Some Los Angeles Apartments is a remake of the original book by the
American artist Ed Ruscha, published in 1965. In Jóhannsson’s version,
which is as deprived of people as the original, Ruscha’s apparent lack
of artistic skill, and his challenge of what it means to be an artist,
is taken a step further: The artist has – in a classic avant-garde
spirit – not made any pictures himself. In this way his book is
composed as an extension of Ruscha’s own words regarding his
publications as readymade collections. The occasionally grainy and
unfocused Google-pictures in Jóhannsson's book give, however,
associations to a theme that in one sense has become all-pervasive and
considerably more relevant today than in Ruscha’s era: surveillance.
Google’s enthusiasm for documentation is today a part of a literally
quite different, and more extensive and disagreeable, picture universe
than the Ruscha-photographs were, spread as they were in a low quantity
amongst art enthusiasts. How the Google-photographs will be used and
function is continually an unanswered question, contributing to the
connection of Jóhannsson's book to a larger world of business and
politics. A sneaking suspicion of danger that was barely noticeable in
Ruscha’s pictures – or in the minds of their beholders – makes Sveinn
Fannar Jóhannsson’s Some Los Angeles Apartments a document that
doesn’t just have a historical dimension, but is of and for our time’s
everyday life.