Laura Whitcomb is the director of Label Curatorial, which develops exhibitions and publications for institutions worldwide. A scholar of Surrealism and the interdisciplinary approach of Black Mountain College, Whitcomb explores how their philosophic and pedagogic approach impacted postwar American art. Label Curatorial’s exhibitions focus on the convergence of experimental music and contemporary art, and often program auxiliary film screenings to supplement each exhibition. Her recent book Dilexi: A Gallery & Beyond documents the interdisciplinary approach of the renowned California gallery Dilexi (1958-1969) and its aftermath when founder Jim Newman, influenced by Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message,” aspired beyond the gallery walls and commissioned a series of groundbreaking artist films which sought to transform a wider cultural demographic through broadcast television. The Dilexi Foundation films debuted on the television station KQED in 1969 in San Francisco, and are considered a model for what became the genre of “guerilla television.” Directors and artists of this commissioned series include Walter De Maria’s Hardcore, Andy Warhol’s Paul Swan, Robert Frank’s Conversations in Vermont, Anna Halprin’s Right On, Yvonne Rainer’s Dance Fractions for the West Coast and Dilexi Gallery artist Philip Makanna’s The Empire of Things. The films also documented the agitprop performances of Julian Beck and Judith Malina of the Living Theater and the little-known activist theater practitioner Ken Dewey, the musician Frank Zappa, as well as Bay Area filmmaker Robert Nelson’s What Shall We Talk About? collaborating with the recently passed William Wiley in a lampoon of the talk show format.
These groundbreaking artists were given an uncensored platform by the Dilexi Foundation, offering unfiltered windows into a year which was one of the most radical in the second half of the 20th century. One film which synthesizes both the existential crisis of this tumultuous year, while offering a philosophic roadmap to navigate it, was Edwin Schlossberg’s Dilexi film Making Visible. The then 23-year-old Edwin Schlossberg offered a deeply contemplative and philosophical exploration of the unseen dynamics and metaphysical shifts catalyzed through the apparatus of television. The film explores the broadcast mechanism as an information system distributed through electromagnetic waves that pose ulterior powers as yet not considered. The film visually synthesizes the visual postulations of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle while Schlossberg’s collaborator of the time, Buckminster Fuller, navigates the viewer through the leaps of technology to better understand and apply communications theory to daily life. The film, which was made the year astronauts landed on the moon, proclaims “the eyes of television are more powerful than the eyes of society,” providing an unfiltered window into both the existential crisis of its era and how television may be used as a means to enlist a new consciousness rather than generate a conforming paradigm, while implicitly warning of how it could become an imminent tool of disinformation. Historically notable is the fact the film presents a series of cameos by Andy Warhol, who becomes the subject of Schlossberg’s camera lens, presenting a series of signs that question the role of the generated image and our inherent trust of its disseminating power by virtue of its documentation.
Making Visible was recently presented on the West Coast in 2018 when Steve Seid of the Pacific Film Archive organized an exhibition at the McEvoy Center in San Francisco, and in Los Angeles during the Dilexi Retrospective organized by Whitcomb in 2019, which included six West Coast galleries (Crown Point Press and Brian Gross Fine Art in San Francisco, and Parker Gallery, the Landing, Marc Selwyn Fine Art, and Parrasch Heijnen in Los Angeles). These galleries presented iterations of Dilexi’s programming 50 years after its closing. Eight years of research has now become the publication Dilexi: A Gallery and Beyond which documents these films as a cohesive body for the first time, and provides biographies of all the participating artist/directors. The book was edited and art directed by Jim Newman, the Dilexi founder, and includes supplementary essays and excerpts from the art critic Peter Frank, the recently passed Expanded Cinema author Gene Youngblood, former Whitney Museum of American Art curator Jay Sanders, film critic Antoine Thirion, and Pacific Film Archive of the Berkeley Museum curator Steve Seid. The book will be available in the gallery with a talk to close Edwin Schlossberg’s solo show at Ethan Cohen Gallery on December 11 2021.
