Scott Benzel- Programmatic Architecture Displacements 6 and 7: Capitol Spire / Randy’s Donuts, Inverted Capitol Spire mockups, architectural maquettes, 2014
In 2010, Benzel presented Inversions I-IV at Kathryn Andrews’ artist-run space Apartment 2. Consisting of several videos, photographic ephemera, hand-lathed phonographic record lacquers, and live string quartet, the show examined Inversion as a musical form (Inversion in music occurs when a musical score is played upside-down) as well as an architectonic phenomenon. The show included inverted videos of examples of Programmatic or Mimetic Architecture from around Los Angeles including a cellphone tower disguised as a palm tree and the Capitol Records Spire- a now-iconic piece of high modernist architecture based on the graduate school drawings of a young architect named Lou Naidorf for the firm of Welton Beckett-which suggests an inverted (skyward) phonographic stylus atop a stack of records.
In the new work, Benzel suggests examples of displacement in iconic Los Angeles Programmatic architecture. Freud defined displacement as a shift in emphasis from something important to something unimportant or the replacement of something unacceptable by an allusion. He saw displacement at work in jokes as well as in metaphor and metonymy.
Benzel here enacts a joke, a somewhat silly, obscene joke: these small maquettes- anti-monumental in the extreme- propose the ‘coupling’ of the spire- emblematic of ‘high’ mid-20th Century culture with another mimetic icon of Los Angeles architecture (this time of ‘low’ culture) the massive yellow-brown donut atop Randy’s Donuts. The obvious sexual metaphor and the admixture of the ‘high’ and ‘low’ reflect architect Naidorf’s position on his own spire:
"A lot of critics thought it would go the way of the Tail o' the Pup," says Naidorf, "that it was just another silly L.A. building. So it's ironic that it's become so famous.”
Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA) is located at 2245 E. Washington, which houses Ghebaly Gallery, Dope Press, 2nd Cannon Press, and the Fahrenheit project by the FLAX Foundation.
