domeniek Ruyters considers the exhibition in Paris which covers the years between 1955 and 1985 and Bruce Hainley adds cursory notes on what has been happening in the LA art scene since.
Postmodernism managed to dump any trust in past and present. Then or now, neither or either – both were a post-modern ‘whatever’. But not to Marta Kuzma, one of the two curators of Manifesta 5, who, in a trusted modernist manner attempts to restore a historical consciousness, as a lesson for the future.
