Alice Könitz

By KAVERI NAIR JULY 17, 2013, 1:00 PM 4 Comments

Like the courtyard houses of Marrakesh, Los Angeles’s residential architecture turns inward, away from the busy boulevards. The result is a lot of inhospitable public space, but it can also produce a special kind of pleasure. There’s a thrill, specific to L.A., in finding an amazing restaurant in a strip mall, or venturing down an alleyway past a chain-link fence to encounter the Los Angeles Museum of Art.

Not to be confused with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the gleaming institution on Wilshire Boulevard, 10 miles to the west, this museum, known as LAMOA, is a hand-built, 13-foot-long wooden structure. It sits in a paved yard near a small cluster of art studios in Eagle Rock, a neighborhood where many artists live and work. When visitors arrive, the museum’s founder and sole staff member, the sculptor Alice Könitz, greets them with a friendly wave.

“There’s a scale difference” between LAMOA and other L.A. museums, Könitz explained, with considerable understatement. “It’s, like, me running it, instead of hundreds of professionals.” As a result, Konitz adds, though LAMOA is public, “it’s also really private.”

Könitz came to L.A. from Düsseldorf 15 years ago to attend Cal Arts, and her work reveals a sensitivity to her surroundings that perhaps only a transplant could have. LAMOA is not her first crack at redefining public space: since 2001, she has been intermittently working on a scheme to build an elevator to an abandoned section of the Glendale freeway overpass, so that visitors can experience its vast, concrete emptiness. (The project is still in need of financing.)

While it may be an art piece in itself, LAMOA is primarily an exhibition space for Könitz’s artistic community, a way of “stepping away from art making and just seeing what other people are doing; seeing if I offer this to the community, what ideas would generate.”

One member of that community is Katie Grinnan, whose sculpture “FYI” is on view at LAMOA until early August and will travel to the Print Center in Philadelphia in September. The work consists of a lime-green steel structure that holds a collection of hanging files filled with all kinds of printed matter. Grinnan asked her personal contacts for “information” that they would like to share and created a filing system around their contributions. Visitors are invited to add their own information or simply browse what’s there already.

As a constellation of niche interests and a display of free association (one sequence of files includes “Crafts,” “Trucker’s Hitch Knot,” “Jacknifing & Iron Lungs,” “Building & Machines” and “Noise & Capitalism”), “FYI” evokes social media or Web surfing. The floor, in fact, is tiled with pictures pulled from YouTube. But in an aggressively bricks-and-mortar gesture, the screen grabs are printed on concrete. “I wanted you to stand on those images,” Grinnan explained. “I didn’t want to mirror the space of the computer.”

To Könitz, “FYI” is “a little bit like Facebook but completely different. It’s like an archaic version of it.” So archaic that in order to share, you have to show up: “You have to walk down this alley,” she said. “You can find it on the Internet, everyone can come, but you don’t really come as an anonymous guest. You sort of have to deal with me, and you will deal with the art.”

The museum is open Sundays from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. and by appointment; “FYI” is on view through August 11. 4328 Eagle Rock Blvd., Los Angeles; losangelesmuseumofart.blogspot.com