... at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, this past Friday. It's music night, and we were both surprised and delighted by the huge crowds out on the plaza enjoying the jazz band, despite the unusually cool weather.
Our first stop was The Mourners: Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy...
(these are my own cell phone pictures...)
... an exhibit that includes thirty-seven carved figures from the tomb of John the Fearless (1371-1419), the second Duke of Burgundy. These beautifully carved objects, each about 18 inches high, were once lined up around the base of the Duke's tomb, as though bearing his body into eternity. The detail of their postures and expressions...
... is testament to the skill and love devoted to their making, and to the profundity of the religious faith they were made to express. The exhibit does its best, with text, photographs and video, to contextualize them in their time and original location; even so, they cannot help but lose some of their power, once deprived of their ritual and spiritual intent and reduced, as it were, to art works. They become mere things of beauty, magnificently displayed and lit to highlight their unquestionable aesthetic worth, but inspiring something more than anything like sadness for a lost world and a lost faith.
In the next gallery, we found The Clock, by Christian Marclay, an astonishing "24-hour, single channel montage constructed from thousands of moments of cinema and television history depicting the passage of time, excerpted and edited together to create a functioning timepiece synchronized to local time anywhere it is shown." We sat down on of the comfortable sofas in front of a wide screen in the darkened room, intending to stay for five or ten minutes, to get a sense of the thing. Fat chance. We were soon hooked, and managed to tear ourselves away only after an hour or more of mesmerized attention. The moving images glide seamlessly into each other, many of them focusing on a watch...
(this and subsequent images, thanks to LACMA's website)
... or clock, or a fragment of dialogue mentioning the time of day--exactly the moment at which you happen to be watching; or by some visual or narrative theme--a running figure, an opening door--or an object. Equally fascinating is the game of recognition, as we identify familiar scenes from movies or the glimpse of a well-known actor's face. Our mind catches on to a narrative thread, only to be foiled in the next instant by a change of scene, sometimes an abrupt change of direction, but the arbitrary nature of the associations is lost in the compelling visual effects as well as in the uninterrupted flow of time itself. We are left to reflect upon the inevitability and the unstoppable quality of time's passage, and on the arbitrary nature of human experience. An extraordinary, complex and thoroughly entertaining work of art.
Pausing to take in the vitality of the crowds gathered to hear the music, we crossed the plaza to the new Resnick Pavilion to see Tim Burton, a large-scale exhibition exploring the richly imaginative world of this film maker and artist whose work is familiar through movies from "Edward Scissorhands"...
... to "Alice in Wonderland." With our eyes tiring and our brains beginning to overload, we walked through this one, as we did through the beautifully-installed David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy--a fine survey of the modernist sculptor's work. We missed at least two other shows I would have loved to see, Gifts of the Sultan: The Arts of Giving at the Islamic Courts, and The Sound of One Hand: Paintings and Calligraphy by Zen Master Hakuin. But there's only so much you can do...
As we left through the still-enthuiastic crowds, I could not help but think about my late father-in-law, a big supporter and one-time board member at "The County", and how delighted he would have been to see the activity here today. He was such a people person, and so passionate about art that he wanted everyone to share in its pleasures. As a footnote, I might mention that we also saw, last week, the movie Beginners--a brilliant picture, by the way--and, in it, a museum scene that had been shot at LACMA, where the protagonist (a truly great performance by Christopher Plummer) was once the (fictional) director. In the background of the scene, we
spotted Montauk Highway, a superb de Kooning painting, donated to the museum by Ellie's father and stepmother years ago. Greatly, I might add, to the benefit of the museum-going public--and, at our least honorable moments, to our (shhh! secret!) regret. Sometimes we still imagine what it would have been like to have it hanging on our wall! Still, we comfort ourselves with the reminder that the painting is where all good art truly belongs: in the public domain, where it is available to anyone who cares enough to go and look at it.
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