California Company Town

California Company Town casts a probing gaze at California towns abandoned by the industries that created them - onetime boomtowns now haunted by the twilight of the American promise.
In the early 1960s, the founder of California Institute of the Arts, Walt Disney, envisioned an American version of the German Bauhaus. Today, in a world even he may not have imagined, CalArts’ vision is distinct and pervasive, with a faculty that includes James Benning, Thom Andersen, Rebecca Baron, Monte Hellman, Nina Menkes and Lee Anne Schmitt. A versatile multidisciplinary artist whose practice extends from film and performance to photography and writing, Schmitt creates evocative, deeply felt works that consider everyday elements of American life as cultural ritual.
An effortless melancholy, marked by an aesthetic Puritanism, begins with the landscape. History marks the land, a process made remarkable in California, whose very geography has been re-charted to serve specific uses. Sold as open space, a limitless expanse with free opportunity, California was actually, from its beginning, fissured by the interwoven needs of private and state interests. The experience of living in a particular place at a particular time, the phenomena of time and space, and the space between ideology and the reality of the spaces we inhabit are central to Schmitt’s essay. (RM)