The Center for Land Use Interpretation Newsletter
Winter 2017, #40

CLUI Shows on the Road



CLUI photo
As a footnote of the CLUI exhibit Fantasy and Realty, the CLUI provided a dispenser with real estate flyers for the Playboy Mansion (which, at the time, was the most expensive domestic real-estate listing in Los Angeles) as part of the exhibition Some Lifestyle Options, at Richard Telles Fine Art, in Los Angeles. The Mansion soon sold (bought for $100 million by “Twinkies baron” Daren Metropoulos) but we doubt we had anything to do with it. CLUI photo

MANY OF THE CENTER'S PROGRAMS and projects live on by circulating in various forms at thematic exhibitions around the globe. 2016 saw CLUI material in more than a dozen different exhibit contexts, large and small. Typically, a curator approaches the Center with an invitation to contribute, and we do our best to consider and suggest material that might be appropriate.

Last year, the Center produced a custom interactive touchscreen of CLUI images and text about model railroad layouts in the USA for the exhibition Routine Pleasures, shown at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House in West Hollywood, CA. This commission helped support field research and photography for a CLUI exhibition about American railroads, currently in production.

Another custom photo screen program, this one about drone test sites, was generated for the exhibition To See Without Being Seen, at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, in St. Louis, MO. The CLUI also provided some material about the Great Salt Lake Exploration Platform for the exhibition Radical Seafaring, at the Parrish Art Museum, in Water Mill, NY.

The CLUI Texas City Landscan premiered at the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial in Istanbul, Turkey. It was also shown as part of the New Cities, Future Ruins programming at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, TX, and in the exhibition L’image Volee, at the Prada Foundation, in Milan, Italy. That exhibition, curated by the artist Thomas Demand, also commissioned a series of photographic prints that were shown in the Hollowed Earth exhibit at CLUI later that year.  

Other CLUI landscans were included in the exhibit Landschaft=Labor, at the Carthinian Museum of Modern Art in Klagenfurt, Austria, and as part of Ballroom Marfa’s Marfa Dialogues at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, in Houston, TX.

One of the Center’s Los Alamos Rolodexes was acquired by the Victoria & Albert Museum, in London. It is now part of their permanent collection, and will be displayed at an exhibit in China later this year. Another Rolodex was shown in the exhibit Data (after) Lives, at the University of Pittsburgh Art Gallery, in Pittsburgh, PA. CLUI project posters were shown in the exhibit Setting Out, at Apexart, in New York, NY, and a series of CLUI postcards was exhibited in Making Use: Life in Postartistic Times, at the Museum of Modern Art, in Warsaw, Poland.

We put ourselves on display too, when we can accommodate invitations to speak at universities, museums, and other cultural venues. This year CLUI director Matthew Coolidge, or program manager Aurora Tang, spoke at places that included the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden; the Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art in Toronto, Canada; and Ohio State University, West Virginia University, Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Visiting academic groups also come to the CLUI in Los Angeles, and to other CLUI venues. ♦