Spur of the moment art museum trip

(A hallway lined with blue fluorescent lights in the Dan Flavin exhibit at LACMA.)

I'm not generally an art museum person, or much of a visual art person; I spend enough time chasing down the performing arts. Though I love visiting art museums while traveling, I haven't really been to any of LA's art museums in years. And certainly not the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), which I have visited only once, nearly 10 years ago as a freshman in high school. Still, though, being a regular reader of the arts sections of many newspapers, one can't help but be fascinated by all the talk of late that LA is a major art center - and then there was the big article in Sunday's Los Angeles Times about LACMA and its newish director Michael Govan. He's doing interesting things at the place, they say.

So today, having the day off from the show I'm working on and feeling particularly restless - and finding on LACMA's web site that the museum is free after 5pm - I decided to jump in and make a visit to LACMA.

The first gallery I stumbled into (because it was across from the box office) was the new exhibit on Dan Flavin, an artist who makes pieces with tubes of flourescent lights. The gallery just opened on Sunday, which I found out when I read the program, and there were a bunch of people who looked like donors gathering in the lobby for a tour of the brand spankin' new exhibit. The exhibit was really cool; the light sculptures and installations were a big spectacle - you know how much I like spectacle - and I especially liked the spareness of the exhibit. There were just the light sculpture/installations spaced far apart on the walls in big, spare white rooms. You can see some of the pieces on LACMA's web site here. The most fun for me was the installations, with the hallway of blue lights pictured above. All that light did make my eyes hurt after awhile though. The museum guards were all walking around wearing sunglasses.

A few other observations:

(1) The place was virtually deserted. A handful of visitors were walking around here and there, but for the most part it was desolate - I had many galleries to myself, and when I was in the Japanese Pavilion I literally had the building to myself. I walked into one dimly lit gallery and as I entered, the motion sensor lights suddenly turned on; apparently no one had been in there for quite awhile today. This is quite the contrast from the way I'm used to experiencing museums, with lots of people wandering around. New York's MOMA on free Friday is packed, and even on a regular weeknight there are lots of people milling around. I guess that's the difference, with LACMA being in a business area where people usually have to drive and scramble for parking to come. While it was nice to walk through the antiquities galleries alone, it was depressing being in the elegant park and quad with no one around.

(2) Much of the museum is closed for renovation or under some sort of major construction. Maybe that's part of the reason why there weren't so many people there; in the Modern & Contemporary building I could only walk around the first floor, where the Flavin exhibit was. The map said there were Picassos upstairs. Sad I didn't get to see those today. And in the main buildings, huge parts of galleries are walled off or inaccessible. So a huge portion of the permanent collection isn't even viewable right now. I walked through the whole of the accessible museum in about an hour.

(3) I was fascinated by the antiquities this time around. Usually I'm bored to death in those galleries, preferring to look at paintings and more contemporary art, but you can't miss the artworld news these days about the controversy surrounding the Roman and Greek antiquities (Italy claims the objects were removed illegally and is suing to get them back). LACMA's collection isn't under much fire - it's the Getty that's getting much of the heat - but still that has given me more of a context and insight into these pieces. Seeing them now and noticing a lot of the details and restoration work, I stared in awe. I was also fascinated by the Renaissance works, which I usually also pass over. There were a few sculptures in particular that were fascinating because of their spectacle: the color, the construction, the scale. The Roman sculpture room was particularly awesome, with big floor-to-ceiling windows flooding the room with natural light.

(4) A bird pooped on my shoulder while I was walking under the main awning in the quad. No joke. A drip, a touch, and my face squelched in disgust. Fortunately, it came off when I went to wash in the bathroom. Hahaha.

Despite the bird, I enjoyed my stroll through the museum. It beat sitting on the couch watching TV, let me tell ya. Not sure if it will become a regular thing, and I'm not sure if I'll ever rabidly follow museums the way I clamor for ballet tickets, but I will certainly go back to see LACMA when more galleries reopen. And I'll definitely be going after 5pm when its free, of course.