Citations Ed. 7: Robert Overby, 336 to 1

Much of the experience of living in Los Angeles is characterized by an anonymous amnesia, the sense that one passes through rather than moves within it. Across its freeways, drivers attend to the flow of traffic, sharing the space with others sequestered in their cars. Whereas passengers on public transportation have no choice but to occupy the seats or benches of a bus or train car, drivers are reduced to the chaperones of their prosthetics, their vehicles – the interior of a car becomes a private cabin from which even the city, abstracted and displaced by the endless expanse of the freeway, is excluded.

A city’s memories are cited in its infrastructure -- new and old structures, buildings, and ruins set in the urban plan that, from the biased perspective of the present tense, might seem arbitrary and incidental. Los Angeles is not without them. Count the numerous on-ramps for the 110 Harbor Freeway that appear suddenly at the intersections of residential streets in the city’s northeast region, as if to haze and prank newly-arrived drivers. Here are not only the traces of those memories forgotten by the amnesiacs. They also mark the peculiar form of forgetting unique to Los Angeles. On-ramps, empty lots, and other abstracted spaces are the third, fourth, or even fifth layers of the cycle of urban destruction and (re)development that tell the story of Los Angeles exactly through what is not there: clues to the past that cannot be reclaimed through memorial evidence like photographs or other souvenirs. In the words of critic Norman Klein, the “overall effect resembles what psychologists call ‘distraction,’ where one false memory allows another memory to be removed in plain view, without complaint – forgotten.”

Few artists have negotiated the insistent present absence that identifies Los Angeles as Robert Overby (b. 1935 d. 1993). The Chicago-born, Los Angeles-based artist trained at both the Chicago Art Institute and the Los Angeles Art Center College of Design, and worked professionally as a graphic designer through the 1960s. He crafted artworks and graphics for commercial enterprises, most notably the logotype for Toyota, which is still in use today. In the 1970s, Overby turned his attention toward his fine art practice, first with oil painting, then with latex rubber casting in the emerging process art movement, whose most well-known practitioners include Lynda Benglis, Eva Hesse, Richard Serra, and others.

The term describes a mode of art making that highlights the development of the artifact itself. Overby used latex as a medium to cast everything from coat hangers to the entire interior structures of derelict Los Angeles warehouses. These were often transferred to canvas, sometimes in strips, that then created traces of the source material. This toed the line between abstraction and representation; in his words, viewers do not see familiar spaces or objects “for [themselves], but by [their] existence as a form by transfer.”

Ironically, Overby is not most known for his large-scale interior maps of hotel rooms nor abandoned warehouse spaces, but the process of documenting his latex casting practice in his first monograph 336 to 1. Designed and self-published by the artist, the pocketbook-sized volume documents in sequential order all the works Overby made between 1973 to 1969 in reverse chronological order, from everyday objects to photographs of his large-scale maps, as he called them. From the quotidian to the massive, 336 to 1 follows Overby’s pursuit of tracing that which no longer exists in Los Angeles, but only through their forms.