8.5.2013—4.8.2013
MAK Center Los Angeles, Schindler House
Everything Loose Will Land explores the cross-pollination that took place between architects and artists in Los Angeles from the late 1960s to 1980. The exhibition is part of the Getty-led initiative “Pacific Standard Time presents: Los Angeles Modern Architecture.”

Guest-curated by Sylvia Lavin, Everything Loose Will Land explores the intersection between architecture and other visual arts in Los Angeles during the 1970s. Reframing Frank Lloyd Wright's famous quip, “Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles,” the exhibition demonstrates that rather than merely abject, this infamous looseness dislodged the arts from their separate habits and encouraged productive realignments amongst cultural practices. If the 1950s in Los Angeles were characterized by the city’s need to establish its establishment and by the arts’ commitment to notions of medium specificity, the 1980s were shaped by a virtually unbounded market and robust institution building that encouraged all the arts to focus on themselves and their individual advancement. Both periods, in other words, structured the arts as autonomous and even competitive activities. But in the 15 or so years in between, after the Watts riots shook the city’s core and before the construction of such monuments as MOCA or Disney Hall asserted the city’s cultural self-confidence, slippery convergences in the ways art and architecture were made and in the understanding of for whom and why they were made yielded profound changes in virtually every aspect of what then came to be called the built environment. The peculiar institutional, geographical and social looseness of L.A. contributed to the rise of this specific ecology, but its impact was to restructure the cultural landscape itself.

Guest Curator Sylvia Lavin, Director of Critical Studies and MA/PhD Programs, UCLArchitecture