The Hammer Museum group exhibition “HEAD FOR THE HILLS!” takes its title from John Knight’s 1974 untitled slide projection piece. Each slide features a text lifted from a Los Angeles Times real estate supplement, where new housing developments are advertised with punchy slogans that sell a “lifestyle” more than a house. The alarmist tone of one particular advertisement — with a phrase meant to signal warning — is used instead to attract a buyer. Los Angeles has a way of absorbing its disasters, its tackiness, and its precarity into its culture. Those qualities become uniquely part of its strange allure, laying bare an ugliness that transforms into a kind of beauty.
The exhibition opened in February, just a month or so after the fires in the Palisades and Altadena, in which the city’s apocalyptic mythos took on a new meaning. The disasters of a far-off future, or the stuff of science fiction and paranoia, became the reality of the present. Rather than heading for the hills, it seemed wiser to stay on the flats — or leave town altogether.
Many of the works in the exhibition depict some form of disaster or decay, whether real or fabricated. One of the first images viewers encounter that sets the tone for the exhibition is Untitled (Freeway Crash) (2002) by Florian Maier-Aichen, an aerial view photograph of one of LA’s signature freeway interchanges with an overpass snapped into chunks like a ribbon cut with scissors. Always ready to believe the truth of images, for a moment, I wasn’t positive the picture had been digitally manipulated. Nearby, in the second room, is Bill Leavitt’s sculpture Cutaway View (2008), a freestanding corner of a room made with plywood set walls, decorated with a framed painting of a horse, and a potted plant. One of the walls is cut irregularly, as if this were the set for a performance that has already taken place and is in the process of being broken down.
Around the corner, a series of drawings by Douglas Gordon illustrate the closing credits from unidentified 1950s films: “The End” is written over and over again, suggesting a cycle of endings. Also by Gordon are two panels with film stills of a man, who looks like he’s in acute distress, captioned with “The End.” The late Kaari Upson’s ghostly two-panel Untitled (2010) uses smoke and oil, and looks as if the artist had siphoned smoke from the atmosphere and placed it under glass. The work has a quality of movement that suggests something dissolving — another iteration of ephemerality.
The only other human subjects are in Rachel Harrison’s series of photographs titled Voyage of the Beagle, Three (Third Set 15–27) (2010), with representations of human and animal faces in a range of traditional and vernacular sculptural media; the faces become a creepy audience with grim or manic smiles. This repetition of anthropomorphized figures recurs in Alina Szapocznikow’s series of photo sculptures, Untitled from Fotorzezby (1971/2007), of chewing gum, mashed and pulled, forming fleshy shapes that look like animal carcasses or invertebrate insects.
The mostly monochrome and portrait-less show has an eerie sense of emptiness, a feeling of showing up to the party too late. The post-apocalyptic allusions read as more sinister than perhaps the curators intended, given recent events. The exhibition’s central room is occupied by Nikita Gale’s installation Private Dancer (2020–21). Light fixtures that look like they’ve fallen from the ceiling are piled together in the middle of the room. Flashing around like a spotlight searching for a subject, or a concert after the crowd has emptied out, the lights remain on, dancing for no one. Gale’s sculpture conveys a compulsive feeling of remaining: a manic search in the dark for the willingness to keep going, to return after disaster, to reinvent, to rebuild, to keep moving even if no one is left.
