Paradise is a full color catalogue featuring photos of the interviewees taken on location by Ataman and essays by OCMA Curator of Contemporary Art Aimee Chang, cultural critic and urban historian Norman Klein, and critical theorist and art historian Irit Rogoff. The catalog was underwritten by Jennifer McSweeney. With the international popularity of TV shows such as The O.C., The Real Housewives of Orange County, and Laguna Beach, Orange County has come to represent a certain kind of paradise in the minds of millions of people who have never been here. In response to this phenomenon, Kutlug Ataman s new multi-channel video installation, Paradise, premiering at OCMA, explores the construction of both the myth and the reality of Southern California. Filmed in a wide-screen format suggestive of Hollywood films, the piece combines video interviews with twenty-four typical and a typical residents of Southern California, from star and car obsessed youth to an Emmy award winning producer who volunteers as a character in Pageant of the Masters, Laguna Beach s famous yearly festival featuring tableaux vivant. Local members of the laughter yoga club are present as is one of Southern California s most famous chroniclers of the apocalypse, Mike Davis. Dr. Robert Anthony Schuller, the 1960s founder of the drive-in church and commissioner of one of the seven wonders of Orange County, the Philip Johnson designed Crystal Cathedral, contributes his thoughts on paradise. Other members of this ad hoc community include a thanathologist, the owner of a Southern California medi-spa, the famous futurist william Knoke, and a leader of the Minutemen in San Diego. According to Ataman talking is the only meaningful activity we are capable of. In keeping with this, Ataman s new work explores how individuals construct themselves within the play of paradise and how they engineer and construct paradise through their narratives.

Paradise: Kutlug Ataman

Arts & Photography

Norman M. Klein

Irit Rogoff

Kutlug Ataman

Aimee Chang

Photography & Video

Orange County Museum of Art

Rosson Crow: Night at the Palomino

Rosson Crow

Honor Fraser

The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, New and Fully Updated Edition

Los Angeles is a city which has long thrived on the continual re-creation of own myth. In this extraordinary and original work, Norman Klein examines the process of memory erasure in LA. Using a provocative mixture of fact and fiction, the book takes us on an “anti-tour” of downtown LA, examines life for Vietnamese immigrants in the City of Dreams, imagines Walter Benjamin as a Los Angeleno, and finally looks at the way information technology has recreated the city, turning cyberspace into the last suburb. In this new edition, Norman Klein examines new models for erasure in LA. He explores the evolution of the Latino majority, how the Pacific economy is changing the structure of urban life, the impact of collapsing infrastructure in the city, and the restructuring of those very districts that had been “forgotten”.

History

Americas

Verso

Los Angeles is a city which has long thrived on the continual re-creation of own myth. In this extraordinary and original work, Norman Klein examines the process of memory erasure in LA. Using a provocative mixture of fact and fiction, the book takes us on an ‘anti-tour’ of downtown LA, examines life for Vietnamese immigrants in the City of Dreams, imagines Walter Benjamin as a Los Angeleno, and finally looks at the way information technology has recreated the city, turning cyberspace into the last suburb. In this new edition, Norman Klein examines new models for erasure in LA. He explores the evolution of the Latino majority, how the Pacific economy is changing the structure of urban life, the impact of collapsing infrastructure in the city, and the restructuring of those very districts that had been ‘forgotten’.

Seven Minutes is a social and aesthetic history of the “controlled anarchy” of the cartoon, from the first talking Mickeys to the demise of Warners and MGM theatrical productions in 1960. Norman M. Klein follows the scrambling graphics and upside-down ballet of Fleischer’s Betty Boop, Popeye, Superman of the Wolfie cartoons by Tex Avery, of the Bugs and Daffy, Tweetie and Roadrunner cartoons from Warners, of full animation at Disney, of the “whiteness of Snow White”, and of how Mickey Mouse became a logo. Reviewing the graphics, scripts and marketing of each era, he discovers the links between cartoons and live action movies, newspapers, popular illustration, and the entertainment architecture coming out of Disneyland. Klein shows that the cartoon was a perverse juggling act, invaded constantly by economic and political pressures, by marketing for sound, by licensing characters to stave off bankruptcies, by Prohibition, the Great Depression, World War II and the first wave of television.

Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon

Verso Books

A loosely constructed documentary underlying a flexible literary journey, Bleeding Through is an urban bricolage held together by the outline of a novel spanning 66 years. An interactive DVD-ROM, it explores the ideas of renowned cultural historian Norman Klein. At the center of the story is Molly--based on a real-life person--who may be hiding a murderer. She lives within a three-square-mile area near downtown Los Angeles, a death zone where more cinematic murders have been committed than anywhere else in the world. This neighborhood, one of the most complex ethnographic districts in the United States, is represented in Hollywood movies, urban legends, and real estate boosterism in ways that erase the lived ethnographic reality. Out of this rich blend of narratives, users must decide what to include and what to leave out so that their own version of the story will become legible--thus the reader discovers how fictions are concocted and misinformation disseminated.

Norman Klein: Bleeding Through

Rosemary Comella

Andreas Kratky

Individual Artists

Hatje Cantz Publishers

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Books by Norman M. Klein