Jon Leaver | University of La Verne (original) (raw)
Videos by Jon Leaver
Photographers such as Catherine Opie and Ricardo Valverde have depicted the geometry and phenomen... more Photographers such as Catherine Opie and Ricardo Valverde have depicted the geometry and phenomenology of Southern California’s freeways in ways that bring the subject into full view. By contrast, throughout Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles Archive, freeways appear only fleetingly, glimpsed from Sunset Boulevard over the guardrails of an overpass or in the signage for an onramp on Melrose Avenue, like a flicker on the edge of one’s vision.
Using Ruscha’s peripheral handling of freeways as a metaphor for this ambivalent attitude to the city’s urban structure, this project further explores the freeways as the unconscious portion of Los Angeles’s divided psyche. If Ruscha’s boulevards are the city’s Ego—familiar and reasonable—the freeway can be regarded as it’s Id, central to its circulatory system but a place of unresolved motivations, and disconnected from everyday life.
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Papers by Jon Leaver
X-tra Contemporary Art Quarterly
Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, 2012
X-Tra: Contemporary Art Quarterly, 2019
X-Tra: Contemporary Art Quarterly , 2016
This article reviews the exhibition "Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination" at the Los Angele... more This article reviews the exhibition "Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination" at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from November 22, 2015 to April 17, 2016. Thater’s work is used a means to meditate on the nature of the corporeal relationship between the viewer and certain forms of installation art (Thater’s being a prime example), especially the way one’s own body and its relationship to its surroundings can become the object of one’s attention in spaces such as her video works.
Such bodily awareness is used by Thater in her works about animals, in which she emphasizes the difference between human ways of being and those of the creatures her work depicts. With reference to the writing of the art critic and historian John Berger, I argue that Thater shares Berger’s melancholy attitude towards the increasingly impoverished relationship humans have with animals under the conditions of industrial and post-industrial capitalism.
Alongside this interest in alternative subjectivities, Thater’s work highlights the profound instability of our own subjectivity. AS it is experienced in her installations, existence can only be grasped as a phenomenon constantly in motion, formed out of a shifting set of relations on an infinite plane. These contingencies are the basis of Thater’s works – within them each moment acts as the catalyst for the generation of new meanings and relations. While, on one hand, the risk of this strategy is that it sometimes produces spaces in which we are left staring only at ourselves, on the other it presents an opportunity to define ourselves from the perspective not only of other people, but through the gaze of something more radically other: animal, technology, geology, cosmos.
Photographers such as Catherine Opie and Ricardo Valverde have depicted the geometry and phenomen... more Photographers such as Catherine Opie and Ricardo Valverde have depicted the geometry and phenomenology of Southern California’s freeways in ways that bring the subject into full view. By contrast, throughout Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles Archive, freeways appear only fleetingly, glimpsed from Sunset Boulevard over the guardrails of an overpass or in the signage for an onramp on Melrose Avenue, like a flicker on the edge of one’s vision.
Using Ruscha’s peripheral handling of freeways as a metaphor for this ambivalent attitude to the city’s urban structure, this project further explores the freeways as the unconscious portion of Los Angeles’s divided psyche. If Ruscha’s boulevards are the city’s Ego—familiar and reasonable—the freeway can be regarded as it’s Id, central to its circulatory system but a place of unresolved motivations, and disconnected from everyday life.
2 views
X-tra Contemporary Art Quarterly
Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, 2012
X-Tra: Contemporary Art Quarterly, 2019
X-Tra: Contemporary Art Quarterly , 2016
This article reviews the exhibition "Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination" at the Los Angele... more This article reviews the exhibition "Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination" at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from November 22, 2015 to April 17, 2016. Thater’s work is used a means to meditate on the nature of the corporeal relationship between the viewer and certain forms of installation art (Thater’s being a prime example), especially the way one’s own body and its relationship to its surroundings can become the object of one’s attention in spaces such as her video works.
Such bodily awareness is used by Thater in her works about animals, in which she emphasizes the difference between human ways of being and those of the creatures her work depicts. With reference to the writing of the art critic and historian John Berger, I argue that Thater shares Berger’s melancholy attitude towards the increasingly impoverished relationship humans have with animals under the conditions of industrial and post-industrial capitalism.
Alongside this interest in alternative subjectivities, Thater’s work highlights the profound instability of our own subjectivity. AS it is experienced in her installations, existence can only be grasped as a phenomenon constantly in motion, formed out of a shifting set of relations on an infinite plane. These contingencies are the basis of Thater’s works – within them each moment acts as the catalyst for the generation of new meanings and relations. While, on one hand, the risk of this strategy is that it sometimes produces spaces in which we are left staring only at ourselves, on the other it presents an opportunity to define ourselves from the perspective not only of other people, but through the gaze of something more radically other: animal, technology, geology, cosmos.