Death To LACMA
Burn it Down
I’m sure the people who actually work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art are really fine, nice people. They work in the arts, for one thing. They’re all distressingly well-educated, for another. They put on really great programs for kids! (People tell me.)
But the museum itself is too big. It’s doughy, and bloated, and sluglike, and despite its new infusions of Eli Broad’s lovely money – and maybe even because of them – it hasn’t aged well. The new Serras in particular, sprawling Jabba-like over 20,000 square feet on the first floor of the new Broad Contemporary, are like sticking two lips filled with 200 tons of collagen each on a desperate and crazy lady’s melting face.
It looks like Janice Dickinson.
There are three possible hypotheses: like other brontosauruses, LACMA is so afraid of being outshone by the smart-alecky kids starting up in their garage that they get paralyzed (the General Motors model of abject failure); or they’re so goddamned arrogant they think their imprimatur alone is enough (our imploding friends at the L.A. Times); or they’re really kind of nuts and they molest the art (Roger Mahony and Mother Church).
Any or all of those are possible, and it really doesn’t matter.
What matters is that I want to punch LACMA in the nards.
That in itself is not necessarily LACMA’s fault – well, I mean, it is – so much as a quirk of criticism. The day I saw Broad’s new building, with its marvelous Cindy Shermans, its surprisingly pretty dead butterflies by Damien Hirst (an artist whose large glass box of flies feasting on rotted meat at the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s “Sensation” in ’97 marked the first time of far too many that I’ve written the phrase “punch [him] in the throat”) and its wretched everything else, I had already been on a date to the exquisite Norton Simon. I had walked that very morning among the Picassos and chunky Braques you see in your collection of garage sale art books. I had sighed myself silly over its Botticelli, its Fra Lippis and its (admittedly minor) Raphael. I had electrocuted myself on its Van Goghs, and rolled my eyes and power-walked through its never-ending collection of the stupid ballerinas of Degas. And now here I was at LACMA. Sure, there was a great stand of monstrous Giacomettis, like a copse of zombies instead of trees. And it had some nice Picassos its own bad self.
But I was wearing date shoes, so my feet already hurt, and the silly Koonses, the scribbly Basquiats, and the Serra-cotta (get it?) left me Greta Garbo-cold.
And now LACMA opens another exhibit, one five years in the making, and I attend the press preview promising myself I will be open, and though I hate LACMA and want to hurt it, I will be intellectually honest and liberal-minded and quick to change my preconceptions if faced with something less than lousy. And a curator at the press preview says “ineffable” and “reification” and “even unruly!” and then another curator says “This Chernobyl of an exhibit … a hurly-burly of sights and sounds!” before saying it was five years in the making, and just the inception of the germ of the kernel of the idea took 18 months, and Holy Stasis, Batman, sweet Jesus and good Christ!
And so “Phantom Sightings” is ours for the seeing.
The subtitle for “Phantom Sightings” is “Art After the Chicano Movement,” and it is right. There is no movement here, because the curators couldn’t even commit themselves to “the viability of race and ethnicity as a curatorial framework” while curating an ethnic exhibit. It’s the worst kind of pussyfooting, a pathetic inability to commit, the biggest kowtowing to an invisible (ineffable!) correctness. Chicanos are not all the same, they must have been keening to themselves, and that is true! Black people do not speak for all black people, either, no matter how many times Barack Obama is grilled about Harry Belafonte’s “traitorous” statements. I can also see the point in a postfeminist show, where nobody’s marching in lockstep, and that – the “post-” – is exactly the message. Hey, it’s unruly, a hurly-burly out there! But even in a postfeminist show, you’ll still have lots of paintings of ’gina, and if your thesis is that your artists’ names all end in ‘z,’ you’d best find the Latin equivalent of the universal cooch.
The hurly-burly of “Phantom Sightings” is not all trash (and trash can be perfectly pleasant, like one assemblage fashioned from the puffy foam that’s used to plug up rat holes, but which I probably really only liked because it reminded me fondly of 1995).
There are some perfectly compelling and evocative works – and just about all of them come from the heyday of the Chicano movement, ASCO (“nausea”), and 1974. Gronk and Gamboa, Herron and Valdez were sort of Chicano and post-Chicano at the same time, their proto-punk fuckery obliterating any movement earnestness. The L.A. and East L.A. scenes of the early ’70s were pretty avant fucking garde, and it’s to LACMA’s credit that it includes ASCO’s hilarious slashings and asshole murals, always surrounded by ashy concrete, their sly send-ups and “movies without film” that birthed the aesthetic of Repo Man and Eating Raoul. Especially since ASCO were the ones who tagged the museum the first time around, after a curator told them Chicanos didn’t make art – they joined gangs. But the big beautiful photographs of ASCO’s happenings give way to … well, some puffy rat hole foam; a couple of crowd-pleasing, Big Daddy Roth-style lowrider coffins; a hang glider jury-rigged, favela-style, out of GAP flags; some cardboard exhortations; and an “our influences” wall of cubbies of books. Mike Davis is represented in someone’s library, which is nice, and … that’s pretty much what’s nice about that. I’ve long been a fan of both Carlee Fernandez and Ken Gonzalez-Day, but here their work is missable. Series of photos by Christina Fernandez, of Laundromats seen through tagged windows, are perfect in their multiple layers that must be penetrated. Delilah Montoya – whose work I’m sure I also saw at Bergamot last week – presents panoramic photos of migrant campsites, eerily depopulated but for hastily abandoned detritus and water jugs hidden like Easter eggs. Between the two of them, they portray not a universality – they do not speak for all their kind – but certainly an element of the experience of a segment of their people. Both women give us work that’s lovely, personal, intrusive and meaningful.
And that’s … it.
Oh! Except for two black John McCracken-style resinated planks where one bends the other against the wall, whether for a police-style beat-down or a good rogering – or both! – I wasn’t able to determine, but either way (or both!) would have been just fine.
The rest of the exhibit is the hurly-burly, a cramming of objets into a warren of galleries in the hopes that you’ll be so overstimulated by the shiny things that you will not notice the gaping maw of emptiness, or the craptastic quality of much of the work. It’s throw-it-at-the-wall – and it will not change your mind.
It’s the same ethos that that turned LACMA’s “Made in California” (with one of the same co-curators, but I’m disinclined to place causation above correlation) into such a horrible muddle. There were floors upon floors upon floors in that 2001 exhibit, and all of them were loaded with orange juice crate labels and ’60s bikinis. The Light & Space guys, meanwhile (and repeat to yourself delightedly New York art snob Joseph Maschek’s bon mot about “hip, young, dropout types hanging out in Venice, California, making fancy baubles for the rich” as often as you want, they are still an integral part of California’s art history), were relegated to a calendar that showed pictures of the artists sitting in their cars. They had a Peter Alexander cloud box, but it was squeezed in amid so many period bathing suits and pictures of Muscle Beach that by the time you got to it, who the fuck could care?
Here at least John McCracken is fucking his own ass (maybe), and you have some lovely work, and you have ASCO and all their awesomeness. But when the sleeping giant awoke last May – for a minute, for a minute – you’d think LACMA might have noticed that there is still a viable curatorial framework for ethnic and racial identity, and that there’s nothing to be afraid of.
¡Si, se puede! and viva la, and while you’re at it, fuck tha police.
And burn the mother down.
Published: 04/09/2008
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Comments
This article read like Janice Dickinson. If there was a valid point to be made, it was undermined by the bloated, beyond-snarky writing. Just my opinion, but I think you could stand to be less in love with your own voice.
this is ridiculously bad writing.
this is a cover story?
this is at best commie girl, which from last week's story/blog is just as bad or worse.
the only saving grace last week? it wasn't a cover story.
please learn real journalism, practice on your own time or on your blog, and don't waste mine or the rest of l.a.citybeat's readership with this stream-of- consciousness b.s. you call writing. smoke your joint and your glass of red wine, hang out in orange county, and feed this commie girl babble to that population. strike that, don't feed this to anyone.
no one deserves this.
crying wolf like this will get you somewhere, but it won't get you far. please be controversial, but try to be a good writer and journalist first.
this is embarrassing.
-one of many disappointed readers
p.s. by the way, your site doesn't allow the word "s--t" but you do in the paper. funny.
quote from your very own website on my first post:
"Watch your mouth! The words "s--t" are not allowed here."
that's rich.
This doesn't make any sense! Who is this person??? I think she wrote something called Commie Girl last week and that didn't make any sense either.
She knows a lot of words, too bad she can't form a sentence.
You guys are all lah-dee-dah in your own damned existenstial hoo-hah with roof tingling mad mulligans and schizofied shenanigans. Who, would you opine, is the better abused substance that tars up the gummery and beats piecemeal puree on this Wonktown train? Um, no. It's all gravy, my random friend confided in me as I tripped nougat all over the crock pot that is the mise-en-scene at the illustrious "what-did-she-just-say?" hall of mirrors. You can shoop it, sister, but in the end, is that the point? Sheet. You know it.
That's what this story felt like to me. Except multiply it by a million words, then hit yourself on the hand with a hammer.
Yours,
WeeGee Manlove
The lack of journalism skills. This story does not have one quote in it and is horribly written. I know some journalists get off on pissing people off, but this is different.
The topic doesn't piss me off at all. It's the lack of skill, this reads like a bad essay.
i don't think this story lacks journalism skills. i think it describes the experience of going to lacma very cogently.
the word "arty" is a pejorative for a reason. when art places itself above the people, it loses its reason to be.
i agree that the norton simon is a much better museum. it's more accessible, has art that appeals to me much more than lacma's usual stuff.
personally, my favorite museum of all time was the "temporary contemporary". it never failed to make me laugh, think, enjoy, marvel at the stuff those artists thought of.
rebecca you have balls. good for you for puncturing the ego of self-aggrandizing folks.
power to the people!
f-kin' a! I hadn't picked up CityBeat in about a year -- I got so freaking sick of that dusty old LA Reader crew...glad they are gone. Rebecca welcome to LA....I think it took some real cahones to send this out on your first mission as Editor. Shake things up and burn them down, all the fat sacred cows across the City, all that sheeyat!
Congrats on the new gig Commie Girl.
The LACMA has always sucked and it still sucks and no matter how much money you throw at it, it will always suck. The only way to save it is to bulldoze it down and start new and get a better Art collection. I have been a Contempary Artist in the OC for over 30 years and when I want to see real Art displays I go to New York and see all the California Artist that are showing there. I stopped showing locally years ago. If you want to see a much better showing go to MOCA
After reading Rebecca Schoenkopf's Death to LACMA, I could not help but wonder at her educational background, professional credentials, and most of all about her word choices and metaphors. Then I could not fathom what editor would send the piece to print, until I saw the masthead list her as same, or acting as same, anyway.
This is not to defend LACMA but rather to contend that an arts review should be more than a laundry list of colorful adjectives and unqualified personal reactions. That it should be treated as a serious and meaningful pursuit, even when its subject is not. That grauitious profanity adds no punch to copy, and obscene slang is an even greater insult to your readership.
I believe in a free press, but free writing does not make for good reading.
This city needs more voices to offset the duopoly of Christopher Knight and Doug Harvey, but I implore our arts editors: when your writer froths at the mouth, be sure to filter the drivel and capture some content. And when your editor is your arts writer? Punch [the critic] in the throat, indeed.
Christine Leahey
Los Angeles, CA
The security guards at this museum are super aggressive. I've never experienced such intrusiveness. When I was at the "Phantom Sightings" exhibit, I sat down to look at some of the books on display. Just as I started to open one up, the guard came over to tell me to remember to put the book back where I got it after I finished. In another gallery I was looking at some paintings and making notes in my journal...the guard came over and asked if I was doing schoolwork and if I found everything I was looking for...it really was kind of distracting...in every gallery except one or two I felt like I was being stared down. Never experienced this...the Getty, the Hammer, the museums in NY, France, Italy...never felt this way.