(More images and exhibition information below essay)

THE THEATER AWAITS, AN EXHIBITION OF WORKS BY TOVA MOZARD

Unlike the typical out-of-towner who gawks down Hollywood Boulevard in flip flops and cargo shorts flapping a Map of the Stars in her face to cool down, Tova Mozard is a much more skeptical and reserved admirer of Los Angeles. The Swedish artist photographs the cities’ performers and venues on the fringes: psychics joints, street performers, wildfires, and amateur comedians. All kinds of clichés of the failed Hollywood dream, her subjects are familiar to both the tourist and local. But instead of photographing with a cool irony, Mozard captures them with a tender curiosity and dramatic flare. This place, though foreign to her, has existed in Mozard’s imagination and inspired her aesthetic interests through its depiction in film and television. The fiction of Los Angeles is familiar and its mythology is far from foreign. Psychic storefronts after dark, empty stages, before or after the performance, street performers off of the street, Mozard captures these spaces when no one’s looking, at their most vulnerable, when you can see the scuffs on the stage, the rips in the curtain, and the neon lights shorting out. But also when the glow of the neon is most magnetic and its services most appealing yet seem completely futile, almost perilous (has anyone’s life really improved by going to see a psychic in the middle of the night?).

The film and 10 photographs of “The Theater Awaits” subtly reveal slippages in the façades of Los Angeles. LA is best known for these façades, if not better known for these slippages. Mozard doesn’t necessarily seek what’s beyond them but rather expands the possibilities of their surface, making you more and more drawn to the thing behind the charade, if there’s even anything there. In “Psychic Advisor” while the neon sign occupies the center of the frame, the eye is led to the right down a bright alleyway that emits a yellow-y glow, a “For Lease” sign hangs above as if something better and more promising is down that alley. -- Gracie Hadland

BEHIND THE MASK: Psychics, Cops and Comedians (a conversation between Tova Mozard and Chris Kraus from the forthcoming publication Tova Mozard, Psychics, Cops and Comedians to be released with Art and Theory Publications, autumn 2020).

CK: The photographs and videos in this exhibition are grouped into three discrete categories: comedians, cops and psychics. Thinking about them, it seems like this work seeks to record a bracket of time in LA. The city’s so vast one could take almost any approach, but by limiting yourself to these categories you ultimately show a lot more. How did you choose these three categories?  Can you describe your first encounters with LA?

TM: I came to LA for the first time in 2002 as a very young art student. I remember buying a car, driving around … I was living in Echo Park. And I was struck by the LAPD everywhere … being Swedish, I’ve grown up with all the cop TV shows and movies, but seeing them in real life, how they moved, how they drove, was pretty intriguing. I remember going to the Short Stop, the former cop bar in Echo Park. At that time, people were talking about corruption, and how they used to bring people in there – it was a whole film noir clash with reality.

At the time, the point wasn’t to critique or expose the police – my work isn’t political in that way. I’m more a theatrical artist, exploring the line between reality and fiction. But I had all these experiences then… my car got stolen by a Filipino gang and when I went to go get it, the cops thought I was part of the gang. It was absurd. In the video, Cops Are Actors, all four characters are actor cops. Two of them are real cops as well, but they’ve played cops on film and TV as professional actors. The last actor, Chuck started out as an actor, then became a cop and detective for twenty-five years while he was raising a family, and finally returned to acting, cast most of the time as a cop. His performance captures what, to me, defines the image of an urban American cop – the uniform, mannerisms, language, the whole set-up and at the same time it’s so theatrical and silly, that’s a frightening combination.

CK: If you were living in Echo Park, you must have also been close to the Police Academy in Elysian Park. It’s like a cop playground, their training ground.  In fact, a lot of your images taken in Elysian Park seem to depict police training exercises. In “The Valley” from 2017 a uniformed figure is looking into a hole in the ground, and in “Skyscraper” 2017 a curved, uniformed figure is almost draped over a branch. They’re playing games – they don’t even have guns.

TM: That’s true. I remember going to the café at the Police Academy. It was like a coffee shop for policemen.

CK: When you arrived in LA that first time, did you feel you were encountering the TV world of your childhood?

TM: Not really, because LA has such a vibe of its own. But the city has been used so much in film and TV, it’s like a corpse – it’s like a body that’s been mutilated in some way. [laughs]

CK: It’s true! Everyone, it seems, is making it up as they go in your video works. When the psychics describe the dangers and negativity around you, they’re so obviously hustling more work. And at the end of Cops Are Actors, Chuck talks about how improvisation is at the heart of everything both cops and actors do every day. Did this quality of improvisation, the way people are writing their own scripts as they go, strike you as something new, something you don’t see much in Sweden?

TM: Definitely. It’s not like that at all here. You follow a script, but it’s not as improvised or collaborative. It’s not as vulnerable or challenging, and it’s not as much fun. In Stockholm, it’s another type of script: socialistic, safe, a little bit conservative, highly organized and a little self-righteous as well. It’s good because it’s safe, and it serves the common good. But there’s something in the air in LA - that quality of improvisation - that works for me as an artist.

Because I’m very interested in acting and role-playing; clichés, and the way people make things work through improvisation, I’ve always been interested in the mask and what’s behind it. And in the way people play games … observing, as you grow up, how adults act in group settings. And when I came to LA, that quality of improvisation that you describe was right in my face. And I thought, “Okay. This is my subject matter.” In one sense, it’s familiar because I’ve grown up with American media, even though it’s so far from my culture. But it's good to have this kind of distance, it helps me view things. People might think – Oh, cops. Comedians, we’ve seen that … but I want to go deeper and find subjects within these categories that haven’t been seen before. I’m not a big fan of comedy, I don’t normally go to see stand-up. And because it’s an alien world, I’ve been able to view it, maybe, differently.

CK: You take something very generic and make it strange. At the same time, you’re drawn to odd characters who’ve carved out a way to exist. Maybe, in LA, this is already a thing of the past. How many of those psychic parlors still even exist? But at the time that you shot them, these little hole-in-the-wall places were where people could eke out a living in this odd way. I’m really struck by the dancing woman in your film and in the photograph “Medium” 2020. Where was that? Who is she?

TM: Her name is Shé, she’s a psychic. I shot the film pretty recently, so even though some of these places are gone because they’ve torn down the buildings, a lot of them are still there. None of the psychics would let me film their faces. This woman I found through another friend. And she didn’t read me – she didn’t want to go there. I don’t know why not, but it was important to me that she had psychic abilities. She’d been a hand model. She has beautiful hands. And she’s a singer and actor. I was there two or three times. We talked. She was all over the place, but not wacko. Still, very self-conscious in some ways, and in other ways, not at all. She didn’t question what I was doing, she just went with the flow. She had a Swedish friend, so she’d talk about Sweden and how clean we all are, and about her house.

CK: Was her dance part of a ritual?

TM: No, she just did that for the video.

CK: What about the gold colored man in “Goldman,”2020. He’s not in any of the videos, but there are a couple of photos of him.

TM: That’s Eddy. He’s someone I met back in 2002. I saw him in a club dancing. He was an amazing dancer and I wanted to approach him, but I didn’t.  A week later I was on Hollywood Boulevard having a coffee and I saw him walk past. And I was like, Yeah. That’s the guy. I just ran after him. He had Elvis glasses and I’m a big Elvis fan. We started talking, and then we became friends.  I’ve been filming and photographing him ever since then. So, there is a lot of material. He’s a clown and an actor. So, he’s part of my interest system …

CK: Was he in make-up like in the photograph when you saw him the first time in the club? 

TM: No.

CK: And you still recognized him in the street?

TM: I have a very, very good face memory. And I’m good at eye-catching.  That’s how I find a lot of my characters, or actors, or friends. I see them and approach them. It’s a very improvisational kind of scouting.

CK: So he’s a street performer with the gold colour, right? A living statue?  

TM: Yes.

CK: In Hollywood?

TM: Yeah. He came to Hollywood from Texas, when Hollywood was more simple than it is now. We’ve done sessions where we talk about the characters on Hollywood Boulevard. And he talks about how things have evolved … how many Batman’s there are, how many homeless people dress up as characters.  We talk a lot about Hollywood because he lives right there. He doesn’t have a car, and he struggles a lot with money. He’s very much part of my art and life. 

CK: And the comedian featured in Entrance … he doesn’t perform in the video, but you get the sense that he probably isn’t that funny and definitely not successful in the comedy world. He looks like an Elvis impersonator. Where did you find him? How did you meet?

TM: His name was Mel Kohl and he just recently died, I found him on the internet when I was looking for stand up comedians. And then his image popped up. I went to his info page and texted him. And then we met at the House of Pies in Los Feliz and started talking. Like a lot of other people, he trusted me because I’m young, pretty and Swedish, ha-ha. And he said, Yeah, let’s do something. I don’t like professional people too much, I prefer people who are more like me, sort of searching for something and drifting around. So then, we can do things on an equal basis rather than as a mere transaction. 

CK: I see that. You’d rather not work with someone who’s a rising star at the Comedy Store.

TM: I almost did, but she was … the whole thing was just obnoxious, I couldn’t.  I’m more looking for someone who has … where you can see the cracks, but you can also see the longing, the wishes, the downfall. You can see all these things happening at the same time.

CK: Was Mel Kohl happy with how the video turned out?

TM: He was, which was a little bit surprising because he was always talking about becoming a big star, he was excited about it, he said, “It’s a film about me.” And I’d say, “Yes, it is, but I’m not promising you anything” I wanted to keep things realistic, but I also let him have his own thing going on in his head, because I noticed that in a sense, it didn’t matter to him what the outcome was. It was more about what he felt himself. He was happy hanging out with me, driving around and doing things. I think for him it wasn’t so much about the product. It was what we were doing together, and the way I let him take charge a little bit. He was directing me when we were filming, “Do this” or “Put the camera there.” I like the way our roles interchanged and the non-professionalism of it.

CK: It reminded me of Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason. Any monologue at close range on-camera that goes on long enough will become an unraveling.

TM: I’ve been interested in this phenomenon since the beginning. I have another film, Cowboy Russ, that features a friend who’s an extra, who’s been in just about every film and TV series in LA. In my film, he’s rehearing a scene from The Magnificent Seven in his kitchen. The camera is very still, it maybe pans a little bit – and when he’s done, there is a standoff, sort of a cowboy gesture between me, him and the camera. I didn’t intend it, but I just let the camera roll.  The film is very much about his relationship to the camera, but you can see so much more. You can see his relationship to film, and to himself. All of that happens when you use long takes and just let people talk. I’ve always loved the films of Errol Morris, Andy Warhol, Chantal Akerman. When you don’t know what you want to capture, it’s better to keep the camera still. You get so many things for free when you just leave things alone.

CK: The visual style in these works is very classic LA noir. The opening of Psychics, the hold on the cactus garden lit up by headlight behind a strip mall, is so David Lynch. And I thought of Boogie Nights as the camera rolled past the Family Arcade, no doubt in the Valley. Is this a style you were consciously aiming for? 

TM: Growing up, Twin Peaks was a big part of my life. I was drawn to the mysteriousness of Lynch’s world, which is not necessarily Hollywood – it’s something more universally mysterious. Laura Palmer’s loneliness, which no one took that seriously maybe, which was so dark and sad, I found strength and recognition in that portrait. L.A. as a city is very sad and lonely and sexy, like her….

I like to create a space that feels suspended between reality and fiction, and those are the kind of places I like to visit both in reality and in my mind.

Driving by the Comedy Store, I thought it looked like a big box, a camera box of some sort. I wondered what was inside? It looked like a weird gravestone.  I read that it used to be a nightclub for gangsters. I spent a lot of time inside there during the day, photographing and filming. There’s a lot of material I haven’t done anything with. I just pick and gather. I manage to steal from the corpse without mounting a big production.

(Conversation between Tova Mozard and Chris Kraus. Tuesday, June 9 2020, Stockholm, Sweden and Bovey, Minnesota)

CLICK HERE TO VIEW VIRTUAL SHOW

THE THEATER AWAITS, an exhibition of film and photographs by Swedish-based artist Tova Mozard.

LADIES ROOM, Bendix Building, 1206 Maple Ave Suite #502B, Los Angeles, CA, 90015

https://ladiesroomla.org/