a visit to the l.a. county museum

Another quick stop over the hol­i­days took the form of a visit to the Los Ange­les County Museum of Art.

Installed at the new main entrance is this bat­tal­ion of 202 antique street­lights, Urban Light, by artist Chris Bur­den. Street­lights like these of course were posi­tioned at curbs in straight lines, spaced reg­u­larly. Clus­ter­ing them together like this accen­tu­ates that fact, and to me makes the whole instal­la­tion seem maybe just a lit­tle bit militaristic.

Arranged behind the Bur­den piece are some palm trees, the first plant­i­ngs of what will be a large instal­la­tion of palms by Robert Irwin. Irwin is the design force behind the Cen­tral Gar­den at the J. Paul Getty Museum, but here the trees will read less like a sep­a­rate gar­den than plant­i­ngs inte­grated into the art and architecture.

Their trunks echo the posts of the street­lights, as does the fact that they’re planted in a reg­u­lar pat­tern. Also, as with the street­lights, they’re a col­lec­tion of dif­fer­ent kinds. A press release states: “Along with the palms, Irwin’s other medium is South­ern California’s light, and the species of palms have been spe­cially cho­sen to gather and reflect the inter­play of light and shadow native to L.A.” [ source ] I love Robert Irwin’s work [ here’s a sam­ple ], and I’ll be check­ing back on this instal­la­tion as time goes on.

The whole ver­ti­cal shaft thing becomes a theme around the Museum’s lat­est build­ing, the newish Broad Con­tem­po­rary Art Museum, which has red exte­rior accents, includ­ing plenty of red columns.

The land­scap­ing in this part of the museum is inter­est­ing in that it uses palms or flat plant­i­ngs. Vir­tu­ally no shrubs. It’s a pretty urban plant­ing that in part seems designed to give the home­less no place to camp.

Most hor­i­zon­tal sur­faces, using decom­posed gran­ite or this Turf­s­tone prod­uct, are designed as walk­a­ble exten­sions of the con­crete paving. Where does the land­scape end and the urban fab­ric begin?

Here’s an inter­est­ing gar­den­ing aside: The Muse­ums are located on the same big city block as the famed La Brea Tar Pits, where the ground oozes black, gummy tar, a sub­stance that has pre­served bones of saber­tooth tigers and woolly mam­moths from the last ice age that got too close to the stuff. Just imag­ine try­ing to gar­den where dig­ging a hole to plant a shrub might put you in con­tact with the deadly sludge! I have yet to pick up a gar­den book that even begins to dis­cuss what to do with this kind of soil prob­lem. While the park con­tain­ing the tar pits has a few gooey shoe-grabbing spots, these plant­i­ngs seemed free of the muck.

My main rea­son for vis­it­ing LACMA was to take in a photo exhibit that reassem­bles many of the works that were seen in the sem­i­nal 1975 “New Topo­graph­ics” exhi­bi­tion of land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy. These works in the show sig­naled a break from the more roman­tic takes on what land­scape pho­tos ought to look like and engaged a land where the human pres­ence reigned supreme.

One of my favorite pho­tog­ra­phers in the show, Robert Adams, often com­bines the roman­tic sub­lime with a cooler take on what the world really looks like. To the left is “Mobile Homes, Jef­fer­son County, Col­orado” from 1973 [ source ], a great exam­ple of what his eye sees. You get the sense in his work that the human land­scape often fails to live up to the stun­ning geog­ra­phy where it’s sited.

See­ing his work again prompted me to reread some of his Beauty in Pho­tog­ra­phy: Essays in Defense of Tra­di­tional Val­ues. (From this photo you can see that he takes “tra­di­tional val­ues” pretty broadly.) Here’s a quick snip­pet gar­den­ers and land­scape design­ers might like to think about.

Not sur­pris­ingly, many pho­tog­ra­phers have loved gar­dens, those places that Leonard Woolf once described as “the last refuge of dis­il­lu­sion.” Gar­dens are in fact strik­ingly like land­scape pic­tures, sanc­tu­ar­ies not from but of truth.

–from the essay, “Truth and Land­scape” in Beauty in Photography

In part­ing, let me move from beauty in pho­tog­ra­phy to beauty in art. Here’s a closeup of Urban Light, back­lit by the after­noon sun:


(For another exam­ple of Burden’s work, check out the instal­la­tion of 50,000 nickel coins and 50,000 match­sticks that the San Diego Museum of Con­tem­po­rary Art exhib­ited: The Rea­son for the Neu­tron Bomb.)

January 12 2010 | Categories: art • landscape • landscape design • photography • places • quotes | Tags: • • • • • • • • | 8 Comments »