Without artists, the art falls flat

Over the last decade, major U.S. museums have increased their budgets for educational programming far faster than they’ve increased their acquisition budgets, many of which are shrinking. At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a recently opened exhibit brings this problem into focus. Installed in the Boone Children’s Gallery, “nano” demonstrates just how bad it can get when a museum puts so much emphasis on educational outreach that art disappears.

The show, the fourth organized by LACMALab, is a dud. It makes the museum look like a cigarette company: shameless about hooking kids before they know better and driven by the bottom line. Getting kids hooked on art is one thing, but passing off brave new marketing strategies as art is another.

All of the promotional material that accompanies “nano” insists that it is for visitors of all ages. Not true.

I went one Saturday morning. Without a kid in tow, I aroused the suspicion of the green-jacketed volunteers and blue-coated guards. Two volunteers offered to escort me through the show. I assured them I was perfectly capable of reading the wall labels on my own, and actually preferred to discover things for myself. One guard asked me to leave and not come back until I had registered at the front desk. Admission is free, but the bean counters must keep track of visitors. Museum bureaucrats measure success in the same way that movie studios do: by the numbers. A big gate increases the likelihood of future funding.

When I returned, about 20 children were running around loudly. They seemed to be having a pretty good time. But that had less to do with “nano” than with their ability to have fun anywhere.

Their eager shrieks did little to dissipate the show’s corporate atmosphere. As a whole, it felt less like a playground or even a loosely supervised classroom than a second-rate trade show. Half of its high-tech displays were out of commission or functioning improperly.

At the installation’s center stands a darkened, dome-shaped enclosure with faceted walls made of triangular components. Along its entryway, projected images of visitors scroll by on the wall. Some people may enjoy their 15 seconds of museum fame. But to me, the piece (and the apparatus that made it possible) had more to do with surveillance than individual expression.

Inside the dome, beach ball-size diagrams of carbon-60 molecules are projected across the walls in green light. Smaller hexagons move across the floor, where four real plastic spheres roll around like real beach balls. Hidden sensors detect visitors’ movements, causing recorded sounds to be emitted from invisible speakers.

I watched as an extremely patient dad figured out how to interact with the wall projections, which do not follow classical laws of motion but interact as micro particles do, more or less unpredictably. The results were hardly inspiring. Anyone who’s ever used a computer is familiar with the experience: Sometimes a procedure works; sometimes it doesn’t; and lots of times you’re not sure why.

No kids bothered to engage the technology, much less to learn about molecular structures from the overwrought display. Some were perfectly happy to push the balls around. Others clung to their caretakers and stared blankly, apparently put off by the laser-like light show, which resembles a small-town disco circa 1980.

The remaining displays are laid out like workstations around the dome. One, titled “nanomandala,” is an elaborate little movie theater. It was supposed to be projecting a video about the scale of molecules onto a circle of sand. But it was broken. The kids used it anyway, as an ordinary sandbox.

Other stations include an interactive 3-D video for the preschool set and a big blue futon made of spongy spheres. Both were working, but what they had to do with nanotechnology remains a mystery.

A touch-screen monitor, set up like a table, was designed to illustrate ideas about tactility. At least that’s what the wall label claimed. The piece was out of commission. Call me old-fashioned, but I’m skeptical about using computer screens to teach anyone about tactility, a hands-on activity if ever there was one. And the piece’s title, “Feeling Is Seeing,” sounds too much like Orwellian doublespeak to inspire confidence.

The most elaborate station, meant to illustrate an aspect of quantum mechanics known as tunneling, consists of a hall running between two small rooms. Each contains a microphone, a miniature surveillance camera and a projector. A wall text promises that the hidden technology will fuse images of visitors’ faces into strange two-in-one portraits.

It sounds amusing. It was, however, out of order. Unperturbed by the technological breakdowns, a family happily used the two mikes for karaoke, singing the instrumental and vocal parts.

The most popular stations are the simplest: kid-size tables and easels stocked with crayons, paints and pencils. Supplies for making collages and assemblages also are available. Here, helpful volunteers let the kids do their own thing -- as long as they clean up afterward. These low-tech standbys prevent a visit from being a complete bust.

Unlike previous exhibits organized for LACMALab -- “Making,” “Seeing” and “Made in California: NOW” -- no visual artists were involved in the creation of “nano.” The institutional administrators and academics who call themselves “media artists” are entirely responsible for this fiasco. Their hubris comes through in a wall label that’s worth quoting at length because it’s among the scariest things I’ve read in a museum: “LACMALab was the producer of nano and the broker of a collaborative process that brought together three university departments, an architectural firm, more than 50 LACMA staff members from 18 museum departments, and outside contractors to plan, organize, and install the exhibition. As an unprecedented joint venture with over 30 participants from UCLA, this complex initiative shifted conventional models of exhibition design from that of individual artist installations to a collective paradigm bringing multiple perspectives, different personal and professional expectations, and at times contradictory needs into a shared work environment. By marshaling the creative talent from divergent domains, this exhibition begs the question: who (or what) is an artist?”

Squeezing artists out of the picture is shameful. Top-heavy, overproduced displays are nothing to be proud of. And pretending that art -- and a viewer’s interaction with it -- can be replaced with pedagogic demonstrations is wrongheaded. It’s professional negligence on a grand scale, and reflects a profound misunderstanding of what a museum should be doing.

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‘nano’

Where: Boone Children’s Gallery, LACMA West, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.

When: Noon-5 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays; noon-8 p.m. Fridays; 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturdays, Sundays; closed Wednesdays

Ends: Sept. 6

Price: Admission to the exhibition is free

Contact: (323) 857-6000 or www.lacma.org