Resnicks Gift Koons "Split-Rocker" to LACMA
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| Jeff Koons, Split-Rocker, 2000, as installed at Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland |
Lynda and Stewart Resnick have donated Jeff Koons' Split-Rocker to LACMA. The 37-ft-high floral topiary sculpture will anchor the campus adjacent to the Peter Zumthor-designed David Geffen Galleries. Split-Rocker exists in an edition of 1, plus an artist's proof. The #1 is at Glenstone, Maryland, and the LACMA gift is the artist's proof. It's the LACMA version that was previously shown at Versailles (2009) and Rockefeller Center (2014).
Split-Rocker consists of a steel framework enclosing over 50,000 flowering plants and integrated irrigation system. While the Glenstone topiary goes dormant in winter, LACMA's will be green or blooming year-round, with plants chosen for the local climate.
The sculpture's form is a "Cubist" riff on a toy rocking horse and dinosaur. The half-prehistoric beast will perhaps echo the nearby tar pits' sculptures of distressed mammoths.
The Resnick gift brings closure to Michael Govan's longtime quest for a monumental Jeff Koons for the LACMA campus. In 2007 he and Koons announced plans for Train, a 70-ft steam locomotive to be hung from a 160-ft crane. Govan touted it as the Eiffel Tower of Los Angeles. Wallis Annenberg donated $2 million for a feasibility study, only to later grow disenchanted with the project. In 2009 she said: "I personally think Los Angeles deserves a much finer icon than a train hanging from a crane." The project lost momentum, despite an attempt to split costs by creating another edition for New York's High Line.
LACMA had also hoped to land the Broad collection and its numerous works by Koons. But in 2008 Eli Broad pulled the rug out by announcing that he would not be donating his art. He instead built his own museum downtown.
In 2017 Koons' polished steel Balloon Monkey materialized on a plaza in front of the Ahmanson Building. It remained on loan for about a year, then went back to wherever it came from.
Split-Rocker will be the tallest artwork on the LACMA campus, topping Tony Smith's Smoke (24 ft high), Yoshitoma Nara's Miss Forest (25-1/2 ft), and Chris Burden's Urban Light (26-1/2 ft.)
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| Split-Rocker at Versailles. Photo: Laurent Lecat |
Comments
> David Geffen Galleries.
The building will have limited public viewing in the next several weeks, and it will be interesting what kind of impressions it receives. I've been skeptical about it since the beginning, but I do hope it's a resounding success. In a way, failure is not acceptable, so it hopefully gets high marks. Although the way the Geffen is fully graded won't be possible until its contents are installed and how they're arranged.
The Resnicks are into older, traditional European art, so Jeff Koons probably is non-abstract enough to fit their style. An article about them several years ago included a quote from one of their LA-nouveau-type friends who said their home would look better if the traditional art was tossed out and replaced with contemporary. Which is one reason why other local people such as Govan regrettably overdo it in making LACMA "a de facto museum of contemporary art, but frankly...not a very good one."
punchlistmag. com, Christopher Hawthorne
The short version of my reaction to the new LACMA is that it’s bold and compromised in nearly equal measure: a sort of hamstrung Gesamtkunstwerk....At the same time, my sense is that Angelenos, thanks in large part to the design’s curious and openhearted attitude toward the city around it, will quickly embrace the new wing.
When we stepped inside and entered the gallery level, what struck me first was the absolute quiet of the massive space. Next came the remarkable sensation that Zumthor has succeeded in producing an all-encompassing architecture, a concrete cocoon that shuts out the chaos of the surrounding city even as it offers shifting views of—depending on your location inside the building—the Hollywood Hills, the downtown skyline, the bubbling tar pits, and traffic in both directions on Wilshire.
Then, slowly, reality began to intrude. I noticed uneven execution in nearly every direction. The floor is veined with spidery cracks. The walls are discolored by huge water stains and other flaws. To be fair, I was seeing a building that wasn’t quite ready for its closeup, with the floors yet to be cleaned or the curtains added to the windows. Still, it’s fair to say that Zumthor’s design promised a level of precision and rigor that the finished product fails in a number of ways to reach.
Not once in more than two decades as an architecture critic have I left a museum wishing it had been bigger. (Only better.) And, in some respects, strategic downsizing makes sense: a state-of-the-art 300-seat theater is a better fit for LACMA than the aging and cavernous one, twice as big and rarely filled, that was part of the Pereira campus.
Zumthor is right about the cumulative effects of downsizing and value engineering. The quality of the concrete construction, on a scale from Ando to Caltrans, is often closer to public-works level. The building can’t hold a candle to Kolumba or Kunsthaus Bregenz, the architect’s most impressive museum buildings in Europe.
It works better urbanistically than I’d anticipated. I thought the decision to extend the museum south across Wilshire was a mistake, and said so in the L.A. Times. I was wrong. Walking beneath the Geffen Galleries where the building spans the boulevard will surely remind some people of a freeway overpass. But the experience of the city made possible inside the building, with galleries and visitors (and, soon, works of art) suspended together in the air over Wilshire Boulevard, in the geographic heart of Los Angeles, is singularly moving. The wing also offers striking views and even reflections of itself as it bends across the street; it’s in these moments that you’re glad the building is vain and even preening, very much aware that it’s on display.
All in all—after all this time, money, and Sturm und Drang—Los Angeles is easily the better for having it. [T]the completed building, for all its faults, is an encouraging sign that Los Angeles is still capable of architectural risk-taking at key sites and the biggest scale.
^ The biggest difference of opinion I have with that critic is I don't know how anyone can visit - for example - MOCA on Grand Ave and not feel the museum is too small. Even the Broad across the street sometimes strikes me as not large enough.
Although if objects in a collection are first-rate than, okay, a smaller exhibition area that contains them is better than mediocre objects in a similarly small space too. Which is why to me nothing is worse than so-so objects in a museum that's also modest in square footage. Or the worst of both worlds.
Louis Kahn's famous Kimbell Museum has an overall concrete format too, but it's interwoven with travertine and non-concrete surfaces too. So that helps give (beyond the collection alone) a polished or first-class quality to the Kimbell. I hope the Geffen, by contrast, doesn't play up the angle of LACMA being "a de facto museum of contemporary art, but frankly...not a very good one."
Meanwhile, down the block, the Natural History Museum seeks to expand its administrative and storage facilities to the 5800 Wilshire / 725-731 S. Curson site. Wild that LACMA didn't seek to purchase this property for less than $30 Million. https://x.com/esotouric/status/1926714805588476034
Zumthor does not make the same mistake with the new LACMA. In fact, I think Zumthor solves a problem Kahn always had with museum buildings, how to use glass.
BTW, Chris Hawthorne does NOT have an academic background in architecture or art history. At Yale, he didn't even take Vin Scully's course on Modern Architecture. Bless your heart though, you don't know better.
--- J. Garcin
You claim to care about the financial stewardship of the institution. But what have you or the SaveLACMA mob done to advance the financial welfare of the institution? Are any of you on the Board of Trustees? Are any of you on the Collectors Committee? Where's the money?
There is no money. You just have a lot of crazy ideas --- like demolishing half of a building that has an integrated structural system. Never going to happen.
> material appreciated
> for its modularity.
Not sure what the so-called modularity of travertine has to do with the look of it versus plain, uncolored concrete.
The photos of the Geffen's interior posted next to Hawthorne's review gave me pause. One room looked about as welcoming as a unit at Public Storage. The ceiling with both its hanging non-recessed and pendant lights made me think of the description, "a de facto museum of contemporary art, but frankly...not a very good one."
Just as the buildings in 1965 were visually and technically a case of "er, uh, oo-kay," I have a suspicion that a bit (at least a bit) of that history will be repeating itself in 2025. Although I don't think the overall impression will be so shaky that, for example, a tourist from Minnesota will drop by post-2024 LACMA and necessarily judge it as below that of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. But who knows? Beaux-Arts (of a MIA or a Louis-Kahn Kimbell, etc) probably makes a lot of people innately treat items as though they're in nicely wrapped packaging versus something in a plain (gray) paper bag.
"American concrete" sounds like another way of saying "value engineered." Or a rationalization of, "we didn't have enough bucks to do it the way it should have been done."
> A permanent collection shouldn’t
> be permanent in its presentation,”
> he contends, rejecting strict
> narratives based on chronology,
> geography, and artificial notions
> of creative progress.
Govan and his people need to a least stop categorizing contemporary art not based on time or style (and not displayed in the Broad), but based on race, ethnicity, gender, nationality.
The Geffen already isn't as large as it could be. So slotting modern/contemporary art into its square footage will add insult to the injury of a permanent collection of older works in a format of being constantly swapped in and swapped out. Which will presumably up the costs of LACMA's operations.
BTW, all the windows will also add to the museum's maintenance budget. Although I guess glass that's not kept clean can be described as a way of keeping things real, urban, trendy. Maybe a symbol of a city's pollution.