Sam Durant Gift to Wende
 |
| Sam Durant, Occupation, Lies, Illegal, Respect, Supremacy, Freedom, 2016. Wende Museum, gift of Cliff Einstein |
Collector Cliff Einstein has given the Wende Museum a 2016 work by Sam Durant. Occupation, Lies, Illegal, Respect, Supremacy, Freedom is a plywood-mounted mirror sprayed with political graffiti, some backward. It's a departure for the Wende, being a contemporary work by an American artist. Since 2023, however, Durant has taught at Stuttgart's State Academy of Fine Arts. His graffiti pieces have parallels in the Wende's collection of dissident art and artifacts from the Eastern Bloc.
Einstein is chairman emeritus of MOCA's board and, with wife Mandy, a prominent collector. He has also given the Wende a photographic piece by Ukrainian artist Illya Chichkan, Opium (2009). Both Einstein gifts are on view.
Comments
Dana Goodyear, New Yorker:
When the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened its doors, in the spring of 1965, L.A. was a young city in the midst of transforming itself into a cultural capital, with the buildings and institutions to prove it….
“It is—or could have been—an important building, the largest art museum built in the U.S. in 25 years and located in a city second only to New York in importance and second to none in growth and vitality,” the editors of Arts & Architecture wrote.
They proceeded to eviscerate the design: the galleries were cramped, the lights cast doubling shadows, and the narrow columns made it look like an office building, of the kind admired by Howard Ahmanson, the project’s lead patron. Other critics agreed: LACMA was superficially trite and substantially dysfunctional. “The total impact is singularly oppressive,” the art critic for the Saturday Review lamented.
Sixty-one years later, how quaint that complaint seems: one poorly conceived arts complex in a city that seemed bound for glory. The L.A. of 2026 is a more mature and more troubled metropolis, certain of its importance but uncertain of its long-term stability… After eighteen months of crisis…the city’s vitality is flagging. Growth is negative, and those still here are deeply unsatisfied, more so than at any time in the decade-plus since U.C.L.A. started collecting data on the subject.
It is for this Los Angeles that…Peter Zumthor has designed a building that is both futuristic and primordial… It’s a winning building, ambitious, frank, and generous, with soulful poured-in-place raw-concrete walls, and acres of natural light illuminating the art, often without the intervention of vitrines or heavy-handed wall texts. There is ample space for contemplation and surprise.
The need to redevelop the LACMA campus was undisputed: even one of the project’s architects endorsed the idea of demolition, not long after construction was complete.
Conversations overheard in the Geffen Galleries mostly revolve around attempts to meet up when one in a party has gone astray. “Where are you?” I heard several people say into their phones, before struggling to describe their location…. The impulse to prioritize individual experience, inviting visitors to get lost the way one might in a garden, makes a powerful argument that is not just about art history but also about Los Angeles as a city of artists in potential.
The new building, made from old materials using ultra-modern technology, has a quality that makes it singular in Los Angeles. Solid as a rock, it feels as if it’s been here all along, and as if it will be here well past when the rest of the place is gone.
I see fewer technical or aesthetic flaws in a museum that dates back largely to 2000 (when MFA's European galleries by Raphael Moneo were built) than the over 60-years of LACMA. I certainly don't see all the underwhelming features that existed throughout the Pereira/HHP campus.
However, visiting the current museum on Wilshire Blvd would still be preferable to me than the one in Houston. But I can easily see a person feeling just the opposite way. That's even more the case since plenty of opinions on the Geffen have been ambivalent, full of qualifiers, and not as positive as the writer for the New Yorker is.
The MFA in Houston is more of a typical enfilade-type, segregated-theme-style museum, which I'm not necessarily the biggest fan of. I prefer the potpourri format of the Geffen, but aesthetic, technical or non-professional aspects of it still reflect a history that dates back to Richard Brown and William Pereira, if not LACMA's time in Exposition Park.
If Michael Govan and his people don't do a lot more tweaking of the Geffen, then they'll be repeating the weaknesses of Brown/Donahue/Powell, Pereira/HHP and museum staffers from decades ago..