The Magazine

On View | Potholes as Art, Garbage as Great Books

When most people think of Los Angeles, they visualize the Hollywood sign, palm trees, the beach. The conceptual artist Daniel Knorr sees potholes. For his first Los Angeles exhibit, “Depression Elevations,” at Kayne Griffin Corcoran, the Bucharest-born, Berlin-based artist took to the streets, scouring the L.A. landscape in a van for aesthetically appealing divots and puddles to cast with polyurethane. “We gave him a van, vests and flares, and he went all over town,” the gallerist Maggie Kayne said.

The resulting wall pieces — Knorr describes them as “materializations” rather than sculptures, to denote the shift from idea to object — are hung smooth side out, creating the impression of fluorescent relief maps, as translucent as gummy bears. ¶Knorr’s reverse puddles share a similar preoccupation with Angeleno car culture as Ed Ruscha’s gasoline station paintings of the 1960s, but are less interested in symbolism than the banality of endlessly repeated human activities.

“It’s the trace of our existence and our everyday exercise,” Knorr said. “It has to do with the form, but you could say it’s also a history.” In addition to the wall pieces, Knorr is exhibiting a series of 200 bound volumes, which the artist filled with litter collected from public places around L.A., then pressed under 30 tons of weight in his studio, embossing the pages with the shape of the trash. (Knorr has created similar artifacts of Bucharest, Istanbul, Berlin and other cities.) Each book comes with a DVD showing the process of finding the objects — a sort of wry demystification of the ready-made, retrofitted to Los Angeles.

 “I try to speak the language of the place,” Knorr said. ¶“Depression Elevations” is on view July 27 – Sept. 14 at Kayne Griffin Corcoran, 1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles; kaynegriffincorcoran.com. Save E-mail Share Print