Or maybe let’s not. Maybe an $800 million museum designed to deracinate you from the constructs of history, culture, and reality, and optimized for objects of distraction and reflection and selfie production is actually a bad idea in an era where everything else is already a screen, a mirror, or both.
That’s the sense I’m getting after reading John Paul Brammer’s extraordinary essay, “Your Reflection Is Not You,” a cautionary plea to avoid the dissociative, narcissistic magic of our own images that threaten to drown us in our screen-based world.
Just minutes before, I’d set out to find a list of works that could not just withstand the light of LACMA, but that could thrive in it. I looked at Liz Deschenes’ Untitled (Claude glass), a contemporary interpretation of the smoky, handheld mirrors used as landscape viewing tools in the pre-photography era. That led to Aztec obsidian mirrors which turn out to play a pivotal role in Brammer’s terrible, dark history.
And that’s when I stopped. And turned around to face the array of high gloss Facsimile Objects on the shelf behind me, and look me right in the eyes, all of me, and ask myself what—oh wait, right: that’s not even me. They’re my reflections. Now what??
“Your Reflection Is Not You” [johnpaulbrammer]