LACMA and Oro? Art?

Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art

Location: 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, 90036

Entertainment Cost: You choose donation after 5:00p or $12 for general admission

Entertainment Highlights: Lamps on Wilshire Blvd., Scary "Stomp on your foot" Elevator ride, and the oddities of contemporary art.

Food Highlights: Ethiopian food in Little Ethiopia

Food Cost: Free if you have an awesome friend by the name of David!

(Really, I wasn't exaggerating)

Oro? is the first word that comes to mind when you are confronted with a exhibit that is in essence a blank Canvas or a huge brown wall. At the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art, we are given the luxury of space and architectural redefinition, or say, reevaluation of what art traditionally is. You know, like coloring inside the lines, shading in hues, a coherent picture. Instead, we would see a photographic picture of a man with a blue, green, or pink dot covering it like a punch hole, some faces were even scribbled out like you would see in a high school yearbook.

Calling all contemporary artists!!--Please explain why a cartoon scribble would constitute as art if it could be found in many variations at any middle or high school classroom, such as the ones made by Joseph Beuys. Some photographic portraits were quite morbid--especially of the Electric Chair by Andy Warhol--it was a like somebody took a picture of a decade old electric chair without using flash, and it was somehow improperly developed in the red room, with smudges of blue tint smeared on the bottom half portion of the picture. I guess it really takes a highly developed aesthetic sensory instrument to appreciate Hoover vacuums stacked on fluorescent light bulbs. Or maybe an inflatable Caterpillar swim toy penetrated through a ladder.

Well enough art bashing for AGNANT laymen folks like me. I did appreciate the view and the architectural precision at the museum. I was fascinated by the how the engineers of this building (or for any building taller than my 5'1'' stature) can mathematically blue print and build such wonders for humanity. The steel cables that run perfectly parallel to the reinforced red beams, the height and awe of it all. The many five story tall palm trees on these five by five feet "pots" get rotated every couple of months. Fascinating.

We also got lucky when we went to an exhibition that won't be officially presented until October. From afar it looked like a bunch of parking space brick dividers that got stacked neatly together to be ready to be inventoried. The giant auditorium was dedicated to this exhibition alone. The ceilings complimented the subject tastefully, giving it an almost tunnel vision illusion. Or at a bird eye's view, it looked like tire treads. Those 2,000 pieces of perfectly aligned and metrically calculated brick thingys (Another SoCo favorite word to describe objects that are unfamiliar to us) were a sight to see.

It didn't take much for us to absorb the awe and confusion at what we were looking at for the most part. We also got to see some of Pablo Picasso's original, uh, weird (yet another SoCo favorite word for the aesthetically unrefined) table. Or one of the originals from my personal favorite artists, Salvador Dali. Many more big names that I'm just too la(y)me(n) to identify. When you leave the museum after seeing all the exhibits only one word could describe the experience: Discombobulated. It felt like everything that I have labeled-- an apple, a woman, a school desk, and have categorized--a bananna is a fruit, or the like, in life, has been questioned. Like my innards have been exposed on my skin, or like living in purgatory, just waiting, and waiting, for something to make some damn sense. It was overall a great experience, in its three hour interval (I think that's as much art as I can stomach in one sitting, or in our case, standing).  

 

 The highlight was when we were leaving the museum and we saw the luminescent lights of the many lampposts majestically guarding the front entrance to the museum (as we were rushing to get out before security locked us in...too creepy if even spending one night..shudder). 

 

We later went to Little Ethiopia and had some yummy finger food plates. On one big dish, we were given a three course meal, filled with curry based beef and tomatic onion chicken, complimented by a thin cotton like texture bread, like Indian Pandori, but more sour, to use as sandwich utensils to wrap the main dish. Overall, a good evening!