Guest of the ilb 2005
Norman M. Klein was born in Brooklyn, New York in
1945. He began his academic career with stops along the way at the
University of California, Los Angeles, Otis College, Southern
California Institute of Architecture and the University of Southern
California. A historian in the fields of architecture, media, and
culture, he has been a Professor of Critical Studies at the California
Institute of the Arts for over thirty years. Memory and all of its
socially relevant functions are at the core of Klein’s interests. By
exploring a multitude of issues and themes, Klein pursues traces of the
past and critically investigates how selective the memory is and how
facts and fiction are combined in history. In doing so, Klein moves
between various genres and techniques. »The History of Forgetting: Los
Angeles and the Erasure of Memory« (1997) is a »melding of archival
research with critical theory«, as observed by the media researcher
Peter Lunenfeld. »Klein cannot help but transgress: he moves from
personal memoir to a theoretical exegesis; binds between two covers
essays, a novella, and a form he calls the ›docufable‹; and refuses to
accept the branding – historian/critic/theorist/novelist, take your
pick.« Klein’s exhibition, »Scripted Spaces: The Chase and the
Labyrinth«, was presented at the Rotterdam Centre for Modern Art, Witte
de With, and in the Künstlerhaus in Stuttgart. In addition to his
theories on Scripted Spaces, the exhibition was modelled on Klein's
earlier book about »controlled anarchy« in animation, across media and
architecture: »Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American
Animated Cartoon« (1993). The Californian metropolis again became a
focal point in his next work. »Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles,
1920-86« (2003) is an interactive CD with accompanying book, which was
developed in association with the Karlsruhe Centre for Art and Media.
The work contains historical and theoretical texts, photos, maps, film
clips, interviews, as well as a background story of a murder case,
whose story the reader has to construct himself – although there is no
definite order to the documents, rather a range of possible ways of
combining facts and memory fragments. Old and new photographs of the
same city views, which are blended together – called, as suggested by
the title, »bleed throughs« – visually typify Klein’s understanding of
history. His next book, »The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special
Effects« (2003), is a depiction of the cultural manoeuvres of
deception, with which actual power relationships were concealed. It
documents in rich abundance astounding examples from the Renaissance up
to the American Presidential Election of 2000 and the political
reactions to the events of 9/11. Klein recently published a
fictionalised memoir on forgetting and the hollowing out of America,
entitled »Freud in Coney Island and Other Tales« (2006). He currently
works on another DVD-ROM database novel, to appear in 2007 – a
science-fiction journey through the Twentieth Century as it was
imagined before it took place: »The Imaginary Twentieth Century«.
Norman Klein lives in Los Angeles.
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