From
John Divola's current show at
Laura Bartlett Gallery in London. My favorites are all part of the 2004 series,
Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert. The artist lives and works and teaches in the vast & arid outskirts of urban Southern California – a flat, nearly featureless, low-budget landscape, popularized over the past century (given its ironic proximity to Hollywood) as backdrop for anybody and everybody's apocalyptic visions. To Europeans these look like photos from the moon. To Americans they manifest something different, something familiar – the well-established national aesthetic of white trash chic, a form of camp.
