Rebranding a Hill

ALLAN SEKULA/SALLY STEIN GARAGE SALE, The Brick, Los Angeles, June 23–29, 2024.

Pedants will tell you that there really is a Melrose Hill somewhere, with an actual hill. It’s just that you can’t see it from this flat stretch of Western Avenue that real estate developers started calling Melrose Hill when overnight it sprouted a complex of trendy restaurants and galleries. Now it gets called all kinds of dirty names: hotspot, hub, boomtown. I’ve never seen the hill but I’ve dutifully looked at pictures at Morán Morán and C L E A R I N G, Fuentes and Fernberger, and at least three addresses with a David Zwirner shingle.

The latest eruption in boomtown is a nonprofit gallery called the Brick. Previously called LAXART, it used to be on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood and before that in Culver City. The old name, which held for 20 years, apparently never stopped being confusing. Stories are told of artists who missed their big break because an important curator or collector went to the airport by mistake. Never again. The new name, I’m confident, has to do with all that exposed brick inside. They’re going for a laid-bare look. The beams in the brand-new ceiling have also been left exposed, as if to say we’ve got nothing to hide. The building didn’t even have a door when I stopped by a kind of soft opening on June 23.

It was a rummage sale of books and personal effects belonging to the artist Allan Sekula and his wife, Sally Stein, an art historian specializing in 20th-century American photography. Sekula, who died in 2013, is known for his studies of labor and commerce, wealth and exploitation, undertaking an unromantic reinvention of the tradition of social documentary photography in the wake of conceptualism. He scrutinized shipping containers and fish markets and Walt Disney Concert Hall, using images and text (he was a fantastic writer) to represent sometimes unpicturable things—global trade, Los Angeles.

There were thousands of books stacked in piles and organized by subject: critical theory, feminism and gender, world history. But I took to the oddities. Among the catalogs and monographs, a YA novel about a plucky young woman searching for her independence during the Gold Rush. Beside analyses of vision and difference, a biography of Mae West and an old issue of National Geographic with a cover story about twins. Research materials, maybe? But books, of course, have a way just kind of showing up and sometimes sticking around. More than one person commented to me on the impression made by the piles of a life measured in books. If that is what we were witnessing—with bargain hunters filling up boxes with the best parts of a corpse—then all the better for those anomalies. No one’s life or reading should be too coherent.

“It makes me sick,” someone said, “the idea of people digging around in my books when I’m dead, thinking they know me by what’s on my shelves. Most of what I’ve read isn’t there. And most of what’s there I haven’t read.”

“He must’ve had a big house,” her friend said.

“This is my art,” someone else said, holding up a hand-bound book. He’d made it years ago for Sekula’s class at CalArts. “I’m not paying for this.”

Those who did pay would bring their selections up to Hamza Walker, director of the Brick and a generally beloved figure, to haggle over prices. He appeared to relish the task. (The only time I’ve seen him happier was a week before, at what I think was actually the first event at the Brick, when he introduced legendary avant-garde jazz saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell. His trio, with vocalist Tom Buckner and guitarist Sandy Ewen, issued unhurried vapors of gurgling sound. It was sublime and an athletic feat: Mitchell is 83, tiny, and he played for ages, sometimes on a big horn, in a sweltering room.)

The thing about the book sale, apart from all the rumination on death and life, is how it emphasized its context, gesturing out at Melrose Hill. In one of his last major projects, Sekula examined the relationship between cultural institutions, capital, and working-class displacement in Los Angeles. His totem was Disney Hall, the jewel of Grand Avenue built on the ashes of Bunker Hill. That’s a story of slum clearance, public-private financing, and starchitecture. Melrose Hill is about rent-seeking and rehabbing vibey old buildings. The whole thing was concocted by billionaire’s son Zach Lasry, who bought up much of the neighborhood and then bent reality to his vision of fine art, fine dining, and luxury apartments. His father, Marc, is a major Democratic Party donor and manager of Avenue Capital Group, a vulture fund famous for its role in the 2014 Puerto Rico debt crisis. Always attuned to the local appearance of global capital, Sekula, I think, would have appreciated (if that’s the right word) how profits reaped from the hollowing-out of Puerto Rico should take such a handsome shape, while driving gentrification in Los Angeles. None of this is scandalous, exactly. Nor could it have been lost on the good people at the Brick, where everything is exposed. They hung one of Sekula’s photos of Disney Hall on the only non-brick wall, and Sekula himself exhibited this work at a venue called REDCAT, located in the basement of Disney Hall. We’re all used to persistent contradiction between the content of art and the exigencies of showing and selling it. We make accommodations. We’ll call anything a hill.

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Photo by contributor.

LARB Short Takes live event reviews are published in partnership with the nonprofit Online Journalism Project and the Independent Review Crew.