LA Exhibition of Julia Stoschek’s Video Art Is the City’s Hot Ticket

### A Long-Shuttered Los Angeles Theater Reopens as a Labyrinth for Video Art in “What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem”

A nearly century-old Los Angeles landmark, dark for two decades, is back in public view — not as a restored nostalgia piece, but as an intentionally rough-edged stage for moving-image art. The Variety Arts Theater, a Venetian-style building that opened in 1923, is now the site of “What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem,” an expansive presentation drawn from the holdings of the Julia Stoschek Foundation and shaped by curator Udo Kittelmann.

Kittelmann’s guiding principle is blunt: “No white cubes! No black boxes!” The show leans into the building’s idiosyncrasies rather than neutralizing them. Inside, the theater’s worn surfaces and varied rooms create a sequence of encounters that feels closer to drifting through a city at night than walking a conventional gallery circuit.

The venue’s history is part of the atmosphere. Over the decades, the Variety Arts Theater has hosted suffragist meetings and performances by figures including Clark Gable and Buster Keaton, and later served as a rental space for everything from Mexican weddings to punk concerts. After years of closure, it remains a little battered — a “just-edgy-enough setting,” as Kittelmann described it — and that texture becomes a curatorial tool.

The team spent a year searching for a space, and the payoff is scale and flexibility. The building includes rooms of dramatically different sizes: a main theater anchored by a 30-foot-wide screen, a ballroom, and smaller spaces such as a former make-up room. That range allows works to expand or contract without competing for attention. Even so, the installation is designed to feel continuous, with viewers moving from one piece to the next without a hard reset.

In a booklet accompanying the exhibition — bound like a screenplay you might pick up from a sidewalk vendor in New York — collector Julia Stoschek frames the project as generational portraiture. “With the collection I try to create an image of the social and cultural changes of my generation,” she writes.

The works, taken together, form a wide-angle meditation on human experience: comic, bleak, opaque, and at times genuinely frightening. One of the show’s most forceful presences is Arthur Jafa’s “Apex” (2013), projected on the central theater’s wide screen. Over eight minutes and 22 seconds, 841 images flash by at a half-second each, driven by a pounding soundtrack by Detroit techno musician Robert Hood. The montage ricochets between celebrity and pop-cultural familiarity, microscopic views of unsettling creatures, and scenes marked by the aftermath of violence. The piece advances Jafa’s stated ambition for “a cinema capable of matching the power, beauty, and alienation of Black music.”

Elsewhere, the exhibition shifts into quieter registers. Klara Lidén’s black-and-white “Untitled (Trashcan)” (2011) plays in a hallway: the artist, seen from behind at a desk in a spare room, abruptly pitches herself head-first into a trash can. The gesture is spare and deadpan, a compact image of absurdity and futility, set to Patti Smith’s cover of Neil Young’s 1970 song “Helpless.”

Kader Attia’s “Mimesis as Resistance” (2013) repurposes a segment from a David Attenborough BBC documentary about the Australian lyrebird, famous for its uncanny ability to mimic human-made sounds — camera shutters, chainsaws. In this context, the virtuosity reads as an uneasy index of environmental intrusion.

The exhibition’s American setting also surfaces through works that grapple directly with US history and media culture. Ant Farm and T. R. Uthco’s “The Eternal Frame” (1975) centers on an artistic restaging of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Chris Burden’s “The TV Commercials” (1973–77) probes the entanglement of culture and commerce. Dara Birnbaum’s “Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman” (1978/79) dissects pop imagery and feminism. Jeremy Shaw’s “Quickeners” (2014) reworks a 1967 documentary about a West Virginia Pentecostal community into a low-budget science-fiction framework.

In a city saturated with screens, “What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem” uses architecture to slow down looking — and to make the act of moving through images feel physical again. The reopened theater doesn’t simply house the works; it complicates them, turning viewing into a kind of passage through memory, spectacle, and unease.