Home—So Different, So Appealing at LACMA

Carmen Argote, 720 Sq. Ft.:- Household Mutations – Part B (at gallery G727) (2010). Carpet from artist’s childhood home and house paint, 798.5 x 178 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Hands folded, body stationary, a hazily rendered man lingers at the threshold of a lavish interior. His deferential stance implies that he will not set foot beyond the home’s ornate entryway. The acrylic-on-magazine work, Osvaldo Waits for his Check (2013) by artist Ramiro Gomez, overlays a painted male figure (presumably Osvaldo) onto a glossy magazine interior. Juxtaposing labor with social class, the artist lays bare the power relations inherent in the domestic labor culture of Los Angeles. Here, and in other works included in LACMA’s expansive group show Home—So Different, So Appealing, Gomez depicts a working-class multitude whose social status and identity alludes to their placement outside—or on the periphery—of the affluent American “dream home.”

Home deftly applies the concept of domestic space as a point of convergence in exploring contemporary social politics in Latino art from the 1950s until today. The show—an early iteration of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, whose main purview this year is Mexican and Latin American art—defines home in wide terms, fixating on its resistance to singular definition. Beyond the ornate wall moldings of Gomez’ painted magazine works, in the story that LACMA tells, home is a community: a sense of belonging, a geographic location, a site of growth, but also one of displacement. This show confronts the bleak reality that more than anything, home is at once essential and precarious.

Comprising over 100 works, LACMA spotlights big-name and lesser-known artists from Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, Venezuela, and the United States, drawing fluid parallels across borders and between diverse histories. While its title references English artist Richard Hamilton’s iconic Pop Art collage, Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (1956), it overtly disavows the American consumerism, post-war capitalism, and white heteronormativity that is evoked in Hamilton’s work. Many of these themes undergird the exhibition’s diverse range of sculpture, video, painting, photography, and various other media.

The show is punctuated by memories of war, tales of violence, documents of migration north, and middle-class dreams deferred. Livia Corona Benjamin’s aerial photographs of identical tract housing developments in Mexico assume a bleak tone in their sheer scale, uniformity, and resemblance to the prefabricated American architectural model. At the same time, other pieces, such as Laura Aguilar’s defiant self-portrait reclining in the nude before an electric fan, celebrate the home as a haven. At times, the cumulative weight of these objects and stories feels less burdensome than uplifting: the site of the home amplifies voices and records stories worth noting.

Though elsewhere, many works dwell on—and deconstruct—the architectural framework of the home, a synecdochal stand-in for that which has collapsed around it. In the wake of social, political, economic, or familial change, the home no longer guarantees stability. Leyla Cárdenas’ Excision (2012) presents a bisected four-inch sliver of a late-19th century Bogotá interior. Its recovered wallpaper, peeling paint, and fragmented slice of wooden table and chair hint at the place it once was, presented here as a flattened vestige. What lives, political rule, and social conditions have these household objects witnessed? They are the faded backdrop of Colombia’s fractured and war-torn past under Spanish rule, and, in their broken state, the violence that plagues its present. Minimalist artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s grainy video Splitting (1974) likewise carves out a section of space: here an abandoned two-story New Jersey single-family home. The home splits open slowly, a seam unraveled by exertion, power saw, and the artist’s bare hands. As the process of dismantling reveals the beams, pipes, insulation, and other foundational interior elements, the fragility of this solid, sturdy structure comes to the fore. In a moment, a sliver of sunlight leaks through the split, casting a magnificent glow into the eerily empty rooms. There is a beauty in this bisection, despite its allusion to loss, abandonment, and decay.

A similar ethereal light refracts in the glimmering mirrors and glossy baseball cards of Puerto Rican artist Pépon Osorio’s ornate recreation of a teenage boy’s bedroom in Badge of Honor (1995), which the artist places next to a recreation of his father’s prison cell. This brilliant installation reflects the way in which family can be a definition of home, despite  physical and psychological distance. A familial bond nevertheless unites father and son.

In LACMA’s show, home is a social construct more than a physical place, encompassing a disparity between beauty and decay, striving and complacency, temporality and permanence, and movement and stillness, especially across borders. Camilo Ontiveros’ sculpture Temporary Storage: The Belongings of Juan Manuel Montes (2009/2017)
speaks to these contrasts as it piles the modest possessions of a Mexican man deported under the current administration and ties them together with rope. In this instance, home is no longer a physical, architectural space, but rather a collection of objects; it is temporary, in a state of constant flux. For these artists, home is thus not simply a site, but rather, an idea, a feeling, and an objective to strive toward.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 9.

María Elena González, Magic Carpet/Home (2003, 2017). Image courtesy of the artist and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo: Museum Associates/LACMA.

Home—So Different, So Appealing (2017) (installation view). Image courtesy of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo: Museum Associates/LACMA.

Simone Krug is a writer, educator, and independent curator based in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Art in America, and frieze, among other publications.

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