Monday, February 25, 2008 – Geometric Isolation

Blame Mies van der Rohe. It was his austere Barcelona Pavilion, built in 1928-1929 and demolished in 1930, that started it all – the serene but blank spaces that frame things in a sort of wide-open but severe geometry. Paintings on the wall, sculpture on the floor, the big plant in the corner by the window wall – they all jump out in relief.  And you really see people – the open grids of space and light make them, as anomalies, hyper-real or something. Mies van der Rohe did say less is more, often, and maybe it is.  Much of the architecture of the following decades was based on what he was doing – all space and volume, without ornamentation, without humor, without comment.  It was the stunning stage, but not the play – one shouldn't confuse the two.  But we all discovered the grids were often cold and alienating places – they framed things wonderfully, or caged them.

So now we get the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum that opened on February 16, 2008, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) on Wilshire Boulevard.  The building is by Renzo Piano, who gave us the famous inside-out Centre Pompidou in Paris and, in Manhattan, the just-completed New York Times building.  This museum is all geometry, although Piano warms it up with all the grid work in Chinese red and the exterior clad in squares of Travertine marble that glows warmly in the sun.  And it is being surrounded by tall Imperial palms, with their odd organic geometry. Like the Paris museum, this one is playful – as noted in the Los Angeles Times' review, you enter from the top and work your way down, but then many an IKEA store is set up the same way.

Well, it's not 1930 – now we get playful austerity, and warm alienation. It's a bit confusing.

Just to keep you event more disoriented, in the plaza, "Firetruck" - Charles Ray, 1993 - painted aluminum, fiberglass and Plexiglas

From the Los Angeles Times – "Charles Ray is one of L.A.’s premier artists, but the disconcerting doppelgänger sculpture hasn’t been shown here before."

From the NYU News on this piece – "Ray makes a powerful comment on the illusory and reductive nature of our collective education."

Across the street, Act Deco lives on at what used to be a perfume shop –

If you wish to use any of these photos for commercial purposes I assume you'll discuss that with me. And should you choose to download any of these images and use them invoking the "fair use" provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976, please provide credit, and, on the web, a link back this site.

Technical Note:

Most of these photographs were shot with a Nikon D70 - using lens (1) AF-S Nikkor 18-70 mm 1:35-4.5G ED, or (2) AF Nikkor 70-300mm telephoto, or after 5 June 2006, (3) AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor, 55-200 mm f/4-5.6G ED. They were modified for web posting using Adobe Photoshop 7.0.  Earlier photography was done with a Sony Mavica digital still camera (MVC-FD-88) with built-in digital zoom.

All text and photos, unless otherwise noted, Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 - Alan M. Pavlik