Closed for decades, a historic L.A. theater reopens for an ambitious late-night video art experience

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The five-story Venetian-style Variety Arts Theater successful downtown Los Angeles volition unfastened its doors to the nationalist for the archetypal clip successful decades Friday — not arsenic a accepted movie palace, but arsenic the tract of an unusually ambitious accumulation of movie and art.

“What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem” runs six weeks done March 20 and spans much than 120 years of moving images, from aboriginal soundless cinema to modern video art. Organized by collector Julia Stoschek — whose backstage instauration forms the exhibit’s halfway — and curator Udo Kittelmann, the impermanent takeover suggests that the past of moving images is little a consecutive enactment than a feedback loop successful which idiosyncratic works resurface, acquiring caller meaning arsenic they walk into shared taste memory.

“We are surrounded by moving images,” Stoschek said during a caller circuit of the exhibit. “They signifier however we think, however we communicate. They are the large creator connection of our time.”

A woman's look successful fractional shadow.

The grounds is anchored by Stoschek’s awesome backstage postulation of much than 1,000 artworks, hundreds of which are digitized online. Time-based creation is notoriously under-collected by institutions and undervalued by the market. But done her extended engagement with artists, Stoschek has assembled 1 of the world’s starring collections — and enactment it to bully use.

Stoschek’s instauration has supported dozens of exhibitions, including 2 of Germany’s pavilions astatine the Venice Biennale, and runs nationalist museums successful Düsseldorf and Berlin. For aficionados of video art, “What a Wonderful World” is an overdue foray into the United States.

While determination is popcorn, there’s nary fixed seating, nary timed screenings and nary effort to archer a linear past of film. From 5 p.m. until midnight, visitors are invited to rotation freely done a dense labyrinth of show and sound, wherever cinematic landmarks similar George Méliès’ “A Trip to the Moon” (1902) and Luis Buñuel’s “An Andalusian Dog” (1929) are scattered pell-mell passim the galleries alongside modern pieces by artists including Marina Abramović and Wolfgang Tillmans. Venice-based creator Doug Aitken is besides premiering a caller project, titled “Howl” (2026), 2 days into the exhibit’s run.

On halfway stage, Arthur Jafa’s “Apex” (2013) makes its Los Angeles debut. Widely regarded arsenic a masterpiece of video art, its driving, syncopated way pulses implicit media appropriated from euphony videos, quality footage and popular civilization to signifier a seductive montage of Black taste achievement, scenes of brutality and vernacular pictures.

“Apex” screens straight crossed the auditorium from New York Herald cartoonist Winsor McCay’s aboriginal animated movie “Little Nemo” (1911), which features a princely achromatic kid dancing alongside caricatures rooted successful minstrel performance. Often contextualized arsenic a milestone of creator invention entangled with racist representation, “Little Nemo” takes connected a antithetic valence here. The former’s pulsing soundtrack tears isolated “Little Nemo’s” enchanting imagination logic, shattering the illusion that Nemo — contempt its virtuosic rendering — tin beryllium truthful cleanly distinguished from its accompanying grotesque depictions.

If the older movie depends connected a ocular hierarchy that isolates refinement from racialized stereotypes, “Apex” refuses that separation. It collapses cruelty and pleasure, grace and grief into a rhythmic kaleidoscope of feeling. The effect is exhausting and unsettling.

A movie plays connected a ample surface successful a acheronian room.

Cinematic montage — pioneered by Sergei Eisenstein and reinvented by Jean-Luc Godard — becomes an organizing rule of the exhibit, arsenic artworks vie for attention. It would instrumentality astir 12 hours to ticker the amusement from commencement to finish, but Stoschek and Kittelmann urge an hr oregon 2 of aimless wandering. Audio from 1 enactment bleeds into another, portion flashes of acquainted sounds and images — footage of 9/11, a Britney Spears way — relation arsenic what Kittelmann calls “memory triggers” that link idiosyncratic and shared experiences.

On 1 balcony, a signaling of Nina Simone’s soulful 1965 rendition of the spiritual “Sinnerman” is acceptable implicit pirated archival footage of the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War protests. Elsewhere, frat boys binge portion astatine Maya ruins successful Cyprien Gaillard’s “Cities of Gold and Mirrors” (2009), portion Maya Deren’s adjacent “Meditation connected Violence” (1948) captures a Taoist ritual of masculine grace.

“What a Wonderful World” treats dissonance, cacophony and strength arsenic metaphors for regular life.

“The satellite itself is large and overwhelming,” Kittelmann said, noting that meaning emerges erstwhile acquainted connections interruption open, allowing attraction to displacement to the gaps between.

A antheral and a pistillate beryllium successful beforehand of a agleam movie screen.

Stoschek builds her postulation astir what she calls “art with an afterimage,” seeking retired pieces that linger successful the mind, past subtly alteration register. The enactment is often hard and disorienting, but the show’s purpose is not to cattle viewers into submission.

“We privation radical to enter, to pause, to reflect, and to permission with a displacement successful perspective, with a glimpse of hope,” Stoschek said.

A adust consciousness of wit surfaces successful unexpected places — similar by the lavatory mirror, wherever Douglas Gordon’s “The Making of Monster” (1996) is installed. A droll infinitesimal of introspection is offered erstwhile Gordon disfigures his look with tape.

A erstwhile MOCA trustee, Stoschek spent years trying to bring her postulation to Los Angeles, which she calls,“the birthplace of the ocular modernity of cinematic imagination.” Access to the Variety Arts Theater presented the cleanable occasion. Artworks by Dara Birnbaum and Elaine Sturtevant flank the building’s entrance, honoring the theater’s origins arsenic a women’s civic center. Prominent nationalist figures specified arsenic Eleanor Roosevelt spoke determination earlier it transitioned into a vaudeville venue. Charlie Chaplin attended the opening.

Variety Arts has been mostly dormant since the 1990s, seeing occasional rentals and agelong stretches of vacancy. Over clip it’s go a awesome of neglect and unrealized imaginable successful downtown Los Angeles.

Showing astatine the theatre represents a full-circle infinitesimal for Aitken.

“I went to a household wedding determination arsenic a 5-year-old, and to underground punk shows successful the ’80s arsenic a teenager,” helium said, adding that the grounds and its mounting antagonistic the acquainted communicative that Los Angeles is “a metropolis with nary history.”

Aitken traces the building’s guiding tone done downtown’s uncanonized taste lineage — on Alameda Street and to venues similar LACE and Al’s Bar — wherever artists merged euphony and movie successful loft takeovers and avant-garde installations.

“Generations of artists support inheriting the achromatic box, and we deliberation that’s wherever creation should reside,” helium said. “That’s specified a blimpish view.”

“What a Wonderful World,” helium said, models an alternate mode to showcase the creator past of Los Angeles — 1 that runs parallel to Hollywood’s ascendant narrative.

The exterior facade of a historical building.

Kittelmann, too, sees carnal theaters arsenic indispensable to that ambition.

“There are precise uncommon spaces where, erstwhile the doors are closed, you hide astir the outer satellite and you respire wholly differently,” helium said.

Through the exhibit, the gathering is allowed to amusement its skin: Walls are plastered but unpainted, and the basement is stuffed with bric-a-brac accumulated during its long, colorful history.

Powerfully installed astatine the extremity of the basement’s agelong hallway is Anne Imhof’s “Untitled (Wave)” (2021). In the video, Imhof stands unsocial astatine the ocean’s edge, repeatedly striking the h2o with a whip. As she does so, everything other falls away, leaving lone this representation of solitary absorption against a unit that does not reply back.

In an epoch erstwhile astir viewing happens alone, astatine location oregon connected phones, “What a Wonderful World” insists — astir stubbornly — connected corporate attraction arsenic a extremist act.

“It’s a emotion missive to time-based artworks,” Kittelmann said, “and a emotion missive to Los Angeles.”

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