Listen Up James M. Keller visits The Broad, LA’s new contemporary art museum
First of all, its name is just The Broad, and it is pronounced “brode,” with a long o. As you approach the museum, it’s hard to take your eyes off it: a brilliant white structure, rectangular (although its geometry changes strikingly depending on the viewer’s angle), its outer shell punctuated by a pattern of crosshatched perforations (more than 500 of them on the side where one enters), the regularity of that facade being interrupted by the “oculus,” an indentation that bends the overriding matrix, rather like a 3-D representation of an astronomical black hole. Just as a black hole sucks in whatever comes in its orbit, this design, by the architectural firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, has proved irresistible since the building opened in downtown Los Angeles last September, helping to make The Broad a magnet for both art connoisseurs and the merely curious.
The museum was created through the benefaction of Eli and Edythe Broad, who got interested in contemporary art some five decades ago and became voracious collectors, their holdings now including some 2,000 works by more than 200 artists — and it’s growing all the time. Many of these are unquestionably major pieces, but the Broads had mounting resources to fund their habit; Eli Broad is the only person to have built two Fortune 500 corporations in different industries — KB Home (originally Kaufman & Broad, residential real estate developers) and SunAmerica (financial services).
A visitor’s first stop inside the vaulted, cavelike lobby should be the kiosk where one is assigned an entrance time to view Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity
Mirrored Room — The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away (2013). This artwork is a darkened room of not quite 10 by 14 feet — the size of a walk-in closet in Santa Fe or a studio apartment in Manhattan — in which are suspended dozens of multicolored LED pinpoint lights which, thanks to the mirrored walls, appear to number in the thousands and stretch away to an unfathomable horizon. Viewers enter the installation one at a time, by decree of the artist, the door being closed behind them to ensure solitude as they stand on a platform in the midst of it all, and they are allowed to stay for just 45 seconds. That’s harsh: At her related installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2012, visitors were given a full New York minute. Still, it’s long enough to glimpse infinity, or at least — to judge from social media postings — to snap a selfie. Visitors may have several hours to wait, but that’s all right. There’s plenty else to look at in the meantime.
The ground floor, where Infinity Mirrored Room is housed, also includes a museum shop, of course, and a handful of galleries. I found these not to be consistently compelling, although Mark Grotjahn’s nine-piece series titled Untitled (Dancing Black Butterflies) from 2007 superimposes large black triangles in a way that invites a meditation on perspective and vanishing points, and Takashi Murakami’s In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow (2014) will justly appeal to other sensibilities, fusing image-types from 18th-century Japanese painting with modern cartoon style, the whole being played out on a canvas that is a jawdropping 82 feet long. On the other hand, there is
The Visitors (2012), by Ragnar Kjartansson, a determinedly scruffy video work in which competing segments are projected on various screens, showing different performers in a derelict house, each of whom “uses different instruments and plays the lyrics in their own deeply felt ways as a camera pans through the house in one long, extremely impressive sixtyfour-minute take,” according to the museum. I found it too tedious to stay for the whole 64 minutes, and I would be curious to know what percentage of the museum’s visitors do.
Where you really want to be is upstairs, on the third floor. You can reach it in two ways. If you rise via escalator, you get to look in at a second-floor storage area, which many visitors find fascinating. But ascending via the round, modernistic elevator is also exciting. It deposits you in the middle of a spacious room in which the eye is drawn still further upward toward the honeycomb ceiling, offering a different take on the decoration seen on the building’s exterior, the perforations now flooding the very white room with abundant light. Dominating this space is a happy sculpture by Jeff Koons: Tulips (1995-2004), a set of seven large-scale, stainless-steel forms (blooms with stems attached) in metallic blue, purple, pink, red, gold, orange, and green. Whether you are a Koons fan or not, you would have trouble not smiling when presented with such a bouquet in as luminous a setting. Surrounding them are the nine large panels of Christopher Wool’s Untitled (1990), each of which is emblazoned with either “R-U-N” or “D-O-G,” the arrangement chosen for installation yielding different meanings or emphases. Anyway, it also conveys something lighthearted, and it joins with Koons’
Tulips to boost the spirits. This would be a great place to begin a visit.
Twenty galleries surround that central space, and strolling through them, one is impressed by how much the pieces in this museum reflect the passions of the collectors who amassed them. When you visit museums of modern and contemporary art, you can be struck by a sameness that tends to pervade them, populated as they are by “representative” pieces by the predictable procession of acknowledged masters. There is much to be said for that kind of approach, as long as the museum’s donors have the deep pockets required to build an encyclopedic collection. The Broad, too, offers a lot of art by the usual suspects, but it feels free to revel in some more than others, and even pieces by big-name artists may not always adhere to textbook expectations. The Broads obviously love Koons, for example, who is represented by eight works of varied personalities in this inaugural exhibition. They like Joseph Beuys, who gets a whole gallery, and Roy Lichtenstein and Ellsworth Kelly, and they like art that has words attached, like most of the 10 works by Ed Ruscha and the six by John Baldessari.
The gallery spaces are generously proportioned, which befits the nature of the pieces, many of which are strikingly large-scale. One gallery is entirely given over to Robert Therrien’s Under the
Table (1994), which consists of an immense table — nearly 10 feet high — surrounded by six appropriately scaled chairs. Not the least interesting thing about it is observing how visitors deal with the thing, whether they squeeze along the walls of the gallery keeping respectful distance from it (art as discrete object), or walk right beneath it to experience a table from an unaccustomed perspective (art as interactive undertaking). Quite a few pieces invite smiles, sometimes of amusement but just as often reflecting the delight of discovery. The Ghanian artist El Anatsui gives us Red Block (2010), a 16-by-11-foot sculpture of “found aluminum and copper wire” that looks like a glistening, undulating blanket until you get up close and discover that it’s made largely of liquor-bottle labels from Ghana and Nigeria, exotic (to us) brands like Castello, Chelsea, and Romatex. An immense painting by Mark Bradford, Corner of Desire and Piety (2008), is an assembly of 72 collages that appear at first to consist of pleasant-enough abstractions but that, upon investigation, reveal themselves to be a commentary on ethical decisions that needed to be made by persons in New Orleans uprooted by Hurricane Katrina.
Many pieces exude playfulness, which is the overriding spirit of a Cy Twombly room. Similarly mischievous is a series of lithographs by Glenn Ligon titled Runaways. It takes on the very serious matter of deep-seated racial profiling, but it turns it on viewers in a way that invites a smile, a shaking of the head, and the admission, “You got me.” Designed as parodies of antebellum escaped-slave announcements, their texts read (for example), “Ran away, Glenn, a black man — early 30’s, very short cropped hair, small oval wire-rimmed glasses. Wearing large black linen shirt with white buttons, dark navy shorts, black socks and shoes.” — and so on. The prints were made in 1993, when Ligon, as you might expect, was thirty-three.
The art at The Broad may be serious, and often it is moving, but it is not pedantic — and if anything tries one’s patience, it’s easy enough to just move along. It is no mystery why the place became an instant hit with viewers of all ages. Millennials were strongly represented among the attendees when I visited, and so were families, many of them with quite small children (who seemed to be kept under control, yet still having a good time) and a surprising number of perambulators. The National Endowment for the Arts recently reported that the average museum visitor in the United States is forty-six years old; at The Broad, the average age is said to be thirty-two. Seventy percent of its visitors are under the age of thirty-four, and six out of 10 identify their ethnicity as something other than Caucasian.
Part of the democratic attraction results from the fact that the museum charges no admission fee. That doesn’t mean you can just show up and walk in. Savvy visitors will know to book their free entry online months in advance, although a limited number of same-day entry slots are kept available for people willing to wait in a “standby” line. (Advance reservations are entirely booked through the end of May; availability for June and beyond should show up soon on The Broad’s website.) The lines to enter the museum for the reserved time slot look long, but once the people flow through the portals, a new group every half-hour, there is plenty of space for them to disperse inside, and one is ultimately grateful that this form of crowd control is in place. The idea of free admission has been a big selling point, which is why shock waves emanated through the realm of social media when The Broad let slip, in mid-February, that it would be charging $12 admission for a comprehensive Cindy Sherman show it will open in its main-floor galleries on June 11, when the inaugural exhibition starts to give way to other things. Visiting the rest of the museum will still be free; but surely most viewers will not greatly resist ponying up the special-exhibition fee, since the Broads possess the world’s largest inventory of Cindy Sherman photographs, around 120 of which will be presented in this show.