Zumthor Mothership Gets a Flying Saucer
 |
| Shio Kusaka, sketches for LACMA commission |
Those references are fitting for a global museum. The other two commissions take an unexpected sci-fi turn. Sarah Rosalena has designed an 11 by 26-1/2 ft. tapestry of Mars for the new museum restaurant. Inspired by rover imagery of the Red Planet, Omnidirectional Terrain is being woven on a Jacquard loom in Tilburg, Netherlands.
The wild card is Shio Kusaka's walk-in sculpture, a 12-ft. high flying saucer with tractor beam that is intended to appeal to kids of all ages. The Times' Jessica Gelt proposes that "creating visitor attractions that can be shared on social media has proved a savvy marketing strategy at LACMA," citing Chris Burden's Urban Light. The article reproduces two of Kusaka's sketches in a coloring book style that makes it hard to tell what the actual sculpture will look like. The saucer will be visible through a glass wall of the education center and, says Michael Govan, "you'll also see it as you're on Wilshire."
Kusaka is best known for her ceramics, some austerely abstract and some playfully figurative. In the latter category is a group of pots with black-figure dinosaurs.
The public art seems intended to ground and humanize Zumthor's brutalist mothership. Other commissions are yet to be announced, including a Diana Thater video projection.
UPDATE: More LACMA news (Mar. 11, 2025). Parts of the plaza around the Zumthor building will open this summer, allowing views of public art and access to a new restaurant and store. Tony Smith's Smoke will be shown outdoors for the first time. Alexander Calder's 1965 mobile Three Quintains and the Rodin sculptures will be reinstalled in new spaces. Commissions by Thomas Houseago, Liz Glynn, and Pedro Reyes are in the works, along with the above.
 |
| Shio Kusaka, (dinosaur 35), 2016 |
 |
| Mariana Castillo Deball, concrete textures for Feathered Changes |
Comments
However, an artist like Edward Hopper can't be described as exactly the most technically skilled. Yet Hopper's works could be creatively, conceptually impressive. I prefer perusing a Hopper than necessarily a Thomas Gainsborough.
Incidentally, the Huntington museum right now has contemporary artworks (some of them from a Japanese artist) mixed in with its classical British works from artists like Gainsborough. So even the Huntington has an urge to be a "de facto museum of contemporary art, but frankly...not a very good one."
Today's society is increasingly based on very political concepts than purely creative ones.
For someone who knows nothing about art history or connoisseurship, you have a lot to say.
That's actually the problem with today's society. People like you think you are "defacto" experts.
With the cone of light, is she commenting perhaps on the Zumthor building and how it models space with light?
With the flying saucer, is she commenting perhaps on how something relatively flat (a saucer) could generate "volume"?
Volume is also a preoccupation in her husband's work. There it becomes a problem of memory and timeliness.
--- J. Garcin
> on the Zumthor building
Not sure if this blog will post anything about an article in today's LA Times about a preview of the Geffen Galleries scheduled for the public in June.
Comments under that article right now are:
s.edwardsla: It's awful. The emperor
Zumthor has no clothes. The donors
have been hornswaggled.
ConcernedLA92: $800 million for
less exhibition space in an ugly
concrete building … great
john crandell: It's an overpass all right.
ConcernedLA92: Just what LA
needs: more concrete
I'm a bit more agnostic right now about the Govan/Zumthor/Geffen building, if only because the thought of LACMA being destroyed (further destroyed?) by its current management is too disturbing to contemplate. I also realized that certain other museums of the nation and world made it too obvious that William Pereira's 1965 campus (and its overly ad-hoc pre- and post-1986 additions) was not ready for prime time.
Thank you for proving my point. You are NOT an expert on art history, connoisseurship, and architecture. Neither are any of the people who commented on that LA times article.
On the contrary, you sound like a bunch of rubes who probably "invested" your life savings in meme coins.
> who probably "invested" your life
> savings in meme coins.
LOL. Seek counseling.