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A Portrait Gallery for Los Angeles
Farhad Mirza
The photographs created by Roni Horn are often portraits in multiples. They are, among other things, studies in “the changeable, inconsistent nature of identity.”1 In response to these aspects of Horn’s work that are concerned with questions about perception and the mutability of the gaze and its target, the project turned to an architectural type that deals precisely with sight and spectator experience in an attempt to explore possible forms for a contemporary portrait gallery in Los Angeles: the Roman theater. By studying certain architectural elements that are characteristic to Roman theaters, such as those that afford a variety of views and proximities, and further adapting them to new scales and tectonic systems appropriate to the site, the proposal reconsiders traditionally democratic presentations of spectator and spectacle. The adapted form allows for a systematically mediated relationship between audience and artwork: works can be viewed in close proximity, from three or four feet away, or from across the room. The location identifies a common ground between the theater type and the unmistakable local gestures toward the densified street life of the Arts District, be it the entrance of the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (formerly the Temporary Contemporary) or the public breezeway at the new Hauser & Wirth space. The major questions of the project ask how the building might participate in tandem with, and in the service of, the alleged me-and-you relationship that a portrait gallery promises while also providing viewers the opportunity to find themselves in the gaze of a photographed or painted face directed toward or away from them. What kind of building might encourage this dialogue? 1 Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, RONI HORN. PORTRAIT OF AN IMAGE, 2013, http://www.schirn.de/en/exhibitions/2013/roni_horn/.