The Meticulous Mr. Anderson

Sometime between viewing Fantastic Mr. Fox (screening at LACMA tonight) and finishing off Matt Zoller Seitz’s five-part video essay on Wes Anderson, I rediscovered the affective themes that lay among the (meticulous) craftwork of Anderson’s films. Aspiration, disappointment, longing, and estrangement direct his bands of outsiders, a family of some sort caught in mid-transformation or already reassembled in a post-domestic formation like a badly healed broken limb.

It might be easy to catalog Anderson’s signature tropes, tendencies, and textures (and Zoller Seitz does one better by throwing in Anderson’s varied influences). Like a Sunday-strip cartoonist, he renders each scene with a distinctive touch; well-appointed mise-en-scene and a comprehensive sense of production design replace the draftsman’s stroke. And that’s without mentioning his way with words and the modulation of tonality, inflection, and rhythm among the spoken parts.

Of course Fantastic Mr. Fox is firstly a breathless entertainment, perhaps the most fleet-footed work in the director’s filmography. Like Arnaud Desplechin, whose dialogue with Anderson appears the latest issue of Interview, Anderson is prone to jolting inventiveness and sudden spurts of activity (not to mention that both directors share a somewhat caustic view of the familial and an unflagging affinity for the black sheep). But unlike the hectic, nervous energy in a Desplechin film, an Anderson picture is crisply precise and exact. His lithe set pieces have an almost panoramic breadth, while he maintains a hawk-eyed attention to minute details. An animated film, particularly one that uses analog techniques that traffic not only in nostalgia but in its inevitably bittersweet side effects, is more than an inevitable choice for this meticulous filmmaker, it’s an inspired experiment in lyrical screwball.

Bernardo Rondeau

Natural Monochromes

When Andreas Reiter Raabe was in Los Angeles in September to paint the Art of the Pacific galleries with tea, he took the opportunity to extend his ongoing photographic work. Beginning in 2004/2005, he started Natural Monochromes, an open-ended series of photographs that employ silkscreened signs with short texts referring to place and painting in specific locations around the world. Reiter Raabe kindly agreed to share one of the images from his recent trip here on Unframed. He told Nancy Thomas, our deputy director, that when he was in L.A., he felt particularly influenced by the natural landscape and its interaction with commercial and residential building.

Andreas Reiter Raabe, Natural Monochromes, 2009, image courtesy of the artist

Allison Agsten

Tour New Topographics with Amir Zaki

Last week we introduced an opportunity for everyone to see New Topographics in an entirely new way: via special Sunday afternoon tours given by leading Los Angeles photographers.

This Sunday’s tour leader will be Amir Zaki. Born and trained in Southern California, Amir focuses on the region’s architectural landscape. Carefully recording—yet deftly using digital technology to transform—subjects such as modernist residences, nocturnal suburbia, and urban density, Amir reconfigures many of his subjects into unfamiliar and confounding images. The desire to challenge assumptions about photographic authenticity also informs his recent survey of elevated lifeguard towers on Orange County beaches. Amir experiments with light and color until, shorn of regular indications of locality or use, these everyday structures become monuments of uncertain function and suggestive new meaning.

I recently spoke to Amir about LACMA’s restaging of this important exhibition, which was first seen in 1975 at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. The video here offers a sneak peek into Amir’s take on New Topographics, including how his early aversion to the work grew into profound respect and inspiration.

Edward Robinson, Associate Curator, The Wallis Annenberg Photography Department

What Lovely Teeth You Have…

Opening this weekend is the first full installation of our permanent collection of art from the Pacific Islands, the majority of which we acquired last year. Though these objects haven’t been on view before, I already feel familiar with them, thanks in part to some beautiful photographs our supervising photographer, Peter Brenner, took upon their acquisition.

Papua New Guinea, New Ireland Province, Memorial Figure (uli, selambungin lorong type), c. 1900, Purchased with funds provided by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation with additional funding by Jane and Terry Semel, the David Bohnett Foundation, Camilla Chandler Frost, Gayle and Edward P. Roski and The Ahmanson Foundation

Easter Island, Rapanui Male Ancestor Figure, c. 1800, purchased with funds provided by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation with additional funding by Jane and Terry Semel, the David Bohnett Foundation, Camilla Chandler Frost, Gayle and Edward P. Roski and The Ahmanson Foundation

Papua New Guinea, Gulf Province, Skull Rack (agiba), c. 1900, purchased with funds provided by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation with additional funding by Jane and Terry Semel, the David Bohnett Foundation, Camilla Chandler Frost, Gayle and Edward P. Roski and The Ahmanson Foundation

Already feeling like I “know” these pieces—and their faces are so expressive, so animated, that they do take on real personalities—I was surprised, when I walked into the new galleries, to find myself bowled over anew. The pictures, compelling as they are, don’t do the objects justice. The detail requires that you get up close. I became captivated by the mouth of one object—a Gable Peak Figure from New Zealand—finding its teeth to be so lifelike, so downright human it was almost eerie. Go figure—when I checked the materials listed for the object, “human teeth” were on the list.

New Zealand, Gable Peak Figure, c. 1800, purchased with funds provided by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation with additional funding by Jane and Terry Semel, the David Bohnett Foundation, Camilla Chandler Frost, Gayle and Edward P. Roski and The Ahmanson Foundation

In fact many of the objects in this collection include the bones of humans and animals, as well as human hair, shark skin, and bird feathers. For me, a twenty-first century Angeleno, it creates a strange disconnect: on the one hand so many of these characters look like they might have walked right out of a Tim Burton film, possessing a kind of sinister charm or a dementia that inspires a chuckle rather than a shiver. But on closer inspection, the human element—both the hands that made the objects and, in some cases, the heads that are part of the objects—makes itself utterly apparent.

Scott Tennent

Q&A with Britt Salvesen

Britt Salvesen came to the museum earlier this month from the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, where she was director and chief curator (as well as organizing curator of New Topographics, on view now at LACMA). In her new role at LACMA, she’ll head up our Wallis Annenberg Photography Department as well as our Prints and Drawings Department. What better way to welcome her than to grill her?

When I was on a walkthrough of New Topographics with Michael Govan last week, he commented on a trend—the exhibition as art—that I thought was very interesting. Can you tell me a little about that phenomenon?

We’ve seen some really seminal shows come to life again recently. New Topographics is one of those, as is The Pictures Generation, which was on view at the Met earlier this year. One reason to revisit these shows, New Topographics in particular, is because the original exhibition, which ultimately has become a chapter in the history of photography, didn’t have a huge audience. The tour started off in Rochester and the accompanying catalogue was quite small. No one was expecting it to become a definitive show that embodied a particular style. So it was time to ask, what can we learn by looking at these images again?

Would you actually use the phrase “New Topographics style”? And if so, what does it mean?

It has emerged as a useful category in today’s vocabulary, though the original work wasn’t intended to forge a style. New Topographics tends to be shorthand for photography that depicts the built environment, human impact on land. It also implies something harder to define as clearly—an objective viewpoint and also a serial approach, an assumption that a single image cannot necessarily capture all aspects of a subject.

What are your initial thoughts on L.A. from a professional perspective so far?

I oversee two departments—the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department as well as the Department of Prints and Drawings—and L.A. is unique in its productive disregard for traditional disciplinary backgrounds. There are powerful precedents of that kind of thinking here. John Baldessari is an artist, for example, who has been working in a variety of media for his entire career. I think, at museums, we can always learn from artists and their ability to create through juxtaposition, contrast, and invention.

And what about personally? Do you have any L.A. favorites yet?

I’m getting to know my way around as I drive to gallery openings in Culver City, to universities, and to other museums. I love the energy here—it used to be people left L.A. for New York and now it’s the opposite for career and quality of life reasons. So far, I’m really enjoying the farmers markets and the restaurants, which are great. I have to say, the fresh produce here is just amazing.

Allison Agsten