At the Geffen in Los Angeles | Part I

When it comes to art museums, I’m a white box man: quiet surroundings, tranquil galleries, no self-conscious capital-A architecture to compete. What is a museum if it is not artwork-forward, which seems at odds with what it contains. Art and artifacts should look at home in their spaces, ensconced and supported by their built surroundings.

I’m not sure that LACMA (The Los Angeles County Museum of Art) fulfills that goal for me. The suite of spaces that opened this month is housed in the so-called Geffen Galleries, a monumental swoop that will define the museum with the same power and presence as the Nike swoosh. It goes on forever, as befits a great metropolis, with polished black floors and gray concrete walls, but without any of the miraculous softness of the Kimbell, Louis Kahn’s great work of museum-building in Fort Worth. The same material used in different ways yields something humane in Texas and brutal in Los Angeles. You are always aware of the towering gray walls.

Some of the art looks very much at home. Many of the galleries, flowing one into the other, are inhabited by one-offs, a selection of greatest hits. The bigger the works, the more sense they make, even if they relate to nothing else. There’s a suite of Bacons that command their wall space but stand apart in solitary splendor.

Ceramics of all kinds, especially those from the southern Americas, “work” in the sense that they feel akin to the walls, and there are enough of them to fill their quarters. Here the museum is at its best. There is a sense of abundance, a profusion of riches, that give us an opportunity to compare and contrast.

The rest of the collection feels thin in comparison: a scattering of objects from Egypt and Rome which do not make for world-beating display. Do not go to the Geffen to see the Temple of Dendur, more than a single sarcophagus, or a set of canopic jars. I’m not sure that there should be a presentation like this if there isn’t enough to make a collection.

I felt this issue acutely in the area of textiles. The Geffen owns and displays beautiful objects, but it is compromised by others that don’t quite rise to the occasion. There is a gorgeous African skirt, unspooled for effect, that is one of the most significant textiles I have ever seen. It shows what can be accomplished by a gifted artist in a constricted palate of brown and tan. It dances on the wall; I could go on and on. But it is hung together with a suite of North American quilts that do not command the same attention. If you’re a great museum without one of the masterworks of Gee’s Bend, I’m not sure that anything else will do.

The other general issue is the question of narration. My ideal museum offers plenty to occupy me: painting, sculpture, and “decorative” objects, all in structures of explication and interpretation. There is almost none of this in any gallery at the Geffen. A few plaques here and there beat a drum for the conceit that art history is the story of connected islands. Ideas and motifs travel and unfold as part of an unceasing trade in a vast archipelago.

But when it comes to the objects themselves, there is almost nothing to explain them or to place them in a context of meaning and importance. The labels are a wash of incomprehensible terminology that no amateur can be expected to know. On top of that there is not much material altogether. I couldn’t get the QR codes to work, and I didn’t want to be tethered to my phone in a museum. The result is that most people stroll through the galleries as in a park; few stop to engage or even look.

Forgive me if I have said too much, or if you find all this talk of museums tedious. For reasons I’m not sure I understand myself, these have always been crucial issues to me. In my next post, I’ll tell you what I liked about the Geffen and why I’ll be going back again and again.