Art Around the World

The Los Angeles County Museum Broadens Its Horizons

By Edward Rubin

	Edward Rubin is a New York City based writer and photographer. A long time contributor to Manhattan Arts International, his writings have appeared in such publications as Art & Antiques, ArtUS, Sculpture Magazine, NYArts and Contemporary Magazine.

With just about every city in the world building a new art museum, enlarging or renovating an old one –“build a church and they will come” seems to be the mantra of the day – the question remains did Los Angeles need another temple of contemporary art? Well, seventy-five year old Eli Broad, the Medici of Los Angeles thought so, and like George Patton, the World War II general who he recently compared himself to, he charged right ahead and built the Broad Contemporary Art Museum. No matter that the new building – the centerpiece and the first phase of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 200 million dollar plus, three-phase, ten year makeover – would belong to Los Angeles County, lock, stock and barrel, the billionaire philanthropist selected the architect, forked over $56 million dollars for construction, and threw in another $10 million for acquisitions. Just as generously, as the official story goes ― though strangely there is no mention of this in any of the museum’s press materials ― Broad opened his enormous art collection and gave LACMA’s director Michael Govan and Lynn Zelevansky, its curator of Contemporary Art, a free hand to select whatever works they wanted for the new museum’s inaugural exhibition. They chose 148 works.

Aerial View of Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM), Southeast Facade, January, 2008. Copyright 2008 Museum Associates / LACMA

Of course no good deed goes unpunished and the critics led most vociferously by the Los Angeles and New York Times – the newsprint arbitrators of good taste – did everything in their power to wrestle Broad and architect Renzo Piano, of Pompidou Centre fame, to the ground. The complaints ranged from the building’s travertine clad face, despite its spidery red trimming, is very 80’s and too staid, the museum’s entry plaza resembles a gas station – the irony being that BP financed it to the tune of $25 million – and the art collection itself, though predictable for a man of his age, wealth, ethnicity and business acumen, was far too white. Worse than that! Out of the 180 works by the 30 artists gracing the walls of the new museum, only 4 are woman, Jean-Michel Basquiat is the only non white, Damien Hirst the only foreigner, and no less accusatory, that most of the artists on view are or have been represented by Larry Gagosian.

While this may be the headlines the backstory is a lot more complicated. It seems that Broad, a long-time trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum, on whose twenty acre, seven building campus, BCAM sits – he also is a trustee at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, a life trustee and founding chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and as of 2004, on the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institute, the latter by appointment of the U.S. Congress and President George Bush – has been dangling his mammoth art collection in the face of museums, LACMA included, for years. To make matters worse, just before the museum’s official February opening he punctured their balloon by announcing that he was not going to part with his personal collection of some 500 paintings but was adding them to the 1500 paintings that make up his private foundation. Ostensibly, the reasoning being that Broad would prefer his foundation to lend its 2,000 works to museums around the world rather than have 90% of his collection end up in the basement of some museum.

Chris Burden's Urban Light , February 2008.Copyright 2008 Museum Associates / LACMA

Shortcomings aside, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, – itself a serious bid by the city of Los Angeles to join, if not trump, New York and London as the world’s center of contemporary art – the building, its grounds and the current exhibition, which will be up for a full year, does offer a number of welcome surprises. Topping the list is Chris Burden’s Urban Light, a delightful array of 202 vintage Los Angeles streetlamps. Looking like twelve rows of candles on a square birthday cake, this permanent installation, a knockout especially at night when it is all lit up, is the first work of contemporary art that the public sees upon entering the museum’s plaza.

Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM), North Facade showing escalator, January, 2008. Copyright Weldon Brewster.

Directly behind the lampposts, traversing the side of the building is a playfully bright red escalator, which makes a scenic 50-foot run to the museum’s third floor where the exhibition begins. Here, under a gentle light-emitting glass-ceiling, the big boys Johns, Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Kelly, Twombly, Ruscha, Warhol and Koons, all multi-million dollar blue chips, hold court. The dominating artist, in quantity, as well as space, is Jeff Koons, Broad’s closest artist friend. Strangely enough, Koons’s kitsch porcelain sculpture Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988), especially in view of the reams of garbage that has been masquerading as art for the past decade or two, is beginning to look important.

On the second floor, we meet Basquiat, Fischl, Schnabel, Salle, Bleckner, Holzer and Cindy Sherman, all artists who made their reputation during the 80s. The big surprise is the Cindy Sherman room where 49 of her self-mimicking, film-still portraits – the Broads own 120 pieces by Sherman – are installed from floor to ceiling in 19th century Victorian manner. The work of this ubiquitous artist never looked so good. The most venturesome work of art (perhaps the only) in the exhibition is Mike Kelly’s mixed media installation Gym Interior (2005) which examines through video, sound, photographs and assorted objects, memories of the artist’s early high school years. With nine works on view, Damien Hirst is the museum’s biggest nod to the 90s. Most intriguing, in a novelistic way, is The Collector (2003-05), a room-size glass vitrine complete with flowering plants, live butterflies and an animatronic lepidopterist bending over a microscope. Most embarrassingly dismissible is Hirst’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (2003), a triptych imitating a Gothic stained glass window made from thousands of butterfly wings. As one critic quipped, it is a Martha Stewart craft project. Ending the exhibition on the first floor, under a ceiling is far too low to do them justice, are Sequence (2006) and Band (2006), two of Richard Serra’s monumental steel sculptures. As I left the museum I couldn’t help recalling Barbara Kruger’s telling statement – her many texts and images line the three floors of the museum’s glass fronted elevator shaft – “Plenty should be enough.” Broadly speaking, it is.

Edward Rubin is a New York City based writer and photographer. A long time contributor to Manhattan Arts International, his writings have appeared in such publications as Art & Antiques, ArtUS, Sculpture Magazine, NYArts and Contemporary Magazine. 
Erubin5000@aol.com

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