HIGHLIGHT OF THE DAY: The cool LA Museum
BUMMER OF THE DAY: Can’t think of a single thing
WORD OF THE DAY: Matchbox cars
The day started at 1.30pm today with a drive to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Christy wanted to see an exhibition there that she had heard about involving over 1000 match box cars. Sounds awesome and to get a little culture while I was in LA sounded like a good idea. After we had parked, I would call this section of town Museum City. There are approximately 5 museums all next to each other that have been nurtured over the last 40 years. We had to walk past some food trucks on the way to the entrance and couldn’t help in stopping for a small bite to tide us over till dinner. The gourmet food truck craze that started in Los Angeles. Hundreds of gourmet food trucks are roving the Los Angeles streets, selling everything from Korean tacos to grilled cheese sandwiches, Indian street food to $12 hamburgers. They are a phenomenon and you can find them all around the city and at big events. They are pretty cool and they really do have a massive variety of food available. The only thing I don’t like is there generally aren’t any seats or tables, so whatever you buy has to be consumed standing up and if you have something tricky like tacos or something that requires knives and forks it could get a little awkward.
While we enjoyed our ‘truck’ food we were able to appreciate some outdoor art. It’s not often one spots pieces of the Berlin Wall along Wilshire Boulevard. A series of the panels (decorated by Berliners nearly two decades ago) rise on the lawn of 5900 Wilshire Boulevard. The exhibition is part of Culver City-based Wende Museum's commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Wall. The panels came from Berlin via boat--a trip that went through the Panama Canal---and arrived to Wilshire Boulevard via flatbed truck. There were a total of 10 panels will go up and the exhibition constitutes the largest concentration of Berlin Wall panels outside of Europe. The 11-foot-high panels, which were originally housed on a private property near Potsdamer Platz in Berlin and weren’t blocked off by any ropes. It was pretty cool to be standing and taking photos of what was an amazing part of history.
We crossed the road and then paid the 15AUD entry fee for the LACMA. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum in Los Angeles. It is the largest encyclopedic museum west of Chicago and attracts nearly one million visitors annually. Its holdings include more than 100,000 works spanning the history of art from ancient times to the present. In addition to art exhibits, the museum features film and concert series throughout the year. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art was established as a museum in 1961. Prior to this, LACMA was part of the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art, founded in 1910. Early trustee Howard F. Ahmanson Sr. made the lead donation of $2 million, convincing the museum board that sufficient funds could be raised to establish the new museum. In 1965, the museum moved to a new Wilshire Boulevard. Money poured into LACMA during the boom years of the 1980s, a reportedly $209 million in private donations during director Earl Powell's tenure. In 1994, LACMA purchased the adjacent May Department Stores building that increased the museum's size by 30 percent when the building opened in 1998.
The museum's best-attended show ever was "Treasures of Tutankhamen," which drew 1.2 million during four months in 1978. The 2005 "Tutankhamen and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs" drew 937,613 during its 137-day run. A show of Vincent van Gogh masterpieces from the artist's eponymous Amsterdam museum is the third most successful show, and a 1984 exhibition of French Impressionist works is fourth. LACMA's more than 100,000 objects are divided among its numerous departments by region, media, and time period and are spread amongst the various museum buildings.
Directly in front of the new entrance to LACMA on Wilshire Boulevard is Chris Burden's Urban Light (2008), an orderly, multi-tiered installation of 202 antique cast-iron street lights from various cities in and around the Los Angeles area. The street lights are functional, turn on in the evening, and are powered by solar panels on the roof of the BP Grand Entrance. It was an amazing photo to see so many street lights; it would be cool to have seen them lit up at night time. The outdoor exhibit we stopped at was the called the Penetrabile. The piece invites one to plunge into the colorful soft plastic tubing and regard the world from within a forest of glowing color. The piece required 20,000 linear feet of the specially manufactured plastic tubing, and a complete back up set is on hand to facilitate ongoing maintenance. There are between 2,000 and 2,500 tubes suspended from the overhead grid. It took two teams working 2.5 full days just to swap out the tubes, each of which was precut to the perfect length to rest lightly on the ground, resulting in a gentle bend that catches the light. It was a weird sensation walking through the tubes and as an afterthought, I wonder how hygienic, but I guess you don’t think about those things at the time.
After looking at a few exhibits just killing some time for the Metropolis exhibition. You can view the exhibit anytime, but the cars only run on a schedule over the course of the day, as they can’t be run all the time due to the heat caused during the operation. Chris Burden's Metropolis II is an intense and a complex kinetic sculpture, modeled after a fast paced, frenetic modern city. Steel beams form an eclectic grid interwoven with an elaborate system of 18 roadways, including one 6 lane freeway, and HO scale train tracks. Miniature cars speed through the city at 240 scale miles per hour; every hour, the equivalent of approximately 100,000 cars circulates through the dense network of buildings. According to Burden, "The noise, the continuous flow of the trains, and the speeding toy cars, produces in the viewer the stress of living in a dynamic, active and bustling 21st Century city." And it was just that. It was pretty noisy but oh so cool to see these 1000 cars shooting around on the road ways.
The newest work by renowned Los Angeles artist Sharon Lockhart (United States, born 1964) is a multimedia meditation on the achievements of Israeli dance composer and textile artist Noa Eshkol (Israel, 1924–2007). She discovered Eshkol’s groundbreaking work during a 2008 trip to Israel. Eshkol is best known for developing in the 1950s, with architect Avraham Wachman, the Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation (EWMN) system, which uses a combination of symbols and numbers to define the motion of any limb around its joint. Eshkol developed a dance practice based upon its simple structures. Lockhart filmed Eshkol’s aging students and a newer generation of dancers performing her choreography in an effort to bring her visionary work to light. Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol, conceived as a two-person exhibition, presents Lockhart’s five-channel film installation and series of photographs of EWMN spherical models, together with a selection of Eshkol’s carpets, scores, drawings, and other archival materials.
Our last stop was the Children of the Plumed Serpent: the Legacy of Quetzalcoatl in Ancient Mexico. It follows the historical trajectory of the life and epic stories of the culture-hero and deity, Quetzalcoatl. The exhibition examines the art and material objects of late pre-Columbian and early colonial societies across Mexico to explore Quetzalcoatl’s role as founder and benefactor of the Nahua-, Mixtec-, and Zapotec-dominated kingdoms of southern Mexico. These socially and culturally complex communities successfully resisted both Aztec and Spanish subjugation, flourishing during an era of unprecedented international entrepreneurship and cultural innovation. On view are painted manuscripts (codices), polychrome ceramics, textiles, and exquisite works of gold, turquoise, and shell that reflect the achievements of the Children of the Plumed Serpent. It was amazing to see how many Mexican looking people were walking through this large exhibit. Trying to see some of their own culture perhaps.
On our way to the car we past the La Brea Tar Pits that are part of the Page Museum. They are a cluster of tar pits around which Hancock Park was formed. Asphaltum or tar (brea in Spanish) has seeped up from the ground in this area for tens of thousands of years. The tar is often covered with dust, leaves, or water. Over many centuries, animals that were trapped in the tar were preserved as bones. The George C. Page Museum is dedicated to researching the tar pits and displaying specimens from the animals that died there. The La Brea Tar Pits are now a registered National Natural Landmark. Tar pits are composed of heavy oil fractions called asphaltum, which seeped from the earth as oil. In Hancock Park, crude oil seeps up along the 6th Street Fault from the Salt Lake Oil Field, which underlies much of the Fairfax District north of the park. The oil reaches the surface and forms pools at several locations in the park, becoming asphalt as the lighter fractions of the petroleum biodegrade or evaporate. The tar pits visible today are actually from human excavation. The lake pit was originally an asphalt mine. The other pits visible today were produced during the 1913–1915 excavations, when over 100 pits were excavated in search of large mammal bones. They smelt like a new road being laid and for effect they have some large mammoths walking on the edges of the tar pit. It looks quite authentic except for the large wire fence that runs the perimeter of the tar pits for safety. It was fascinating to see the pits bubbling away in the middle of a massive city like LA.
By the time we left the museum it was after 5pm and the guys wanted me to try one of the best burgers in town at Fathers Office which is an upscale pub featuring craft beer and wines. You aren’t allowed to make any changes to the menu as their slogan is ‘No Substitutions’ and with a hamburger and sweet potato fries that arrived were absolutely delicious. They had a wall of beers on tap but I couldn’t see an Australian beer, but Eric said they would definitely have one there somewhere. It was a funky little place and it was our last meal as a ‘family’ as Eric heads to Cannes tomorrow and Christy back to work. I tried to change my ticket to come home earlier but the flights on Monday go via Sydney at an additional cost of 170AUD. I wasn’t too worried about the cost, but to go through Sydney? I was over air travel and after 14 hours the last thing OI wanted was to have a 3 hour layover and then an additional 1.5 hour flight to Brisbane. So I am just going to chill at the Brown residence for the next 3 days. Christy mentioned about borrowing the Audi and going for a spin which I declined in a micro second. Firstly it’s an Audi (a very nice one), secondly I haven’t driven for 15 months and thirdly they drive on the opposite side of the road. Add all that and just oozes disaster right!! I have some ‘office work to do to keep me busy and after 450 days, 3 days of guilt free rest at home is always welcome. I think I am a little tired.
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