A Tombstone for Wall Text
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| Tombstones at LACMA's David Geffen Galleries and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art |
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| Interpretative labels at the Broad and the Autry |
Traditionally it was contemporary art museums that favored tombstone labels. But not always: The Broad uses informational labels in its Yoko Ono show. Conceptual art usually depends on the viewer understanding the concept.
Museums showing older art, such as the Huntington or the Getty, make extensive use of informational labels. That's why the Geffen's tombstone labels have generated controversy.
It's been reported that LACMA curators have differing opinions on text panels, and the Geffen installation design is still being fine-tuned. The Geffen does announce each of its thematic installations with concise and accessible descriptions. I wish there were similar descriptions for individual works.
But at the Lucas… well, were you really expecting deep dives into the meaning of Motherhood, Sports, or Adventure? You just get the name of the theme, in mirrored bilingual lowercase.
Lucas senior curator Ryan Linkof, who appears to be George Lucas' second-in-command, told Hyperallergic: "The primary experience of walking through the museum is an unmediated one. We’re not necessarily telling people what to think, or how to experience it."
That's the talking point of the moment, that the museum does not structure the visitor's experience. Visitors wander rather than taking a prescribed path. They aren't told what to think.
Great, but curators are the people who decide what works visitors see. That's part of the job description. Shouldn't they tell us why they believe these works matter?
The median museum visitor spends 15 seconds on a work of art, of which approximately zero seconds are spent reading the label. If you don't like wordy labels, they're easy to ignore.
The Geffen does without directional signs, but the Lucas has them. The Lucas signage highlights a few featured artists and refers to them by their last names. So you've got Benton, Wyeth, Rockwell, and Frazetta. Even if you're well informed about American art and illustration, as most visitors aren't, it may not be obvious that they mean Thomas Hart Benton, N.C. Wyeth, Norman Rockwell, and Frank Fazetta. There are other famous Wyeths, and "Rockwell" reminds me of Rockwell Kent, who's in the Lucas collection too, as it turns out. I suspect there are not a few American art history Ph.D.'s who can't place the name Frazetta (and whose heads would explode if they saw his stuff).
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| Screenshots from the Bloomberg Connects app for the David Geffen Galleries, LACMA |
Both LACMA and the Lucas are emphasizing digital alternatives to analog text panels. The Geffen has a guide on the Bloomberg Connect app, and the Lucas has its own browser-based guide, accessible by scanning a QR code on the hand-out gallery map. Once you're in the Lucas web app, you can snap a photo of an artwork to call up a description. That's more intuitive than photographing a pixel code, and it worked without a hitch the few times I tried it. But the online guides do not cover every work on display, and the write-ups are often rudimentary and English only.
The real problem with digital labels is that you don't know what you don't know. Sure, if you see a work that flat-out gobsmacks you, you can pull out your phone and research it. Most of the time, you're not that motivated. Yet it's the nature of art to have layers of meaning that aren't apparent at first glance. The wall label is the most seamless way of conveying what you don't know enough to ask about.
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| Screenshots for the Lucas Museum's browser guide |
Comments
Mark Hilbert...predicts that the Lucas Museum will “upend the art world” by displaying art that “tells a story.”
“For too many years, there’s been such a push towards non-objective art,” Hilbert said. “And we’re just rebalancing the scale a little bit more based upon what the population wants,” he said of both museums. [End quote]
J. Garcin did describe the Lucas as the Hilbert on a bigger budget, so Mark Hilbert's comment in today's LA Times fits right in.
But forget a museum's collection or format. Because the Hilbert Museum is regrettably architecturally too much like what might be in Fresno or Bakersfield, it loses a lot of Brownie points.
Same with the Geffen Galleries: It's excessively gray and about as refined as a parking garage or storage building. It also opened without some of its basic features (theater, restaurant) in place.
In the case of the Lucas, its packaging (ie, the building, gardens, library, rooftop restaurant) comes off better than the Geffen on Wilshire Blvd did. Or certainly what was true of Hilbert's building in 2024.
As for LACMA overdoing it in the category of hip-abstract-au-courant art ("...transitioned to a de facto contemporary art museum. But not a very good one"), the Lucas across town displaying very representational objects (or not as much the dynamics of, "even my kid can do that") is an interesting and necessary counterpoint.
I like a Broad Museum, MOCA or 20th-21th-century in BCAM/Geffen as much as anyone. But after awhile it's too much like the old saw of having to drink castor oil: "Because it's good for you!"
--- J. Garcin
Luckily, the Met on-line accession records for its European paintings are nonpareil.
My favorite one runs maybe 12,000 words..a great read:
"The Annunciation," by Petrus Christus (Netherlandish), ca. 1445:
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/435899
Not sure why the sense of "shouldn't there be something here?" or "why is this area so barren?" in the interiors of the building on pylons on Wilshire Blvd and the building on pylons in Exposition Park doesn't come up with other people.
Carolina Miranda, Bloomberg:
But the overall story this museum tries to tell is hopelessly muddled…. its interiors are a throwback to the past — both in the unimaginative ways that art is displayed and the contents of the collection itself (it’s a lot of dude).
A rule of telling stories is that even the most gripping yarn might need polish; it’s unfortunate that this extraordinarily well-funded project — estimated at $1 billion — did not avail itself of someone to kick the tires on the ideas… To be certain, the museum’s 13-acre campus is a dramatic reimagination of what was once a barren public parking lot in Exposition Park.
…much of the structure’s western flank offers a rather tedious pedestrian experience of bland fencing and grey walls. On the eastern side, the architects put the Lucas’s garbage and loading docks right across from an entrance and cafe belonging to the Natural History Museum … It’s a thoughtless placement — possibly stemming from the fact that the building was conceived to go anywhere its founder could score a patch of public land.
Other problems lurk within, the galleries being the biggest. The configuration…functions well — offering a range of spaces that vary in size and shape. But navigation is an issue. A lack of visual markers makes the principal gallery floor disorienting.
Long hallways that run the length of the building have been left blank. Moreover, the galleries are each installed in the same fashion: Paintings or drawings are presented at eye level across a vast ocean of white walls, one after the next. There are no large wall texts to signal new themes, no imaginative groupings, no accent walls saturated with color to provide a sense of differentiation. The flooring — wood parquet, a strikingly old-fashioned choice — is the same throughout.
For a museum intended to break with convention, the experience is a monotonous throwback, as if someone teleported a museum from one of Norman Rockwell’s paintings and expanded it to fill the Lucas’s footprint.
What is ultimately so disappointing about both the curation and the installation is that it can’t seem to settle on a coherent story, even with the bounty of stories it cites…. The unintelligible curation penetrates the design, too… Some objects are real, some are reproductions, some are shown on LED panels, with much of it, for some inexplicable reason, presented in recessed display cases that resemble futuristic ice caves. As with the rest of the Lucas, no context is given. Instead, what you find is an absolutely bewildering potpourri of the fake and the genuine, of places and times…
Gary Baum, Hollywood Reporter:
The new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is a Rorschach test for the value of mass culture, the future of Los Angeles and the legacy of founder George Lucas. Its arrival also happens to highlight LACMA’s epic flop of a main new exhibition hall, the David Geffen Galleries building…
But Lucas has directed and produced a much better artgoing experience. Even if his show-over-tell instincts, including negligible wall text, means there’s far too little context for his creative choices.
Both fresh facilities, which feature circular arrays of interconnected galleries with no marked beginnings or endpoints, have gone all-in on a thematic approach to curation that devalues chronology and geography. The result at LACMA is an incoherent, chaotic ping-pong across art history, from Asian neolithic vessels to European modernist abstraction. Visitors don’t know where they are, where they’re going or why. It’s time-is-a-flat-circle as museological model.
At LACMA, the most glaring problem has been just that — the glare. Its Pritzker Prize-winning Swiss architect Peter Zumthor had never built anything at this scale, and never in relentless desert light. His concept of wraparound, floor-to-ceiling gallery windows is negligent, and the attempted remedy of instituting semi-transparent metallic curtains hasn’t fixed the issue.
Throughout any given day, even when overcast, there are reflection challenges occluding parts of the collection. Meanwhile, the Lucas Museum building…allows for similar expansive, elevated views across the city from dedicated alcoves while (sensibly!) retaining controlled light within the interior gallery spaces.
Zumthor’s sprawling building, raised 30 feet and comprised of 85,000 cubic yards of concrete spanning across Wilshire Blvd., shadows a comically bleak, vast hardscape expanse most comparable to a freeway underpass… Whereas at the Lucas Museum, the veteran local landscape designer Mia Lehrer has conducted a lesson in topographical storytelling with regional vegetation that draws on California’s varied terrain.