The Broad Museum is the newest addition to what they are now calling the LACMA complex. Like any complex, it is a messy conglomerate of seemingly unrelated constructions—but BCAM is beautiful. I like it. It takes the cake.
First, the building. Clean, yet textured, with a goofy flip of a roof line and a red exterior escalator that takes you to the third floor. Just like an IKEA building, you start your visit from the top. Architect Renzo Piano says "I love the idea of the escalator. It's part of the almost anthropological ritual of rising up slowly. You can just stand quietly. You have time to look around and to realize what you are doing, like levitaion." I'm not sure what he means by "anthropological ritual of rising up slowly." I'm afraid he means like evolution, walking on our knuckles, then standing up straight. I hope that's not what he means. But I do like the analogy of levitation. It does feel like that (like I know). No, I mean, it feels like a soft lift in mid-air because you are out in space as you rise slowly to the top level where the view is expansive: palm trees and hills in the distance, and behind you the big mother stone building with her embrace of creativity.
Ah yes. You enter and up there at the top are two flanking grand spaces—8,500 sq feet each—with glass ceilings, no columns. Wooosh, big airy space with floating walls. Oh yeah. The glass panelled ceiling lets in soft light bouncing off sun shades—those metal roof flips. The light is extraordinary.
There's a massive red metal and glass elevator between the two big rooms. Through the glass you see the 86 foot tall, red & black piece by Barbara Kruger, Shafted. Did I mention the exterior escalator is red? Red is the accent color, just the right red to go with the creamy stone walls. This is a good-looking building—and the art is good-looking in it.
Oh yeah, the art. There's been a lot of wanking in the press about the inaugural exhibition being just big-ticket heavy hitters, the "usual suspects." Well, ye-ah. The Broads are big-money collectors of big-price-tag art, so it seems to me, they built the space (which years down the line will have housed all sorts of interesting shows) so why not showcase their collection, or the best of their amazing, eye-popping collection of contemporary American art? I mean, really, get over yourself.
I for one was happy to sail around the commodious spaces, cooling off, and taking in the excellent works by Koons, Baldassari, Ruscha, Twombly, Kelly—no I'm not going to list them all. Let's say a museum's worth of sparkling works. But I did mention Kelly—the Ellsworth Kelly room was a revelation to me. I think it was about five works that only work in person. The effect was of such searing clarity and optical engagement the like of which I never expected. More than likely in another setting I passed his work on by. Here, the paintings fairly leapt off the wall—no, more that they bore colored space into them. Hard to explain. Had to be there. This is Blue Red from 1968.
I will mention the women artists in the exhibit, there being only four. There was a Jenny Holzer installation that involved quotations on stone slabs. I mentioned the Kruger in the elevator shaft. On the second floor there was a retrospective of Cindy Sherman, 49 pieces in all, looking very much the Victorian portrait gallery. And then there was one iconic, quietly beautiful painting by Susan Rothenberg, Blue Body.
Trivia: this Spring, Rothenberg is being recognized, with her husband (I didn't know they were married. What should I know who's married to whom, but it struck me, Wha-? Really?) Bruce Nauman, by the The Santa Fe Rotary Foundation For the Arts as Distinguished Artist of the Year 2008. It's an award that goes to local lights. I guess they live thereabouts. What you learn on the internet. Agnes Martin was one. She lived there. She was a Distinguished Artist for sure.
So BCAM. What else do I want to say? I want to say Damien Hirst. Damien Hirst, Damien Hirst. Damien Hirst's cold-blooded, sterilized, and cool—cool-cat cool—art ran to two rooms. Butterflies, pharmacology, botanics and Away From the Flock, the sheep in formaldehyde. I was cooling off; now I had the chills.
And Basquiat. I really liked seeing the choice selection of Basquiat—what I mean to say is, selection of choice Basquiat, including this skull which not only is in the color-scheme of this post, but could be considered his signature piece and here it is in the Broad Collection which exemplifies what a choice collection this is, but more, brings home the point that this collection is now public. The Broads gave $60 million to LACMA to build the museum along with an arrangement to show their incredible collection of works. Wow.
Outside the museum there were Robert Irwin's palm trees, Jeff Koons tulips, and Chris Burden's Urban Light, an installation of antique lamp posts he rescued and refurbished and set up in a grid, shoulder to shoulder like. As a work of public art it is a whimsical gift to the city—a memory, no, actual, literal pieces of her past retrofitted, reworked, reimagined as a focal point, an illumined gathering together of individual beacons of light to be a community of lights. It is a sweet and humble 21st Century, West Coast answer to the torch-bearing lady of the New York harbor.
What a gift. I say, Bravo all around.
*images, except the last, courtesy of LACMA and the The Broad Art Foundation.
