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Public Culture 13.2 (2001) 233-241



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City Centers/Peripheral Transmissions:
A Conversation with Lincoln Tobier

Interviewed by Lisa Cohen

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Lincoln Tobier's work expresses what he calls "place in concentrated form." For over ten years, Tobier has been making art in which he considers the production and consumption of social--and particularly urban--space. His Panoptiramicon, presented at Gallery Side 2 in Tokyo in March and April 1998, used aerial photography and video projection to allow viewers to survey the entire city of Tokyo in three minutes. His ongoing project (It all comes together in) Ruckus L.A.--which quotes Red Grooms, Robert Moses, and Edward Soja, among others--is an attempt to produce a handmade yet vast and spectacular panorama of Los Angeles. Although Tobier orchestrates this panorama, he wants the city's inhabitants not only to be able to walk through it but also to have a hand in creating it. Reimagining, integrating, and intervening in both intimate and official geographies, subjective and objective representations of public space, Tobier has also, since 1993, created a series of independent, short-term radio stations in the United States and Europe.

The following conversation took place during the summer of 2000. Begun in New York and continued over the telephone and by e-mail, it was punctuated by Tobier's trip to France and his move from New York to Los Angeles. In France, he worked on Polyradiobucket, the ninth of his radio projects, which was located in the community of Champfleury, near Avignon. For Polyradiobucket, Tobier and members of the community produced and broadcast various programs that [End Page 233] [Begin Page 235] the participants devised. Now transplanted to (or "based" in) Los Angeles, Tobier is at work on plans for (It all comes together in) Ruckus L.A.



Public Culture: Our first question should probably be: Why Tokyo and Los Angeles?

Lincoln Tobier: Well, Panoptiramicon, which I've described as "a room to view the entire city of Tokyo in detail in three minutes," originated from the invitation to make a show there. I don't have a studio, so I try to make new work when such opportunities occur. Often that work takes into account one or more aspects of the exhibition's context, particularly those aspects that I can use to articulate ideas about the eroding public sphere. My Los Angeles project, (It all comes together in) Ruckus L.A., is ongoing. It first came about because even after I became familiar with Los Angeles it still seemed incomprehensibly vast and disjointed. I wanted to try to find a way to talk about that quality and to address the city's history, its representation, and its relationship to power.

PC: The LACMA [Los Angeles County Museum of Art] exhibition of your L.A. project uses two different scales or modes of scaling space. 1 On the one hand, you present a large aerial photograph [12 3 20 feet] that lays out "real" space--or presents what we read as "real" space (or represents how a certain visual technology frames the idea of real space). On the other hand, the piece is trying to chart the relationship between that sort of space and a more imaginary or personalized space, through the use of the three-dimensional models of homes, buildings, and "landmarks" that some L.A. residents constructed. Could you talk about this tension?

LT: At LACMA, the thirty-five models made by members of the museum's staff, administration, and board of trustees (all were invited, 10 percent participated) were placed on a composite aerial photograph that showed the entire city of Los Angeles in detail. That installation can be thought of as a study for (It all comes together in) Ruckus L.A., a project in which I want to render Los Angeles as a tangible entity composed of the subjective views of individuals within a geographically accurate or objective topography (not unlike Robert Moses's Panorama of New York City [1964] at the Queens Museum, but larger). The tension you see...

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