Chris Lipomi Installation photo of Uzihektaka Wakipi (2008) Los Angeles

The CaVe Project
Chris Lipomi trespasses. His infringements hurtle backwards, borrowing from recent and distant art history. This trespassing is doubled in Lipomi’s recent CaVe project. Squatting on neglected city property, he has taken over an abandoned underground pedestrian crosswalk underneath one of Los Angeles’ busiest streets just south of the city’s mid-Wilshire corridor. No one goes down there anymore. The city is oblivious to the fact that Lipomi has secured sole access and trespassed nightly for about a month, gradually covering the tunnel’s parallel walls with his contemporary rendition of cave paintings modeled after prehistoric precedent. The dank and shady underground walkway has been covertly converted into an off-site installation, an unlikely gallery. To view it, you have to trespass, too. But you can’t go alone. You will be led there furtively under cover of night by Lipomi himself; the gate is locked and he has the key.

When I went to Lipomi’s CaVe on a January night with a group of about five people it was raining steadily, rather atypical for L.A. We waited, drinking red wine, at Lipomi’s apartment until it was our group’s turn to take the tour, at which point Lipomi led us up the block to the intersection of South Orange Drive and Olympic Boulevard. Angelinos hardly know what to do when it rains; people start driving badly, most plans get canceled, and every desert roof springs a leak out of surprise. There was disorientation in the air, and the oil-slick street, reflecting street lamps and headlights lent an air of film noir to the scenario. While standing at the street corner and waiting for the signal that it was safe to enter we felt a slight thrill of risk, charged by the shadow of illegality. Lipomi held the chainlink gate ajar and each person squeezed in, descending the staircase into the underground tunnel.

Originally, the tunnel allowed pedestrians and school children to cross the busy boulevard without dodging cars, but its remove from the public eye seems to have been more conducive to vagrants urinating, junkies shooting up, garbage accumulating, rats teeming, and predators preying on stray pedestrians. One safety hazard was traded for several others. Throughout L.A. these pedestrian tunnels have been locked up. Lipomi’s choice of site speaks to his notion of the artist as navigating surreptitiously between public and private space, exploiting the potential of neglected sites that are simultaneously and ambiguously open and closed, permitted and prohibited.

There is no lighting in the CaVe and it is flooded with over a foot of dirty, stagnant water. For each visitor, Lipomi provided tall rubber galoshes and hand-held electric lanterns that cast a dim glow on the coarse, stuccoed walls. We experienced the installation as the simulation of an archaeological expedition, art-viewing framed as a nocturnal dig. It was hard to see. I walked down the hall slowly—the lake of water filling the tunnel deepened with every step. In the middle of the tunnel the water level was just centimeters from flowing over the top of our boots. Being placed, along with many other regulars of the L.A. art scene, in such an unusual viewing situation, I could feel a palpable excitement in all the viewers, as though we were taking a field trip out of the limited gallery setting we’ve grown accustomed to. I found myself nearly as preoccupied with the darkness of the passage and the depth of the water around my calves as with the many roughly painted images on the walls and ceiling. The sheer contrast in environments made it very clear how conventional and homogenous most art venues are. The relocation of art to this underground site struck me as the CaVe project’s first and final lasting impression, punctuating the otherwise predictable cycle of monthly openings.

Chris Lipomi Installation photo of Uzihektaka Wakipi (2008) Los Angeles

Scanning the walls with squinting eyes, I could immediately make out the sprayed silhouettes of Lipomi’s handprints staggering up the walls on either side of me. Less easy to decipher were a variety of images, all painted in dark earth tones, which I knew to be representations of Lipomi’s past works. At the beginning of the walkway there were images of his early work as an MFA student at UCLA, like Spaghetti Spiral Jetty, or the suspended yo-yo of his Momentary Eclipse. At the far end, I recognized the fat curves of his enlarged Venus of Willendorf sculptures and his take-off on the Koons bunny rabbit from his recent exhibition Webik: Okori Wakipi at New York’s Renwick Gallery. Doubling back about halfway down the tunnel, I made out schematic faces staring down at me, recalling the angelic and carnivalesque masks Lipomi often used in his sculptures of a couple years back.

C_V_
A project of personal archaeology, Lipomi’s CaVe is dubbed Uzihektaka Wakipi, loosely translated as “the backwards dance.” Uzihektaka Wakipi turns a forgotten underpass into a curriculum vitae timeline charting the artist’s full span of artistic production over the past ten years. He calls it a “pre-career retrospective.” Lipomi’s CV, his cumulative chronicle of personal achievement, is transformed from a professional formal trope into a cave painting narrative told linearly through a series of pictograms representing the range of the artist’s previous works. Uzihektaka Wakipi is a coded symbol system picturing Lipomi’s artistic past in terms of prehistoric modes of representation; it’s a grand act of self-historicization, using low-tech special effects modeled after Hollywood’s set-design tradition of faux-antiquity. Much of Lipomi’s practice up to this point defines itself largely in relation to a panoply of art historical references and cross-references as recent as Paul McCarthy, Thomas Kinkade, Jeff Koons, Bruce Nauman, Andy Warhol, and Jean-Michel Basquiat and as ancient as the Paleolithic Venus of Willendorf and cave painting. Uzihektaka Wakipi continues Lipomi’s geschichtaufarbeitung, though this time he is working through his own history.

CaVe
Lipomi’s CaVe project dwells in his preference for the unseen, what lurks in hiding. The CaVe is a project of subterranean subversion. A consideration of structural foundations, the CaVe literalizes questions of conceptual precedence and what lies beneath the surface, what came before the present. It visualizes a spatial model of history—the abandoned underground tunnel being symbolic of time passed over, buried, unearthed, and revisited. Lipomi continually reinforces a belief that history has always already happened, or, put in other terms, that any proposed beginning is also a middle or end contextualized according to another vantage. Caving and spelunking allegorize a reverential study of artistic ancestry or, alternatively, a pillaging strategy. As is characteristic of Lipomi’s reference-rich practice, the CaVe argues for a dynamic interaction with one’s history as being intensely generative for contemporary production.

Chris Lipomi Installation photo of Uzihektaka Wakipi (2008) Los Angeles

Lipomi has spoken of his repeated employment of art historical references as a way of exorcising influence, working through and beyond the shadow of contemporary artists who have most informed his own practice. A model for probing latency and unconscious drives in the artist’s psyche, the CaVe’s descent into the subterranean excavates a meeting of base Id and self-conscious Ego. In Uzihektaka Wakipi, Lipomi processes his own personal trajectory as an emerging artist in the early phases of his career, and in doing so achieves a catharsis that purges the baggage of his own history and the weight of art history he has inherited and with which his work has wrestled over the past ten years.

Remaining drawn on the tunnel’s walls indefinitely, Lipomi has drafted his own past as a time capsule below the traffic of Olympic Boulevard to remain unseen, to be forgotten, and to be discovered again in the future. Like a tomb, Uzihektaka Wakipi is made in advance of becoming a ruin, anticipating its own aging into history. Flirting with science fiction, Lipomi welcomes the day when an unwitting trespasser descends to stumble upon a latter-day Lascaux or Altamira.

Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer is an art writer and curator based in Los Angeles. She is currently pursuing an ongoing project on Lee Lozano.