Word: pavilion
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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With its new Pavilion for Japanese Art, which opens to the public this week, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has risen from architectural hodgepodge to full-blast cacophony. Where but in Tinseltown could you see such an overlay of styles? First, the flaccid institutional moderne of the original buildings designed by William Pereira in the early '60s. Then the deco-ish hulk of stripes and glass blocks shoved in front of it by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer in 1986. And now the only major public building by America's maestro of post-Wrightian, off-the-wall kitsch, Bruce...
...other, main cell swoop down through gentle ramps reminiscent of Wright's spiral in the Guggenheim Museum, hung above black water-filled moats. At each level are two tokonomas, large niches in which paintings from the Shin'enkan Collection can be hung. This collection is the core of the pavilion. It consists of some 300 screens and scrolls from the Edo period (1615-1868), assembled over the past 30 years by the Oklahoma collector Joe D. Price. In recent years, Price's collaborator has been LACMA's new curator of Japanese art, Robert T. Singer. The Shin'enkan is -- with...
...West German pavilion is filled by a rambling installation, Unlessness, 1985-88, by Felix Droese, 38. To judge from his materials, which include wooden beams salvaged from warehouses and bridges, oxidized metal, tar paper, dusty broken glass and spindly watercolor drawings, Droese is under the spell of Joseph Beuys and, to some degree, Beuys' former student Anselm Kiefer. He draws with scissors, creating silhouette cutouts (a favorite form of German folk art) on an enormous scale. They make all manner of references to pacifism, to imprisonment and the gallows, to shadow puppetry and children's drawings, and aspire toward...
...most impressive sculpture at this Biennale, however, is in the English pavilion: a survey of work by Tony Cragg, 39. It issues from a strong and wide-darting imagination. Cragg's sculpture is richly polymorphous, refusing to be pinned down in any style and incorporating such materials as bits of blue plastic scrap, bronze, wood, lab glass, plaster, cogwheels, rubber and sandstone. At times the results look mysteriously vulnerable and reserved, like Silicate, 1988, an array of laboratory beakers and bottles, sandblasted until holes appear in their milky skins. Other pieces are farcical: Code Noah is Cragg's gloss...
Inevitably, the centerpiece of the Biennale is the U.S. pavilion with its show of Jasper Johns' work since 1974, organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and treated to a piercing catalog exegesis by its curator Mark Rosenthal. , Johns' presence at the Biennale seems to close the American parenthesis that Rauschenberg opened there 24 years ago, and one leaves it convinced he is the deepest of living American artists, a painter whose subtlety and richness of imagination stand beyond doubt even when, as sometimes happens, one cannot find a direct way among the hints, inversions, repetitions and false scents...