At times it is only the remnants of memory we later deem
worthiest of our consideration. I tend to see art in waves, doing
the “gallery walk,” “museum crawl,” or
such. I’m sure that’s not unusual amongst
contemporary art patrons. The Sunday in question, January 9th, I
was initially drawn to visit the LACMA by the final exhibition
day of the exhibit, “Olmec: Colossal Masterworks of Ancient
Mexico.” A panel discussion on race and origin of the Olmec
evoked passionate, polarized debate.
The Olmec people had loomed large in my imagination since I
learned of their culture in my college art history introduction
course taught by the legendary late Bob Loescher at the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago. For those of you who don’t
already know, the Olmec are a pre-Mayan people known for
sculpting gigantic stone heads, found as relics in the southern
Gulf Coast of Mexico in 1925. I always enjoyed imaging a bunch of
archaeologists stumbling into big stone heads in the middle of
the jungle in the 1920’s. I confess, I had built up a lot
of expectation over the “gigantic” aspect of the
sculpture, so much so that when I actually saw the heads they
couldn’t live up to my own mental hype. However, when you
remember the scale of everything else at the time that these were
being made, and that they were produced by hand in the middle of
such an early society in a “public sculpture” sort of
way; The sculptures had meaning which was both spiritual to the
society members as well as integrated into their daily lives.
They didn’t have skyscrapers or billboards. So they
probably seemed “bigger” in that sense, originally.
They are still very cool. And if you missed them in Los Angeles,
you can see the whole show at the
DeYoung Museum through May 8th.
I found myself seduced by an adjacent show, Fashioning Fashion,
in the Resnick Exhibition Pavilion. (For an example from the
show, click
here.)
Wandering into the three-story BCAM building (the Broad
Contemporary Art Museum) I first walked through a maze between
the snail-like angular, weighty rusted walls of the truly
monumental Richard Serra dyad of Sequence (all
two-hundred-thirteen metric tons of weathered steel) and Band,
two colossal works taking up the entire first floor of the
building. I whirled through the Blinky Palermo Retrospective on
the second floor. I enjoyed the “Color
and Form” show on the third floor heavily featuring Imi
Knoebel, who broke through barriers of art / not art and wall and
four dimensional space with white on white frames breaking out
from or replacing the traditional canvas.
While several of the other shows I saw that Sunday are no longer
running, including the exhibition of Indian miniatures from
Lucknow (concomitant programming included an Urdu poetry reading
in February) one of the shows you can still catch is R.B.
Kitaj’s “Covers
for a Small Library” which runs through June 5th. These
enlarged photographic reproductions of the artist’s worn
book covers are sure to charm any bibliophile who also loves
art.
But it was a single artwork housed in the permanent collection
which later rose to my mind’s consciousness literally in
the form of a torn scrap of paper marked with the words,
“Wilfred’s Light Art” that I found myself
wanting to know more about months later. (When I gorge myself on
art I tend to take a lot of notes. Whatever else was on the
paper, I had already decided to recycle.) After hours and hours
of walking through several floors in four separate buildings, I
had found myself sitting in front of Thomas Wilfred’s Opus
162 (1967-1968). This artist from Denmark (born in 1889, died in
1968) left us today only thirty-five existing “Lumia”
or light art objects, which look like a cross between a
television set, a lava lamp, and an aquarium where the Northern
Lights are on display. These screens are several inches deep and
filled with an ever-changing nebulous display of colored
cloud-like light forms. There is something about this one piece
that stood out to me even after visiting the entire European,
Modern, Oceanic and Contemporary collections on display. This art
was pioneering in its use of material or medium. Other artists
who work primarily in light, including Robert Irwin and Dan
Flavin, are seemingly indebted to Wilfred. This quiet,
unassuming, and very rare sculpture is, on its own, worth a trip
to LACMA. However, while you are there, you may also want to
check out a timely exhibit of Firooz
Zahedi’s photographs of Elizabeth Taylor in Iran. These
interesting photographs show the luminous icon in an Oriental
manner, lounging like one of Matisse’s Odalisques.
For more information on Thomas Wilfred, visit www.lumia-wilfred.org
For more information on other LACMA events, including LACMA
film (recent screenings include Godard's "Every Man for
Himself" and upcoming screenings include Bresson's "Diary of a
Country Priest") visit the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
(LACMA)
website.
-Moira Cue
© 2011, The Hollywood Sentinel