I visited the new Geffen gallery at LACMA
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art just added a monumental brutalist new gallery made up of giant concrete forms which swoop literally across the street.
If this excites you, you should go. There is not currently a large mount of art in the gallery - it feels very widely spaced out at the moment, and it is in fact smaller than the gallery buildings it replaced, which is rightfully a controversial decision - but it's still got a lot of very cool stuff. Here's a jaguar holding a bloody human head, from a piece of either Mexican or Peruvian pottery that had not yet got its informational label:
And here's a sculpture which is just a bunch of horse asses welded together:
And here's a giant Japanese screen from 1810 which I really loved:
Apparently one of the goals for this gallery was to put all the art on one floor and deliberately avoid grouping it by geography, time period, culture, or movement. It definitely is INTERESTING to wander around the collection in this form, but I can't say that it made me enjoy the art any better. I definitely didn't learn as much from it as I otherwise would, I think.
I was always grateful to encounter one of the smaller rooms inside the concrete piers, where the artwork is usually a bit more coherently grouped together. The Japanese screen art from above was in a room of all Japanese art about water. I felt a sense of relief being in a space that was actually organized!!
The gallery building itself is an enormous, interestingly-unpleasant, Quake-map-esque space, and it's clear that they built this gallery not really to house the art but to create a piece of statement architecture-as-art, an ambition which is... totally fine, I guess. I don't actually have a problem with that. Since I work in videogames, I am easily entertained by shit that looks like a Quake map. I do think it was fucking dumb to reduce the gallery space, but the desire to create impactful architecture in an art museum is not something I have a problem with.
But beneath it, it contains a monumental, oppressive, perplexing NOTHINGNESS which I kind of want to return to simply to photograph:
The underside of the Geffen was as interesting to me as some of its contents. The concrete surface under and around the building is, itself, an artwork - unfortunately I did not take a picture of the attribution plaque so that I can name it correctly, but the concrete is patterned with grooved shapes that look a bit like a big mess of unearthed bones. This is clearly meant to recall the La Brea Tar Pits just on the other side of the fence.
But this concrete pattern is so enormous and wide-ranging and difficult to perceive or appreciate at ground level that it feels accidentally or wrongly empty. It feels like it should have clusters of potted plants and coffee stands and seating areas in the empty, less-detailed sections of the engraving. There should be weird statues here, and, like, additional water features, and stuff. Right??
It felt to me like the underside of the gallery should look like a jungle!
This sense of it being missing something is also helped by the fact that the whole underside of the gallery is covered in these huge drifts of aluminum tables and chairs, like the museum wants people to come to this space and spend time here to read or whatever. But the space is so unfriendly that nobody is sitting in these fucking chairs!
Instead, they're all gathered either in the shaded plaza near the older LACMA buildings, or in at the far end of the Geffen gallery where the water features and the coffee shop are. This space is much more intimate and green, and was absolutely full of people when I visited. You can see it in the back of this image:
I really feel like the people who created this museum should have watched The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, one of my favorite documentaries ever. You can watch the whole thing here:
So, the other thing about the underside of the Geffen gallery: there's also a fucking Erewhon coffee shop down here. I don't have a good picture of it but it was kind of a miserable shock to see that the cheap coffee stand in the main plaza had been replaced by an outlet for one of the city's most expensive and polarizing grocery stores.
Nevertheless, we spent time in that little area near the water feature and the coffee shop, and it was a nice place to sit. The water feature sounded great, and the coolness of the shade beneath the gallery is profound, and there were LOTS of people here, so it felt very alive and fun, even on a random weekday afternoon.
I came away from the museum actually feeling pretty good about my experience. I don't know if this space is "good for the city," but as a game developer who enjoys unfriendly architecture much more than the average person, I felt glad to have been there and to have experienced the ways in which it is ungainly and unpleasant and kind of bad.
It feels unfinished. I am crossing my fingers here hoping that the wide open oppressive nothingness beneath this museum is eventually filled with something, at least. I think it has a lot of potential...