Postcard from Pasadena 2.

25th October 2012

Just before 12.30 the technician comes to switch on Metropolis II. Crowded around a room-size contraption that is part Heath Robinson, part Meccano mountain, is an expectant group of young children, older men and perhaps even an art lover or two. It is just as well that the operative is slight and on the short side, since once he has removed his shoes (and tucked them away out of sight) he has to squeeze into a complex lattice of roadways and railways to reach the crucial buttons. After some final checks, and with no trace of a fanfare, he activates the belts that take the cars to the top of the structure and then tip them over to race down – powered only by gravity – around curves and between buildings and then back to the belt. The spectators smile and watch transfixed. Welcome to Chris Burden’s installation at LACMA – if you’ve not seen it, I promise you’ll love the video (and don’t worry, we’ll get to the big rock above soon enough).

Today’s post is a visit to two museums: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (that’s LACMA) and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. I’ve been to both today and I have seen some wonderful things, of which the most remarkable was Metropolis II. It has been on show at LACMA for just over a year but it runs for only a few timetabled hours on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. If you ever had a train set or if you’ve driven the L.A. freeways or if you like complex mechanisms (and I’m prepared to admit this may be mostly a boy thing), I think you’ll find it irresistible.

If we want to bring a little theory to the party, we might see in Metropolis II a fine example of the ‘technological sublime’ – what author David E. Nye defines as ‘the common feeling of awe inspired by large-scale applications of technological prowess’. Granted this is not the Hoover Dam but its complex inter-connectedness and its relentlessness conjures up more than a touch of the wondrous.

Another slice of the sublime is on view in the backyard of LACMA: Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass, or the big rock. Installed earlier this year on earthquake-proof brackets over a specially dug trench (all part of the artwork), the rock travelled very slowly from Riverside County, California on a journey that attracted extraordinary attention from the Angelenos. Indeed, there are those that think that the journey was the work’s finest hour, and that now it is a little inert and unremarkable. (See the L.A. Times article Los Angeles endeavours worthy of ancient Rome by Christopher Hawthorne for a fine comparison between its journey and another recent passage by the space shuttle Endeavour and the Roman triumph.)

I found the experience of walking beneath the rock engaging but hardly transformative. The ground around is a tidied-up ersatz desert and the trench is clean and controlled (complete with at least two security guys). There is no sense of danger and none of shock and awe. Which is very different from what it’s like visiting Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969-70) cut into the sides of mesa near Overton, Nebraska.

I went to this early land art work when we were filming the first series of Artland USA – and simply getting there is a pilgrimage and a half. There are (or there were not then) any signposts and entering into the work involved scrabbling down fragile cliffs  in the broiling sun. In that case, we had to go to the (small) mountain and the effort was a large part of why it all seemed so remarkable. Levitated Mass is a monument that came to the ticket-buyers of LACMA, and its impact is far less as a result.

LACMA is a melange of a museum, with eccentric collections (and a small village of gallery spsaces) that in no sense cohere. But there are always stimulating things to see, including currently a small show about the films Metropolis (1927) and Dr Caligari (1920) against the context of German Expressionism in the visual arts and a display of Robert Mapplethorpe’s X, Y and Z portfolios which back in the 1980s stirred up a firestorm of censorship and legal action in Cincinnati. (For background on this, Mapplethorpe photos on view – will they still shock? is a good piece for Jori Finkel for the L.A. Times.)

After which, I drove downtown to the Grand Avenue outpost of MOCA. Maybe it was the entirely unremarkable turkey sandwich that I half-ate in the café or maybe it is an awareness of the ructions that have torn the institution apart in recent months, but the museum and its recently opened show Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void 1949-1962 came across as a touch sad, apologetic, bereft of élan and lacking in confidence.

I disinclined to recap the difficulties here that followed the arrival of Jeffery Deitch as director and have led to the forced departure of the chief curator Paul Schimmel, who was the force behind Destroy the Picture. The New York Times recently ran Guy Trebay’s interview The Lives of Jeffery Deitch which gives some of the background, at least from Deitch’s perspective; Mike Boehm’s 3 September piece MOCA meeting aims to generate unity among trustees is also valuable. Let me say simply that MOCA is not currently a merry museum.

I wanted to like Destroy the Picture, which brings together paintings from America, Europe and Japan that enact creative destruction from the immediate post-war years. Christopher Knight’s review of the show makes a good case for why it is interesting and important, but I found its classical hang and the seemingly wilful refusal to provide context alongside the artworks distancing and disappointing. (There is only a single wall panel at the start and a timeline cordoned off from the galleries themselves, plus a pamphlet with biographical details of the artists; I understand there was also an audiotour but I didn’t indulge in this.)

I kept thinking of the possibilities of a very different show that presented these works against manifestations in film and elsewhere of contemporary events, as well as archival records of the artists making these canvases that were torn and burned and shot at and had acid thrown upon them. Hung in off-white gallery spaces, with brief and bland labels, they seemed to me aestheticised into impotence.

As you leave MOCA you cannot miss across the street the new museum that mega-collector and L.A. art scene player extraordinaire Eli Broad is building to show off his collection. The opening is promised for spring 2014.

This is the link for Postcard from Pasadena 1., which includes a visit to the Huntington Library.

Tales from Hollywood 5. is a June 2010 blog post with some further (cautious) thoughts about the influence of Eli Broad.

For my previous visit to the city of the angels, see also Tales from Hollywood 1., Tales from Hollywood 2., Tales from Hollywood 3. and Tales from Hollywood 4.