Currently on view:

Joe Mama-Nitzberg

Died and Gone to Hollywood

September 14th - November 9th, 2023

EXTENDED through November 23rd, 2003

—> curated by Larry Johnson

“But there is another side to the picture that you and Proust don’t show.”

Story has it that this is an adapted citation from a letter from Christopher Isherwood to Gore Vidal in response to the ending of the original version of The City and the Pillar. Specifically, Isherwood suggests that the go-to portrayal of the homosexual through explicitly tragic narratives may not be inaccurate but is also insufficient. Are there no happily-ever-after endings? No triumphant returns? The text in this piece (Another Side to the Picture 2021) runs through a kaleidoscopic image from Judy Garland’s legendary Carnegie Hall performance where a sea of pre-liberation gay male Judy fans are multiplied into archetypal exhaustion while Judy and her famous daughter are made anonymous, their famous faces covered.

Joe Mama-Nitzberg came to Los Angeles in 1989 and, with the encouragement of Larry Johnson (and others), received his MFA from Art Center College of Design in 1995. 

Jump to sometime in spring 2024: Larry suggests I look at the work of this guy Joe Mama. It’s good! It’s smart! It’s funny! It’s right up my alley! Shouldn’t we do a show?

From where I was sitting, Joe was already a fascinating and storied character. The Joe Mama “legend” is a sub-cultural coming-of-age story of punk music, conceptual art, sex, drugs and the queer underground. 

The exhibition “Died and Gone to Hollywood”, which includes work from 2018-2024, takes it’s name from a story about a gay man, hospitalized and dying of AIDS-related illness at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles. He was only sporadically conscious, but once woke up to a visit from Elizabeth Taylor. Later, when asked what is was like to awake to an iconic movie star standing over his bed, the patient replied plainly: “I thought I’d died and gone to Hollywood.”

The questionable authorship of the text elements in Mama-Nitzberg’s work is revealing. Texts are invented or quoted, words are changed, stories are adapted. and details are altered and/or embellished over time through repeated re-telling. Images are morphed, or obscured, or created, or recreated. Or just used.  As a Svetlana Boym quote states in another piece in the exhibition ( Total Recall (Self-Portrait Late 60’s) 2021) “Only false memories can be totally recalled.” This complicated relationship to, yet earnest exploration of, authorship, identity, fame and those commodities called “history” and “nostalgia” permeate his work.

Saying this might come back to haunt me, but: it’s possible that I prefer the activity of hanging an exhibition more than visiting one. I’ve learned more about art and about life while talking with artists and physically holding their work in my hands. The installation of this exhibition was particularly entertaining as Larry and Joe told jokes and re-enacted stories. Something about Liza Minnelli getting on stage with Cyndi Lauper and Rosie O’Donnell and then detailed descriptions of each of Cher’s sixteen costume changes. A constant stream, one might say a fluidity of rumors, trivia and forgotten histories. I found it difficult to hang the works ‘straight’ for all the laughter and banter. “Queer Practice” indeed.

We trade in stories. And in stories regarding “trade”.

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