Lauren Mackler runs Public Fiction. | Image: Still from Artbound episode MOCA: Beyond The Museum Walls. Artbound episode MOCA: Beyond The Museum Walls explores the programming of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, investigating new programming and curatorial methods that are redefining what it means to be a 21st century museum. This documentary features the The Underground Museum, Wolvesmouth, and Public Fiction. Watch the episodes debut Tuesday, May 31 at 9 p.m., or check for rebroadcasts here.
Without question, Public Fiction is one of the stranger entities floating around the Los Angeles art world. It's not a non-profit, but it's not for-profit; it's not an institution, but it's not not an institution. Run by Lauren Mackler, the French-German daughter of two foreign correspondents, Public Fiction most closely resembles cloud-based computing in the form of an art exhibition. I believe in complexity, says Mackler when I visit her at her tucked-away backhouse she shares with her gray cat Frankenberry in Los Feliz. There's nothing wrong with a little confusion, of trying to understand an exhibition, but not understanding it. The lack of clarity is hopefully an openness that allows people to take a leap. Viewers are asked to jump into the abyss for Public Fiction's installation within the storefront space at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), through June 19, 2016.
In the show at MOCA, which Mackler has titled The Poet and The Critic, and the missing, a few of the concrete aspects of Public Fiction follow: the exhibition is three months long, it moves across platforms (readings, talks, film screenings, performances), and it culminates in a publication. But instead of jumping off a conceptual conceit, Public Fiction's show takes place in spiritual concert with chief curator Helen Molesworth's Don't Look Back: The 1990s at MOCA.
The initial idea at MOCA was that I was to commission artists and writers to make tangents to the permanent collection exhibition, says Mackler. But it's not a mirror or directly addressing the exhibition, but the space between the objects, which is what an exhibition really is. But instead of intervening in the gallery, we're on the margins, and using the permanent collection as a common ground to reach out.
Installation view of storefront: Public Fiction: The Poet and The Critic, and the missing, March 19-April 25, 2016 at MOCA Grand Avenue. | Photo: Brian Forrest , courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
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Mackler tapped Nathaniel Mackey, Nevine Mahmoud, and Lynne Tillman for the first iteration, which closed on April 25. On view now is work by Nancy Lupo, Litia Perta, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya.
Nevine Mahmoud's work has the same play with material and defying of gravity that is in this Liz Larner work that's central to part of the permanent collection, says Mackler, giving an example. It's also an experiment in creating compositions in the studio, similar to the Barbara Kasten works that are exhibited in the room prior to the Liz Larner works. So there's a space in between those two works in which Mahmoud's work becomes annotation onto these works.
On top of it all, there was a screening on May 5, featuring works by Isaac Julien, Alfred Leslie and Frank O'Hara, Maha Maamoun, and Mungo Thompson. And finally, theres an online publication that features writing by Sophia Al Maria, Corrine Fitzpatrick, Quinn Latimer, Ann Lauterbach, Fred Moten, and Michael Palmer. The online publication, Mackler says, is meant to draw the permanent collection exhibition and the storefront show together.
A Public Fiction publication. | Image: Still from Artbound episode MOCA: Beyond The Museum Walls.
Public Fiction began in 2009 -- and officially opened in 2010 -- when Mackler visited Los Angeles for the first time after studying at NYU and receiving an MFA in design from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She noticed a for rent sign on a storefront in the Highland Park area, and quickly set up shop. While in the process of thinking of a name, Mackler says, a neighbor's cat bit her. It was while she was hooked up to an IV that the name Public Fiction hit her. That's the real truth, she says laughing. I mean, I had been thinking of different names that had to do with institutions and museums, like library, archive, public, common, temporary. But I wanted to come up with something that didn't exist. It's been used a little bit in political theory, social sciences, and studies of public myth, but it's rare. It's a story that belongs to everyone.
The fact that Public Fiction is based on institutions is no mistake. I wanted to invent an institution, she says. I believe deeply in museums and their public potential. Michael Ned Holte wrote in ArtForum that I was presenting a form of institutional critique. I'm so proud of this article; it's so beautiful. But if I'm making an institutional critique, I don't mean to be. It's critique in the most gentle way possible. Because I'm earnest in my belief in institutions.
Exterior view of Public Fiction storefront in Highland Park. | Photo: Public Fiction.
It's important to point out that throughout its existence, Public Fiction has taken on a personality that goes beyond traditional thinking of what a curator is. Mackler has created hotels based on Allen Ruppersberg's legendary month-long artist's hotel Al's Grand Hotel from the early- 70s, and later worked with Ruppersberg to recreate the hotel at Frieze New York. Last year, she organized an exhibition by Anthony Lepore at a bikini factory. And whether it was early concerts by experimental and punk bands, or The Free Church (in which Mackler turned the Highland Park space in
