Extra Credit Event 2: Los Angeles County Museum of Art | LACMA: Ongoing Events and Exhibition

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is the largest art museum in the western United States; it features many artworks from different styles and different continents. There is the Pavilion for Japanese Art where they have fascinating tea ceremony performances, the Art of Americas Building that hosts American Art and Latin American Art. The Hammer Building which has Korean art and ancient Chinese collection such as the amazing antique silk worm book and the children gallery. The Ahmanson Building with modern art, European Art, Islamic, South and Southeast Asian Art, the Picasso exhibition is the first time that I get to see a real Picasso work up close. There is also the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and the Resnick Pavilion that I think is particularly interesting to look at.

Among all the artworks at LACMA, I saw several interesting pieces and surprisingly they are from the same artist Chris Burden, who just passed away last month. Burden’s iconic work is definitely the Urban Light located outside the BP Grand Entrance, the Urban Light is composed of 202 historic streetlamps dating from the 1920s and 1930s originally spread throughout Southern California (LACMA).

https://www.magasin3.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/chris-burden.jpg

Urban Light

Another mesmerizing work by Burden is the Metropolis II; this piece features 1,200 toy cars on their roller-coaster ride through the sculptured city. Burden built this sculpture to present a fast paced, frenetic modern city. The steel beams forms an eclectic grid interwoven with a vast network of 18 tracks. These miniature cars speed through the sculpture city at 240 mph, the equivalent of approximately 100,000 cars circulate through the dense network of buildings (Jobson). This piece reminds me of the robotics lecture, I think that the Metropolis II is a vision of what future cities will look like if we maintain our life style. At the same time, the continuous movement of trains and cars symbolize the stress for human beings living in the modern century.

Another piece by Burden is the Ode to Santos Dumont, a kinetic airship sculpture inspired by Brazilian-born pioneer aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont, who is also the father of aviation in France. This balloon looking airship is filled with helium to neutral buoyancy, and the motor is able to push the balloon in a 60-foot circle. The reason I love this piece is because what it signifies in the age of robotics and air travel. This airship examines the balance between weight and power, and this sculpture gives insight to Alberto Santos-Dumont’s innovative ideas that bring human to the sky, and subsequently inspire many other space adventures. The airship signals a progress of human beings and their capability to break through constraints and limitations.

Reference

Jobson, Christopher. "Metropolis II: A Kinetic Sculpture That Circulates 100,000 Miniature Cars Every Hour." Colossal, 3 Mar. 2014. Web. 7 June 2015.

Sykes, Stephanie. "Chris Burden: Ode to Santos Dumont | Unframed." LACMA, 13 May 2015. Web. 7 June 2015.

Theung, Linda. "Chris Burden, 1946–2015 | Unframed." LACMA, 11 May 2015. Web. 7 June 2015.