Quote of the Day: Christopher Hawthorne
"There is admittedly something paradoxical, or at least contradictory, about my reaction. Some of the art looks terrible in the building, but seeing the building with art in it has given me a fresh appreciation for its architecture. So be it."
—Christopher Hawthorne on Peter Zumthor's David Geffen Galleries, in Punch List
Comments
--- J. Garcin
> looks terrible in
> the building
Since he says both that and a "fresh appreciation," I'm assuming he doesn't necessarily think plain gray concrete for artworks is a poor background. I generally think it is.
However, at least the inner rooms were tinted. If they hadn't, I'd know that Govan's aesthetic sense was really shaky, prone to make him have poor judgments and decisions.
Nonetheless, and unlike a few years ago, I'm more in his and Zumthor's camp. Part of that is because I finally realized just how mediocre the 1965-1986 campus really was. Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.
If the current Geffen also reflected the complete installation, I'd be shaking my head and thinking the ghost of William Pereira had chosen to revisit LA in 2026.
But I'm still not certain how I'd deal with out-of-towners visiting today's LA.
Before 2020, I'd grimace about their dropping by LACMA. The BCAM and Resnick by themselves (unless the Resnick were hosting something like the Met's current show on Raphael) weren't must-see. But I can still imagine people even from Houston, Detroit, Kansas, Minneapolis, San Francisco, etc, treating Geffen/BCAM/Resnick as more "let's instead go to the Santa Monica Pier" versus "LACMA is so good a museum or better than my local museum is, let's make it a day!"
...this huge new extension have actually resulted in significantly less display space for art. It sounds a lot of cash for a downsize. But the important question is whether the new spaces work. After years of local and international bitching...we can finally see them for ourselves. And I’m a little disorientated to conclude that the new gallery is utterly astonishing.
It breaks every rule of conventional museum design. Floor-to-ceiling windows in the bright California sunshine, concrete walls with works directly fixed to them, a floor plan which is counterintuitive and confusing, a lack of obvious entrances, a fiercely sun-baked plaza, and on and on.
There is only one floor, and items from the museum’s encyclopedic collection...are jumbled together with the vaguest of narratives, something to do with a world connected by its seas. Yet it works.
So many museums make a grand architectural statement and then enclose their artefacts in generic sheetrock rooms with dropped ceilings: the white cube banality that is the default genuflection to art. This one does not.
...Every object is allowed to be beautiful, to be seen in all its three dimensions, to be seen against other, wildly different things while seducing you around the next curve. It is the history of art and culture seen as encounters and threads...and the museum manages to convey that magical serendipity without lapsing into incoherence.
Where US institutions turn to European architects for taste, European architects are quickly seduced by LA in turn... Zumthor’s gesture of bridging Wilshire Boulevard is the apogee of this visceral delight in difference...
It is certainly a theatrical moment but not overplayed... I was nervous that you would reach the end of the bridge and think, well, now what? I have to just go back again? But you barely notice. This is a space that keeps you wandering, tantalised, enthralled by the art and the city beyond.
The building itself forms a capacious canopy and I wondered how that vast undercroft would feel, but its polished quality, its extreme elevation...and the brilliance of the California sky mean light is refracted back down surprisingly delicately.
LACMA’s new wing is a little confusing, framed by an insanely expensive and over-engineered structure, and full of delight. It is a little like LA itself in its irresistible brilliance and its capacity to be both visionary and almost painfully nostalgic for an earlier model of modernity. [End quote]
Unlike 1965 Pereira, 2026 Zumthor can be at least adjusted to (in my opinion) remove some of gray concrete monotony (tinting more walls) and, most crucially, filling in current blank walls and empty floor space. Right now, if visitors are split between liking and not liking the Geffen, I'll understand either POV.
However, I kind of prefer more people respond the way the critic of the Financial Times does. But I'd be dishonest if I couldn't figure out why other people have problems with the Geffen.
In a way, it's a variation of 1965 LACMA all over again. But Pereira/Hardy-Holzman-Pfeiffer would have required a massive makeover to make it *look* and *feel* more acceptable, much less A grade. Or more like what Rafael Moneo in 2020 did to one major, totally new section of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.
Tint is the way.
tommarblearchitecture, 14h
LACMA is a revelation. I was reserving judgment until I visited and was blown away. It’s much bigger, more complex, and more exciting than I had anticipated. It feels like a city, with buildings inside of buildings, on an island floating on the vast sea of Los Angeles. [End quote]
^ That blogger on the Instagram platform, which I'm generally not into (image-based/short-clip social media to me are like bubble gum), has generated 14 replies. Blogs like this deserve no less feedback. But we're in a TikTok, short-attention-span, selfie-snapshot-only era.
But this video shows the a lot of visitors at an analog-type event, the Festival of Books at USC, and one of the participants, the Lucas Museum. They will just on the other side of the school and is a museum that the former art critic of the LA Times (the sponsor of the book event) has characterized as treacle:
https://youtu.be/6sOPvwIq4Uc?si=lgfZUwFqAKAVd7RG&t=620
The budget and planning should have shown more logic and transparency. The logistical complexity of spanning Wilshire Blvd probably raised the costs enough that things like offices for staffers and conservation services - along with the amount of gallery space - were affected. But if the entire building were north of Wilshire, geological problems with tar sands might have been greater. But who knows?
However, Govan and Zumthor (etc) do deserve more benefit of the doubt in the 2020s because Richard Brown, William Pereira and the overseers of Expo-park-era LACMA in the 1960s (then later, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer) did compromise the museum for decades. Not sure if it will ever live that down, but hopefully it will be able to.
Right now, however, their special exhibition schedule in the Resnick and BCAM remains mainly non must-see. Or just the opposite of, by comparison, the Raphael exhibit at the Met on 5th Ave.
> minimum
I'm sure that exhibition costs way more money to organize and present.
When it comes to LACMA, I always wonder how many of their temporary shows are based more on budget than personal creative preferences? Or visa versa?
If it was known that Govan found contemporary art to be overdone in LA, a lot of LACMA's special shows could be traced to cost factors.
If not, and he wonders how to raise his museum's daily attendance figures, temp shows like at the Hammer Museum right now (per yesterday's blog entry) aren't going to help.
If he sees the Broad Museum, however, as having a daily head count that impresses him, then the main way to do the same for LACMA is have free daily entry.
I notice a major traveling show at the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco right now and 2 temp shows in the Resnick involve Impressionist art, which is always an easy sell. 2 of the 3 just so happen to be joint ventures with the Brooklyn Museum.
The 3rd one involves works from LACMA's own collection and comes with a cover image of its Jean Beraud. Acquired 2 years ago, I cringe every time I see it. A crucial part of it reminds me of a something I'd see on sale at a home furnishings or, even worse, Goodwill store.
As with LACMA's solo Van Gogh, I'm guessing those works - after the show ends next January - will be switched from the Resnick to the Geffen.
I've watched video tours of various museums, particularly of the one in Houston. Although much of LACMA was torn down 6 years ago, no extensive filmed tours of its galleries have ever been done (or aren't online). If that reflects people's regard for 1965-1986 LACMA, it ain't good.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston follows the age-old format of everything being categorized and grouped separately. That might work if a museum has fantastic collections across the board, but it's more iffy if a place is trying to be encyclopedic but really isn't.
In LACMA's case, quite a bit of its online collection makes me think of "study piece" (or even "Goodwill"). So now I'm not so sure if the Geffen necessarily has a lot of blank walls and open floor space because the museum's staffers haven't found time to install what's worth displaying.
However, in a thematic display, when one of them is isolated/singled out the shortcomings of the Caravaggisti are more obvious.
In a thematic display, the masterpiece serves as a major node around which you can form a network of meaningful relations.
LACMA is trying to do the same without major nodes. The outcome seems decorative rather than meaningful. In short, great way to decorate a building, not so great if you want to educate.
--- J. Garcin
> can make an inferior collection
> look better.
The European collection of the MFA Houston, particularly because of the design of its galleries (which I believe date back to only 2020), whether A grade or C grade, has the overall *look* of a top-notch museum. The galleries in the Ahmanson never had a similarly unified quality look. They instead seemed more like a TV-set version of the Beaux-Arts-enfilade style common in many museums throughout the US.
That could be one reason why visitors through the years weren't inspired enough to take video images of the inside of LACMA. If so, ouch.
> seems decorative
> rather than meaningful
If LACMA's collections were clearly more in the wow-ser category (eg, the Metropolitan or the Louvre), the potpourri format of the Geffen would bother me more. Unlike you, if artworks aren't top quality, a museum had better try to *look* good. Or if it can't get the connoisseurship or scholarship down right, it had better get the so-called decorative down right.
My current take on the Geffen is too many of its areas look like the environment of a parking garage or storage building combined with a collection that lacks if not enough quality, than not enough quantity. Of enough quantity, than a lack of enough quality.
Although I wouldn't be as sheepish if an out-of-towner from, say, Detroit, Houston, Minneapolis or Kansas (and is familiar with those city's art museums) visits LACMA, I also won't be confident they'll feel, "visiting this place was worth it!"
"Well, for me, it will always have this personal cast to it. But art criticism is not a particularly reputable profession, and it’s not something that one feels particularly, I think, good about being—an art critic. Especially if one considers the way one’s colleagues conduct their professional activities."
If you don't know who Craig was, google his name. As an art critic, he championed the work of Cindy Sherman, Hans Haacke, Barbra Kruger...
--- J. Garcin
Vogue:
The museum’s layout also allows for objects and traditions that have historically been sidelined in art spaces—photographs, textiles, works on paper, non-Western collections—to be encountered differently, folded into the same visual and conceptual field as more canonical works. [End quote]
The traditional format of most art museums, such as in Houston, Minneapolis or Detroit, much less a Met, AIC (Chicago) or Louvre, is several galleries of one thing, than another set of galleries of another thing. another set of galleries of a third thing, etc.
A lack of variety stood out to me several months ago when perusing the lower level of the Simon Museum. Part of that is because to me a little Indian/Southeastern Asian sculpture goes a long way.
However, when I was browsing through the museum's upper level of older European works, I felt the same way. Not as much, though, because that style to me (painting vs sculpture, one type of skillset vs another) looks more approachable. But the less regimented format of the Geffen may help offset a feeling of "too much and same 'ol, same 'ol."
In the Louvre, that's analogous to being in a room where someone is wearing way too much perfume. In the Met, its ancient Egyptian galleries, as another example, are like being in a room full of archeologists where only the topic of archeology is welcome.
Variety is sometimes the spice of life---and moseying through a museum too. Plus, the Geffen has windows, lots of windows. So if a "drink" of artworks needs a chaser, look out the windows.
Funny, for us lovers of what the Caravaggisti accomplished in the first 75 years of the 17th century, seeing Caravaggio's successors around the world has been for me both the frosting and the cake and the cherry on top, equal to seeing the masterpieces that he himself left to us.
I won't try to convince anyone here. But LA's museums, and California's museums writ large, have the bandwidth to mount a stunning and sterling survey of Caravaggio's most monumental achievement --not his own oeuvre-- but the pan-European legacy he left in his wake.
The California catalogue could write itself.
https://youtu.be/mOiEOs3ZlT8?si=tUHiSiFRAYH7_KWU&t=214
Of course, the difference is the Met's collection isn't (to cite J Garcin) on the level of a rube the way that {{{ cringe }}} LACMA's is. lol.
However, the overall look of the architecture of the galleries of the Met at least has been somewhat successfully duplicated by the MFA Houston (etc).
The Ahmanson Foundation should be unhappy about LACMA not so much just because its gifts wouldn't be appreciated, but because so much of the museum in general has been about as impressive as the Palm Springs Museum of Health and Wellness---if such a place existed. {{{ cringe }}} lol.
However, differences between the West Coast and East Coast, north and south, North America and Europe, etc, date back centuries. So what's going on is nothing new. Still, to realize that LACMA since 1965 has been outplayed in certain key ways by museums in both larger and smaller American cities is a major fail.