What MOCA needs is a reborn identity

The Museum of Contemporary Art’s  financial and management problems have become depressingly clear over the last several weeks.

But MOCA also faces some stubborn architectural challenges — ones that the museum and its potential saviors, including Eli Broad and the L.A. City Council, would be smart to confront before they finalize any rescue plan.

On paper, MOCA enjoys an embarrassment of riches when it comes to architecture. Its main venue, a 1986 building designed by the noted Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, stands in the heart of the Grand Avenue cultural corridor, a block from Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Music Center. Just down the hill, near an increasingly vital section of Little Tokyo, is the Geffen Contemporary, a warehouse renovated by Frank Gehry in 1983 and widely recognized as one of the architect’s most successful art-world designs. For good measure, MOCA also has a small outpost at Cesar Pelli’s Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood.

MOCA’s downtown venues contain a range of smartly designed gallery space. But in two related ways the buildings, each of which does its best to hide in plain sight, have been big disappointments: They’ve failed to define the museum’s identity in a clear way for a broad public, and they’ve never acted as magnets for attendance in their own right. Space limitations at the Grand Avenue building, combined with climate-control issues at the Geffen, have also frustrated some of MOCA’s ambitions over the years and kept much of its outstanding permanent collection in storage.

The result is a museum whose prominence in the city, in both literal and symbolic terms, has for years trailed its art-world reputation by a significant margin. In many ways, this is the crux of MOCA’s recent troubles, and explains in part why it leaned so often on expensive blockbusters to draw crowds.

I can’t be the only one who, considering the museum’s slide into crisis in recent weeks, found myself thinking about the fact that I tend to visit MOCA far less than I do other museums in town. When there is a particular exhibition I want to see — Gordon Matta-Clark on Grand Avenue, Takashi Murakami at the Geffen — the museum is a draw, and once inside I appreciate anew the appeal of its galleries. If I am more vaguely looking to spend a weekend afternoon at a museum, on the other hand, MOCA usually winds up near the bottom of a list topped by the County Museum, the Getty, the Huntington and even the Norton Simon. I suspect there are many other museum-goers in Los Angeles who feel the same way, not to mention thousands and thousands of tourists.

Why is this the case? And what can MOCA, or its would-be rescuers, do about it?

On the question of why MOCA’s venues so rarely seem worth visiting in and of themselves, one obvious answer is their faint presence in the cityscape. Isozaki’s design is in many ways a kind of anti-monument. It has no virtually no facade along the street, only a low red-stone wall. Its entrance, its cafe and its galleries are all below ground,  and the main face it turns to the public is a banal plaza. In part this is because the Isozaki building, born as part of a real-estate deal with adjacent California Plaza, was forced to keep its ground-level space open and connected to a pedestrian walkway running behind the museum.

But it also has something to do with the priorities of Isozaki’s design. His MOCA in many ways misreads the strange context atop Bunker Hill, which despite so much construction and urban-planning attention in recent years remains a quiet pocket of downtown, with giant parcels remaining undeveloped.
In a busier, noisier city — Tokyo, say, or New York — Isozaki’s museum would play against an urban cacophony and seem all the richer inside for the quiet inertness of its exterior. But on Bunker Hill it operates as a cipher. The result is a museum that keeps itself aloof from sidewalk traffic in a part of downtown that has very little sidewalk traffic to begin with.

Some of the same problems plague the Geffen Contemporary, a police warehouse brought back to life by Gehry in 1983 and planned initially to hold MOCA’s collection only during construction of the main museum up the hill (hence its original name, the Temporary Contemporary). The building is nothing short of a triumph inside. Its unpretentious but superbly proportioned galleries match MOCA’s postwar collection with uncommon sensitivity.

But the building, whose exterior Gehry sparingly touched, is virtually invisible in its urban context: Flanked by parking lots and tucked behind more conspicuous pieces of architecture, including the Japanese American National Museum and the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy, it can be tough to see even when you are looking for it. On top of that, it has no cafe and very few other visitor amenities.

Those shortcomings pose a bigger problem now than when MOCA was young. In the last decade, a global boom in art-world construction — begun in earnest in 1997, the year Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum opened in Bilbao, Spain and Richard Meier’s hilltop Getty opened here — has created, for better and worse, a museum-going public that closely associates dramatic architecture and high-end restaurants and gift shops with the act of looking at paintings and sculpture. Compared with the designs of those newer museums, MOCA’s architecture moves quickly from smartly self-effacing to largely forgettable.

There have been tentative moves over the years to end the Geffen’s physical isolation. Almost a decade ago, the museum and the city began exploring plans for an Art Park at the foot of the building. Designed by Michael Maltzan Architecture, the park, an undulating layer of landscape atop a partly buried garage, would have stitched together a number of downtown cultural institutions, including a planned Children’s Museum. It would also have dramatically lifted the Geffen’s profile as an object in the city.

The proposal ultimately clashed with plans for a gymnasium on the site and then fell into limbo. MOCA has returned to it periodically, and Maltzan updated it as recently as last year, but the city has waited to see how much fundraising momentum MOCA could gather behind it.

Now there are signs MOCA and the city may be trying to revive it. At his Modern Art Notes blog, Tyler Green has posted links suggesting that Jan Perry, who represents much of downtown on the City Council, may be working behind the scenes to set up another go at the Art Park.

While building it is a good idea now — it would be encouraging to see real leadership from Perry on this issue — it was an even better idea when it was new, when it would have qualified as a forward-looking rather than reactive gesture.

In fact, a few lessons of the MOCA debacle for policymakers are already clear: We can no longer afford to see our most valuable institutions in a vacuum, floating free of bigger and more complicated questions about how a sophisticated city ought to tend to, promote and safeguard its cultural amenities. We can no longer design them or operate them as if they were islands in the city — as if their connections to the larger city were somehow a minor issue, if not altogether irrelevant. And we can no longer put stock in the outdated idea that the most authentic pieces of Los Angeles architecture are by definition hidden or isolated.

It surely says something about the drawbacks of the Isozaki museum that when LACMA last week proposed a merger with MOCA, it suggested that the Geffen should replace the Bunker Hill location as MOCA’s primary facility. Even without the merger in place, MOCA should consider making the Geffen — in some expanded, reconfigured or climate-controlled form — its No. 1 venue. It has far more potential going forward as the anchor for a revived MOCA.

It certainly will be far easier to coax it toward real engagement with the city than to do so with Isozaki’s building. And a Gold Line Metro stop is due to open across the street from the Geffen in 2009.
In addition, museum and elected officials, as part of any rescue package, need to clarify the prospects for the Art Park and MOCA’s Grand Avenue building. Indeed, one condition for any sort of bailout, whether the money comes from the city or Eli Broad, or both, should be a plan to boost the visibility of both downtown venues and their sense of connection to the city. Otherwise MOCA risks slipping back into the anonymity that has plagued it for years.

--Christopher Hawthorne

Top photo: MOCA's building on Grand Avenue

Bottom photo: MOCA's Geffen Contemporary space

Credit: Brian Vander Brug / Los Angeles Times

Comments

[Brady Westwater]

I completely agree with everything you have to say about why MOCA's physical shortcomings have been a source of its problems - even beyond its inability to attract major collectors to its board when there is no place to exhibit their collections.

But expanding the Geffen site will only make things worse. MOCA needs to be in the heart of the city and not surrounded by a federal prison and other government buildings.

And only obstacle to this happening has been that the leadership at MOCA has been unwilling to examine the multitude options there are along Grand Avenue for expansion on already publicly owned land.

[Bruce Cana Fox]

Hi Folks,
The museum and its exterior presence are only a momentary phenomenon in the time of a visit. It is what is inside that counts. If you are showing nasty and ugh-buttly stuff time after time in the pursuit of showing the history of modern art, people are going to be less inclined to make the trip, brave the traffic and parking follies to see it. I've been making the trip from time to time in my 30+ years in the area, and I have seen some very inspiring thing there in past years. The last few visits have been disappointing. This last week at Grand, the justifiable anger of one lady still alive and working was evident. She had a couple of pieces of nice work and the rest was a walk through anger. Okay, I get it, but it became a bit much. Then the dead German guy, fully invested in the modern art of the 70's and 80's in a seriously egotistic and excessively self portraiture manner had no piece that was nice to look at. Really. I came away slightly sad that he died young, and congratulating the angry woman for being alive and working. I did not come away with joy, revelation, or inspiration. And thusly I understand better the troubles of MOCA.
I believe that MOCA must work on the inside of the museum first. Then make the venue fit the city scape better. They have a marvelous collection, can we see some of it sometimes?
[rant mode off]
Regards,
Fox sends.

[Gerald Sequeira]

The fallacy of Eli Broad's rescue is that he has conditioned his "rescue" on MOCA continuing to be headquarter at Grand Ave, where it can only exist in anonymity, where it cannot grow, where it cannot exhibit its vast holdings. The reasons are very clear, Eli Broad has a vested interest in the Grand Ave Project just up the street and having MOCA around helps to sell condo units.

Mr. Hawthorn just said what many people are unwilling to admit, be they Christopher Knight or Tyler Green. I don't think either of them are blind to the obvious, but Mr. Hawthorn is not from LA and his approach to criticism of LA has been from a foreign point of view: without sentimental attachment to the past. Some who grew up with MOCA are unable to admit to themselves that MOCA outgrew its 80s space before that decade was over. Continuing at the Grand Ave site is like trying to fit the new Getty Center on the Getty site in Malibu, dreaming that it might just work. It wont! MOCA at Grand Ave is like a childhood home, with sentimental value, but inadequate. There is plenty of public land around the Geffen to build THE world's premier contemporary art museum. It's therefore not surprising that another young ambitious outsider made that part of his counter offer.

Eli's offer merely buys a sinking ship a couple of minutes, replenishes the coffers that will likely run out in a couple of years. Govan's offer re-envisions MOCA and makes it relevant going forward. Nobody wants to see MOCA disappear into LACMA, but it is just as painful to see it diminish by its inability to grow. In the time that MOCA got its measly site on Grand, the Tate Modern embarked on a second mega building and MOMA rebuilt itself. On a sentimental note, I have only seen Small Rebus twice and Jasper John's Flag once.

[FlipFlopper]

Gerald stated perfectly what I have been thinking these last couple of weeks, but haven't been able to put into words. Yes, Broad's "generous" offer is primarily an investment in the Grand Ave project, not in MoCA. In addition, keeping MoCA HQ'd in downtown - and further away from his new BH vanity museum - will offer less competition than if LACMA inherits it in the Miracle Mile.

On the surface, Mr. Broad's offer is, indeed, generous, and he has a good history of philanthropy, but his actions the last couple of years with both the backstabbing BCAM maneuver and now this semi-transparent power play, make him seem suspicious.

I was initially in favor of MoCA's autonomy, but I admit I've since changed my mind and am siding with Michael Govan and LACMA's proposal...unless someone can give me a damn good reason not to.

[BT]

While the idea of an upgraded Geffen is certainly appealing, I think Mr. Hawthorne gets the big picture wrong: the lack of a sufficiently conspicuous architectural "identity" is not a big problem for MOCA.

Hawthorne assumes that MOCA aims to appeal to the broadest possible museum audience. Is that really their mandate? They are a specialty museum, focusing on contemporary art, often presenting work that defies or challenges conventional tastes. They have a stellar record (and reputation) in this regard, critically speaking. The fact that they attract smaller numbers of visitors than encyclopedic museums like LACMA or the Getty is not a sign of failure. Their current financial crisis is due to gross financial mismanagement, not poor attendance.

Even if we grant Hawthorne's premise that MOCA wants to draw more tourists and locals "vaguely looking to spend a weekend afternoon at a museum," I suggest two issues to address before architectural branding: 1. They don't offer a permanent display of relatively familiar "masterpieces," as do the other institutions Hawthorne contrasts with MOCA. 2. Physical accessibility: driving, parking and public transportation to their Grand Ave site is difficult. In LA, accessibility by car is far more important than the facade a building presents to the sidewalk.