Lulu White: Mixed Use Ziggurat

As Lulu White drops down onto Hollywood Boulevard to make a charcoal rubbing of Houdini’s star, a crowd starts gathering around her to watch. They stare like she’s the Michael Jackson impersonator nearby or the guy you can pay to hold a big yellow snake or the tag team who dress as Zach Galifianakis character in The Hangover and Pennywise from It, respectively. The Walk Of Fame is one of LA’s most public spaces, where anything goes, so the fact that Lulu is managing to crane tourists’ necks to her feels powerful amid the general chaos as she traces in front of a giant Transformers robot while a Shakira song plays from a souvenir store.

Lulu is stalking Hollywood Boulevard’s tourist corridor today as a publicity stunt to promote her first solo show Mixed Use Ziggurat. We are snapping photos of her doing charcoal rubbings of Walk Of Fame stars and Chinese Theater handprints to evoke studio publicity photos promoting its studio stable of starlets, like the photos of Lana Turner returning to the malt shop across from Hollywood High where she was allegedly discovered drinking a Coke (this discovery myth itself a fabrication).

Lulu is wading knee-deep into the physical aspects of image-making, looking deeply into the grotesquerie of glamor not to criticize it but to celebrate it. She makes something practical and tangible out of stuff meant to be ethereal and ideational, digging into the dirt of history for artifacts of clunky symbolism.

In Mixed Use Ziggurat Lulu White explores how LA’s landscapes collapse the long arc of recorded time into a permanently ecstatic now. Her artworks also collapse the purely theoretical gap between fine art and matte paintings and props, between symbolic objects and their purported uses.

In these pieces Lulu returns to core subconscious obsessions. These include the exotic revival style architecture closely associated with Los Angeles. Over the course of about a hundred years these local monuments have gone from brand new to crumbling. Even Grauman’s Chinese Theater, one of the central tourist attractions of the Hollywood strip, is pretty shitty and very dusty when you get up close. That’s because they are made of cardboard and plywood, like mini golf course castles blown up to full size.

Marquee movie palaces like the Chinese theater and Egyptian theater up the street were built as winking nods to great ancient civilizations. The Chinese Theater, after weathering a strange century in Los Angeles, has morphed from an emulation of an ancient tomb into a real one. The handprints and footprints that Lulu did fossil rubbings of belong to a strange array of famous stars, mostly dead now. Even for the living the concrete handprints look like gravestones, and it feels like they’re bricking up the door of a fanciful cemetery.

As Lulu makes her rubbings, pausing occasionally to smile for a snapshot, the handprints and signatures become defamiliarized and then newly recognizable as ancient trilobites.

LA may be made of glue and sandpaper but that doesn’t make it dishonest. To me it feels more honest to admit that human settlements are temporary and humanity itself is a blip on a much longer timeline. Will any of this exist in a thousand years? And much more than that truly should it ever have existed at all? When the giant sloths return to take the earth, will they use the movie palaces as shelter caves?

Southern California’s surroundings predict their own apocalypse, the future time when the Babylonian revival outlet malls will be covered in moss and inhabited solely by coyotes and cockroaches. Lulu White’s work looks forward to the moment when DWP manhole covers will be like the jugs found preserved under volcano sediment in Pompeii.

Lulu’s work for Mixed Use Ziggurat ties these themes of great dynasties into her own personal history as a child of successful working artists with familial ties to early American history, the Southern United States and Southern California. Her familial legacy is folk art forms like comic books and puppets, designed for the pleasure of the artist but also to be enjoyed by audiences. Big ideas as presented like paintings seen through the lens of a giant chunky silver needle. It takes as its subject the inherent comedy of an Ozymandias whose temple is a tire shop built from shitty concrete to look ancient. Her paintings and novelty frames lure the eye with pleasure and then reveal its dusty reality like dare I say…Houdini.

There’s a nihilistic optimism that comes from growing up somewhere constantly in danger of burning down, being swallowed in a hole, or going underwater. It helps to shake off traditions, to be free of old worlds. But history flows underneath regardless of how many times you rebuild on top of it. The wheels of the pioneer wagons that brought white colonizers to California become a golden reel of film in White’s work, or a cornucopia, as Lulu traces how the comforting lies of pioneer narratives are linked to the entertainment business’s own well honored but extremely hard to verify tales about its own greatness and foreverness. In Lulu’s mind it’s all one long linear story about the long flattening out of histories.

Lulu White and I (Molly Lambert) are old family friends. My parents met her mom, cartoonist Mimi Pond, when Mimi was waitressing at Mama’s Royale Cafe in Oakland and they all moved down from the Bay Area to Los Angeles around the same time in the early 1980s. Lulu and I both grew up with parents who worked in the entertainment industry behind the scenes and witnessed the mundane parts of show business early on: spreadsheets and sawdust. As a kid my parents tried to hide the little underground comic books put out by Lulu’s parents and their friends from me on a very high shelf but I stood on a chair.

I attended Lulu’s parents’ wedding although I was too young to remember being there. I do remember going to a taping of Pee-wee’s Playhouse, my favorite show, and seeing that the stage was tiny and in a giant dark soundstage. I understood that the Playhouse could be both fake and also very real. At one of her parents’ parties I asked a woman how she knew the family and she said “I’m Chairy,” which made me unbearably starstruck.

I then met Lulu when she was a kid and thought “wow what a cool kid!” She was running around in the yard making art. It was funny to be a grown up at the party I’d once been a kid at and then even funnier to meet Lulu later when she was also a grown up and think again “wow what a cool kid!” I felt a kinship with her over having cool parents, which really limits your options for rebelling.

We share an interest in rummaging through the trash history of LA looking for shiny things. I am stoked to present to you here in The Beautiful Town of Los Angeles with Quarters Gallery, Lulu White’s Mixed Use Ziggurat! (crowd goes wild with applause)