Another Postcard from the Southland

We went down to LA last weekend to see our friend Jessica’s play reading at the Open Fist Theatre in Hollywood. One of the great things about LA is the 99-seat house. Equity actors are allowed to perform in non-union theaters if they are less than 100 seats. There must be hundreds of these theaters in LA. You can see great plays and great actors in an intimate setting at very little cost. Jessica’s play is about a place very familiar to Paul and me. Thankfully, only one of the characters is really close to reality, and she is no longer living. One of the actors was O-lan Jones, who would be familiar to Magic Theatre audiences. She was a real standout. We were relieved not to see ourselves in any of the characters!

The playwright outside the theater

We stayed downtown at Checkers, which was once a posh hotel. I think it was like a sister to Campton Place in SF. It has been kept on life support by big chains and is now a Hilton. But the beds are good, and I love sitting in the rooftop hot tub and looking at the highrise towers above me. 

View from the jacuzzi

One of the weird LA mashups was driving out to Monterey Park and going to a Chinese restaurant in a mall where all the businesses are Chinese. There are few English signs, and they are usually misspelled. The best part was that the architecture was High Taco Bell. Really the most hideous fake Mission Revival (which is kind of fake even when it’s good) highlighted by neon. This topped off (or bottomed off?) by a surface parking lot and two-level subterranean parking garage that brought to mind that splendid kids’ puzzle Rush Hour. Once we got upstairs, there was a band on the other side of the screen playing for a wedding. A wedding attended by maybe a dozen people. That said, the duck was quite good.

We got to chat with Charlie Schroeder, whose new book, Man of War, sounds hilarious.

The screenwriter blows out his candles

We were in China celebrating our buddy Ian’s birthday. While we are name-dropping, we have to mention that Ian’s movie The Oranges, starring Hugh Laurie, comes out October 5. Welcome to New Jersey.

Our good buddy Johnny took us to the farmers market on Ivar in Hollywood on Sunday. It’s huge! A real town square. One of our favorite bookstores of all time, Hennessey & Ingalls, has a branch in a little retail center that was repurposed from some kind of warehouse. And of course we got to see the rear end of Crossroads of the World, another great LA mashup! Funky fantastic.

The Ivar Theater along the farmers market

The market

The rear end of crossroads of the world

Back downtown, we wandered around a bit and were pleased to see so many people living in converted office buildings. There is still a paucity of good restaurants and food emporiums, but there is no lack of dog walkers—always a sure sign of gentrification. Certain pockets are still just empty, and other pockets are still scary. Pershing Square is really bad. Legorreta’s bold colors don’t do much for the homeless.

Pershing Square

Union Station

We took the subway to Union Station, which was packed. It is the first time I ever saw it full of people, just as it is supposed to be. The ticket area was closed off, and Paul and I thought it would make a great setting for “The Ghost Train.” The old Harvey House restaurant is still empty, just like it was when my buddy Kristina first showed it to me in the late 1970s. Apparently, it is leased out for special events and photo shoots. The tile floor is divine. Here is a blog post about the space. http://laplaces.blogspot.com/2010/02/union-station-harvey-house.html

CA Union Station - the old Harvey House Restaurant

Across the street from Union Station is Olvera Street, the perfect alley of cheap crap. Despite the hideous trinkets, I love the scale. This time, we wandered into the Avila Adobe, which gives a sense of how LA’s earliest Spanish settlers lived. I especially enjoyed the scale of the courtyard.

Avila Adobe

Although Frank Gehry has been overexposed, his Disney Concert Hall is still beautiful, at least on two sides. The Chandler and the Mark Taper Forum brought people back downtown in the 1960s, and the Disney Concert Hall extended that possibility into the new century. Just down the street, Arata Isozaki’s Museum of Contemporary Art never quite achieved the same level of significance. After the expensive, postmodern, mostly subterranean showpiece was completed, most folk said they preferred the Temporary Contemporary, a former police car warehouse reshaped by Frank Gehry. That was where most of the fun took place.

Disney Concert Hall

Temporary Contemporary

My favorite show in the Temporary (now known as the Geffen Contemporary, although most members still call it the Temporary) was the one in 1989 about the Case Study Houses called “Blueprints for Modern Living,” curated by Elizabeth Smith. As I have written before, I think this show was the catalyst for reexamining midcentury modernism. It sure brought Julius Shulman out of his Soriano lair in the Hollywood Hills. The staff used the space beautifully, rebuilding two Case Study Houses and the living room of the Eames House (not quite the re-creation we saw recently at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, but cool nonetheless). At MOCA up the hill, I count a wonderful Ad Reinhardt show and a Robert Irwin retrospective in the 1990s as two of my favorites. MOCA started life as the museum that artists supported. Back then, LACMA was kind of fuddy duddy.

Blueprints for Modern Living:
History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses
by Elizabeth A. T. Smith

So it’s sad to see MOCA in such trouble. There was an enormous show called “The Painting Factory: Abstraction after Warhol,” and while I really liked the Mark Bradford and Tauba Auerbach canvases, I really can’t be bothered with the Andy Warhols. He is one artist who really suffers from overexposure. Rather like Salvador Dali. Director Jeffrey Deitch appears to be favoring a kind of safe avant garde. And some folks feel that he has made a Faustian bargain with tract house mogul Eli Broad. The prediction is that Broad will eventually take over MOCA and fold it into his own Broad Museum (with a new building by Diller Scofidio + Renfro under construction now).

The Broad

Over at the County Museum, director Michael Govan was willing to disagree with the mighty mogul, and after his namesake building was finished, Broad picked up his marbles and moved downtown. Strangely enough, this seems to have served the County Museum well. They are much freer to pursue all kinds of different avenues and have now become the preferred museum for artists. Although it was the Temporary that put on the Michael Heizer show in its early days, it is the County Museum that got the rock.

Levitated mass by Michael Heizer

In the last year, the County Museum exhibit “Living in a Modern Way” bookended the Case Study House show from 20 plus years ago. And their reconstruction of Ed Kienholz’s “Five Car Stud” was one of the most disturbing and wonderful pieces to be seen in recent LA history.

Although I didn’t care for the “Abstraction after Warhol” show, I was relieved to see the Rothkos from the Panza collection front and center in their show of masterworks from the collection. I remember when these were shown at the Temporary and how they were barely lit. They just hummed. Count Giuseppe Panza’s gift must have been one of hope. Hope that this new museum would forge a brave new way in art. Maybe it will again one day.

Finding the Right Architect

Some Notes on the Rothko Chapel

John and Dominique de Menil, 1968.
Photo: Hickey-Robertson, Houston
courtesy menil.org

If there was one person who inspired me to begin this blog, it would be Dominique de Menil. (I never met her.) She was born in France, but spent much of her adult life in the United States exploring the terrain where art and faith cross. She was patrician, educated, thoughtful, and generous. A biography by William Middleton is slated to be published next year. In the meantime, there are books about her and several art books to which she contributed essays. I think of her often and wrote about her recently for a brief piece in Faith & Form (http://www.faithnform.com/). The editor, Michael Crosbie, posed a question on his LinkedIn site: “Can atheists design sacred spaces?” And that got me thinking about all kinds of folks, including Dominique de Menil, Mark Rothko, and Philip Johnson. In my short piece, I didn’t have enough room to really get into Johnson. That’s what a blog is for!

In her largesse, Mrs. de Menil commissioned a number of architectural projects. For the Menil Collection in Houston, she eventually turned to a young Renzo Piano, who created a masterwork that helped launch his career in the United States. It remains one of my favorite museums in this country. It looks simple, like some of the art contained within, but like the art, it’s not. She scored a home run with that one. Piano’s courtliness and humility were genuine. It’s in the work.

Museum Building
courtesy menil.org

Cy Twombly Gallery
courtesy menil.org

Earlier in her philanthropy, de Menil commissioned several works from Philip Johnson. In this effort, the results were mixed. The campus for the University of St. Thomas, a small Catholic university in Houston, is a serene academic environment where the student outdid the master: it’s better, though considerably smaller, than Mies van der Rohe’s IIT campus in Chicago. The brick has a rose tint that works in the Houston light. Here you can tell the difference between an industrial building and a chapel. But the chapel, built later during Johnson’s postmodern phase, just doesn’t fit. It’s in the right location, but it feels tacked on, and like most of his work during this era, looks a bit comical.

His first project for the de Menils, their residence in Houston’s River Oaks neighborhood, was so austere that most folks thought it was an industrial building. And the flat roof leaked. Apparently Mrs. de Menil insisted on the windows in the kitchen, so the façade is not as austere as Mr. Johnson wanted. She also didn’t go for a house furnished with a few pieces of perfect Miesian furniture, and so she hired her dress designer, Charles James, to help decorate. And he did what Johnson couldn’t do— humanize it. His soft, sensuous furniture and unusual color palette provided the right background for the de Menils’ life. Mix it up. Johnson hated it and wouldn’t include the house in monographs.

Philip Johnson

Menil House, ca. 1964
courtesy menil.org

Menil neighborhood
courtesy menil.org

The de Menils’ least successful collaboration with Johnson (if collaboration is the word) was to commission him for the Rothko Chapel. At first this was to be part of the St. Thomas campus, but that changed over time, and it became a nondenominational chapel a few blocks away.

Johnson spent his career focusing on wealth and power. He knew how to ingratiate and how to imitate. He could follow the money, but he didn’t really have an original idea. His other ecclesiastical projects, like the Crystal Cathedral, aren’t inspiring. With the de Menils and Rothko, he had a client and an artist who exemplified the idea of art as transcendence. But that meant he wouldn’t be the star. His limitation was his endless sense of self.

There was a precedent for Rothko and Johnson collaborating, and it did not go well. The recent play “Red” is built around Rothko’s turmoil painting a set of murals for the Four Seasons, the restaurant that Johnson designed at the base of the Seagram Building (the office tower on Park Avenue that Johnson designed with Mies van der Rohe). The legend is that after dining in the restaurant, Rothko was so disgusted by the wealthy patrons that he returned the commission. (The paintings are now in the Tate Modern in London.)

For years, the paintings in the Rothko Chapel have been plagued by the lighting conditions and their inadequate solutions. As others have noted, Rothko probably did not understand the light conditions of Texas. But the problem was deeper than that. Johnson didn’t understand Rothko as an artist. Johnson was a chameleon of great skill, but one would be hard pressed to suggest that he was a spiritual man.

Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk and the Rothko Chapel
photo: Frances Carter Stephens
courtesy rothkochapel.org

Rothko Chapel interior
photo: Hickey-Robertson
courtesy rothkochapel.org

Philip Johnson never fully lived down his well-documented Nazi sympathies, but went so far as to atone for his sins by designing a temple on Long Island and a nuclear reactor for Israel. But as another writer once pointed out, he got the symbols mixed up: the temple looks like a reactor and the reactor looks like a temple. I would rarely find myself in agreement with the late conservative art critic Hilton Kramer, but his article assessing Johnson’s career in a 1995 issue of Commentary hits the mark.

“—what characterizes his work is a series of brilliantly performed charades in which other people’s ideas, other people’s tastes, and other people’s styles have been appropriated, exploited, deconstructed, and repackaged to advance the prosperity of his own reputation and influence.”

Johnson was an amoral man. He didn’t stand for much beside himself. It’s well known that Rothko was often difficult and paranoid. But he was painting for something beyond himself. Houston architects Eugene Aubry and Howard Barnstone finished the Rothko Chapel after Johnson left the commission, although he was invited back later to consult on the entry.

Could another architect with a greater spiritual sensitivity have given Rothko a space equal to his work? It is a shame that the de Menils did not commission Louis Kahn for this project. He didn’t have the social airs and the wealth that Johnson did. His office wasn’t filled with expensive flowers and furniture. But he was known to them. He had written an introduction to an exhibition Mrs. de Menil organized at St. Thomas in 1967. Wouldn’t his poetic ideas about space, light, and silence have found resonance with the de Menils? Indeed, he did do some initial schemes for the Menil Collection building, but both he and Mr. de Menil died in the early 1970s.

In his biography of Rothko, James E. B. Breslin writes that the viewer cannot see the complete work in the chapel simultaneously and concludes that the murals “…are spiritual only in the sense that they renounce the world.…” My own experience was that the withdrawal, like a retreat or meditation, allows the individual to return to the outside world more present and more compassionate. It took a religious client and an agnostic artist with a great capacity for the transcendent to create that space. Too bad the original architect was so rooted in his earthly self.

Dominique de Menil with various Religious Leaders
Dedication of the Rothko Chapel, 26-27 February 1971
courtesy rothkochapel.org

Further readings
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/philip-johnsons-brilliant-career/

http://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/2012/01/31/blog-special-alain-de-botton-on-his-temple-of-atheism/

http://www.amazon.com/Art-Activism-Projects-Dominique-Collection/dp/0300123779

http://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Modern-Activism-Aesthetics-Collection/dp/0292723334/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1336523162&sr=1-4

http://www.amazon.com/The-Rothko-Chapel-Writings-Threshold/dp/0300167776/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1336523194&sr=1-2

http://www.amazon.com/The-Rothko-Chapel-Act-Faith/dp/0945472005/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1336523217&sr=1-3

http://www.amazon.com/The-Rothko-Chapel-Paintings-Structure/dp/0939594374/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1336523236&sr=1-1