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Time Zones Get Arty

An art sequel landed us at the LAPD downtown headquarters today.

Like shedding a nostalgic tear over old photos of yourself, or fondly looking back on the best of your Facebook status updates via that super confusing time machine function, revisiting previous incarnations of one’s life is important for stuff like “personal growth.” Good art does this for the public—shows us how far we’ve come as a society, and comments on what’s happened in the meantime.

So goes a main theory behind Pacific Standard Time, the Getty Museum’s way expansive series of exhibitions, performances, and actions in basically every art institute in the Los Angeles vicinity. There are retrospective musings, such as Vaginal Davis's My Pussy Is Still in Los Angeles (I Only Live in Berlin), a formal lesbian separatist tea party. There are reunion performances, such as with Single Wing Turquoise Bird, a pioneering projection and live visuals collective that worked with Velvet Underground back in the day (picture above). And there are straight-up restagings, which is why we ended up at the LA Police Department headquarters downtown today. There, taking up the majority of the main entrance wall, Suzanne Lacy’s Three Weeks in January is a map demarcating the officially reported rapes that’re happening around LA since January 9, 2012. As of our visit, it was 32.

Lacy did this once before, in 1977, and honestly, it’s a pretty 1970s feminist piece/concept—what could possibly be relevant about anticipating crime just so you could make art about it? Isn’t it better to, like, do something, bring it more up-to-date? But then seeing it up close, and checking out the hot neighborhoods for rape these days, we realized they’re 1. Within a three-block radius of the very police station this was being staged and 2. Hollywood. And that’s important commentary right there.

If that's a bit heavy for you, don't worry, PST is not all body politics, or even politics at all; there are also all kinds of ancillary projects exploring time and its passing. The main festival goes on from right now through this Sunday; full schedule here, and here are some things that look good to us:

Lou Reed worked on an "ambisonic 3-D recreation" of Metal Machine Trio 
Single Wing Turquoise Bird
Future Gestalt
Welcome Inn Time Machine