Getty’s PST Art: Art & Science Collide festival is the largest art event in the United States. Every Friday, Alta Sketchbook will offer the most intriguing takeaways from the 800-plus artists exploring the collision of art and science through exhibitions across Southern California.
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A student in one of my courses at the Yale School of Architecture gave a presentation not long ago on Culver City’s Center for Land Use Interpretation, or CLUI for short, that prompted me to see this strange and wonderful institution anew. In CLUI’s own words, the nonprofit is dedicated to “the increase and diffusion of knowledge about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived.” I’d written about CLUI initiatives for years as an architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times—including its remarkable 2010 exhibition Centers of the USA, which surveyed all the places that claim such status (population center, geographic center, Google Earth center of the U.S. map). I’d also had a chance to get to know its unassuming founder and director, Matthew Coolidge. But it wasn’t until my student carefully summarized CLUI’s mission for the class—showing us its faux-bureaucratic logo and probing research projects on oil extraction, mining operations, and related subjects—that I understood what a tough trick Coolidge and company are trying to pull off, and how useful the center’s approach might be for our current political moment.
CLUI’s Culver City exhibition Remote Sensing: Explorations into the Art of Detection, the first of two shows produced for Getty’s PST: Art & Science Collide festival, is about all the ways technology allows us to record, measure, and understand parts of the earth distant from us—from neighboring cities and counties to continents on the other side of the globe. More specifically, this exhibition—Part One: Southern California Aerospace—is about the outsize role that Southern California sites (beginning with LAX) and companies have played in developing that technology and introducing it to the American public.
The exhibition does all that in a smallish L-shaped display inside CLUI’s Culver City headquarters. Opening wall text suggests that while humans have always tried, by climbing hilltops or building towers, to find high ground offering views of distant lands, something radical happened once airplanes “brought the entire globe into view.” Straight ahead, there is a control room (or the suggestion of one): three office chairs where visitors can sit facing a wall lined with monitors and touchscreens. The displays show satellites orbiting the earth and map more than 100 aerospace sites related to remote sensing, operated by government agencies and private companies in and around Los Angeles. (The imagery here is a combination of Google Earth images and photographs from CLUI’s own extensive archive.) The second part of the exhibition, Part Two: Remote Sensing in the Field, on how themes like surveillance and measurement at a distance have played out in the California desert, will open January 11 at CLUI’s Desert Research Station in the Mojave Desert, near the town of Hinkley.
In the Culver City exhibition, a main area of focus is the aerospace industry that grew up in the greater L.A. area before and especially after World War II: Think companies like Douglas Aircraft, Hughes Aircraft, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and others all the way through to SpaceX, though that last enterprise is now busy packing up to finalize its move to Texas. As the industry evolved, primitive airships and dirigibles birthed satellites and drones and, eventually, GPS and Google Earth. In the Southern California R&D ecosystem, it is a rather short trip from benign aerial photography to a number of terrifying military capabilities, including intercontinental ballistic missiles, now in use around the globe.
As my student reminded me, CLUI, in everything it produces—wall text, web copy, brochures, and even bus tours—achieves a tone that is somehow coolheaded without being deadpan or dispassionate. The careful selection and analysis in Remote Sensing of the places where aerial surveillance was invented and perfected—and then literally weaponized—is one example. This is not political work per se, but it is the labor of committed attention and occasionally exquisite summary: the raw material that any genuine, productive political work requires.
In other words, if you wanted to begin the task of challenging the power of companies like Google to surveil us, to pick just one example, such work would be made endlessly more efficient and effective by tapping into the research CLUI has already laid out in exhibitions like Remote Sensing. The goal is to make the public a little more intelligent about the city, region, and planet surrounding us. In that sense, CLUI might just help—and how many institutions can you say this about these days?—suck some of the cynicism out of the political atmosphere.
One of the by-products of CLUI’s singular combination of deep research and curatorial restraint is that its shows are often evocative of larger meaning but hold back from making symbolic statements directly. Remote Sensing is very much in this vein, thick with portent that it keeps—mindfully, discreetly—always at arm’s length.
So I’ll take the leap into metaphorical territory, even if CLUI’s Coolidge himself never would. What is L.A. if not a city that is sensed remotely, with or without access to an airplane or a rocket? The view through the car windshield, from the 101, of the Capitol Records building; the movie filmed in and displaying Los Angeles but not about Los Angeles; the opening paragraphs, pockmarked with cliché, of the New York Times article blithely summarizing the city’s food or literary scene; the vista from one hilltop to another, skimming a canyon or two, or from Dodger Stadium toward Downtown or from Julius Shulman’s camera lens through the floor-to-ceiling windows of Pierre Koenig’s Stahl House to the urban grid spreading beyond: To feel yourself fully in Los Angeles is to be looking, from a distance, at some other part of it, and understanding, at least viscerally, the vastness of what’s in between.•
REMOTE SENSING: EXPLORATIONS INTO THE ART OF DETECTION
Through Feb. 16, 2025
Center for Land Use Interpretation
9331 Venice Blvd., Los Angeles
Christopher’s Must-Sees
MATERIAL ACTS: MATERIAL EXPERIMENTATION IN ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN
Curated by Jia Yi Gu (formerly of the MAK Center at the Schindler House) and Kate Yeh Chiu, Material Acts offers a survey of new material practices and experiments in biomimicry in architecture, as well as a reminder that most building materials, even those marketed as organic, are not natural. Through Jan. 5, 2025, Craft Contemporary
CROSSING OVER: ART AND SCIENCE AT CALTECH, 1920–2020
The show (for whose catalog I wrote a chapter), distributed across several sites on the school’s charming Pasadena campus, explores how scientific breakthroughs have taken on visual and sometimes artistic form. It’s anchored by a number of indoor and outdoor installations, including site-specific works by Helen Pashgian and Lita Albuquerque. Through Dec. 15, Caltech
Upcoming Shows
EXPERIMENTATIONS 6: THE UNCANNY IN 1980s CHINESE FILMS
Oct. 27, Los Angeles Filmforum
ENVISIONING THE FUTURE OF OUR CITIES: THINKING WITH THE HARRISONS
Nov. 16, La Jolla Historical Society
DIGITAL WITNESS: REVOLUTIONS IN DESIGN, PHOTOGRAPHY, AND FILM
Nov. 24, 2024–July 13, 2025, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Related Coverage
- The Best PST Art-Science Shows Work Against Today’s Obsession with ‘Innovation,’” Art in America
- “Stroll Through History at Caltech for PST Art: L.A. Arts and Culture This Week,” Los Angeles Times
Christopher Hawthorne is a senior critic at the Yale School of Architecture and a former longtime architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times. From 2018 to 2022, he served as chief design officer for the City of Los Angeles, where he helped organize the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office Civic Memory Working Group and edited its 2021 report and recommendations, Past Due.
