So I decided to endure afternoon traffic in Los Angeles to go see this exhibition today. I loved the concept of the pop-up exhibition and thought the venue had potential.
Slash exhibition
So this is it... Really?
The building is hip, I would say it was cool but it doesn't have air so it isn't - they were running fans to deal with the heat. The concept of the exhibition display is interesting how it hangs from the ceiling and you move through it. Someone put a lot of time and effort in to that, plus they had the plastic holders for the magazines created for the exhibition. I know this because they all had "Slash Exhibition" molded in to the top of them. But the reality is this exhibition sucks. I went there hoping to see the images from the magazine printed and displayed like a normal gallery, I thought I would see some of the magazines too, but I expected more. All they did was hang a bunch of the magazines up so you could look at them. Big deal? There is no lighting in the building so it hard to read most everything. You have to deal with the harsh lighting from the front windows and the reflective properties of the plastic sleeves so good luck with seeing half the work. Another thing is this is an exhibition about the punk era of the late 1970's, the presentation is too clean and delicate, it doesn't fit. Someone would have done better to spray paint the walls and glue copies of the magazine over them. The presentation is more befitting modern images where the process of actually walking through them was an important component of the exhibition. I looked at the catalogue while I was there, $50 for basically a bunch of reprints of the original magazine but again they are scaled down in size and hard to read and see detail.
It just seems like someone was looking to make a quick buck with this rebirth by quickly repackaging the magazine issues in a catalogue and hanging some old copies from the ceiling. If someone would have taken the time to go through old negatives and make some good scans then reproduce the text this exhibition, and catalogue, could have been pretty amazing. As it is I would have gotten way more out of this if someone would have just scanned the original magazines and put them on line so I could read them when I had the time.
