The world will have to wait to know the whole truth about the Center for Land Use Interpretation until the publication of my as yet unoptioned Mr. Coolidge’s Filing Cabinet of Wonder, but in the meantime we have Overlook — a splendid institutional autobiography compiling many of the highlights of the dummy corporation’s first decade of geosociological interrogation, edited by director (Mr.) Matthew Coolidge and associate director Sarah Simons, with an essay by former L.A. Weekly columnist Ralph Rugoff. CLUI, headquartered immediately adjacent to the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City (and embodying a fearfully symmetrical extrovert doppelgänger to the Jurassic’s trance-inducing interiority complex — one of the earliest and most inspired of CLUI’s site-specific interventions), is a cultural project that mimics the structure and aesthetics of large — essentially governmental — bureaucracies. But instead of delivering some pat critique of those unwieldy psychic parasites (or, worse yet, arbitrarily bestowing institutional authority on more Art), the center pursues a mission that seems like something the government should have been doing all along, if it had balls and a sense of humor.
more from the LA Weekly here.