Lost in the Geffen
 |
| Handout map for David Geffen Galleries |
The Los Angeles Times and New York Times are each running their second reviews of Peter Zumthor's David Geffen Galleries, by Leah Ollman and Holland Cotter respectively. Both are about as positive as the first round of reviews (by Sam Lubell and Michael Kimmelman), and both focus on finding your way through the building. Cotter wants an orientation gallery with suggested routes. Ollman doubles down on Michael Govan's premise that getting lost is the point. She brings up an issue scarcely mentioned elsewhere: the minimalist labels for art. Govan says that more information is available online, but Ollman finds spotty WiFi behind Zumthor's concrete and prefers a respite from digital screens.
Comments
Yes, provide visitors with LACMA on-site free wifi that is 55K-strong..no dead spots. For $30 bucks a ticket, that's the least you can do.
Even have an interactive app so visitors can cross off rooms and hallways that they've seen.
> holdings uneven in scope
> and depth.... It’s spotty in
> Western European painting,
> and thin in African
> and Oceanic material.
> It doesn’t come anywhere
> close to the breadth or
> depth of the Met...
In effect, LACMA is comparable to art museums in city A, city B or city C. Which is why the *look* and *quality* of the European galleries in, for example, the MFA Houston or the overall *look* of the MIA in Minneapolis, etc, easily will give a traveler to LA the sense that LACMA is more municipal than must-see.
I once naively perceived it as a bit better than that. But, whoa, I've been riding the turnip truck and have been one of the rubes referred to by J. Garcin. lol.
If the staffers (and director) of the museum perceive LACMA the way I now do - referring to its internet page, Youtube channel, special exhibitions and overall history - they better not assume that drinking latte from Erehwon somehow offsets a lack of enough sophistication.
The new building doesn't change the claim that "LACMA has transitioned to a de facto contemporary art museum [b]ut not a very good one."
However, Geffen LACMA is better than 1965-1986 LACMA, but I now feel like it's a 40-year-old finally learning how to drive a car---perhaps the Studebaker Avanti in one of the galleries.
Cotter did NOT conclude that LACMA's collection is "comparable to art museums in city A, city B, or city C."
He observed that there were strengths in the collection: Spanish Colonial Art.
Cotter also observed that there were some masterpiece around which LACMA could make sense of the whole.
This is how Cotter concludes his review:
I hope it will go with the “flow” idea, but articulate it more clearly, maybe in a single starter gallery that will set up, like a hiker’s AllTrails app, several suggested exhibition routes. And I hope that it will continue to tell intricate, knotty, scholarly stories and alternate such telling with some “masterpiece”-touting. The collection has some sensational things; new ones will arrive. Bring them out for their close-ups. In short, be the institution you clearly want to be: a “glocal” beacon of glam-with-brains.
... I suggested something similar the other day: organize the themes around the masterpieces and work on acquiring more.
--- J. Garcin.
> conclude
I didn't say or even imply he had said that. That's my take, period.
Your reading comprehension seems kind of rube-ish.
Incidentally, I recall your in the past implying LACMA was anything but a typical municipal-type museum. So reactions like yours through the years have lulled me into not fully understanding the true nature of the place. Or it being more rube than high faluting [insert Southern twang here].
I knew LACMA wasn't up to the standards of [insert name of big-time museum here], but I didn't fully realize how it also wasn't up to the standards of [insert name of second-tier museum here].
> work on
> acquiring more.
If even a Getty in the 2020s struggles to gain more traction, a museum like LACMA has that much more of a rube-ish budget (and rube-ish mentality too?). lol.
> for their close-ups.
I don't know if that's Cotter implying some gems are still in storage. I like to think there are, but when I zipped through some of LACMA's online collection, I didn't see as much "why isn't that on display!?" as I wanted to.
The museum has a lot of study pieces or, even worse, objects that give me "Goodwill" vibes. But I'm not a connoisseur, so someone's treasures may be junk to me, and my treasures may be junk to someone else.
... LACMA's collection is better than that of the second-tier museums you have named in the past. For Cotter, obviously, the basis of comparison is the Met. LACMA is never going to be the Met, but neither is the Art Institute of Chicago.
... Acquisition can take many forms, for example loan agreements
There should also be a capital campaign to establish an endowment for acquisitions.
Finally, Govan needs to switch gears from building to collecting. Find the collectors and make a case for giving the works to LACMA.
--- J. Garcin
> a rube
When I was an even bigger rube, I winced at Wendy Beckett's comment about LACMA---per the reactions of people she had been in contact with.
"Traveling around America, I was surprised to find how relatively unappreciated LACMA is."
https://youtu.be/nm6evrelKkY?si=gaGlNaL5hJdM5hTS&t=159
Today, her observation to me is way less surprising. Although I've long heard guffaws aimed at LACMA, going back to when I visited it as a kid with my family, my being a rube convinced me the museum wasn't as shaky as it really was.
Your own rube side has made you in the past several months imply that LACMA deserves a better response than Wendy Beckett's "unappreciated."
Generally, when things, people or places aren't too much in the rube category, they're appreciated, maybe even greatly respected or admired.
About that Hockney picture (Muholland Drive), I haven't seen one person comment that Zumthor might have been inspired by the shape of the road in that picture. The other work of art in LACMA's collection that might have inspired the shape of the building is Burden's Metropolis II.
From the winding shape (Hockney and Burden), to the letters hanging from the building (Ruscha), to the angled shadows (film noir and Ruscha), there is a lot of Los Angeles in this building.
It's a remarkable building. Now, the collection has to catch up.
--- J. Garcin
Promised gifts is Govan's raison d’être now.
I was inside the new David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for all of 20 minutes before I realized I had absolutely no idea where I was.... But I found myself not caring—that disorientation is entirely the point.
During a preview last week, the first thing I noticed was the light. Floor-to-ceiling glass lines the perimeter galleries... light streams in and shifts across the space over the course of the day, so a gallery that feels one way at 10 a.m. can feel entirely different by 3 p.m.
For someone who has spent a lot of time in traditional museums with windowless galleries, the experience was disorienting in the best way.
In practice, wandering through the David Geffen Galleries feels almost like taking a nature hike... At times, the structure feels thrillingly random. More than once, it struck me as an apt way of seeing art now: a museum for the TikTok generation, for better or worse.
The experience reminded me of moving through L.A. itself—driving from Echo Park to West Hollywood to Venice Beach in a single afternoon, each neighborhood a world of its own. [End quote]
Given LACMA's history and collections, I don't know if the traditional approach would have worked. Given my sense of same-'ol, same-'ol, creating the look and layout of a traditional museum for LA in the 2020s wouldn't have been necessarily ideal. So few options existed.
I've been using the Museum of Fine Arts Houston as a counterpoint. Part of that is because it's a generally younger instead of older museum. And it's associated with the Sun Belt, not the Frost Belt.
Most of all, I think it now also has more square footage than LACMA. Moreover, MFAH has the stereotypical look or feel of a Beaux-Arts-enfilade-type museum down pat.
Artist James Turrell has an installation in 1 of the 3 main tunnels that connect the MFAH's buildings on different blocks.
I can see people based in a city like Houston (etc, etc), were they to visit LACMA, still having mixed emotions about what they're familiar with versus what's on Wilshire Blvd. But when trying to envision myself meandering through a MFAH compared with a LACMA, a museum like the one in Texas would be more of a slog, more analogous to doing homework. The Geffen, concrete warts (and collection gaps and blank walls) and all, might be more like going to a party or taking a camping trip.
> offices/storage
For technical, creative and - obviously - financial reasons, I can't see space being created on the Geffen's roof top. But I wonder if some of the hollow spaces under the main floor and around the pylons that hold up the building (where the store, theater, restaurant are located) might eventually be filled in.
I don't have the greatest confidence in Govan's planning and judgment. I wish I could, but he reminds me of the person who does something first then asks questions later.
I'm still wondering how the theater on the south side of Wilshire Blvd will or won't be affected by its greater distance to parking north of Wilshire.