This Weekend at LACMA: Visions of the South Opens, Art Meets Science in Talk with Yale Professor, Second Week of Hacienda Heights Art+Film Lab, and More!

There’s no better time to visit the museum than on rainy days. Opening on Sunday to the general public, Visions of the South surveys the unfolding artistic concepts of the South (a geographic reality and an exotic fantasy) from as early as the 16th century. The exhibitions includes around 40 works from the museum’s permanent collection and features artists like Pablo Picasso, Nicolas de Staël, Richard Seewald, Emil Nolde, and Max Pechstein. Members see it first during the Member Preview day on Saturday.

Richard Janthur, Robinson’s Island, 1922, the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, purchased with funds provided by Anna Bing Arnold, Museum Associates Acquisition Fund, and deaccession funds

During your visit check out the full schedule of free docent-led tours which come included with general admission. For example, take a look at the history of photography during the 50-minute tour of See the Light—Photography, Perception, Cognition: The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection on Saturday at noon or a full 50-minute overview of our Modern Art gallery at 2 pm. If you’re here on Sunday quick 15–20 minute samplings of Egyptian works at 1 pm or a focused look at one artwork, in this case Antonio Montauti’s Triumph of Neptune and Europa, at 1:30 pm make for a quite pleasant afternoon. At 2 pm join a talk with professor of psychology, cognitive science, and neurobiology at Yale University, Marvin M. Chun, as he discusses How the Brain Sees the Light in the Brown Auditorium. This event is free and open to the public.

Antonio Montauti, The Triumph of Neptune and Europa, c. 1735–40, purchased with funds provided by Anna Bing Arnold

Families visiting the museum would do well to stop by Andell Family Sundays on Sunday at 12:30 pm, where this month the free art project centers around soccer and the new exhibition Fútbol: The Beautiful Game. In the evening, Sundays Live presents conductor Maxim Eshkenazy and the Colburn Chamber Orchestra in the Bing Theater at 6 pm for the free, weekly orchestral performance.

In nearby Hacienda Heights the Art+Film Lab, located at Steinmetz Park, visit the public art space for sessions of Oral History Drop-ins and a free screening of staff-favorite short films on Friday and a free hands-on filmmaking workshop on Saturday. Back in our galleries, see The Ancient Maya World: Masterworks from the Permanent Collection before this display is rotated out on Sunday and make your reservations for James Turrell: A Retrospective now, as spots are filling up fast for this crowd-pleaser, ending in a month’s time. Oh, and remember to pack an umbrella.

Roberto Ayala

All That Had Been Lost: An African American Journey through the Luba Exhibition

Is it possible that an African American can view the exhibition Shaping Power: Luba Masterworks from the Royal Museum for Central Africa without a tinge of discord and disconnect; or are we to be washed over, teary eyed, and spellbound in awe of this immense beauty that is before us?

Here we must travel through time to a dark period as Africans who are not pure bloods. One must peer at a world or cosmos whose complexity was assured and complete. Luba Masterworks stands in a parallel universe, with its profound sacred objects, beatific scars, and intimate rituals of glorification. Simultaneously, we’re wretched back to another darker world of bondage, an adopted god and the abstract scarification of the whip.

Mary Nooter Roberts and Allen F. Roberts write in their book Luba (Visions of Africa) that “the Luba Kingdoms never constituted an ‘empire’ . . . , even the main Luba Kingdom was first and foremost a construction of the mind.” I found the intellectual weight of this notion that Luba’s political strength comes from spiritual power and the beauty of their arts was in profound accordance to all great civilizations.

Caryatid stool, Africa (Democratic Republic of the Congo, Luba Peoples), The Royal Museum for Central Africa, collection RMCA Tervuren, photo R. Asselberghs, RMCA Tervuren ©

Upon entering the African gallery, one is confronted with a hall of a kingdom that is past and yet is present. A wooden female figure, a quite small caryatid stool, kneels before you. She is kitenta, a spirit capital. Holding up a thick disk, her eyes are cast down. A choker of giant blue beads adorn her neck and small white beads circle her waist—she is poised. Her extended navel is surrounded by precise, patterned scars that texture the nut-brown wood, which darken toward its edges as she kneels on an equally thick disk.

The Mulopwe (the king) is dead. One is in the presence of “a lieu de memoire,” where his spirit resides. This was the king’s throne as is the other, larger stool in the exhibition. Female power is at the very heart of Luba royal arts, for kings were represented by women “who surround, uphold, and empower them.” Enshrined in a complex ritual, women were endowed with conferring and giving life. “The foundation of kingship is the women.”

Male Mask, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Luba Peoples, 19th Century, Wood (Schinziophyton rautaneii), Royal Museum for Central Africa, RG 23470 (collected by O. Michaux in 1896), Photo R. Asselberghs, RMCA Tervuren ©

At the center of the gallery, as out of the marshland of Lualaba River as it were, a buffalo man, the Mbidi Kiluwe, the hero, stares out of a powerful dark buffalo-horned mask as if at the center of gravity. It was remarked that his skin is “black like the night.” He is a masterful hunter and blacksmith, the one that made the Luba Epic—the oral narrative—possible. He imparted knowledge, stimulated memory, and harnessed the spiritual world. He is the touchstone of the Balopwe and the secret association called Mbudye, in which all-esoteric wisdom, customs, and complex rituals are transformed and transferred. The gallery holds these instruments of the intermediaries between the world of mankind and world of the spiritual ancestors.

Bowl-Bearing Figure, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Luba-Henba Peoples, 19th Century, Wood (Ricinodendron rautanenii), Royal Museum for Central Africa, RG 14358 (Collected between 1981 and 1912, gift of A.H. Bure), Photo R. Asselberghs, RMCA Tervuren ©

I came upon the Bowl Figure that holds chalk (mpemba), the sacred white substance of enlightenment. I thought about how deeply personal each adornment embodied a sacred expression, spells of grave enchantment.

In this world, the Mbudye members and ruler would drink palm wine and other secretive potions from the ceremonial Kiteya bowls and cups, smoke from the pipe, whose figure’s genitals impart complex social and ancestral relationships that foster personal transformation. Earth spirits in the form of lizards would be carved into lids of bowls. Antelope horns, smoke stained, packed with medicinal substance for these spirit figures, the Bilumbu, had transcendent power of locomotion, not only seeing into the beyond, but may have traveled to the beyond.  There were royal spears, staffs of office and ceremonial axes, which provide metaphors for “breaking a path.” How needful!

Africa—a beckoning world—the “Heart of Darkness,” as Joseph Conrad’s ponderous narrative of barbarians in contrast to “civilized society,” dense in the myth of the “savages,” the “other,” as it is suggested. Marcus Garvey offered a dreamland of return, a land of sad, exotic contradiction, where innocence died. Mary Roberts’s scholarship gives us a complex Luba society of profound depth, and yet it, too, would be a counter narrative to another world tragically simpler, a cosmic failure—ours was where the shame of skin and chained servitude and the endless nightmare of its terror, cruelty, and violence was itself a continent within a continent, creating its own bleak weather, day in and day out, year after endless year, unrelenting, in deep time, hollowed out until memory knew no other.

I am amazed by the sophistication of the Luba people: the intricacy, the subtlety, and the sheer fundamental naturalism interwoven with spirituality that is based in the earth, and honors the corporeal, mystic mystery of the life force. Ironically, by a cruel dent in history, we, as a people attenuated, became the modern embodiment of the existential man who was denied his history.

When I was a boy, we were Negros. Maybe the constant adjusting of the name we were to go by; Negro, colored, blacks, and now, African American, distilled its own formal, paradoxical, elusive identity. As if we were a species of an indeterminate form, aliens from an alternate universe. And one must invent the self through the eyes of the chains that bind us. So I come to this Luba cosmos as an explorer, not as progeny. Only our DNA knows the truth. What were left unmoored were the voices, unencumbered energy in our hips and bodies, the acrobatic motion of a million rituals still in tune, in rhythm, still dancing in the blood of time.

In the new world, there would be no hero, no Mbidi Kiluwe. The mother would be taken from you. No secret association, no Mbudye, no Bilumbu diviner that slips through shadows, no radiant Mboko reading the will of the spirits, no healing and no problem solving, no intermediaries to the darkness they confronted, only the precarious, invented world would be theirs. For the most precious of all Luba artifacts is the memory board, the Lukasas, here the universe of time and place could be read, could be seen through the constellations of beads, shells and bits of metal offering a mnemonic code, geometric patterns of deeply esoteric meanings.

But there would be no “men of memory”—thus we are the people of dreams.

The sheer beauty of the Luba culture was on, some level, beyond imagination, idealization, or at least I was unprepared for its depth—the elegant coiffure, the scars, the animals, and the abstraction that wasn’t an abstraction but a symbol of meaning, the distinctness, a sign of a deeper realization. It was the infinite sky on the other side of the world.

Hylan Booker

Talbot and the Possibilities of Photography

One of the first things I noticed upon entering the exhibition See the Light—Photography, Perception, Cognition: The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection is the numerous quadrants of photographs arranged on the first wall. (Previously discussed in this Unframed post.) The four photographs in each grouping represent the four themes covered in the exhibition: descriptive naturalism, subjective naturalism, experimental modernism, and romantic modernism.

A number of photographs by William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the earliest adopters and promoters of photography, are included to illustrate the descriptive naturalism theme of See the Light. And understandably so—as a witness, and even a competitor, to the earliest methods of making photographs, Talbot was interested in the lens’ ability to act as testimonial to what was situated in front of it. He trusted the lens to depict and describe reality better than the eye or through written observation.

William Henry Fox Talbot, Articles of China, c. 1844, the Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, gift of the Annenberg Foundation, acquired from Carol Vernon and Robert Turbin

This photograph was made in 1844, a few years after the invention of commercial photography in 1839. Talbot used the method he invented—calotype—to construct this meticulously arranged field of china. Calotype, a process involving paper coated with silver iodide, was a departure from the daguerrotype, which required heavy plates and numerous contraptions to render an image. Talbot considered the ability to create images on paper a substitute to drawing as documentation. (It should be noted, however, that the calotype produced a less-detailed product than the daguerrotype.)

In The Pencil of Nature, published in London in the same year that the photograph (above) was made (Articles of China was also one of the plates of the book), Talbot writes that the illustrations in the book “have been obtained by the mere action of Light upon sensitive paper. They have been formed or depicted by optical and chemical means alone, and without the aid of any one acquainted with the art of drawing.”

William Henry Fox Talbot, Articles of China (detail), c. 1844, the Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, gift of the Annenberg Foundation, acquired from Carol Vernon and Robert Turbin

Talbot continues, “The more strange and fantastic the forms of his old teapots, the more advantage in having their pictures given instead of their descriptions.” I imagine he might have been referring to an object such as the one above.

It’s remarkable to read Talbot’s description of this image in the context of our visually saturated environment. To our 21st-century eye, Articles of China might perhaps be read as a simple grouping of porcelain objects. In essence, it is the consummate showcase for descriptive naturalism—it accurately represents the reality of that scene. To Talbot, however, someone who was exploring the nascent medium of photography, this picture presented an opportunity to capture all the intricate details present in each of the pieces of china.

William Henry Fox Talbot, Articles of China (detail), c. 1844, the Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, gift of the Annenberg Foundation, acquired from Carol Vernon and Robert Turbin

We take this practical aspect of photography for granted, but it’s incredible to consider that, just a mere decade before this picture was made, the only options to depict reality were either through painting, sculpture, or drawing. Talbot was right to examine and promote the possibilities of the medium. He writes, “The articles represented on this plate are numerous: but, however numerous the objects—however complicated the arrangement—the Camera depicts them all at once.”

Although the mode of descriptive naturalism seems to have organically come about upon the invention of photography, its use is not unique to the 19th century. Straddling the boundaries between art and science, the crux of the descriptive naturalist strategy in photography—to serve as an objective eye—is still being used today. (The built-in camera on phones, for instance, often functions as a machine that produces testimony/proof of an event.) It’s a rare opportunity to encounter the entire span of the history of photography in a singular exhibition, but when we do, we might realize that our passive consumption and production of images are linked to a trope that was the subject of fascination in the 1840s.

Linda Theung, editor

Interview with Curator Franklin Sirmans—Fútbol: The Beautiful Game

The subject of fútbol—or soccer—nicknamed by one sports commentator as “the beautiful game,” touches on issues of nationalism and identity, globalism and mass spectacle, as well as the shared human experience between spectators from many cultures. As the 2014 World Cup takes place next month in Brazil, LACMA mounts an exhibition featuring approximately thirty artists from around the world who examine the sport through video, photography, painting, sculpture, and large-scale installation. Franklin Sirmans, Terri and Michael Smooke Curator and department head of contemporary art, sat down with Insider’s Linda Theung to talk the exhibition Fútbol: The Beautiful Game.

Kehinde Wiley, Samuel Eto’o, 2010, Roberts & Tilton Gallery, © Kehinde Wiley, Image courtesy of Kehinde Wiley, and Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California

Linda Theung: Why are you interested in representing the sport of soccer through an art exhibition?

Franklin Sirmans: Like other exhibitions, there’s something underlying that you think needs to be explored. Unlike many other exhibitions, this happens to be one of those things where you are already obsessive about it. Your obsession drives you to explore different ways of examining the subject. The format of an exhibition presents a perfect opportunity for such an exploration. Writing is another way to look at such a topic.

Theung: Tell me a bit more about your obsession. How do you begin to cultivate an intellectual interest in something that is often seen as purely physical?

Philippe Parreno and Douglas Gordon, Zidane: A 21st-Century Portrait (detail), 2006, © Philippe Parreno and Douglas Gordon

Sirmans: I’m thinking about where that transitional moment occurs. As a curator, I’ve been fortunate to be able to take certain personal obsessions and spin them, or look at them, or, for better or worse, intellectualize them. This is not limited to fútbol; I’ve done exhibitions about sports as they pertain to America. And exhibitions about music, to take another obsession. And even about, to some degree, my obsession with spirituality—not, by any means, obsessing about spirituality as it relates to any specific religion, but about the idea of spirituality. I’m interested in intellectualizing the quotidian.

Theung: It happens just organically, right?

Sirmans: In this case, it’s also listening to artists, and all of a sudden looking and thinking: there’s a lot of work about this subject.

Theung: Why is it, do you think, that artists are responding to soccer in particular, and so consistently? In the works in your show, there’s a repeated representation of the grid of the soccer ball and the physical nature of the sport.

Sirmans: I think partly it’s the blanket fact that soccer is the most obsessed-about sport in the world, and so artists, being a subpopulation, will be somewhat proportional in their interest. It’s interesting to engage with international artists and see a thread of similarity in their consideration of the sport. And the aspect of fútbol plays out even bigger globally than it does in the United States.

Theung: Why do you think the U.S. hasn’t really picked up on the interest in soccer? Many sports writers have asked this question. One thought is that it’s a low-scoring game.

Lyle Ashton, Harris, Verona #1 (detail), 2001–4, Dunbar, New York, © Lyle Ashton Harris

Sirmans: I think there is definitely something to that, and in the American imagination, the two more popular sports are basketball and football.

Theung: And NASCAR.

Sirmans: [laughs] Yes, of course.

Theung: Speed and numbers.

Sirmans: NASCAR seems to be a bit more regional. But the idea of numbers is definitely supported if we look around out there. And soccer is not something that can be claimed here, in a way, and therefore you have to work against that idea in the market.

Theung: What do you mean by claimed?

Sirmans: It’s not like basketball. The sport didn’t originate here. It’s not American football. It’s a wonderful, amazing import. But it wasn’t made here. Though the U.S. appeared early on the international stage.

Theung: Given that the exhibition runs concurrently with the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, a country that’s wild about the sport, do you think the exhibition will bring a different audience to the museum? Not only a different audience who will take part in the programming, but also in the conversations that you might have?

Sirmans: I hope so. There are a lot of people who play the sport in L.A., and a lot of people obsess about it here.

Theung: More so than in other parts of this country.

Robin Rhode, Hondjie (detail), 2001, L&M Los Angeles,
© Robin Rhode

Sirmans: Absolutely. This city has two Major League Soccer teams. I don’t think any other city can say that. Some of the best players are in Los Angeles. It is the perfect place to further explore the idea. Connecting back to the idea of the 2014 World Cup being in Brazil, the interest in the South American population vis-à-vis the game is immense. The first World Cup was in South America. With the demographic in Los Angeles, it seems like a perfect fit.

Theung: And the Olympics in 2016 are in Brazil, so it’s a double feature of really prominent sporting events.

Sirmans: It’s good and bad. Fútbol and FIFA are usually ahead of the crowd in terms of determining the next area of geographic interest. The Olympics tend to be safer in their selection of host countries. If we talk about where the next three World Cups will be, we’re looking at Brazil, Russia, and Qatar, on the heels of the first cup in Africa four years ago. This year the Venice Biennale, which began in 1898, will have its first African curator. No South American or Middle Eastern curator yet.

Theung: Considering the diversity of countries that the World Cup will touch, will the exhibition deal with the political or geopolitical nature of the sport?

Sirmans: To some degree, yes. There are works that touch upon those things. We have some ideas for programming that will make the exhibition very relevant, and it’s interesting to think about fútbol’s position around the world, and politically and socially. There’s a wonderful book about how soccer explains the world [How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (2010), by Franklin Foer] that shows how you can document the world’s changes through soccer. When the first World Cup was given to Uruguay in 1930, it was a way of celebrating that country’s first hundred years of independence. Also, see Simon Kuper on how it doesn’t!

Theung: In antiquity, athletes were often subjects in art. They represented the classical ideal. One of the artists in the exhibition, Chris Beas, harkens back to this mode of representation in his paintings: his athlete figures are depicted in a celebratory, almost mythic light. On the other hand, the athletes featured in Generic Art Solutions’ works are almost caricatures, almost comedic. There’s an interesting juxtaposition between these two artists: the serious depictions of great athletes and exaggeration of emotion with soccer players holding each other, like in a pietà.

Sirmans: And the work also touches upon, coincidentally, the expressionism of Italian players. It’s making humor out of the exaggerated physicality that happens on the field. And in Chris’s case, he’s dealing specifically with obsession. He’s only painting the team he follows: Manchester United. All the red and white is not simply a graphic choice, but it relates to that team specifically. He’s going for myth. He doesn’t really paint any of their players before the 1970s. They’re these heroic, idealized individuals who are no longer held up to scrutiny but who are essentially martyrs to their cause.

Theung: It reminds me of neoclassicism and the way artists in the eighteenth century mythologized their ideas of figures in antiquity. I’m curious, how is soccer unique among sports in this country?

Sirmans: Like basketball, its simplicity is appealing. It crosses borders. It’s just that one ball. You don’t need a lot of equipment. It’s a sport that has accessibility.

Theung: Right. Soccer is accessible, despite climate and location. It’s easy to have a pick-up game with soccer. Even when you look at the Olympics, and specifically the winter games, it’s all European countries, and in the summer, it’s all non-European countries. It brings up the political aspect.

Sirmans: There was an article in the New York Times about the pick-up games in Brazil. The idea of community is very important. There’s a piece in the show, by Gustavo Artigas, about community and how communities that play different sports see one another. It shows two teams of basketball players and two teams of soccer players. They all play in the same space.

A version of this article originally appeared in the winter 2014 (volume 8, issue 1) of LACMA’s Insider.

This Weekend at LACMA: Hacienda Heights Art+Film Lab Opening, Musical Performance by Smoke and Mirrors, the Afterlife of Piet Mondrian, and Much More!

Take part in the debut of the Hacienda Heights Art+Film Lab this Friday with an opening party! Los Angeles–based Chicano Batman rings in the festivities at 7 pm at Steinmetz Park with a free show. See a screening of the film These Birds Walk by Omar Mullick and Bassam Tariq at 8 pm. Exploring the plight of poverty in Pakistan by following a unique friendship between Omar, an orphaned toughie, and Asad, an ambulance driver who unites runaways with families by night, and delivers bodies to the morgue by day. Through March 23, the Hacienda Heights Art+Film Lab offers free film workshops, an oral history project, and a diverse selection of films through the Hacienda Heights Art+Film Lab.

LACMA9 Art+Film Lab, photo by Duncan Cheng

Need last-minute plans for Friday night? See a special screening of the 1943 film Shadow of a Doubt in Bing Theater at 7:30 pm. As the latest installment of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association Restoration Tribute series, the screening includes an introductory conversation with actor Bill Hader.

On Saturday, we’re hosting a free lecture and book signing about the Afterlife of Piet Mondrian with Stanford professor Nancy J. Troy, who also The Afterlife of Piet Mondrian. Troy will explore the different ways Mondrian’s art has influenced culture, and the ways in which his own surroundings shaped the artwork during his life.

Papua New Guinea, New Ireland Province, Memorial Figure (uli, selambungin lorong type), circa 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

Andell Family Sundays continues, focusing on Memories and Art from Africa. Students are encouraged to design personal memory boards and their own royal objects in artists-led workshops.  The program takes place at 12:30p m in the Los Angeles Times Central Court.

Guests are invited to take part in a conversation with Jeffrey Deitch and Michael Chow at the Art Catalogues Store on Sunday. Jeffrey Deitch will discuss Chow’s return to art with the artist, as well as his book that is available for purchase in the store.  The talk will be proceeded by a book signing and reception.

Also on Sunday, Los Angeles–based percussion ensemble Smoke and Mirrors performs in the Bing Theater at 6 pm. Come hear this rare performance this Sunday, free and open to the public.

Rose Mandel, On Walls and Behind Glass, 1947, printed 1947, the Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, gift of the Annenberg Foundation, acquired from Carol Vernon and Robert Turbin, © Rose Mandel Archives, all rights reserved

While you’re here, stop by and witness the history of photography—and the science of sight and vision—in one exhibition, See the Light—Photography, Perception, Cognition: The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection. Indeed visitors will encounter both iconic works and be introduced to new pictures as they traverse the exhibition. Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-Garde to Iconic located in the Resnick Pavilion, showcases the kinetic and dynamic work by this master of 20th-century sculpture. And the exhibition Fútbol: The Beautiful Game features famous football portraits by Andy Warhol, Kehinde Wiley, and many more, and is on view in BCAM. Be sure to check out the entire list of exhibitions to find what you’re looking for this weekend.

Larkin Manger, intern, Marketing and Communications