Tag Archives: lacma

Precious Contemporary Artwork Practically Invites Art Museum Newbies to Damage It

Pity the beleaguered museum gallery attendants who get assigned the shift to keep watch on the art installation by artist Carmen Argote at LACMA. The art in question is titled “720 Sq. Ft.,” and for good reason.

The title references the 720 square feet of carpeting ripped from the artist’s childhood home and displayed on the wall and floor of a high-ceiling BCAM space as what some might like to call a “sculptural object.”

About half of the artwork lies on the floor like a … well, like a carpet. This can cause confusion for some museum visitors, unsure whether they’re allowed to — or are supposed to — walk on the carpet (you know, the one that’s on the floor, as it were).

Sometimes for certain kinds of works, artists encourage or expect viewers of their work to physically interact with it — to touch it, walk on it, sit on it and so on. But not here. Not for “720 Sq. Ft..” Casually sauntering across the re-purposed and modified floor covering would amount to vandalism. It’s verboten.

The gallery attendants have their work cut out for them here, ’cause a lot of museum visitors think they can and should walk on carpet or don’t even realize it’s a work of art. There are many “Excuse me, sir”s and “Please don’t walk on the artwork!”s uttered in the cavernous white space where “720 Sq. Ft.” is on view.

These utterances are often spoken quickly, firmly but politely. But on occasion you sense the exasperation in the attendant’s voice and a curt and mildly-aggressive tone seeps in. It’s kind of #sad but a little entertaining too.

But take note: Encountering this adds yet another dimension to the experience of Argote’s artwork (though it may not have been intended). This makes “720” one among our favorite set of artworks on view at LACMA. 

“Transparent Migrations”

The LACMA exhibition “Home – So Different, So Appealing” is turning into something of a landmark show with all the buzz from critics and patrons alike. The exhibition features a sprawling collection of artwork from Latin American and Latino artists since the 1950s to the present. As the shows title suggests, it explores themes of home, aspirations and identity,  as the collection reveals, it’s in the context of immigration, socio-economic hardship,  and the personal bi-cultural experiences that come with migration and transience. Contemporary art figures prominently. There are many art-installation pieces and many worthy of attention. One of the more striking and evocative works is “Transparent Migrations” (2001) by the American Latina and Californian artist Amalia Mesa-Bains, who is now in her seventies. The work is beautifully mysterious and sublime shrine.

“Death Rider”

In her body of work, Los Angeles artist Liz Craft has created some fascinating and evocative sculptural objects that have death and the human form at the thematic center. In fact, a couple of notable works from her that have been shown in Los Angeles museums the past year have “death” in the title. One is the powerful and darkly comic “Death Rider,” recently on view at the Hammer Museum and pictured in this post. The other exhibitied last year at LACMA is “Death of a Clown,” which you can see here.

What is Miracle Mile?

We never tire of revisiting this minimalist masterpiece by artist Robert Irwin at LACMA in Los Angeles. The colorful installation of fluorescent lights has a permanent home in a large ground-floor gallery at LACMA’s Broad Contemporary building. The title of the artwork is “Miracle Mile” and it is specific to its location.  

The museum is on Wilshire Blvd. at the heart of an area named Miracle Mile, which was originally planned as an alternative urban district to Downtown LA in the 1920s. Wilshire eventually became one of LA’s main east-west traffic and business corridors and the “mile” area has since become a kind of “museum row” for the number of other large galleries and museums nearby.

Irwin’s artwork, in its length, geometry and brightly illuminated presence, is a visual metaphor for the commercial strip and aptly is displayed on a wall that faces and runs parallel to Wilshire Blvd itself. A long floor-to-ceiling window in size and proportion similar to the artwork separates the gallery from the boulevard and makes “Miracle Mile” a kind of symbolic mirror.

Death of a Clown

The first time you see “Death of a Clown” by artist Liz Craft, you can’t help but want to get up close to and examine it, to bear witness to its texture in detail, as if to confirm that the woman lying on the sofa is not real. You know its not a real person, you assume she’s not real, but a part of you thinks she could be, like those street performers who pretend to be statues. It could be a real person, lying deathly still, forezen underneath a thick coat of ghostly-pale make-up and improbable orange hair. And you can’t help but think of Sleeping Beauty. And of a character in a Hayao Miyazaki anime film. Unreal, yet rendered in three dimenions, life-sized, in the actual physical space of a gallery at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 

But this is a sculpture, an object. There is no performer.

Craft is a Los Angeles-based artist who runs the Paradise Garage art space and collective in Venice Beach. Her faux-naive sculptural objects and installations have a whimsical, fantasy quality, though, as in the case of “Clown,” there’s a sense of realism baked into the layer of dreamy, fantastical imagery. The colors beguile, at once bright and muted, at once like saturated and then over-exposed like some old polaroids discovered in a shoebox at a flea market. 

The Amazing Drawings of Toba Khedoori

The artwork of Australian-Iraqi artist Toba Khedoori leaves a distinct impression. Her works are primarily finely detailed, photo-realistic pencil drawings in monochromatic lead or color on massive sheets of waxed paper. The drawings tend to be focused on discrete, single objects set in a vast emptiness — a chair, a fence, a door — or a piece removed from its larger architectural context — rows and rows of seats from a theater or, as in the example pictured here, a fireplace. It’s one of a series of drawings of fireplaces currently on view as part of her solo show at LACMA in Los Angeles. The drawing has a trompe l’oeil quality but has none of the cheap gimmickry of that anachronistic decorative conceit. Looking at the drawing from afar, it appears as if there’s an actual fireplace recessed into the gallery wall.

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これらの大きくて、詳細で、現実的な図面は、オーストラリア – イラクの芸術家トバ・ケドゥリ氏によるものです。 これらはロサンゼルスのLACMAで展示されています。