If you like the Chateau Marmont and images of penises, you're going to love Rebel, the new MOCA show organized by James Franco and opening tomorrow at the JF Chen furniture showroom space on Highland Ave. As you might imagine of a show inspired by Rebel Without a Cause and including Harmony Korine (who's known for writing Kids) and Terry Richardson (who's known for his American Apparel ad-style photos and for being the subject of persistent rumors of sexual assault), the art itself is on the whole relentlessly masculine (the other artists involved are non-females Douglas Gordon, Damon McCarthy, Paul McCarthy, Ed Ruscha, and Aaron Young). But for Curbed, the coolest part of Rebel is the installation, designed by Commonwealth Projects: the whole warehouse has been converted into the bungalow section of the Chateau Marmont, "one of the central points in Rebel, and perhaps the single most significant reference and home to Hollywood behind the scenes life," as described by a press release (see construction photos here).
In Bungalow Two, at the entrance to the show, a video by the McCarthys features Franco as James Dean and Paul McCarthy as Rebel Without a Cause director Nicholas Ray "in ludicrous abstractions of events that were rumored to have happened during the making" of the film. In another bungalow, Korine's video "Caput" reinterprets the movie's Griffith Observatory knife fight with naked women and machetes. Young has sunk a motorcycle into a small pool on a raised platform at the center of the space. Ruscha's face beams off a video screen made to look like a billboard, just like the ones that frame the hotel on Sunset Boulevard. So if you can't manage to sneak onto the Chateau grounds, or if you just think the real thing doesn't have enough filmed James Franco staring down at you, Rebel runs through June 23.
· REBEL [MOCA]
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