Larry Johnson & Hedi El KholtiSeptemberSep 7th - OctoberOct 19th, 2024Gaga L.A.

On one side of the gallery, five new works by Larry Johnson use collage and, more specifically, an analogue graphic design technique called “pasteup” to perform a sort of aesthetic surgery on specific bodies of text, “copy” and typographic material, all related to Hollywood and its layered, conflicting histories. With its all-caps “ATTENTION!,” Johnson’s Untitled (Do Not Demo), 2024, warns trespassers and developers away from a site where the notorious “Trunk Murderess” Winne Ruth Judd stored the bodies of her victims in 1931. Collage, bodily dismemberment and the carving up of urban space and time resonate suggestively in this scaled-up street flyer, which the artist has mounted by hand using real strips of giant, foot-wide duct tape. Another new work employs pasteup to repeat the line “Tom Cruise Did Not Attend Gay Artist Party with Gay Cowboy” in two different typefaces. This statement, issued by Cruise’s management company, denies that the actor ever showed up at Warhol’s Factory with a member of the Village People. Correcting the rumor (or memory) twice, and using the word “gay” four times, Untitled (Baskerville vs Caslon), 2024, invites the viewer to either weigh the convincingness of its two font options or to simply enjoy the denial’s visual doubling, just like the echo of repeated gossip… or a typographic stammer.

Gay icons Greta Garbo and Kay Francis also make appearances in Johnson’s new work, the latter spelled out “Fwancis” … a joke either on the late actress’s speech impediment or on stereotypical-cartoon fag talk, or both (Untitled (Pasteup for Old Gay Men), 2023). In these collages, the specific combination of X-acto knife, rubber cement and non-photo blue pencil operates upon the positive forms of letters and the negative spaces that distance them on the page, elaborating an art of graphic statements and visible silences. Some truths can only be communicated in code, or by typographic innuendo, via the sharpness of the cut and the stickiness of glue. In Johnson’s practice, pasteup is where a manual and mental queering of information takes place, where language opens onto an unspoken dimension. Here, collage becomes an art or style of inserting oneself into communicational space in order to get something else across and arrive at other, stranger, more telling meanings. Collage is also theft of intellectual property, a tactical poaching and liberation of another man’s copy. The city itself is like a printed page, as if already published. To live and make meaning here, we devise ways of moving and existing between the lines. Untitled (AKA), 2024, is a to-scale pasteup based on an eggshell sticker seen all around town lately, a collaborative tag by “Veks” and “Evict.” Johnson’s presents a negative image of this sticker, reversing its black and white values on museum board while carrying over the precise weight and air that make it so effective and poetic as an urban signal.

On the gallery’s other side, Hedi El Kholti presents a selection of small-scale, densely populated collages produced between 2006 and 2024. Taking images from movie magazines, paperback book covers, art publications and gay magazines, the artist creates complex, swarming worlds such as the panoramic Untitled (for Sandra), 2024, where characters from The Wizard of Oz meet up with the reverend Jim Jones and a gang of Manson girls, and where Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty optically conspires with Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. El Kholti’s collages enact a sort of autobiographical time travel through wildly various cultural materials, touching on specific moments in the artist’s life. The works perform a sort of psychedelic archeology on his own experience as a gay youth who moved from Morrocco to Los Angeles in 1992, telling this story through appropriated images which are made intimate in the process of cutting and pasting.

A longtime editor at Semiotext(e), where he has actively fostered a living, international avant-garde of queer literature, El Kholti’s visual practice can be seen as a silent, retinal accompaniment to his ongoing work in publishing. To read is to actively rewrite oneself between the pages of others, opening up literature to an auto-fictional process (or selfwriting) that also involves music, cinema and art. El Kholti’s collages activate this extradimensionality of literature as a channel or vehicle for subjective transportation. Appropriated content is rerouted toward a sort of willed hallucination, as if to steal a world back from specific, fetishized fragments of mainstream and underground culture. El Kholti works at the intimate scale of the zine or journal, organizing a page-like interface between the inner space of fantasy and an avalanche of cultural and historical reference points.

In one series of collages, El Kholti uses a blade and glue to alter the covers of massmarket paperbacks. One of these inserts an image of Divine from John Waters’ Pink Flamingos into a livre de poche edition of Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée. In another, the artist transplants Joy Division singer Ian Curtis onto the cover of Yukio Mishima’s Confessions d’un masque. These perverted book covers convey the specific experience of reading existentialist and queer literature to a postpunk soundtrack – and of an ongoing re-queering of cultural information, an always contingent process of remixing. Literature, cinema and music are treated as alchemical substances – combined in druggy, desiring, DIY doses. Some works incorporate song lyrics by The Cure, Bauhaus, etc. These collages double as scores for El Kholti’s own live performances of the songs, marked with color-coded chord changes. Like storyboards for impossible music videos, Slowcore soundtracks for an epically exploded literature.

As if to contradict the idea that El Kholti’s collage is a private or minor practice, the artist has massively blown up one of his small collages, Untitled (Conquest), 2017, and installed it as a wallpaper mural occupying the dimensions of an entire wall. Here is a scene with Speedo-clad Fire Island boys (photographed by Tom Bianchi in the 1970s) cut and pasted into the fiery red hellscape of a B-horror film by Lucio Fulci: a liberated pleasure zone opening directly onto schlocky damnation. While this work seems to narrate the private anxieties of a gay man coming of age in the time of AIDS, it now communicates at the loud, aggressive scale of a billboard on Sunset Strip.

Using a stereo turntable to power a kinetic collage-sculpture based on Brion Gysin’s “dream machine,” El Kholti assembles a nightmarish cast of murders and their victims, taking images from the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. Glued to the inner surface of a rotating cylinder and illuminated by an inner light, mugshots and paparazzi images swirl at the limits of perception as if to invade the subliminal mind of the viewer:a plugged-in collage, weaponizing the “cut-up” as a means of remaking consciousness in its own image.