Luca showed great affinity for Chris Burden’s Metropolis II; I hadn’t seen the city in action before, and all the little cars and trains absorbed me in their noisy interplay. The operator for this contraption was wearing heavy noise-cancelling headphones and looking stern at all the movement from inside the city. On LACMA’s website, this is described as an “intense kinetic sculpture”, and the intensity comes from the frantic movement that excellently captures a crowded essence.
Going further, we walked around Richard Serra’s Band, and then changed Luca’s bum-bum (aka “dirty diaper”) on a bench nearby. LACMA, just like most public places in Los Angeles, doesn’t excel at having changing tables in restrooms. We managed to find one, on the other side of the museum, but it was so grubby and disgusting that we continued to use benches and other improvised means to clean the baby’s bottom. This is the sense of life happening behind “closed doors” I was referring to in a previous post. I’ve always thought that babies are part of life; maybe so, but not everywhere. Or, in any event, the outside lives of their parents are not necessarily made easy. How difficult would it be to have a changing table in a public restroom? Apparently, a lot more difficult than we thought. It’s clearly a lot more difficult than hanging a bad picture showing poorly photographed flowers, something that upscale-r restaurants do. Since our first trips around LA, we have learned to always take the stroller with us: even when Luca prefers to be carried, the stroller provides the perfect place to change her bum-bum, even in the absence of such sophisticated means of living, like benches or changing tables. But I digress. 
It should be noted that LACMA is a wonderful place to spend most of one’s day, in general. This is even more so, when your kid is 3 or 4 months old. LACMA has it all: varied art, coffee shops, great weather. It’s like going to the mall, but for the bourgeoisie: how ironic do I find it when some of the art on display is making points against class, the elites, etc. Especially given how much competition there is for the meters of white wall! After all this ironic absorption of shapes and colors, mommy likes to sit down and have a Perrier. My favorite spot for the LACMA Perrier is on the other side of the Broad building: that’s where daddy likes to have his cold chocolate drink; the atmosphere is relaxed and the shade aplenty.
After this break in art-viewing, we went on to see the pieces by Young-Il Ahn, grouped together under the title “Unexpected Light”, on view in the Hammer Building (show ends on 01/21/2018). This is the first solo exhibition of a Korean American artist at LACMA. It consists of 10 large oil paintings from his Water series, which he started in 1983 and is ongoing. This series references an autobiographical episode: in 1983, Ahn was on a fishing boat, off the coast of Santa Monica, and the fog engulfed him, menacingly trying to eat him whole. His visibility was close to nil: he was sure his hands were lost; all sense of proprioception seems to disappear if vision doesn’t supply an external location. In an instant, the fog cleared and his eyes shifted from dark blindness to the hurtful sightlessness of sunlight water. This disorienting shift in perception is the main topic of investigation in the paintings on display. Different colors render the subject differently: all encompass dizzying displays.
The green is shimmering; the red is firing at unexpected intervals. This was my partner’s favorite painting. The photo doesn’t do it justice: there is yellow too, interwoven with the canvas. The yellow gives everything a 3D aura that is lost on virtual paper.
Gendered preferences? For my part, I liked the pink one! Although, I would claim that this one speaks to me more because of the grey. It’s diffuse, in a way in which the other one is assertive. It’s deceptive: pink, orange, bright yellow, and green are not emblems of the sunny disposition everyone associates with Californian living; for me, they converge to show LA’s anxiety-filled underbelly.
The last thing I’ll mention is something we have seen in the Pavillion for Japanese Art. The building itself is something to behold: a mixture of art deco details — taking the elevator immerses one in an ocean-liner experience of sorts — and Japanese inspired ligneous grids.
The current exhibition, entitled “Japanes Painting: A Walk in Nature” (ongoing until 09/10/2017), shows about twenty paintings on scrolls and screens, dating back to the sixteenth century. I am very far from being an expert in Japanese art, but am attracted to its minimalism. Before the KonMari method of tidying, people could enter the sentiment by contemplating the few signs suggesting a mood, a transitory feeling, a freshness of solitude. They are now available to the minds of Westerners: all we have to do is accept the Bamboo Painter’s invitation to accompany him on his journey.
Oblivious to all of this, baby Luca spent some more time enjoying the comfort of her father’s chest, in her wonderful baby carrier.
