Does L.A's Bold New LACMA Museum Work?

0:01You have all of these myriad pathways. The museum is not a grid. They shoot off in every direction. So yes, it's designed to get lost. And so if you go in without any idea about what you expect to see, I think it can be a very rewarding experience, like where to see where these paths take you.

0:21I'm Ben Davis, and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News.

0:32Los Angeles has a new museum, or a new vision for an old one. One of the most important museums in the country, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has just debuted a long-awaited new building. It's designed by the revered Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. It cost three-quarters of a billion dollars to realize, and long before it opened to the public last month, it was controversial for a whole host of reasons. It debuts with LACMA's charismatic director, Michael Govan, promising not just a new LACMA, but a new vision for how museums show art and relate to the public. I went out to Los Angeles to see for myself what it was all about last month, and I could think of no better person to talk about it with than Carolina Miranda.

1:15Miranda has the gift of being both a sharp observer of L.A. art and a gifted translator of sometimes esoteric museum and architecture debate to the public. She has just published an analysis of Zumthor and Govan's vision for CityLab called For Better or Worse, The New LACMA is an Instant L.A. Icon. And she is here with me today to talk about what LACMA means for the city and for museums now. Carolina, thanks for being here. Ben, thank you so much for having me. This is so fun. So I thought that I'd start with just L.A. As long as I have you here and you really are someone who I follow to get the lowdown on what's going on in L.A.

1:57So I just wanted to know what's the general conversation in the L.A. art scene about right now? I think the conversation in L.A. is much like the conversation everywhere else right now, which is the market is soft and how will small and midsize galleries survive in a climate of expensive art fairs and blue chip art galleries swooping into the city to open up locations. One artist put it to me. He's like, it seems like people have budgets for$3 million paintings, but they don't have budgets for$3 ,000 paintings. So that whole sort of lower tier of the gallery ecosystem, I think, finds itself pretty challenged at this moment.

2:42And you've seen in the wake of the fires, the closures of some important spaces like the box in the Arts District in downtown LA, which was run by Mary McCarthy, Paul McCarthy's daughter, you know, a space that has been around for 19 years that he has effectively subsidized. Well, the entire family lost their homes in the Eaton Fire in Altadena. Running the gallery while also trying to basically rebuild their personal lives from the ground up has proven too much of a, I think, a time and a financial challenge. And so that gallery just had its last show with an exhibition of Wally Hedrick's work.

3:20So it's a challenged time. And I think the debates that are being had here are similar to the debates being head everywhere else. Yeah, I mean, I guess there's a whole Angelito's joke about New Yorkers perpetually discovering L.A. It's like, oh, it's about to be L.A.'s moment. It's like, well. There's a great blog run by William Poundstone called Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, and he has a running column where he excerpts quotes from publications talking about how it's finally L.A.'s cultural moment. You know, L.A. finally makes it. And they go all the way back to the 60s. Basically, since the 1960s, this story about L.A.

3:57finally making it has been written over and over. Yeah. And I guess LACMA is part of that story, right? Going back to that time. Exactly. 1965. Which you get into in your article. So in terms of LACMA and, you know, Michael Govan, who's one of the most, I think, watched museum directors in the country, kind of a superstar, came out there, I don't know, a decade ago, more than that, with big plans for LACMA. And so how does this opening of the Zumthor Museum fit into this moment? Well, I think, you know, this has been Michael's baby. He joined the museum, I forget the exact year, but it was in the early aughts.

4:39And there had already been plans sort of sketched out of replacing this trio of William Pereira buildings that date to the 1960s. And that had never been architecturally remarkable. They kind of looked like department stores. They kind of felt like department stores. I actually worked in a William Pereira design department store. And I always used to kid around that going to LACMA felt like, you know, Near East Art on three, ladies undergarments on four. Like they definitely had a very department store vibe. And so there had been plans dating back to the late nineties. There had been a competition at one point.

5:17Rem Koolhaas plan had been put forth to raise all of those structures, build a new museum. Michael came on board and took over that process. The 2008 recession delayed all of that. And I think at that moment, Michael took the opportunity to kind of rethink the plans from scratch. And that's when it was after then that he started to approach Zumthor with the idea of doing something for LACMA. So this has been something that he has been working on since he got here. And, you know, Michael is one of those directors, you know, who wants to build. And building not just a new museum or an expansion was not enough.

6:00It had to be something that felt very new, very different, iconic, that would do strange things, which includes being built in the shape of a blob and straddling Wilshire Boulevard and rethinking the nature of art. And so this has been his baby and it is finally open. So that's when the real verdict is going to happen. So Peter Zumthor, the architect who is behind this kind of a wizardly figure, I take it? Shamanic. I like the word shamanic. Something like that. For people who've never been at the Zumthor Museum, which I should say includes me, except for the new LACMA, what's he known for? Why is it important to people that this figure did the museum?

6:44He's Swiss. He's a Pritzker Prize winner. So he's quite well known within the architecture community, if not that well known in the United States. And I have not been to his European museums either. Believe it or not, I don't jet set to Europe on the regular on my freelancer salary. Go figure. But he is known for these museum spaces like the Kunsthaus, Bergens in Austria that are kind of these temple like spaces. He works a lot with brute concrete and light and these very sort of austere, simple, minimalist spaces to show art. Now, mind you, the spaces he has worked on are far smaller than LACMA.

7:26So, for example, Kunsthaus Bergens, if I'm not mistaken, it's something like I want to say in the vicinity of 30 to 32 ,000 square feet. This LACMA building, the galleries alone are 110 ,000 square feet and the entire construction is like 340 ,000 square feet. So this is a massive structure. And so it's bigger than anything he's ever done. In Switzerland, in the mountains, apparently it's supposed to be like, you know, the kind of place where you take your shoes off when you go in, you know, a little bit like entering a temple itself and known for that style of architecture. Yes. Intimacy. Intimacy.

8:01The New York Times' architecture critic reviewed the new space. It was a rave review, and he ends that review talking about an experience he had in this chapel space that Zemther had done in Europe that's, I gather, some sort of like teepee made out of logs that has like a very interesting like burnt wood finish. Basically what he did in that chapel is he put a bunch of logs in a pile, put concrete around the logs, then burnt the logs so the logs are no longer there. And what you have is the interior of this chapel space that's in a field with a skylight above where the logs once were. And, you know, the sides of the concrete are kind of singed.

8:39They have that patina from the fire. So, you know, these very unusual processes. It sounds very artistic. I mean, it sounds essentially like an artwork. But I guess what I was going to say is I couldn't tell whether Kimmelman, the critic, was like reading back from that experience into the LACMA that sort of had that context of these other sacred experience he'd had with this architecture and was kind of reading that into this space. Yeah. I think there may be some of that in the criticism of this building. You raise a really good point because I have not experienced any Zumthor buildings. And so this is my Zumthor experience.

9:13So you could say I came to the slate pretty clean. so the design you mentioned the scope of this new museum lacma is a big deal i mean it is a civic institution a civic centerpiece for los angeles there's city money in the building it was very controversial in the lead-up i would even say in a certain sense there's a certain part of the la arts and architecture scene that are almost invested in it not working out um what were the controversies. Oh, gosh, there are so many controversies. How much time we got? I think I would start with the process. You know, it's the L.A. County Museum of Art. The museum is subsidized to a large degree by taxpayers.

9:56They get thirty three, thirty four million dollars a year, which is about a third of their budget, a quarter to a third, depending on what year you're looking at from the taxpayers. So this is a county space and there was no public process. There was no competition. There was no presentation of plans because Peter does not do competitions. It was like Michael and Peter working together to design this museum kind of in private. You know, it only became public once there was a design to show. And then the environmental impact report is when we found out that, oh, the building was smaller. It's going to be a different color.

10:31It's going to be this. It's going to be that. So the process was not very public, which is weird for what is essentially a public museum. So there's that. In the Kimmelman piece, there's a very funny part where he describes like being present when Zumthor is like pitching to the board and kind of like wowing them with like his like almost like outsider architect energy. And like they're not paying attention. And he like throws a paper on the floor or something and they all lean in. I thought that was a wild detail. Well, that goes back to the cult of the shamanic. Yeah, yeah. Around Zumthor. So I think there was, yeah, there was the process, which was very closed.

11:05There was the question of the building's shape, which people were like, how exactly is this going to work? Initially, the design was all contained on the north side of Wilshire Boulevard. But there was a moment where the building extended over Wilshire and dropped a foot onto the south side of Wilshire onto a property that LACMA owned and that had been a parking lot. And there was a lot of controversy around that. One, because it meant that the museum would A, now be crossing a public street. Two, would be abutting a bunch of apartment buildings. And three, it raised the question of that sort of financial decision.

11:41You know, property in this part of Los Angeles in Mid-Wilshire, the Miracle Mile, is very, very valuable. Would it make more sense to maybe save that property and use it as a money generating engine for the museum or for some sort of other structure or their offices? LACMA now has to rent offices because the new building does not have space for their offices. So there was a lot of controversy around how that old parking lot was being used and what it would mean financially for the museum. Listen, I grew up going to LACMA. LACMA was one of the museums you went to on your field trips as a kid. If you grew up in L.A.

12:15in the 70s and 80s, you went to the L.A. County Museum of Art. You went to the Tarpets next door. It's like part of growing up here. And I felt a certain love for the museum as an institution I grew up with. But the Pereira buildings were not good buildings. But there were some people that really felt fondly about them and did not want to see them torn down. So I would say that was a little bit of the controversy. And then I think like with any expansion project, any building project of the scale, there's the question of price and what is that going to mean for the museum? Because, of course, all of these projects are always more expensive than they start out being.

12:55It is an interesting moment, as you've already alluded to, for such a mega expensive museum expansion to come out. And you talk about this in your City Lab piece that, I mean, we're almost at the end of this kind of moment of thinking about museums where they're in constant expansion mode. They always have to be big things, which, as I perceive it, is almost more about fundraising. It's like museums constantly have to be growing or just the rich people lose interest in funding them. So you're just like constantly waving new shiny objects in front of them. And I think it's pretty widely understood that that's not healthy.

13:33There is also the question, though, of the size of the galleries, correct? Your former colleague Christopher Knight, the recently retired L.A. Times art critic, won the Pulitzer Prize for his criticism of the new design of LACMA. I mean, people who have been a very generative project for everybody. People who haven't been following this should know. I mean, like, it's really controversial to the point where it's like award winning controversy. So what was that debate? So LACMA has been on this like piecemeal expansion since the 80s. I mean, one of the things I write in my story is that if there's one ongoing tradition that you can count on in L.A.

14:12is like LACMA continuously rebuilding itself and adding things. And historically, those things have not added up to a lot. I feel like there's a lot of frustrated architecture on that campus and they have done a bunch of Renzo piano expansions. There's a pavilion for Japanese art by Bruce Goff. One of the buildings that was torn down was a pavilion designed by Hardy Holtzman Pfeiffer. And what happened is when they tore down the Pereira buildings and the Hardy Holtzman Pfeiffer, the idea was to replace it with more gallery space than those buildings collectively contained. But then it came out when the environmental review report was released and the building design had been updated that actually the new building would have 10 ,000 square feet less of gallery space than the buildings it was replacing.

15:01So what Michael says to this is that actually LACMA has expanded in a million other ways. We have more gallery space than we did in 1965. There's two Renzo piano additions. So cumulatively, there is more space than there was when the building opened, but it did lose some gallery space with the new design. And it also, and this is something not a lot of people talk about, which I think is, I would say is more controversial than losing 10 ,000 square feet of gallery space, is that they lost their offices. Their offices used to be in the LACMA building. Now they're in a building across the street that they have to rent.

15:39So that represents an additional expense. And I also think there's something to be said for museum staff really being in their building, like as part of their daily life, you know, walking through the gallery, seeing something that may be off, getting ideas. And so being in a remote office and not being included in this very expensive structure seems like a shame. Yeah, it's interesting. Those are things that the spectacle of it, you can't see that kind of like manifest at the level of the lived experience of the building. And it makes me think that, yeah, there's a difference between how a building functions as a museum for the public and how it functions for the workers and the people there.

16:18So for people who haven't been, what is it? It's sort of, you know, an homage to L.A. in the sense that it sort of evokes the form of a Starcotec designed freeway overpass in a certain sense. Exactly. There's that. I think also in its blob form, Zumthor was trying to nod to the La Brea tar pits next door. So one of the amazing things about this museum is that L.A.'s forefathers had the incredible vision to put their priceless art objects next to a tar pit. And so La Brea tar pits are right next door. And that is another site that I grew up going to. It's very important to Angelenos. It's a very beloved site.

16:58Every kid does a school trip there. If you have kids, you're taking them to the tar pits. It's surrounded by parkland. So it's an area that's very well inhabited and used. And what had happened with the old buildings, with the Pereira buildings, is that all of those buildings gave their back to that park area and to the tar pits and kind of ignored it. Even though they're all in the same park, it was hard to travel from LACMA to the tar pits because of the way that the buildings were built. You used to have to walk out to Wilshire or walk north and make these huge loops. Even though they're right next to each other, you couldn't easily go from one to the next.

17:33So I think Zumthor, in looking at the site and this crazy ancient paleontological thing that we have in the middle of our city, he in some ways took the forms of the building from that. There's right next to LACMA in the tar pits is a big tar lake. It's actually a lake pit. It's not just tar. It has tar in it, but it's mostly water. And it's surrounded with plantings that evoke the era that all of this tar was beginning to come to the surface. So it's this kind of wild, prehistoric site. And LACMA had always ignored it. And I think one of the interesting things that Peter did here is that he was like, no, this is super weird and amazing.

18:14Like, let's build a building that not only evokes that shape, but looks upon it. Like now the museum really engages that site and it's much easier to travel between the two. Or it will be once all the construction fences come down. It floats in the air. You ascend to the museum through a staircase or elevators, so everything kind of happens in the air, but then it's all one level. So it's just this single, long promenade of art that you're walking through constantly in the presence of a window, although there are many galleries of different kinds placed down the center of it.

19:00I did find it a pleasurable experience, you know. What was your take on it? You know, I've reported on some of the financial issues around this building when I was at the LA Times. So as a good reporter, always like skeptical of some of the lines I'm being fed about the building. But I really wanted to approach it with an open mind, not only for what this represented architecturally, but what it might represent artistically. I think I found some really remarkable moments. Yeah, the old buildings were very hermetic. You were in these like kind of airless spaces. You never knew what time of day it was.

19:35You didn't know the tar pits were next door. And this building really embraces the city around it. And I talk about that in my story. That said, some of the art works better in this context than others. So, for example, the sculpture looks great. These Roman statuary, Egyptian busts, Assyrian bas-reliefs, some of the pre-Columbian artifacts, some ancient water vessels, they all look great in that daylight. Those are pieces of art that are just begging for daylight. And then as the light shifts, you know, they cast different shadows. And there's a real dynamism to looking at that kind of art in those conditions.

20:16That's what it was designed for. Other things that are, say, covered with glass, not so much. There are a number of works that are covered with glass on that perimeter surrounded by the windows. And you literally can't see the work because there is so much glare. I was standing before a vitrine of Mesoamerican stone objects that you literally had to put your nose up to the vitrine to be able to see the work. And then when you do that, then the guard comes over and is like, don't do that. And I was like, I don't know how this is going to work in the long term. I got to agree with you there. And I don't know if that sounds like nitpicking to people, but you got to see the space.

20:55It's full of just like beautiful L.A. sunshine. But that does have this glare problem. I mean, it is like unbelievable how hard it is to see things under the glass cases when you're looking at little pottery shards or something and you're like squinting at them. And then, yeah, I got to say, one of the big highlights of the new installed collection is that Francis Bacon triptych, like an extremely famous and important donation to the museum. It's like, I don't know, it's worth over a hundred million dollars or something like that. But these are like grim paintings. They're kind of like they're set on this wall in this like blazing sunlight with a bench in front of them and nothing around them.

21:32And I'm just not sure seeing a grim tortured Francis Bacon in the full blazing L.A. sunlight. I don't know. Maybe it's interesting context. I thought it was a little weird. You know, I think with the Bacons, it also depends on the time of day because I went back to report my story. And so at the time that I was back, there was a lot of glare on those paintings and you had to stand at an angle to them in order to view the images. is. An interesting thing about the museum is that you go in just a couple of steps in this museum from that sort of like beachy sun to like these internal galleries that sometimes I think there's a little overstated maybe I don't know if you've reconsidered but I know that you said and you saw the early design for the museum you said Salvadorian mega prison was the reminding of I wouldn't say that, but I mean, they feel like you're underground for sure.

22:29Yeah, they're tomb-like because I saw them initially without any art installed. Some of the walls are tinted now. Yeah. And so all I saw was just concrete space, concrete space, concrete space. And when I say concrete space, I mean concrete floor, concrete walls, concrete ceiling. Like you are in a bunker and it felt very carceral. It feels subterranean for sure. Yeah. And that has been softened by some of the pigments that they've installed. And now there's lighting, there's art. It does not feel carceral anymore. But some of the spaces definitely feel very tomb-like. You know, and like I said in my review, some work does well in this kind of atmosphere.

23:06Maybe like Baroque artifacts, Tibetan temple textiles. You know, artifacts that were kind of meant to be seen in these kind of gloomy, dim spaces look great. Other art, not so much. There's this gallery that features work made with plastic and there's all of these light and space works and they just look sad. They look like they're being crushed. It's in a charcoal black room. When you have charcoal black walls and a black floor and a cement ceiling, light does not bounce. Light is absorbed. And so these pieces that are supposed to be translucent and feel dynamic and be about color and sensation just feel like they're being drowned by these very dim galleries.

23:55There was another gallery that featured some Latin American kinetic art, and it did look a little like it was in prison. Well, Govan's response to that is they have the chance to tinker with it and experiment and they're going to work on it. Maybe you can swap the Francis Bacon with the light and space art and then, you know, everything lines up. No, exactly. I mean, I understand. They're getting to know this building and it's going to take a minute. But there are architectural aspects of it that are going to make that complicated. One of that is that the building is just surrounded on every side by windows.

24:34There is not one place that doesn't have windows. And that is a feature, not a bug. And that's going to be, as a curator, I think rather difficult to work with. You know, there's an artist-made curtain designed by Reiko Sudo that's quite lovely, but it doesn't do enough to filter the glare. So is that going to mean a heavier curtain? I don't know. There are places where the transition from light to dark is just really sudden. You know, there's a point where you're like in the Dutch paintings gallery, like you're looking at a Rembrandt. And if you shift slightly to the right, you've got daylight streaming into your eyes from the windows.

25:06I mean, that is part of the architecture. Like there were aspects of that design that I think did not really think through fully those transitions from dark to light and light to dark again. What do you make of the fact that the views are so important? I mean, I feel like it's something that you like best about this museum and this connection to the surrounding environment and so on. I think it's definitely part of the experience of the museum is that you are up in the air, you're surrounded by amazing art, but you're also just like constantly have these view lines to the environment around it.