June Gloom has moved in 18 days after the start of the namesake month. Fashionably late. Without the Los Angeles light prying open my eyes these mornings can drag. It’s comfortable, cozy, but late in the week on a Thursday runs the risk of derailment. Toss my machine in a bag, out the door and into the haze.
A cup of drip coffee from Loquat begins offsetting the grogginess. Turning right on Wilshire towards Miracle Mile, you first see it from a distance. A concrete slab spanning the boulevard, protruding into the flow of traffic below, drawing the eye above.
Sitting beside a shallow pool of water as security chases toddlers away from the edge. A cluster of kinetic works by Calder sway in the breeze. Michael Govan walks past. The fog begins burning off.
I like the building. It appeals to my appreciation of simple form and simple material use. The attributes that draw me towards works like those of Ando and Schindler. You see more by doing less.
This sense ends once entering the space. Once attempting to look at the work contained within it. The building overpowers it all. Viewing work against the unfinished concrete walls strains the eye. Robert Irwin, when producing large abstract canvases nine miles to the west and sixty years in the past, fell into an obsession with cracks in the wall. The effect it had on the perceptual quality of the work. This building would be his fucking nightmare. It’s pretty close to mine.
The glass facade fills the space with natural light. I prefer viewing work this way, but only when diffused from above. The DIA Beacon sets the gold standard. But from the side? No. Oil canvases become unviewable due to glare. LACMA tries addressing this with fine drapes, strategically missing in areas as to not obscure the view of the surrounding hills. A complex and distracting moire pattern appears when drapes overlap.
Wandering the floor leads to disjointed confusion. One moment you’re looking at Egyptian artifacts, one wrong turn and you’re confronted by Monet. It becomes evident that the openness of the space has been designed around the view outside the volume, not what’s on view inside the volume. Line of sight for the camera takes priority over the seeing the work. Los Angeles truly is the land of the image, no exceptions found here.
As disorienting as this missing linearity is, sometimes luck finds you. Around another corner a Studebaker sits in the sunlight in cherry condition. Beside it a low plinth covered in layers on layers of auburn lacquer. Flecks in the paint reflecting the horizontal rays in all directions. Outside the exterior glass, parking lots full to the brim. A room dedicated to Finish Fetish hovering above gridlock traffic on Wilshire Boulevard… I’m into it.
Continuing to meander, I hook a left. “Plastic ‘is in essence the stuff of alchemy’, wrote French cultural critic Roland Barthes in 1957, invoking the malleable material’s almost infinite transmutability.” The wall text a pleasant surprise. “Plastic” is my favorite essay by Barthes, and I think of it frequently concerning material use. Specifically when designing interfaces for screens.
The room was full of plastic objects, many produced in Southern California. A breastplate cast in plastic by Issey Miyake. A naturally unnatural object to exhibit in Los Angeles, the land of plastic tits. The air conditioning gently excites a dangling tapestry. Nylon monofilament, multi-layered nylon micro-slit film, aluminum vacuum-coated polyester, titanium-oxide vacuum coated micro-slit film. Now that’s the stuff.
Small Cloud Box refracts the dim overhead light. A cast resin cube by Peter Alexander. June gloom, in a cube, in a room, in a museum, in June gloom.
Exiting down the stairs back to street level. My last time seeing “Smoke” by Tony Smith was when performing beneath it over a decade ago during an evening of Dublab Programming. It was the focal point when entering the original William L. Pereira structure. I remember being instructed to carefully negotiate movement around it. Now installed outside, fresh bird shit bakes in the afternoon sun on the tessellated black surface.
I like the building. It’s terrible for viewing work. A building for the image—one to take, one to see.
Cross the courtyard and up the escalator to the Broad contemporary. Magritte’s “The Treachery of Images (This is not a Pipe)” on the opposing wall. Part of the permanent collection, I had first seen it shortly after moving to Los Angeles. A pipe painted on a canvas, with the words “this is not a pipe.” I remember reading about it. “An image is simply a representation of an object, not the thing itself.” This was a new idea to me. A simple but true one. Seeing it now, I think of how often a thing is confused for something it isn’t, and how this confusion moves and changes through history.
“The Treachery of Intelligence”
The Guston hits. Love to see Sol Lewitt. I’ve never seen a copper Judd wall box. A canvas with three horizontal lines. Two white, one yellow. Robert Irwin. “I painted a total of twenty lines of a period of two years of very, very intense activity.” The best. I hadn’t seen any Bob since some scrims at the Dia. “Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees” is an all time favorite. Don’t call it a pipe? Don’t call it intelligence? Just see.
Ducking behind a black curtain into a room, feeling my way along the edge. The room is hot, loud, and deeply dark. Towering machines with light spilling out of them consume miles of film on display, zig-zagging all over the place. The mechanical complexity and precision of these old analog machines reveal the mechanics of the image. I’ve never seen analog projectors of this scale in person or this close. I see what inspired Paul Virilio when writing “War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception.” How the mechanical advancements of the automatic machine gun made possible the motion film camera.
At least twenty minutes have passed since entering the room before looking at the images being projected. Violent images, none of them real. All just images. Instead I watch the volumetric light made visible in the haze.
War and cinema. War and intelligence. This is all playing out as the government puts export controls on Fable, revoking access to Anthropic’s flagship model. Seeing a thing for what it is can be quite hard in the moment. I exit the gallery, and back to Wilshire.
I like the building. It’s terrible for viewing the work, experiencing the work. It follows the logistics of the image, like many others. Despite this, the work it contains remains vital. In this case it’s the content, not the container.
