Look, I think we all get it: the light in LACMA sucks for paintings.
But if there’s one work in the whole blasted out place where a reflection so strong you can take a selfie with Peter Zumthor’s wall of artisanally curtained windows in the surface doesn’t support the critique, it is Veronika Kellndorfer’s giant 2007 triptych photo, Ocean Vista.
Kellndorfer’s photo of the south-facing wall of artisanally curtained windows of the Eames House, one of the most iconic modernist houses in Los Angeles, screenprinted and annealed on glass, is such a perfect embodiment of the Geffen Galleries Experience, I’m sure it’s spent 20 years on Zumthor’s museum moodboard.
From the artist’s website:
The perception of the viewer changes while moving around the work as the glass reflects its surrounding environment of visitors, artworks, windows and skylights. These reflections become integral to the experience of understanding the work on its own terms.
James Turrell describes the experience of his work as seeing yourself seeing, creating an awareness of perception, the constructed nature of our reality, and the systems and phenomena that enable or manipulate it. Producing this self-awareness is part of the project of modernism, and several generations in, it is water to artist fish, whose objectives for their work can be just “understanding the work on its own terms.”
Ocean Vista is in a gallery/space/grouping titled, “In This Light”, whose subject is actually the building and the experience of it: “Natural light is a vital element of the David Geffen Galleries—the first building in the United States designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor,” and “This gallery, suffused in north-facing light, brings together artworks that respond to and reflect this light.”
Nothing embodies this better than Kellndorfer’s work. Which is actually a different problem. Though the wall text also mentions “light’s counterpart,” Shadow, “In This Light” seems to involve only four works: Kellndorfer’s, a Roni Horn cast glass sculpture, an Uta Barth triptych photo, and a James Turrell print. While the last two are very much about light, as a medium, they are at best indifferent to the Zumthor-Geffen Light Experience. If anything, they should be wary of it. That Turrell—an aquatint of a drawing of a spotlit corner sculpture—and the Barth’s inket prints should be kept away from it. [I have to hope conservators were consulted.] And while Horn’s monumental sculptures always revel in the changing lights of day, the parenthetical title of this one, at least, undercuts any curatorial claims for its visual momentousness: Untitled (“The sensation of satisfaction at having outstared a baby.”)
Surely—surely—there are other objects in the collection, or in the world, that will respond to and reflect Zumthor’s Geffen Light in an inspiring way that causes you “to take your time and slow down—to consider your surroundings in a different light [sic].” Until they find them, I guess we should be glad they found at least one.