It isn’t by design that this issue has so many subjects about or made in Los Angeles — skaters on Venice Beach, a modernist house by John Lautner, Jeffrey Deitch’s vision of the city’s art scene, portraits of Johnny Hallyday in downtown LA, a graphic interpretation of its architecture by Nicolas Alan Cope… In less than a century, LA has grown from an outpost of 15,000 people to a megalopolis of 16 million, while hanging on to its connection to the natural world around it — the sea, the desert, the mountains, and the enveloping blue sky. LA is Western culture’s final frontier, capital of the Pacific Rim, and the mecca of American film, where history is fictionalized for popular audiences. The city has even been instrumental in creating a style of suburban architecture — in the ’60s, when Richard Neutra transformed Bauhaus sensibilities into West Coast domesticity. LA’s art world was also born in that same decade, with Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari, and later grew up in the perverted pop art of Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy.
Yet only recently has LA’s reputation in art begun to compete with New York’s. Now, LA is an art capital as well as a film capital. Why now? What’s the attraction? Is it the climate and the beach? The casual lifestyle? Does the threat of seismic disaster from the San Andreas geologic fault contribute to its energy? Are dreams and hopes LA’s psychic defense against calamity? Or does LA’s creative force derive from its geographic placement at the frontier of history — our history?
Naturally, Purple is instinctively attracted to any shifts and changes on the cultural map.
— OLIVIER ZAHM
[Table of contents]
Roland Barthes The Rustle of Language
by Camille Bidault-Waddington
night pictures
by Olivier Zahm and Stéphane Feugère with a portfolio by Patrick Sarfati
by Glenn O'Brien
by Olivier Zahm
by Luca Lo Pinto
by Olivier Zahm
by Olivier Zahm
by Donatien Grau
by Olivier Zahm
by Camille Bidault-Waddington
by Mario Sorrenti
by Paolo Roversi
by Sandy Kim
by Katerina Jebb
Kacper Kasprzyk
by Marcelo Krasilcic
by Terry Richardson
by Chikashi Suzuki
by Johan Sandberg
by Olivier Zahm
by Olivier Zahm
by Ken Miller
by Jeffrey Deitch
by Olivier Zahm
by Ed and Deanna Templeton