M A T I N É E is an exhibition project in Los Angeles I’ve initiated to revisit work produced during the 1980s and early 1990s. From the Cold War to the rise of neoliberal governance, and through the culture wars shaped by the AIDS crisis and identity politics, some of the most ambitious artists of this era reflected deep currents of collective anxiety through materialist practices. As artists today confront new assaults on political, social, and economic stability, this earlier period of art production offers important instruction in how political stakes and historical realities can meaningfully shape new aesthetic paradigms.
The project’s two-year program will unfold as a series of three-month-long solo and two-person exhibitions by artists whose practices forged critical frameworks for understanding images, systems, and power. These presentations re-evaluate the period not through stylistic resemblance to contemporary work, but through the urgency and precision with which they addressed the uncertainties of their time. In an environment where nostalgia often masquerades as novelty, and outdated aesthetic strategies are routinely mistaken for radical gestures, Matinée reconsiders the political stakes and historical conditions that originally shaped these strategies.
The inaugural exhibition, opening Saturday, November 1, presents Gretchen Bender’s TV Text & Image series (1986-1991)—works that simulated and abstracted the visual language of consumerism to rupture traditional media circuitry. Bender is part of a generation of artists who offered perhaps the last substantive innovation in the production of critical art—the appropriation and recontextualization of popular images from film, television, and print advertisements.
Matinée is housed inside the Jewelry Theatre Building in downtown Los Angeles. Built in 1920 as the Pantages Downtown Theatre, the Beaux-Arts structure has undergone multiple transformations: from cinema palace, televangelist set in the 1970s, to jewelry exchange in 1980—from public spectacle to place of worship to a dense site of commerce. Much of the original ornamentation—the chandeliers, balconies, and decorative plasterwork—survives. Matinée occupies two interior storefronts in the northeast corner of the building, where the stage used to stand, a site that itself performs the layering of social, political, and economic circumstances that this project seeks to examine.
Matinée extends my own artistic investigation into the architectures of display and the circulation of meaning through objects, systems, and images. The project proposes an alternative exhibition model—one that treats context as material and subject, and that approaches history as something continually replayed through the spaces, technologies, and desires of the present. ANDREW J. GREENE
The project’s two-year program will unfold as a series of three-month-long solo and two-person exhibitions by artists whose practices forged critical frameworks for understanding images, systems, and power. These presentations re-evaluate the period not through stylistic resemblance to contemporary work, but through the urgency and precision with which they addressed the uncertainties of their time. In an environment where nostalgia often masquerades as novelty, and outdated aesthetic strategies are routinely mistaken for radical gestures, Matinée reconsiders the political stakes and historical conditions that originally shaped these strategies.
The inaugural exhibition, opening Saturday, November 1, presents Gretchen Bender’s TV Text & Image series (1986-1991)—works that simulated and abstracted the visual language of consumerism to rupture traditional media circuitry. Bender is part of a generation of artists who offered perhaps the last substantive innovation in the production of critical art—the appropriation and recontextualization of popular images from film, television, and print advertisements.
Matinée is housed inside the Jewelry Theatre Building in downtown Los Angeles. Built in 1920 as the Pantages Downtown Theatre, the Beaux-Arts structure has undergone multiple transformations: from cinema palace, televangelist set in the 1970s, to jewelry exchange in 1980—from public spectacle to place of worship to a dense site of commerce. Much of the original ornamentation—the chandeliers, balconies, and decorative plasterwork—survives. Matinée occupies two interior storefronts in the northeast corner of the building, where the stage used to stand, a site that itself performs the layering of social, political, and economic circumstances that this project seeks to examine.
Matinée extends my own artistic investigation into the architectures of display and the circulation of meaning through objects, systems, and images. The project proposes an alternative exhibition model—one that treats context as material and subject, and that approaches history as something continually replayed through the spaces, technologies, and desires of the present. ANDREW J. GREENE