Los Angeleno Joni Mitchell wrote Free Man in Paris for and about her close friend David Geffen, inspired by his complaints about the pressures of the music business. In it, she sings, “You can’t please them all, there’s always somebody calling you down.” And so it is, true again, about his new David Geffen Galleries at LACMA, which opened in May.
The massive, amoeba-shaped concrete structure that seems to float and crosses Wilshire Blvd. has become LA’s latest Rorschach, especially among architects, designers, and artists—people with qualified taste and opinions. “I hate it,” one native said. “This looks scary bad,” quipped another from out of state. Neither had been—the book judged by its cover. Even people who admire Brutalism complain about its sheer amount of exposed concrete. Meanwhile, the money people question its high cost: roughly $724 million for less gallery space.
But what you can’t tell by the exterior is how revolutionary architect Peter Zumthor’s new creation is—a gamechanger for the art world, museum aficionados, LA traffic, and in some loose paleontological way, the La Brea Tar Pits, which still bubble across from it. Inside its sprawling galleries, viewers won’t feel like they’re viewing art so much as living with it. They can sneeze on most pieces by proximity—few are under glass and fewer still are roped off. This proximity changes the viewer’s relationship to the viewed. It’s as if the art has been brought out of the morgue, out of the sterile environments, or dethroned from pedestals. This informal, yet smartly curated staging generates a sense of equality and familiarity between the museumgoer and the collection. It’s decorative in the best way possible, like art in homes or studios, no matter how humble or grand the collection where they sit or hang as part of one’s day-to-day.
The handsomely stained concrete in smaller galleries also presents art as if it were part of a living room or study, with maroon, black, and cobalt blue hues supporting the work in rich, seductive colors. Art hangs or stands before these walls like a layer within something greater; gone is the sense of a sterile display on a white wall under a white spotlight.
The shapes and spaciousness of the gallery’s walkways create an experience of flow—full-body participation through space—a space framed by windows that allow the exterior and interior to merge, another new relationship within this experience. The view outside complements or juxtaposes the chosen artwork inside, at times becoming as interesting and entertaining as the exhibition. Art is reclaimed by the world in which it was made, the pedestal shattered but its dignity intact, made more realistic. Both the exterior and interior seem to reshape the city, the culture, the zeitgeist around them. And the city looks back through its floor-to-ceiling thinly veiled windows, revitalizing the art as if giving it a new lease on life.
The same is true of the curation and exhibition, which scrambles time—art history—history. By positioning classical, traditional, and contemporary art in seemingly random, almost casual displays, art is ushered into the present tense. The ultimate way the past can truly exist—right here, right now—held by the viewer’s gaze and made more alive by the closeness of their breathing bodies. It’s as if museumgoers have become the museum’s living archives, as if the vault door has been left open. Time is transformed, freed from the boundaries of gallery cubicles and artificial lighting. Sunshine walks the outer gallery and exhibits alongside children, artsy types, and elderly couples.
In the Polynesia: Our Sea of Islands gallery, a vertical video screen showcases Samoan/Japanese artist Yuki Kihara performing a taualuga—a Samoan ceremonial dance. The video montage captures precise hand gestures in a quick-edit format. The monitor is sandwiched between two framed barkcloth textiles known as tapa, which serve a variety of functions, from wearable ponchos and garments to room dividers. It’s this juxtaposition of digital performance with traditionally framed textiles that brings viewers into a fresh relational experience with both art forms.
Around another corner, West African artist El Anatsui’s Fading Scroll, 2007, woven from discarded bottle caps, does the same, appearing to fold around the corner itself, spanning one wall and part of another, thus existing on two different planes.
More than curating an exhibit, the architecture, exhibition design, and curation have created a woven experience—a tapestry of riches—while at the same time creating something subversive for the museumgoer: gently forcing us to move past periods and styles of art that our preferences and prejudices may naturally avoid or ignore, causing us to reconsider and give something dismissed a second chance. But if you prefer galleries, history, even memory to be presented in a linear fashion, removed from the environment, sanctified from the ordinary—or if you experience time as linear rather than as concentric circles continually overlapping—then the Geffen Galleries probably aren’t for you.
It is exactly this desire to create an experience that has always motivated former cabinetmaker and preservationist turned Pritzker Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor—who has astonishingly built relatively few buildings, accepting only commissions with which he feels a kindred connection. Although his accolades rest on a relatively small body of work, his lifelong obsession with working with wood, stone, concrete, and light defines every creation.
Of those few structures in his portfolio, Therme Vals is considered one of the greatest buildings of the last half-century, where every ray of light, reverberating echo, and reflection has been precisely choreographed by Zumthor. Movement, sound, smell, touch, temperature, and light are the dancers he stages, not just form. And like dance, it’s the experience, the movement through that experience, that we remember—regardless of how we feel about the amount of concrete.
In the same song, Mitchell imagines Geffen wanting nothing more than to walk through the doors and wander. More than fifty years later, he’s built the doors—and invited the rest of us to wander with him.
David E Moreno
