Thanks to Claire's foresight, we were lucky ticketholders for the opening weekend of the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) at the LA County Art Museum (LACMA). There are few things that can bring a tear to my eye faster than seeing throngs of people genuinely enjoying an art museum--the same thing happened when I walked into the new Renzo Piano space at Atlanta's High Museum a few years back. LACMA pulled out all of the stops for the opening of the new museum. Edgy modern dancers and performance artists happily existed alongside clowns on stilts, magicians and bands. Everywhere you looked, adults and children were deliriously engaged with art.
Renzo Piano was the architect for this museum expansion project as well. He did what he does best--opens spaces up to make them into friendly "piazzas" and tacks amazingly well-lit Travertine marble cubes onto the existing spaces. LACMA's director has installed some spectacle-worthy sculptures and installations around the grounds, chief among them "Urban Light", an ethereal Greek Temple built out of restored Parisian lamp posts. Jeff Koons "Tulips" (pictured at the top) also have a home in the new entry pavilion for the Broad. Robert Irwin was also brought in for some sneaky and inspired landscaping.
The museum itself doesn't disappoint. Piano hearkens back to the inside-out approach of his Museum Pompidou in Paris by making viewers ascend an escalator that is eerily similar to the kind you find at modern stadiums. After a brief 3-story escalator ride, the museum visitor finds themselves with a great birds-eye view of the surrounding hills. After Claire and I soaked up the view, we entered the museum proper, which is dominated by the biggest elevator that I have ever seen. The elevator shaft is a showcase for installation art--in this case by Barbara Kruger. The largest gallery on the top floor of the museum is devoted to John Baldessari, Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons. Iconic pieces by Warhol share space with equally iconic Koons works--from early basketball and vacuum cleaner pieces to Michael Jackson and Bubbles. There are also newer sculptures and paintings by Koons that make sense to me for the first time alongside his more classic works from the 80's and 90's. As with the High Museum in Atlanta, Piano has found innovative ways to bring daylight into the gallery--in this case using a sawtooth roof and an elaborate series of shades that help reduce the harshness of the California sunshine.
Next came a room full of bluechip painters--Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns and others. This room in particular stands as a testament to Broad's vision as a collector. Even though I have seen (what seems like a thousand) paintings by each of these artists, there was almost always a painting that impressed me in a new way. My favorite painting from this wing was a very savvy benday dot mirror painting on an oval shaped canvas by Lichtenstein. Sure, at times his art seemed to jump the shark during his career, but the breadth of his exploration into his chosen materials were all on display.
The same could also be said about Damien Hirst's work. I've always been a sucker for his in-your-face rah-rah spectacle, and the room allocated for Hirst served as a mini-survey of his career. Taxidermy (check), Pharmacy stuff (check), Vitrines full of skeletons, etc (check, check) and dot paintings (check). It was Hirst's butterfly paintings that held the most power over me, though. I had seen the pictures of Hirst's (relatively recent) butterfly paintings in the art magazines, and I kind of shrugged my way through them. In person, the windows were jaw-droppingly amazing. Constructed out of luminous butterfly wings embedded in common housepaint, the paintings achieve a level of awe for nature and the accomplishments of man that must be parallel to how the first viewers of stained glass in Gothic cathedrals must have felt.
Another revelation was the room that the Broad devotes to Cindy Sherman. I don't count myself as the biggest fan, but when a career-spanning range of her work are placed together salon-style in a smallish room, they gain in power. There was an intriguing giant-sized table installation by LA stalwart Robert Therrien, a Jenny Holzer bench installation, batshit awesomeness from Mike Kelley, and a room full of (semi-regrettable) 80's art stars like David Salle and Julian Schnabel. The David Salle room was definitely redeemed by an entire gallery of amazing Basquiat paintings.
The entire bottom floor of the Broad is devoted to two MONUMENTAL Richard Serra sculptures entitled "Sequence" and "Band". No amount of writing can convey the experience of walking in and around these two pieces. I had never experienced a Serra sculpture indoors, and that change the entire ball game. The sculptures became huge velvety walls with ingenious curves and surfaces that I could spend all day wandering in. They were an absolutely perfect end to a museum overstuffed with stimuli. Refreshed, we were able to walk outside, where the sun was setting. They had turned the Chris Burden sculpture on, and that warm, fuzzy feeling that I got when I was first watching the families interact with the art has stuck with me for the past day.
Rarely do I ever get the same feeling from the "big boy" art world as I do when I'm looking at "extreme craft". On this day, though, the blue-chip art on the walls felt every bit as alive to me as craft-based art usually does. The Broad Contemporary pushes the LA County Museum of Art into the rarefied company of the Getty, the Met and the Louvre--places that you can't even attempt to fully take in during a single visit. It is a rare occasion when I feel that bazillion dollar expansion plans in the name of the art world are justified, but in this case, the people of Los Angeles should feel mighty lucky.
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The obsessive craftsmanship in his work also brings Michel Gondry to mind. Daubiss takes a material that is so common that we take it for granted and makes us see it in a new way. He does this through old-fashioned hard work. Simultaneously, his sculptures never appear overworked--it is a rare feat to spend countless hours crafting something and still have it come off as fresh. His eye for texture and form are perfectly suited to the low tech medium that he has chosen.
