LA (Century City) © 1980

[ video link ]

The LA ( Century City ) photo-text- video installation follows up on the B movie modes
and tropes employed by Godard, others in the New Wave and a host of Indie
directors that followed. ( See ALPHA, TRANS, CHUNG project book in TEXTS link. )

In LA ( Century City ) photo-texts serve as a deconstruction of the short meta-narrative
movie loop d’Agostino staged at sites in Los Angeles. In this work photo and language
issues are extended into a kind of simulacra described by Baudrillard in Simulations
reversing classical concepts of map and territory. In the case of LA ( Century City )
five large photographic stills are in effect, a condensed map that dominates its source-
the diminutive moving images of the video included in this installation.

( “ Initially inspired by Reyner Banham’s 1973 book Los Angeles: the architecture of
four ecologies ( beach, freeways, flatlands, and foothills ), I kept only the beach and
freeway updating the concept by adding mall and media - TV and surveillance .” - pdA )

LA ( Century City ) was produced through an NEA funded artist residency program at the
Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art. It premiered at the LAICA gallery and the ABC
Entertainment Center at Century City in December, 1980. D’Agostino’s solo exhibition
of his Coming & Going projects: PARIS (Metro), San Francisco (BART), and Washington,
DC (METRO) were also at the gallery from December to February, 1981.
During that time there were two other exhibitions at LAICA,
those of Wolf Vostell and Luis Benedit.

LA ( Century City ) was also exhibited with Dayton MALLING as part of d’Agostino’s
SUBURBAN STRATEGIES installation at the Photographs and Words exhibition,
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art ( SFMOMA ) in 1981.