Florian Hecker, Processed photography, 2019, digital image. Original Photography: Julius Shulman, 1937 © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10).
Florian Hecker, Processed photography, 2019, digital image. Original Photography: Julius Shulman, 1937 © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10).
Florian Hecker, Processed photography, 2019, digital image. Original Photography: Julius Shulman, 1937 © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10).
Equitable Vitrines
Fund: $25,000
Equitable Vitrines—an organization that supports projects that challenge contemporary art orthodoxies—will commission a new work by German artist Florian Hecker to be staged at Rudolph Schindler’s historic Fitzpatrick-Leland house. For his first major exhibition in Los Angeles, Hecker will collaborate with signal processing specialists, software developers, audio engineers as well graphic designers and theorists to orchestrate a sensory experience that resists categorization. During a residency in Los Angeles in 2004, Hecker encountered the exhibition catalogues for the 1985 Pompidou exhibition, Les Immatériaux, conceived by French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and design theorist Thierry Chaput. Through Les Immatériaux, Lyotard was concerned with articulating a shift in the status of the human subject that followed what he referred to as the “computerization” of society, and tracking the emergence of new materials and object types—such as artificial aromas and synthetic biology—that seemingly followed this shift. Some of the underlying themes explored in Les Immatériaux were expressly influenced by a period Lyotard spent exploring the conurbation of Southern California. For this project, Hecker will work in partnership with the British philosopher Robin Mackay to produce an analysis and synthesis of ideas surrounding Les Immatériaux. Hecker will use computer-generated sound—itself a symbolic form for such Immaterials—to dramatize their findings. Equitable Vitrines will use this exhibition as an opportunity to organize supplemental programming that further scrutinizes the connections between theory and practice in contemporary art.
Awardees
