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Mapping the Unfindable / Norman Klein

March 2 - March 21 and April 6 - 24, 2004 (Closed during Spring Break)
Lecture and Film Series Schedule

Curated and designed by Indi McCarthy and Celia Pearce
Projection design by John Crawford

"Special effects . . . are coup de théatres, thunderclaps that shock you: a burst; an eruption; something small, like an insect down your back; a wall dissolving suddenly."
—Norman M. Klein, The Vatican to Vegas

The Beall is honored to be collaborating with the indefinable and indefatigable Norman Klein, Los Angeles writer, theorist, media historian, urban philosopher, cultural critic and new media experimentalist on the first-ever retrospective of his diverse body of work. This unique installation/exhibition will bring together all of Klein's major works-his trio of books, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, his unforgettable tour of the real and imagined Los Angeles, Seven Minutes, a definitive history of animation, and the long-awaited The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects, as well as his new media collaborations, including the U.S. debut of Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986, a cinematic database novel created with Rosemary Comella and Andreas Kratky as a co-production of the Labyrinth Project and ZKM (Center for Art and Media). The exhibition will explore the interweaving themes of Klein's body of work-the relationships between collective memory (and amnesia), mediation and power; the creation of illusion and scripted space-from special effects to animation to digital culture; and the thin line between fact and fiction, the "social imaginary" and historical record. The opening reception will include a book-signing party for The Vatican to Vegas.

Norman Klein is a cultural critic, an urban and media historian, as well as a novelist, and an experimental media maker. He has taught and lectured throughout Southern California and the world, and is currently on the faculty of the California Institute of the Arts.

Works represented in the exhibition: The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects (2004), Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986 (2003), Freud-Lissitzky Navigator (1998), The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (1997), Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon (1996).

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