L.A. Dolce Vita: Artist Mike Street's Ode to Bygone Lobby Cards, Fellini and L.A.'s Art Scene

Before there was endless media buildup to promote every film coming out a year ahead of time, there were movie posters and lobby cards. When you went to the movie theater throughout most of the twentieth century, there were posters for the movie you were about to see and some for upcoming attractions. They enticed your imagination and inspired your patronage. More extensively, lobby cards gave actual photographed scenes from movies. Shot mid-scene, they were often inexplicable to anyone who had not yet seen the film - which in most cases was everyone passing through the theater. Lobby cards were usually good shots of the stars, starlets and character actors populating what Hollywood was churning out for your consumption in the next few weeks.

Artist Mike Street has revived the format of the lobby card in a whimsical exhibit called L.A. Dolce Vita at the Mike Kelley Gallery at Beyond Baroque in Venice. Although known primarily as a painter, Street is one of many Los Angeles artists who documents the Southern California art gallery scene with regular photo postings to his Facebook page. In L.A. Dolce Vita, he contextualizes snapshots and selfies as snippets of a larger cinematic endeavor and in formatting them as B&W lobby cards, the implication is that a grand production comprised of many surreal scenes is coming soon to a theater near you!

While the title of L.A. Dolce Vita is a fun, civic play on Fellini's infamous film La Dolce Vita, there are enough parallels here to make a viewer pause. The 1960 masterpiece delivers surrealism as ordinary existence and still stands as a groundbreaking piece of cinema, abandoning its characters to a jaded abyss of endless pleasure seeking without narrative or redemption. The film could serve as a perfect metaphor for the surreal world of art openings documented through social media. Detached from context and placed in a lobby card format, simple camera-muggings with background art from last month's gallery party suddenly seem rarified, mysterious and elite; ultimately the shots produce that hallmark of the surreal - a desire to be initiated into a world that simultaneously retains an aura of repulsion.

The artist and his co-conspirators ham it up for the camera, shots from Saturday night's opening party that would look goofy on Sunday morning social media. But cropped, made B&W and formatted as a lobby card, the context that there might be a woven plot or symbolic opera associated with these clips sparks wonder in the mind of the viewer. In the gallery in Venice, presented as a grid, an attempt to find a pattern and fill in holes occurs. You realize what a small scene L.A. really is when you recognize friends and colleagues. The overall effect is homage to Fellini's sense of the surreal and cinema's ability to captivate our imagination. Without making a movie, Mike Street has made the L.A. art scene a cinematic wonder.

A poster promoting the show is modeled after classic Italian cinema posters, with a nod to horror films as a purple-shaded self-portrait communicates the possible terror that awaits them. Is it the terror of a goof off in front of a digital camera becoming iconic, or is it the fear of being left out, not photographed at all? Yours truly made the cut in some pictures and I'm left with the feeling that it is better to make a funny face in any photo where the photographer is also in the picture.

Any lifelong fan of cinema can appreciate that the way Fellini's La Dolce Vita weaves 120 co-stars with the protagonist was a predecessor to the actual surreal interaction with our daily hundred Facebook friends. Street captures the essence of social media by making social encounters heroic. That these portraits occur at art parties adds a layer of meaning made surreal by the occasional inexplicable artwork and of course, the mawkish poses the artist encourages from his social circle.

Street religiously absorbed cinema with his lifelong friend, the late Paul Stiver. The show was dedicated to Stiver's memory and is an endlessly fascinating filtration of ordinary experience through the language of cinema. After an immersion in the exhibit, the old adage, "What if Fellini was just a photojournalist?" seems apropos - we live in an era where surrealism is just a simple re-contextualization away.

All Photos here are courtesy of the artist.
MIKE STREET solo show L.A. DOLCE VITA runs at Beyond Baroque's Mike Kelley Gallery thru September 12, 2015.
There is a closing party on Thursday September 10 at 7:30 PM. It is bound to get surreal.