The walls can talk, and these artists listened
ARCHITECTURE shows are increasingly common in museums, but two recent exhibits offer a slightly different take on an old theme. “Lessons From Bernard Rudofsky” at the Getty Center offers fashion as well as buildings, while “Inside Architecture” at MOCA’s Pacific Design Center site explores a more private kind of architecture, not through the eyes of designers, but through the imagination of contemporary artists.
The relatively small MOCA show presents 19 works by nine artists including Thomas Struth, Paul Winstanley, David Hockney and Richard Prince. Each comes from the museum’s permanent collection, and each looks to inspire the viewer “to either fantasize about what might take place in certain rooms,” says curator Brooke Hodge, “or to project ourselves into those spaces.”
What’s more, each comes with its own rigorous conceptual strategy. Candida Hofer’s handsome but clinical photographs of study rooms, libraries and research facilities, for example, become a self-reflexive exercise when her recorded images are placed in institutional settings to be studied and cataloged. By contrast, Kirsten Everberg’s large-scale depiction of the White House dining room uses Pollock-like drips and splashes to create a display of ‘60s-era opulence.
A decidedly different sense of the poetic pervades the Getty show. Rudofsky was an architect, essayist, curator, clothing designer and professor who’s probably best known as the inventor of the Bernardo sandal in 1946. But it was his embrace of indigenous, or what he termed “vernacular,” buildings that gained him currency in the 1960s.
“He believed, and rightly so, that we can learn from these buildings,” says Wim de Wit, head of architecture at the Getty. “From sustainability issues to a more harmonious relationship to both our environment and each other.”
Such ideas are particularly relevant to L.A. But the real surprise is Rudofsky’s own architecture designs, which were built in Spain, Italy and Brazil. Each embodies Rudofsky’s belief that a house should contribute to physical and mental health through privacy, sensuality and a reciprocal relationship with nature.
“He titled an early essay, ‘What We Need Is Not a New Technology, but a New Way of Living,’ ” De Wit says. “And that stayed with him throughout his lifetime.”
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‘INSIDE ARCHITECTURE’
WHERE: MOCA at Pacific Design Center, 8687 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood
WHEN: Ends May 25
PRICE: Free
INFO: (310) 289-5223, moca.org
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‘LESSONS FROM BERNARD RUDOFSKY’
WHERE: Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, L.A.
WHEN: Ends June 8
PRICE: Free; parking, $8
INFO: (310) 440-7300, getty.edu
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