I confess that I’m not sure why I particularly care, or at what point I might have begun to see this as something larger than simply the loss of a theatre or auditorium space (i.e., LACMA’s Bing Theatre, which was a part of the original LACMA complex), or the razing of a few once-significant museum spaces. The 1986 Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer additions always struck me as ungainly and oppressive, with the various bridge/escalator configurations across the central courtyard undoubtedly super-charging Michael Govan’s obsession with single-story museum structures.

I felt more bemused than alarmed when it was first proposed that the projected museum footprint cross Wilshire Boulevard into the Spaulding Avenue parking lot across from the east campus entrance. That was when Govan and his chosen architect, Peter Zumthor were morphing from what I now refer to as their initial “Jetsons” phase, to a significantly streamlined “Gumby” incarnation.   I have to ask myself why “Gumby” seemed friendlier. Certainly it seemed more pliable. But maybe this refers back to issues of my own obsessions. Then, too, as the Zumthor office had then proposed puncturing the roof in a dozen places, it also seemed more realistic, and opened the door to a possible future second story. This was not to last.

One significant turning point was the Perenchio “promised” gift of 47 works (mostly paintings, mostly Post-Impressionist) valued then at up to $500 million, contingent upon the construction of Govan’s new museum building which would presumably house them. Govan’s blather at the time about “completing the story” of Impressionism, seems even more absurd now, since the only story-telling permitted in the projected galleries will be a cut-and-paste version with most of the scholarship relegated to the Variety building across the street. It was something out of a Marx Brothers movie, with Govan in the Groucho role all but tap-dancing his jubilation before a Busby Berkeley chorus line. “We’re in the money,” was the theme of the day, but even then you sensed a dark Godfather undercurrent.

But ultimately, at least where Govan was concerned, it hardly mattered, because, however briefly, he had succeeded in pulling our eyes away from where the real maneuvering was taking place, which was with the County of Los Angeles and its Board of Supervisors and staff. $25, $50, and $100 million dollars were sweet pickings; but $425 million was real money—the kind of money you need to tear up Wilshire Boulevard and half the LACMA campus. He was fortunate to have a pliant and well-connected Board to help him connect the pieces.

I vaguely associated an oppressively desolate café he installed in place of the restaurant and bar that once occupied the east campus—once so convenient to the Bing Theatre if you needed a coffee or martini on the fly—with his gutting of the film program Ian Birnie successfully curated for years before Govan fired him. It tended to push me through the Ahmanson wing—that much maligned structure, refurbished and reconfigured a number of times, never entirely successfully—whether or not I was headed in that direction. But that wasn’t it either.

Unlike Michael Govan, charm is one thing the Ahmanson wing never had. It is not unhandsome as such buildings go. It seemed at the time of my first encounter, which must have been sometime in 1969, comfortable and well-appointed, though not necessarily the kind of setting that would have occurred to me as a museum or art gallery space. But then I already had an idea of what museum spaces should look like—from the natural history museums of both New York and Chicago, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago. This seemed more like the kind of bureaucratic or educational structure I might associate with a state college—not unlike the state college I lived within walking distance of. But none of that really mattered because I was there to look at art. There were some outstanding French and Italian paintings; and I remember being particularly struck by an exhibition of (mostly French?) drawings. I was not necessarily going to be blown away by anything I might see here; but there was plenty to see and learn from. And I didn’t even know how to drive then, so wasn’t it great just to get there or have a place like that to sneak away to while our parents thought we were shopping for school clothes at Ohrbach’s and the May Company a block over at Fairfax.

It was a modest proposal; and at the time I don’t think it ever deterred my brother or me from wanting to get back to New York where the real world seemed to buzz at a higher wattage. This was the architecture of that modest proposal, a kind of civic-minded attitude born out of post-war bureaucracy, progressive politics (cultural politics, too), with a nod to retail values. (My older brother and I used to joke that the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion reminded us of a fancy car showroom, in spite of the obvious fact that Lincoln Center followed a similar template.) But out of such modest proposals, education and some modest prosperity was being successfully delivered to a larger proportion of the population than has ever been delivered since.

There is no such thing as a ‘modest’ monument. Museum buildings almost always make grand ‘statements’; whether or not they begin as monuments, they veer in that direction, though what ensures that status is their value as repositories of great art (no less than libraries, concert halls or theatres dedicated to great books, music and performances). There would have been no fight to preserve Carnegie Hall without almost universal consciousness of its great legacy. But only in recent decades have we begun to see museums, particularly museums of contemporary art as monuments. The best example of this is still undoubtedly the Guggenheim Bilbao, though there have been a few attempts since to rekindle some of that glamour. I sometimes wonder if half the impetus behind the Broad Museum was Eli Broad’s dissatisfaction with the comparative discretion of Renzo Piano’s BCAM with respect to its placement on the LACMA campus. He wanted a statement and he wanted it seen and heard.

Hedging the very real prospect of a significantly shrunken museum for the permanent collection, Govan has been quick to claim the BCAM structure as a portion of the square footage of exhibition space added to the campus under his watch, but it should be recalled that BCAM was already in progress when he assumed the directorship, with contemporary art its defined mission. What is more remarkable is how unmonumental the current and finally approved model of the Zumthor project now appears. It is significantly less imposing in terms of its elevation, although it will still cross Wilshire onto Spaulding. In yet another irony, it has assumed all the presence and character of a suburban department store (or, given its elevation above the street level, an airport terminal). Its most salient aesthetic characteristics are its flatness and its dog-legged spread (the Los Angeles Times’ Carolina Miranda has compared it to a moose antler). Although Govan has demonstrated a deft hand for factory/warehouse scale conversions, the project never had that character, whether as a vessel of light or in terms of fluid spatial flow. As far as actual department store conversions go, he was easily persuaded to lease out the May Company space to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences for 55 years, while the Ohrbach’s that was once directly across the street from it was long ago converted to the Petersen Museum.

But then Peter Zumthor’s reputation has never exactly been for the monumental gesture. Govan has made some claim for this as the right moment for Zumthor to make a statement of this scope; and maybe it is—which is not to say the Los Angeles Fairfax/Miracle/Museum Mile is the right location for it. But—setting aside the issue of the selection process (or more accurately pre-selection process, since there wasn’t any)—can we even be sure this is really Zumthor’s statement at all? How easily Zumthor might have welcomed the challenge of building something over and around, say, the Bing complex, as he had built over and around the fragments of an ancient church in Cologne (the Kolumba Museum). It might be seen from this angle how the notion of puncturing that flat roof with double or triple-height spaces might actually have been Zumthor’s own. But this was not the vision in the desert Govan came to California with.

Perhaps the closest Govan has come to achieving his ‘vision’ has been with Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass. What else do you call a platformed, single-level structure? The sculpture that you actually walk beneath, catching a glimpse of the Variety Building just down the street and overhead. It was no small logistical feat to bring that boulder down Wilshire and around to the LACMA campus—in other words, a perfect trailer and dress rehearsal for the Nightmare on Wilshire Boulevard set to commence early next year. We really shouldn’t speak of this as the Zumthor project. It’s Govan’s project, his fixation, his obsession; and we can either view it as a sadly diminished one or an arrogance that rises to the level of hubris.

You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh a bit at the title of Govan’s Monday op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. When Govan is not dancing through his ‘alternate’ cost estimates and exhibition space breakdowns or his rosy fiscal outlook, he’s doubling down on his ‘vision’. Now here he was, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, reasserting the “visionary” quality of his terminal pancake museum that was “big enough,” underscoring the fact that it could not be expanded. The extension across Wilshire Boulevard seemed more like an overpass than ever; and the director’s now familiar “edifice complex” was threatening to turn into an Oedipus complex at its terminal self-blinding stage.

At the Board of Supervisors meeting the following Tuesday morning, the only self-blinding (or at least blinders) in evidence seemed to have been carried out by the Supervisors themselves. There were friends and other journalists there, some to report (Jori Finkel’s coverage went up that afternoon on The New York Times site; Deborah Vankin’s followed some hours later), some to simply observe the proceedings; none, as far as I was aware, particularly enthusiastic. I had only spoken to one journalist over the week-end who was actually in support of the project. Govan was there with a phalanx of staffers, allies, and supporters. More disquieting was what seemed to be a full-blown schmooze-fest with Govan among the Supes in progress even before the meeting formally commenced. The atmosphere was, if not celebratory, self-congratulatory. Govan was joined in his final statement before the Board by the L.A. Natural History Museum‘s director, Lori Bettison-Varga—I couldn’t think why, even after she spoke; the Supervisors were fairly open about their inclination to approve the FEIR and Govan’s final “Zumthor” proposal. But that, too, I saw was part of the ‘process’ here. Between the politicos and museum professionals here, there was enough log-rolling to supply a sawmill.  

The phrase, ‘assumes facts not in evidence’ occurred to me as I listened to Michael Govan tick off a few talking points while thanking the Board of Supervisors and County staffers for their collaboration in the planning process and design/environmental impact clearances leading up to approval. I hesitate to call them ‘lies.’ I have no doubt there were some considered arithmetical calculations behind each revision. ‘Oh wait, if I factor in….’ — fill in the blanks. Govan might simply call them ‘alternate calculations’—which would have to be the term applicable to the faulty Final Environmental Impact Report, about which neither Govan nor the Supervisors cared the slightest; or the reduced usable gallery space and wall display area, notwithstanding both the Los Angeles Times’ Christopher Knight’s and architect-critic Joseph Giovannini’s repeated corrections and verification regarding the discrepancies; or per square-foot construction costs—also thoroughly vetted by Knight and Giovannini. But in his ebullience, Govan couldn’t resist sinking still deeper in the mire, dredging up the now infamous Jerrold Perenchio donation charade, as if to remind the Supervisors that, having raised a big ‘building-related’ donation before, he’d have no problem raising the $50-100 million he was going to need to complete the project. And given the fact that he was about to walk away with more than $400 million, who could doubt him? I had to give him credit for sheer chutzpah. 

But it was pretty obvious that every one of the Supervisors was simply lapping it up. With the relatively few of us who spoke to voice our opposition to the project, it was clear that they were perplexed that we even bothered. (Which echoed what a PR friend of mine had relayed to me from one of the Supervisor’s staffers only the day before: “Stop your campaigning already. The vote’s a done deal!”) 

I was certainly ready to. ‘Campaigning’ is not something that comes naturally to me (unless we’re talking about campaign furniture). But as Lou Reed might have put it once upon a time, ‘these are different times’. There is more at stake than simply a mediocre motel of a museum or even the wholesale disruption of the museum’s organization and scholarship. Govan will not be there beyond or possibly even before the project’s completion. But in his willful gutting of a core cultural institution, his imposition of mediocrity upon its edifice and its wasteful disruption of the urban fabric, he was committing an act of grandiosity that insulted the progressive political values that had enabled the institution’s creation and desecrating its physical legacy.

Coincidentally, in the days leading up to the hearing, I had been revisiting some of ‘those’ times, when LACMA’s Miracle Mile campus was still in its infancy, and I was more likely to visit a film studio backlot (or Canter’s) than a museum in the Fairfax neighborhood. 1969 was a year of fracturing transitions far beyond my scope—for Los Angeles specifically, in the political order for the country as a whole, in contemporary pop music and culture, and in art. More generally it was a period of cultural unmooring—something it may have in common with the culture and politics of the current moment.

Both politically and culturally, it was apparent that there was a crisis of meaning that in turn engendered a crisis of values; and vice-versa. This was reflected in the art of those years, from post-Warhol Pop, through Minimalism and the early Conceptualists. In many ways the political and cultural legacies of the late 1960s and early 1970s set in motion forces that are with us today.

I understand—to some extent—Mr. Govan’s approach to the museum, or (I should say) philosophy of art. I mean that with some respect as I think it is grounded in an actual philosophy of art that has been articulated by a number of critics and philosophers for whose work I have some respect, including for example, the late Arthur Danto. It means in the post-modern, contemporary era, as Danto puts it “a notion of strategy, style, and agenda.” You could almost say this applies to Mr. Govan’s entire modus operandi in running the museum. It has had notable successes. Also, recently, as Christopher Knight has pointed out in the Los Angeles Times, serious failures.

Danto’s thesis regarding “The End of Art” (further developed in After the End of Art and subsequent defenses) was significant as the starting point of a discussion about the way we produce and look at art in the 21st century. It was also grounded in a deep understanding and respect for the history of art, which in Govan’s proposal both for the museum’s physical layout, and his non-departmental curatorial approach to the Permanent Collection, is hobbled, if not abandoned altogether. But even Danto’s “end” or “after the end” thesis was in some respects incomplete, because regardless whether we have come to “the End” of art, or some point ‘after’, per se, we have not come to the end of time. We do not escape history—as history is gravely reminding us in recent years. Nor as we are reminded in recent years, do we escape the planet’s history and that of the biosphere we share—facts which should give us further pause in making decisions like these with far-reaching consequences for a city and an entire region. 

The occasion for revisiting 1969 Los Angeles came by way of Lars Jan’s staging of Joan Didion’s The White Album. Jan and his collaborator, Mia Barron, were both engaged by Didion’s controlled narrative taking shape in discontinuous fragments reflecting both the destabilizing social, cultural and political currents of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the strain and challenge of making sense of them. The performance was based entirely on the title essay and I suggested that they might think of layering in a few fragments from other essays and reportage in the anthology to flesh out the context and the tectonics of the shifting order and ethos under Didion’s close observation.

And suddenly I had a sense of who Michael Govan might be. In declaring his absurdly horizontal, shockingly mediocre “Zumthor” museum for the LACMA permanent collection “big enough,” giving himself implicit permission to store or disperse the collection as he might see fit, and unilaterally endorsing his own “vision,” Govan resembled no one so much as the one-time Episcopalian Bishop of California, James Pike, who proclaimed (“in the name of God”) San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral “finished,” which as Didion noted, seemed to be “an extreme missing of the point.”

Let’s not underestimate the symbolic value of such a monument at an urban crossroads—even one that looks like a motel (consider Hitchcock’s unsettling incarnation of such a place in Psycho). This is not a gesture of “inclusion.” In flattening and closing off the Museum, Govan more or less announced his intention to flatten and close off the history of art, challenging not its cultural hierarchies but the layering of time and history itself, its geographical and physical placement, the scholarly consideration of its authors and the conditions of its making. Beyond issues of taste or aesthetics, architectural landmarks become emblematic of our regard for history, of our values and ethos.  

In her essay, “James Pike, American,” Didion describes a socially ambitious, superficially ingratiating, but pathologically narcissistic personality, whose way of dealing with past failures or the casualties of his relationships was a kind of nullification of the ‘petty details’ of its history. I presume no judgment of Michael Govan’s psychological character here, though at some point, like Didion’s grandmother, I may be inclined to call him “just a damn old fool.” The art museum has traditionally been a place where we privileged those ‘petty details’, where we let them ‘breathe’. Certainly the lack of transparency in Govan’s pursuit of the flattened art museum constitutes an extreme breach of trust to match his ‘missing of the point’. But whether or not the Anthropocene puts an end to all of us before the end of the century, our demise will not rewrite or nullify its history. To presume to foreclose the close consideration of that trace to future generations reduces the flattened museum to the scene of a cultural crime.