ETEK L.A. Trip, 2009: Day 1

The first day of the ETEK L.A. trip tends to be somewhat shambolic, a bit of a random tour of Los Angeles sights before getting down to the weekday business of visiting studios and production houses. This Sunday was no exception, starting off with a delay as they changed the tire on our airplane before letting us board. The delay gave me ample time to sketch out a couple of other stranded passengers on my iPhone.



But eventually, we were up in the air, crossing the sierras before dipping into the brown paste of LA smog. I slept through most of it; Sarah took the pic below.


After some breakfast/lunch off Wilshire Boulevard, we hit the LaBrea Tar Pits.




Much of the displays seem a bit old-fashioned; the animatronic animals, like the small mammoth, or the saber-tooth tiger locked in a perpetual dinner interruptus with a giant sloth, have shuddery stalling movements, as if they're constantly second-guessing themselves, and you can hear faint clickings under their fur. And the large mural that you see on entrance is quite hyerbolic in its insistence on carniverous drama. Check out this sabertooth tiger, who looks not just hungry but also clinically insane:


But those sorts of details constitute part of the offbeat charm of the site. There's something inherently comical/horrible about the sort of image that is emblematic of the rich fossil finds at LaBrea: the vision of a dead horse, with a dead sabertooth tiger glued on top of it, and then some enormous vultures stuck on top of the tiger, all sinking together into the tar under the accumulated weight of the food chain. It has the ridiculous momentum of those children's songs that build on an ever-expanding chain of misfortune: she swallowed the cow, to catch the dog, she swallowed the dog, to catch the cat, she swallowed the cat, to catch the bird...






There's an impressively fastidious painting of the prehistoric LaBrea area by Mark Hallett included with the displays. Although it doesn't offer much relief from the carnivorous round. There's one fox, sleeping placidly in the hollow of a felled tree trunk, but other than that, it's nature "red in tooth and claw," with a pretty robin proffered only to spill its guts to a hawk, and even the lowly earthworm unspared, wriggling in the maw of a mole.



I think the most interesting part of the museum is the scientific "fishbowl," where you can watch excavators at work behind glass, removing the fossils from their cement of excess rock. Peeking at the dry-erase boards posted for the edification of us spectators outside the bowl, you learn that the excavators like to give the exhumed skeletons names like "Zed," "Fluffy" and "Conan." They're also eager to expand their contact beyond the fishbowl -- a URL was posted for The Excavatrix, "the semi-official blog of the excavators and excavatrices at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, CA," at which you can find stories of long-dead gastropods, and dragonflies stuck together with asphalt.




From there it was a quick hop to LACMA (we didn't even have to leave the parking lot -- a smooth continuity from asphalt to tar to art). There's an exhibit called Heroes and Villains: The Battle for Good in India's Comics currently up, which seemed promising. As the blurb has it:

This exhibition examines the legacy of India’s divine heroes and heroines in contemporary South Asian culture through the comic book genre.

The exhibit had some nice work, especially some pages by Mukesh Singh and Abhishek Singh (the latter employing a dynamically loose inking style that you can get a hint of in the black and white reproduction below). I wish more work had been on display -- it was more of a sampler plate than a full-course meal. The image directly below, showing Durga defeating the demon Mahisha (as he assumes the form of a buffalo), isn't included in the LACMA show, but it's similar to another piece representing the same story, dating to the mid 1700s, which is in the show. The way Durga's multiple arms seem to be a form of animaton, in the way that speed-lines or superimpositions can suggest frantic or rapid movement, formed a tenuous but suggestive link between 18th-century illustration and 21st-century comics.




For me, the highlight at LACMA was probably the roomful of Giacomettis (the pic below isn't from LACMA's collection, but the head is similar to one of the heads on display there). The surfaces of his figures are so whittled at, so chipped away (as if an excavator has scraped his way to bone, then kept scraping), that the light falls and scatters over them, not like an illumination, but like a thin tissue of spiderweb, torn against the ridges of substantive fact.


And then we drove down Hollywood Boulevard -- and after that finally corkscrewing up into the Hollywood Hills, ultimately (after a few involutions and wrong turns, and a bit of GPS consulting via iPhone) looping up Mulholland Drive, getting close enough to the HOLLYWOOD sign that we could make out the vultures wheeling in the blue air directly above it.



(The last two pics were snapped by Sarah)

ETEK trip, day 1

We caught the last day of the Bernini exhibit at the Getty. Perhaps the most arresting piece was the marble portrait of Camilla Barberini, her face emerging from the symmetrical folds of her headdress like the imperturbable prow of a white ship, cutting a symmetrical white wake in the sea. The aliveness of the portrait is all the more remarkable for its having being created 10 years after her death, as a commission from her son, with only painted portraits for Bernini to use as reference. It must have been eerie for the son to have his mother so indelibly materialized, a decade after her passing, with no photographs or home movies to disperse or otherwise distribute the authority of her presence. The portrait, in that way, would be as potent, as liable to speak, as any idol.

Marble in particular slows the eye. It invites you to become intimate with the portrait’s subject, perhaps even more deeply than the intimacy invited by movie stars, whose faces we examine for hours on end, with the sense of leisure and ownership that comes from the fact that, however long we may stare at them, they’ll never return or challenge our gaze. The artist of a marble bust invites us to occupy the privileged space he himself occupied, as the official portraitist. We get to gaze upon the face of someone powerful, to really study it, without fear of rebuke. People watching the marble busts in the exhibit also became frozen, rapt in their observation, turned into appendices of the original statuary. One man leaning on a cane, with a UCLA baseball cap, met the intensity of the gaze of a long-dead Pope, their eyes not fixed on each other, but on some middle distance of contemplation.


One interesting detail that emerged from Bernini’s process was the use of painted portrait models for subjects he couldn’t have sit for him in person. There was a Van Dyck portrait of Charles I in three positions, as if he’d been born as identical triplets – side, front, and three-quarters-view, the faint pink around Charles’ eyes giving him an animal vulnerability. It was like an animation turnaround, created prior to embarking on a virtual 3-D polygon model. Except, in this case, it was a freaking Van Dyck turnaround.

Some other Getty highlights for me:

An exhibit of humor in art, that corralled many of my favorites, including Rowlandson, Tiepolo, Goya, and Daumier. Two students caught me in a reverie over a Watteau drawing of an enema, which was kind of embarrassing.


Velazquez’s “Allegory of Artistic Creation,” which contained a smoking curl of red paint wending its way along the edge of a woman’s diaphanous blue-white sleeve, stopping me short.

A marble portrait of Maria Cerri Capranica attributed to Giuliano Finelli, the whorls in her hair like calcified battalions of wasps’ nests.

One of Franz Messerschmidt’s “character heads,” titled (not by him) “The Vexed Man.” Like other “character heads” I’ve seen reproductions of, the face is pulled into an extreme emotion, a grimace that would only last seconds on human musculature, but which becomes as powerful and unsettling as a ritual mask when rendered in marble. From the side, you can see something perhaps comical in the man’s expression, but when seen from below, he looks absolutely agonized.


Behind the Messerschidt is a 1783 self-portrait by Joseph Ducreux, yawning wildly, his arms heroically thrust into the air as if waving invisible flags, his mouth distended into a bright pink yawp.


We also went to the La Brea tar pits, and watched the asphalt blow bubbles for our amusement. Unlike the Getty, you can take pictures of the display, so I have more photographic proof of that particular rendezvous.