For the Lives column, Ezequiel Olvera presents a diary of the time he spent, guarding and pondering, in Hollenbeck Skate Park in Boyle Heights, where he’d mounted a show of sculptures by Lina Viste Grønli called—like its melting antecedents—“Persistence of Time.”
Lina Viste Grønli, Persistence of Time, 2022. Installation view. Court Space at Hollenbeck Skate Park, Los Angeles, September 10–17, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Court Space, Los Angeles. Photo: Ezequiel Olvera.
9.15.2022
By the time a meth addict stole three of Lina Viste Grønli’s sculptures from the park, the Seiko wall clocks with melting truckles of Camembert cheese had decayed over the course of four days. A hyperbolic heist in the culprit’s imagination? It’s a mystery. All that I know is that by the time they were taken, ants, roaches, and flies had begun to eat away at the rancid puddles of molding fromage.
I imagine the incident occurred when I was in the bathroom. The rank smell of piss hit me as I glanced at my image in the mirror, obscured by hundreds of knife-scratched gang tags, then pulled out my penis. As I pissed, I closed my eyes and dreamed of the auto-dimming lights, marble countertops, and Aesop soap in the bathrooms of David Kordansky Gallery. I remembered the hundreds of gallery openings and conservative backroom deals I had witnessed around the Los Angeles contemporary art scene. Now, I’m the very embodiment of that hustle.
Something in that dark, shit-encrusted bathroom changed my perception of myself. I left feeling like I could sell Lina’s work and buy a yacht the following day.
But the sculptures were gone. Was I to tell Lina? I scurried around the area, in case some fictional nemesis had rearranged the clocks to fuck with me. My eyes rested on a group of young brown skaters drinking Don Julio from the bottle. Their lean bodies were elegant, basking in the warmth of the summer air—regal type shit.
Skaters at Hollenbeck Park, 2022. Photo: Ezequiel Olvera.
9.10.2022
I spent an entire day watching a young brown skater repeatedly launch himself from a cement ramp. Hollenbeck Stake Park sits on a peak facing the San Gabriel Mountain range, so it feels like you are above everything else and closer to the heavens. If you watched him from the back, you would think he was flinging himself into the sky, merging with a timeless place.
He fell over and over again, smearing his sweat onto the cement. From my park bench, I saw the sun glisten on his skin like water running over rusted bronze. Frustrated, he tossed his board skyward, stomping it with his foot as it landed. I watched him stare at the broken wood, as if hypnotized after orgasm. After a while, a smile came to his face: the satisfaction of destruction.
As he walked shirtless out of the park, a backpack desperately clinging to his power, he stopped to look at an artwork of Lina’s I had nailed to a eucalyptus tree. He looked at the wrist watch covered in pieces of chewed gum and reached out to touch the tree it hung on. His fingers glided across its smooth gray skin and rested upon the letter “N” of a word that had been carved into the bark: ANTHRAX.
Left: Lina Viste Grønli, The motion of the sun across the sky, the phases of the moon, the swing of a pendulum, and the beat of a heart, 2022. Wristwatch, chewed gum, super glue. Right: Lina Viste Grønli, Earth Rotating On Its Axis, 2022. Wristwatch, chewed gum, superglue. Courtesy of the artist and Court Space, Los Angeles. Photos: Ezequiel Olvera.
9.11.2022
As I sit in the park reading my stolen copy of Bob Nickas’s Theft Is Vision, I scan the locations where I positioned Lina’s watches. Although I’ve been bored by his essay “Everything I Know About Art I Learned from Andy Warhol and On Kawara” before, I do love the sentiment. Nickas describes a fictitious meeting between the two artists as they smoke cigarettes and go over museum catalogs. They review their mechanical processes of capturing time within mediums, film or writing—Andy with his Polaroids and conversations with Pat Hackett, On in journaling I WENT. Life in seriality.
I hunger for a cinematic narrative, one where the recording of time is dissolved. I envision the two of them meeting in a Kusama Infinity Room to observe themselves in silence once a week for a year. There in that room, time melts away into the dense quietude of reflections; the processes of taking Polaroids and recording minutiae are obsolete.
I recognize my desire to lock Warhol and Kawara in a mirrored room is sadistic. But it’s also informed by Dali’s The Persistence of Time and Zen Buddhism. When attention is turned to the interconnected infinity within all things, time loses all meaning and takes permanence with it; this is nirvana—the supramundane.
When I return to check on one of Lina’s watch pieces on a ledge scratched with thousands of skateboard trucks, I find a pack of menthol cigarettes, a bottle of Miller High Life, and a JanSport backpack resting courteously beside it. The artwork is titled: The continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future.
Lina Viste Grønli, The Camembert of Time I, 2022. Wall clock, Camembert cheese. Courtesy of the artist and Court Space, Los Angeles. Photo: Ezequiel Olvera.
9.3.2022
A week before Lina’s exhibition, I talked to the park director over the phone. “Yes. Hi, Ezequiel, this is Armando from the Hollenbeck Recreation Center. Listen, just a heads up, several of our light posts are not working because someone pulled out the copper wire.” I imagined a meth addict shimmying up a light fixture and yanking out metal in a craze of desperation. After talking with the director, I explained my concept of exhibiting sculptures at Hollenbeck to my father. He recounted a disturbing encounter he had with members from White Fence, a Boyle Heights gang, and a girl he asked on a date to the park. When the young couple arrived at an isolated side of the lake, the gang harassed them with the intent of raping the girl. Luckily, a neighbor saw the whole thing go down and called her comadres (comrade girlfriends) for help, because the cops were unreliable. By the grace of those women a tragedy was prevented.
“Don’t fucking go there, Pops. We moved out of Boyle Heights so you could have a better life.”
After the conversation, I asked myself: Where does trauma reside? Does it perch on park benches like a gargoyle? Or does that gargoyle fly above us always poking and prodding at our perception of place? When do we turn the mirror to see its reflection in our face?
Elisabeth Grace at the opening of Lina Viste Grønli’s Persistence of Time, September 10, 2022. Photo: Ezequiel Olvera.
9.10.2022
The night we opened the exhibition, a group of skaters watched the guests, who watched readings from poets Jeanetta Rich and Elisabeth Grace. We fashioned a makeshift stage out of a cement platform in the skate park with a speaker system I bought with the intent of returning. Were we blaspheming the skater’s temple? As the sky darkened, the kids started to grind on the stage during the readings, inching their way into our institution. Eventually, I approached and offered them drinks, but the youngest of the group informed me that they weren’t of drinking age. Instead, the boy asked if I had any food in my ice chest, but I myself was surviving off of wine, sodas, and water.
After the poets finished, I left the speaker on and generator running so that the skaters could use it. We proceeded to project our voices to the night sky:
Ezequiel: “You got the mic. Give a shout-out.”
Skater: “Shout-out out to my crew. Shout out to my moms for bringing me up. I’ma buy you a house in the hills when I get rich. I love you.”
“What’s your mom’s name?”
“Oh, I can’t say that.”
“All good. What’s your name?”
“I’m not going to say that either.”
“It’s all good. How much is that house for your mom going to be worth?”
“Umm 1,000 dollars.”
“No, more.”
“100,000 dollars.”
“Not even, G. Go higher.”
“800,000 dollars.”
“You getting close.”
“A million dollars… Damn! Mom I’m going to put you in a million-dollar home. On God.”
“Anyone else in your heart?”
“Shout out to the homie Smiley. I thought I wouldn’t even be able to do an ollie, but I kickflipped my first fourstair. Anything is possible.” X
Ezequiel Olvera is a curator and the director of Court Space, an emerging non-profit that initiates dialogue between the public and private art establishments. His practice is devoted to piercing institutions through projects utilizing critical discourse, site-specific concepts, and radical aesthetics. He is interested in forging a culture of prestige for black and brown artists through elevating the poetic expression within American survivalism, intellectual hustling, and gambling artistic intuition. His writing has been published by Topical Cream and The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles.
The author would like to thank Jeanetta Rich for her help editing the piece.