In her introduction to this lavishly illustrated, indispensable book, longtime Koshalek colleague Erica Clark describes the Downtown L.A. That’s it.” But that’s all there ever was, and the burglary call was a false alarm. Everything’s gone.” He asked them to describe what they saw. My favorite Richard story, which shows his undying commitment to Modernism: Pasadena cops, called to his house about a possible burglary there when he was out of town, telephoned him while peering into his (intentionally spare) living room through the wall of glass. Riding a Gold Line train in the age of LA Metro anxiety This big book is properly written as a kind of love letter to former MOCA Director Richard Koshalek, originally hired as chief curator in 1979, and its big boss from 1983 to 1999, when he left to helm Art Center College of Design. It put us on the map where we belong - beside MOMA, beside Paris’s Beaubourg - as one of the loci of world art in our time. had wrought, culturally, in the world of contemporary art. Yes, the Little Tokyo building originally called the Temporary Contemporary, a warehouse reimagined by the fantastic Frank Gehry, a moniker I still use rather than the rich person it’s now named after, had for years been putting on brilliant and groundbreaking shows as the wild artistic, financial, development and civic wrangling described in this essential book took place and ended in the creation of the Arata Isozaki-designed Grand Avenue MOCA.īut the Grand building, problematic as it is, weird as the almost-underground space it’s in is, built deep into Bunker Hill, was absolutely essential to letting the world see what L.A. It’s a glorious thing, what they did, building that building, which marked two huge milestones: The acknowledgement that Los Angeles was one of the world’s great centers of art, and that Downtown, not the Westside, was the center of art in L.A. It’s a wonder they didn’t choke to death. When the reader opens the massive new volume “A History for the Future: The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, 1979-2000,” the first photographs, black and white, are of MOCA’s Grand Avenue construction site, workers on its arched rooftop, with smog wafting around them and creeping down the skyscraper canyons of Downtown. become the home to the Light and Space Movement artists, or Hockney’s poolside shimmerings, when the light was so bad? A: They all worked in good-air Santa Monica, except for the great Helen Pashgian, who worked in Pasadena, which is even more amazing, as the smog was even worse. A unifying force in looking at photographs of Los Angeles in the 1970s is the smog.ĭeep, mountain-view-blocking clouds of it.
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