Images via ARTINFO
Rudolph Schindler's Buck House, an International Style specimen near LACMA, went up for rent back in June 2009, and was found wanting, preservation-wise. Now it's been completely destroyed, but for art! In September, Cincinnati-based gallery Country Club moved in, with principal Christian Strike using the house "as a home and project space," reports the New York Times T magazine, which has news of the latest installation inside the Buck. Artists Justin Lowe and Jonah Freeman, known for installing a detailed meth lab in an unfinished Miami condo for Art Basel, are staging Bright White Underground, which imagines the house as an abandoned remnant of 1960s acid tests. They've created a back story "loosely based on the life of Dr. Arthur Cook, who lived in Buck House for a time and began his career as a practitioner of LSD psychotherapy," according to a July NYT article on the project (and we're going to have to trust the Grey Lady's fact checkers on that one--it's difficult to tell what's been invented just for the piece).
T reports that the pair "spent the summer living inside the Buck House’s implacable calm, littering its rooms and seemingly marring its pristine walls and creating for it a past, as a swinging safe house," making changes that were "like the home improvements of someone involved in the extended use of psychedelic drugs," says Freeman. In July, the artists brought about 30 entertainment types around to the Buck for a prosecco-fueled party made to look like a psychotropic-fueled party (their story calls the drug Marasa). At the party, documented in photographs, "The walls were decked out in psychedelic imagery; crystals could be found on virtually every surface. The cactuses were interconnected with rubber tubes that snaked throughout the room."
When the exhibition opens Friday, however, the house "will appear as if it has been abandoned for decades," and it will be heavily bugged, wired to spy on innocent art-lovers. See the before photos here.
· Turn On, Tune In, Drop By [T]
· More Photos of Schindler's For-Rent Buck Residence [Curbed LA]
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