You do the math Chris Kraus As anybody who has lived here any length of time knows, there

is hardly any architecture in Los Angeles. Oh, of course there are the famous Neutra houses and the magic monolithic Gehry structures and the Case Study houses and the gorgeous Lautner spaceship house nestled somewhere up above Mulholland Drive, but this isn't what you see. What you see when you are driving, and you are always driving, are miles and miles of low-rise stucco apartment complexes. They are developer's knock-offs several times removed, built fast and cheap between the 1950s and 70s to house the swelling rental population. In them, you see the aesthetic purity of west-coast modernism reduced to block cement and stucco, painted pale flamingo pink, mint green and yellow. Form is function. As modernism's bastard cousin they are completely free of any ornamentation. Except for the odd display of brise-soleil cinderblocks or sheets of metal mesh spray-painted mauve and mounted on the front side of the buildings like heraldic shields, the only architectural detail on these buildings are their address numbers, and these are huge. They have to be enormous because you have to see them from the distance of the street while you are driving. Crafted from wrought iron, brushed aluminum, copper, plastic, sometimes burnished steel, the numbers constitute a kind of folk modernism. They stand against the stucco, straight and jagged, in italics, roman numerals, cursive script and blunt sans-serif outlines. Just as institutional inmates devise subtle means of individuating rigid codes of dress -- a hair barrette, the way the sleeves or cuffs of uniforms are rolled -- the designers of these numbers expressed themselves, or something, through their selection of materials and typographic styles.

My friend, the artist Daniel Marlos, has been taking pictures of these buildings and their numbers for the last four years. Except he doesn't just like photographing numbers, he likes taking pictures of his friends. He is a kind of folk formalist. Perhaps because he is a gay man living in Los Angeles, and perhaps because his art career has taken a more jagged path than that of many of his MFA contemporaries, forcing him to juggle an eclectic series of odd jobs -- staff photographer for the Griffith Park Observatory, photo finisher at a one-hour photo lab, freelance critic for a porn-video magazine, instructor at Los Angeles City College -- he has the widest number of acquaintances and friends of anyone I've ever met. In The Century Project (1998-99) Marlos documents the 100 years of the 20th century by taking photos of 100 friends, each one posed beside an apartment building numbered for a different year of the century. The addresses, numbered from 19001999, were culled by Marlos from boulevards and streets spanning thirty miles across the city. I was 1934, standing in front of 1934 Rodney Street in the residential section of Los Feliz. In the 99 other photos, in the series, my fellow citizens -bricklayers, short-order cooks, movie producers, museum curators, smallbusiness owners, gardeners -- pose in various states of awkwardness and composure beside these buildings numbered year by year. As in life, we may not actually relate, but all of us are here. As a photographer, Marlos keeps an open mind. The portraits are neither consciously generic nor sensationally intimate and probing. The numbers allow him to photograph his friends, who do not fit into any particular psycho-sexual narrative or genre, within a framework -- architecture, space and time -- that is large enough to hold them. His friends are individuals composed of every

conceivable race and class and age and body type, living in the immigrant capital of the world, Los Angeles. By photographing them within the arbitrary holding pattern of these numbers, Marlos has accomplished nothing more or less than his title's goofy grandiosity suggests: he's made a portrait of the century. Eventually, Marlos' project outgrew its 100-frame parameter. His history of the city of Los Angeles -- founded in 1781 -- gave him an extra 118 buildings, friends and years to work with. A second project, Timeline (2001) was exhibited this year at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) in its entirety. As an assemblage, Timeline is a cumulatively monumental work that, in its casual obsessiveness, makes sense. Marlos is a prodigious record keeper, making entries in a diary each day. The diary reads like a police blotter. It is assiduously apersonal. Notes on film stocks, light conditions, intersections, quotes from Vladimir Nabokov and dictionary definitions are all given equal weight. And yet the diary and the photo-works have the perverse effect of making me very jealous of his life, consumed in this exacting and exhaustive project that keeps threatening to leak through its completely arbitrary formal boundaries. Though Marlos is actually from Ohio, his work seems more Latino than American: part tabloid-art, part Borges. Once, when pitching an article on Marlos' work to an LA art-magazine editor, I said what interested me about him most was that he has a very artistic life. What do you mean by an artistic life? the editor asked, looking at me strangely. A thing that once seemed obvious -- that it might actually be more artistically productive to herd goats or hang around with gardeners and porn stars than to spend your time exclusively in the art world -- now seems alien and childish.

Marlos' current project, Plotting Along Parallel Lines, takes place underground. It is part of a project curated by Brent Zerger of the Metropolitan Transit Authority, a bold attempt to pierce the provincial character of LA's public art by commissioning temporary projects on the subway lines by contemporary artists. In Parallel Lines, slide images of numbers are projected on the subway walls. The numbers on the slides correspond, somewhat, with the numbers of the buildings standing on the street above the metro. Because the city of Los Angeles was cobbed together from adjacent neighbourhoods that were once separately incorporated towns and hamlets, the numbers end and then start up again as they arrive at nowamnesiac boundaries. You do the math. The numbers flash off of Marlos' single-lens projector quickly, back and forth, in chronological succession. Distance, social histories, time dissolve and reconvene in geometric patterns. The project is a sculptural inversion: the human presence of his friends, now absent from the images, is relocated in the moving bodies of the subway riders. It is a bizarre investigation of time and the way that people's paths intersect, or don't. (Once, in Mexico City, I met the only person that I knew there in the subway.) The Spanish/English promotional brochure for Marlos' Metro show repro duces excerpts from the artist's diary. "Granted that time and space were one," he notes, quoting Nabokov on the 27th of October, 2001, "escape and return become interchangeable." In Marlos' work, Los Angeles becomes a Borgesian world where flight takes place within a set of finite boundaries. Chris Kraus is an critic and fiction writer living in Los Angeles.