Pat O'Neill

Philip Martin Gallery is proud to present Pat O’Neill’s “The Decay of Fiction.” The exhibition will feature a five-channel installation of Pat O’Neill’s landmark film of the same title as well as a selection of his fiberglass sculptures and framed transparency pieces.

Released to tremendous acclaim as a single channel 35mm film in 2002, “The Decay of Fiction” stands as one of the most mysterious works in Pat O’Neill’s five-plus decades of practice. “The Decay of Fiction” is a meditation on the dilapidated Ambassador Hotel, a place intertwined with Hollywood and the making of modern America. Demolished in 2006, the Ambassador Hotel was the site of the Academy Awards, the famous nightclub Cocoanut Grove, and in 1968, the assassination of Robert Kennedy by Pasadena-resident Sirhan Sirhan. In the 1980’s the Ambassador Hotel was purchased by Donald Trump, who entered into a protracted legal battle with the Los Angeles Unified School District over the property, and lost. The Ambassador Hotel was ultimately bulldozed.

“People spend [time] trying to figure out how to get an image on the screen that will tell the story they need, instead of getting an image and then seeing if it tells a story.” (Pat O’Neill, interview with Jennifer Peterson November 2017.)

Anyone who has ever seen a Hollywood movie is unwittingly familiar with the interior of the Ambassador Hotel, which served as a film location in movies ranging from “The Graduate” (1967) to “The Wedding Singer” (1998). Film crews were in fact still working on location as the hotel was being torn to the ground. Through back-channels, Pat O’Neill was granted 9 months of access in 1999. “The Decay of Fiction” reveals the Ambassador Hotel as the "intersection of fact and hallucination” — a place of both boredom and transformative beauty. “I go down there sometimes and I think, Oh God, it's just this dreary old stucco building. But every so often, it will show me something that will just send a shiver up my spine.”

“I’ll look in a room and there will be this reflection from a building across the street of the sun coming through a rippled window making this astonishing picture.” (Excerpt from interview with David E. James, Millennium Film Journal, No. 30/31, Fall 1997.) O'Neill's time-lapse photography lends the film an ethereal effect that serves an intentionally distancing purpose. For O’Neill, the Ambassador Hotel, like Los Angeles itself, is an uncertain subject, a displaced location in space and time.

In O’Neill’s study of historic Hollywood edifice both literal and filmic, there is no discernible plot and there no recurring characters. O’Neill’s film superimposes reenactments of classic Hollywood films — the stars of which came to see and be seen at the Cocoanut Grove — onto shots of the dilapidated establishment, with ghostly gangsters and their gun molls interacting with icy blondes and wisecracking bartenders in carefully deconstructed snatches of dialogue. The film construction has the appearance of snippets taken from lost films of the 1940s; it uses surreal vignettes of nude men and women, stop-motion animated mannequin torsos, flickering film projections and dim light bulbs to create what devolves into a sense of nightmares, giving a result that feels more like an art installation than the expected film.

The Ambassador Hotel, “comes with all this cultural baggage,” O’Neill says, “in the film business, everybody who ever passed through L. A. went there and has memories of the place...My uncle played trombone in the Jan Garber band, who were regulars there for years...I've just occupied myself with filming the container, finding ways to move through it, finding ways to approximate the way people might have existed in the space.” (Excerpt from interview with David E. James, Millennium Film Journal, No. 30/31, Fall 1997.)

As a five-channel work, the film “The Decay of Fiction,” which has haunted O’Neill for years, reappears as an active immersive environment in which viewer and image interact in the physical space of the gallery. No two screens can be viewed at the same time, meaning that there is always slippage and memory in uniting the parts of the final work. This parallels the nearly twenty-year existence in one form or another of “The Decay of Fiction” itself, as not only the film, but also the city it depicts, and the industry that gave it birth, have aged and changed in their meanings as time moves on.