Central Meridian (The Garage)

WORKING

McMillen, Michael C. Central Meridian (The Garage), 1981. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), visited 28 July 2026.

From the LACMA website:[1]

Curatorial Notes

Michael McMillen has described Central Meridian (The Garage) as a “walk-in assemblage.” The artist originally created this highly theatrical simulation of a garage for the 1981 LACMA exhibition The Museum as Site: Sixteen Projects. As McMillen described, “Central Meridian evokes the experience of wandering into our neighbor’s garage on a summer evening. An old radio broadcast mixes with the distant sound of crickets. We are twelve years old and filled with curiosity and wonder at the fascinating collection of mid-twentieth- century objects and organized detritus. The owner of the garage is not present but the amalgam of objects conjures a portrait of someone we never see. Questions abound as our eyes scan the walls, cabinets, and every surface of this repository of history.” Like clues in a mystery, the contents of the garage hint at the nature of an imaginary individual whose belongings of a lifetime are stored within.

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Especially striking for the experience of the Initial Compiler were the centrality of the vintage/beat-up old car in a garage, plus an old, black, mechanical typewriter that has been damaged and dented by (apparently) repeated blows by a heavy blunt object.

A good deal before 1981, one of the Initial Compiler's friends — quite possibly Howard Golden — gave him a similar smashed-up typewriter produced by Golden (?) and a friend (?), and given a sarcastic title such as "Man's Inhumanity to Machine." See also June Hee Chung on Henry James's character Addie in the 1902 story "Flickerbridge," who embodies the traits of a machine in a factory by identifying herself with her work and [...], becoming "a kind of mechanical amanuensis or typewriter" (p. 98).[2] Further afield but suggestive for context, note that when the first of what we would call "computers" was coming into use at Bletchley Park, U.K., "computers" were still people, often women, "employed to perform mathematical calculations and ballistic or navigational computations by hand (often using mechanical desk calculators like a Brunsviga or Marchant)" (A.I. Overview from "Alan Turing.org"). Note also dehumanization in the office in the age of the wholly mechanical typewriter, imaged at "Josef K.’s workplace" in Orson Welles's 1962 film of Franz Kafka's The Trial, "where 850 secretaries banged typewriters at 850 office desks."<https://www.clockworks2.org/wiki/index.php?title=The_Bureaucratic_Experience> If computers can serve for objective correlatives for bureaucracy and much else in late-modern moving into postmodern times, the manual typewriter can serve for somewhat earlier in the period.

RDE, with thanks to June Hee Chung and Joseph Kuhr, 29Jul2026