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*Out the Window (LAX) press release
*Review - art blogging
*Pico Iyer - The Space Between All Spaces
*Norman Klein - Fourteen Ways
Not to See the Airport
*Julian Myers - Out the Window (LAX)
*Artists' Statement (LAX)
*Studio 360 - Jan 05
*Installation Shots
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THE SPACE BETWEEN ALL SPACES
By Pico Iyer
In 1994 I went to live in Los Angeles Airport for a couple of
weeks, taking it to be an emblem (though hardly an inspiring one) of the
city of the future. All the cultures of the world assembled under a
single roof, yet few of them sharing a common language. Passionate,
life-changing moments--children taking off for war, parents met again
after half a century, honeymooners and refugees and missionaries
assembling--all set in a near-anonymous matrix of TCBY yoghurt shops,
Starbuck's cafes and stores whose very names (The Nature Company)
enforce a kind of placelessness. More than 23000 parking places crowded
in to accommodate a daily working population twice the size of the whole
principality of Monaco.
I wrote a long account of this unsettling, post-modern metropolis in
my book The Global Soul--LAX seems the spiritual home of a new,
placeless, roaming and often dislocated population of sleepwalkers and
speed-fliers--but getting it all down did not get LAX out of my system.
Over and over, visiting my sometime home in Santa Barbara, I found
myself back in its spaceless spaces, its strange passages of elongated
time, the Babel of its voices and petitions that come to see a vision of
the global marketplace, a planetary meeting-place. "The white zone is
for loading and unloading of passengers only. No parking." I took off from
LAX to go to North Korea, Tibet, Easter Island, and often what I saw in
the long grey corridors of the airport matched anything I saw at the other
end for strangeness and poignancy and power.
This is the life of only a few these days, perhaps, but a number that
grows larger with every passing day. I spend 40 days a year in airplanes
and airports, which could come to eight years of my life, if I live long
enough; my friends in business or computer-related industries spend more
(ten years of their lives in a place they never stop to think about or
look at!). The curious, sometimes chill reality of the modern world is
that we spend much of our time not in A or B but in the passage from
one to the other, the empty spaces between.
I felt a shiver of recognition, therefore, when I found out that
Zoe Crosher was charting the very same altered space and displaced
reality--half weirdly anonymous, half weirdly intimate--that I had tried
to record: the sudden thrill you feel when, in a foreign jungle, you
meet someone who knows the layout of your hometown. But jungles and
hometowns are all mixed up these days, and home may be the state of
motion, jungles the line of high-rising hotels along Century Boulevard,
leading to LAX. The names of the very streets around the airport enforce
this sense of living in allegory, a few stories above the ground.
Airport Boulevard, Aviation Boulevard, World Way. The post office,
taking up a whole block, never closes here.
The photos I grew up on gave me glimpses into an exotic world of
transport and wonder; they showed the snowpeaks of the Himalayas,
customs of the Amazon, the vast, primordial spaces of Africa. But now
there's a new kind of exoticism coming upon us, which creeps up on the
soul and enters our system like the air in a pressurized cabin. A place
of random lights and look-alike rooms, of friends (of lovers) whose
names you don't recall, and windows that offer the sight of people
taking off into new lives. It's not a comfort at all to be riding those
moving walkways in concourses exploding in light, but it is a comfort,
sometimes, to know that someone has been there before you and tried to
make it intelligible.
I have stayed in the Motel 6 on the wrong side of the 405 freeway
near LAX. I have slept in the lobby of the Sheraton, and enjoyed free
overnight parking at the Thunderbird. I have watched the lonely drinkers
at the Proud Bird bar listen to air-control instructions on their
headphones while watching planes land and take off again. The Theme
restaurant, which looked like a forgotten relic of the Space Age when I
stayed at LAX, is now called the Encounter restaurant, and looks like
tomorrow's piece of nostalgia.
Zoe Crosher's work starts off at LAX, but it is taking us somewhere
very different, to that global Airportland where the billboards are all
for Korean companies, the words "hotel" and "taxi" are understood by
nearly everybody, a stranger is walking towards you with a smile and an
extended hand. You don't know who he is, but he has ideas about you;
and when the light comes up in the morning, you know you're not in a
place you recognize, but you don't know exactly which of those places it is.
It gives me heart that she is going off, ahead of us, to map this
unknown country, fearless as one of the explorers of the 19th century,
investigating India or the salt spaces of Utah, and ready to risk
herself, even to lose herself, in the process. Like all art, her pictures
teach us how to pay attention.
--Los Angeles Airport
July 2005
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