Duelling Reviews
DUELING REVIEWS: DAVID GEFFEN GALLERIES Two takes on the David Geffen Galleries at LACMA
Maybe you know the type? Barely noticeable by day—except perhaps when crossing the street right in front of you—and only slightly more interesting at night. Yet, somehow, once you’re inside, unforgettable.
From the street, it’s strictly Airport Modern. Perhaps there’s an economic or engineering reason that every pulp sci-fi novel cover illustrator can sculpt a building exterior more interesting than most big-name architects, but I am not here to dwell on that; standing outside in Los Angeles during business hours is strictly for masochists and, anyway, this is an art magazine and most of the art is past the front door. That is where you want to be.
A wall of bending glass opening out onto a shifting panorama of our cryptic city, the ceiling a high gray sky with lamps overhead like stars drilled into stone over a reflecting dark ocean of floor. My visit pal opines it’s all too much: “The building is so distracting, you can’t see the art!”
This became a running joke for the next two hours:
Pal: “Oh I like this one” (a Madonna and child).
Me: “WHAT ONE? I DON’T SEE ANYTHING I AM DISTRACTED BY THE ARCHITECTURE!”
Pal: “Fine, ok, I get it.”
Me: “YOU GET WHAT? I AM TOO DISTRACTED BY THIS WALL OF SMOOTH ROCKS TO HEAR YOU!”
Of course, only the deadest mind could be distracted from beauty by more of it. A visitor to Venice who claims to be unable to notice a Veronese because they’re distracted by the Doge’s Palace is just someone who doesn’t like art. And the LACMA’s new glass/concrete/stone sandwich isn’t that beautiful; it’s just a near-perfect package for all the things it contains.
It seems to have taken some notes from Gordon Bunshaft’s excellent Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.—a heavy neutrality, as much art in daylight as possible, a sense of rolling-like a marble through curving and art-strewn alleyways and comfortable leather-covered benches.
The best part of it all, however, is the entire lack of context. While you always know where you actually are in the Geffen Galleries—how far up a long, modified and windowy boomerang—you never know when you are in art history. There are just objects, thank god, from everywhen and all over. And they look fucking great.
Context is often a way of grading art on a curve. Something can be “A good example of…” an art movement that was awful and shouldn’t have existed. The new LACMA throws it all together and trusts the best will visually advocate for itself, making the entire building so sexy it’s a shame the bathroom doors don’t lock. If a twenty-first century postmodern abstraction is easily mistaken for a work from sixty years earlier that’s a temporary loss for art history (at least until the wall label’s read) but a permanent win for art criticism: the younger artist needs to move along. The aesthetics of the mosh pit are harsh but fair, unique things remain unique, pointless work fade into the background.
This perfect chaos applies not only to cultures and times but genres—industrial design and the self-conscious academic fine-art are, for example, not segregated. An actual Studebaker Avanti is savagely juxtaposed with photos from Ed Ruscha’s Parking Lots (1967) series, sending home a profound art historical insight: Ed Ruscha, despite the fact that no self-respecting LA museum could fail to include him, sucks and is boring, and Avantis, despite the fact that many self-respecting museums all over the world do fail to include them—do not and aren’t. Welcome to LA, welcome to the future, welcome to pluralism and to democracy.
Pal is upset. Pal likes a didactic museum. Museums, Pal opines, should be about learning. The rooms should be organized by time and by place and by material.
Me: “Ok, let’s test it. You like art, you make art, you have been employed in the art business, you grew up here in LA. What do you remember learning when the LACMA was all laid out with signs saying the 18th century sculpture is over here and the 20th century ceramics are over there and all that?”
Pal: “Well…I remember the Andy Warhols were in that room with the other mid-century paintings…”
Me: “So you learned that Andy Warhol made art in the middle of the century and so did some other people. Do you remember learning anything else?”
Pal: “Ummmm…”
Me: “Literally anything at all?”
Pal: “Uhh…”
Whether the new galleries do not try to teach or simply try and fail (and exhibition titles like “Transatlantic Exchange and its Legacies,” rather suggest the latter), the result is the same: museumgoers and art-lovers are given a much-deserved break from being bludgeoned by well-meaning attempts to dragoon art into serving other more important (or at least topically-urgent) things. Perhaps curators have realized that several decades of museums oscillating between big-ticket blockbuster exhibitions (Monet again?) and attempts to subvert something or other via strategic deployment of wall text (colonialism again?) have resulted in a public as indifferent to both art and its messages of cultural liberation as it has ever been (cuts in the arts budget again?) and have finally remembered what museums are good at: affording weird people the opportunity to look at weird things. In other words, perhaps curators have realized what all intelligent people in the arts have always known—that the incessant narrativizing of art gatekeepers is half the problem. Just let us see the stuff.
The thing of it is is that no one learns about any kind of art unless they like it and they don’t learn to like it by finding out it was made in the sixteenth century by Swiss nuns and is now housed in its own sub-basement, they learn to like it by seeing it—often when they were trying to see something else. Here are some photographs by Paul Caponigro of Redding, Connecticut (1968), here is cabinet from Paraguay, here are underexposed Futurist and Op experiments from Argentina, here is Modernist glassware from Germany, here’s Arthur Frank Mathews making both the American Arts and Crafts Movement and a copse of random trees look sharp and stylish, here is Nasser Al Salem three-dimensionalizing calligraphy into a blue labyrinth. All of these things are beautiful, and not in the participation-trophy sense of humanistic appreciation that they merely exist or represent some other thing, but in the literal sense that they are worth looking at because that act of looking upon them with actual eyes is enjoyable. The new galleries are a delirious tribute to the inability of any time or place in the world to be quite as bad as it wants to be. To fail to enjoy them is to fail to enjoy art, to want more than they give you is to want all of the tendencies that threaten to hollow it out and paralyze it.
Following what felt like an eternity of delays—budget-related, structural and otherwise—LACMA opened its new Peter Zumthor-designed David Geffen Galleries this spring, finally unveiling its long-awaited proposal to reinvent the encyclopedic museum. According to LACMA, the architecture manifests its twenty-first century mission statement, where new narratives, “unbounded by traditional classifications,” can overwrite the prejudices of history. The official literature emphasizes how the building allows works of different cultures, eras, and mediums to sit together on a single non-hierarchal plane. The collection unfolds across dozens of thematic micro exhibitions, mounted in both enclosed galleries and the interstitial spaces between them, and grouped by bodies of water rather than by continent. By reshuffling old systems of classification, the inaugural hang promises opportunities for unexpected encounters and “revelatory connections.” But does it deliver? Well. Maybe not as much as we would like.
Revelatory connection, to me, is the unexpected resonance between seemingly unlike objects, that when shown in close proximity can spark new ways of thinking about the world. An exhibition called “Picturing the American West” includes Richard Prince and Wendy Red Star side by side, highlighting the resonant parallels between them. Both dismantle imagery of cowboys and Indians as American mythmaking, but from the opposing roles in which white men and Indigenous women are cast. In “Transatlantic Exchange and its Legacies,” Betye Saar enters into dialogue with Winslow Homer, sharpening themes of racialized and gendered divisions of labor in his work. Shown alongside her assemblage, I’ll Bend But I Will Not Break (1998), his painting, The Cotton Pickers (1876), suddenly resounds with a shared theme of Black women’s exhaustion with America.
Both exhibitions, however, are two examples among many where a curatorial theme is cast too wide and stretched too thin. The works in “American West”—photography, 19th-century landscape painting, sculpture and more—function individually to address an exceptionally broad range of institutional critiques, from gender expression to land stewardship, racial violence and more. I say this respectfully: please pick a struggle. Focusing on the movement of craft and labor between Europe and its colonies, “Transatlantic Exchange” features Betye Saar; examples of English cabinetry; indigenous crafts from all over the Americas, dated between now and the last thousand years; and portraits of fairly obscure figures, like one eighteenth-century oil painting of Major Paul Mascarene (According to Wikipedia, he was a British army officer who governed Nova Scotia from 1740 to 1749). The combined presentation of these items looks and feels extremely fucking random, unfortunately, lacking a readily apparent narrative structure or aesthetic rhythm.
That’s the overall weakness of this inaugural hang: where bursts of curatorial rigor appear between unlikely pairs, they ultimately fizzle over the arc of the larger exhibition. This is a consequence, I think, of rejecting old institutional narratives without fleshing out new ones; there’s no organizational principle on which to build. The overall hang also seems to prioritize showcasing the breadth of the collection at the expense of curatorial depth. Certain pockets don’t actually seem curated at all. If you’re perplexed by the inclusion of a 2025 Do Ho Suh textile sculpture in an exhibition titled “The Evolution of Abstract Painting in Modern Korea,” or the exhibition’s placement in the museum’s Indian Ocean section rather than the Pacific, good news: so am I.
My favorite of LACMA’s mini micro exhibitions is “China in Transition,” a little corridor where a handful of Henri Cartier-Bresson photos hang opposite Yang Fudong’s Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, Part IV(2007). Their respective black-and-white photographs capture moments of Chinese social transformation through vastly different approaches, with Cartier-Bresson documenting the industrialization of 20th-century China through snapshots of daily life. He broke new ground in photojournalism, while simultaneously crystallizing visions of China as a developing country in the Western imagination. Fudong’s single photograph, meanwhile, depicts a group of model-attractive men and women on a boat suspended over the beach, casting aloof, cosmopolitan stares into the distance. Captured at the dawn of globalization in the twenty-first century, it’s an expression of existential longing and crisis of identity, stylized as a cinematic fiction.
That’s the revelatory power of art and objects: civilizations develop identity through their cultural production, a means of recording how they viewed the world as well as themselves. What’s unfortunate is that with no information about Fudong’s work on the walls or museum’s website, the vast majority of viewers are unlikely to read deeply into his work.
That’s the inaugural hang’s other major weakness: a dearth of text inside the galleries. The context of individual works—what they did, why they’re important, how they relate to the other objects in the room—has largely been offloaded somewhere onto the internet. People can access that information on their phones! I can hear the curatorial team saying. There are also arguments to be made about allowing works to speak for themselves and relinquishing curatorial authority to individuals’ interpretation. But context provides viewers a connection to what they’re seeing, as well as proof of curatorial effort. Why send visitors outside the museum to access that? More importantly, will they make the effort?
Seemingly calibrated for poor reading habits and waning attention spans, LACMA’s inaugural hang at its best is a vibrant and diverse aesthetic experience, and at its worst, a social media scroll. There is such a thing as being too twenty-first century. Wherever museums abandon the curatorial responsibilities of robust interpretation and storytelling, they ask to be replaced with ChatGPT.
