When the 340-ton boulder that will be the centerpiece of Michael Heizer’s "Levitating Mass" rolled up in front of the Los Angeles County Museum at 4 am on Saturday morning, completing a logistically momentous 11-day, 105-mile journey from the quarry of its birth, truck horns blared and cheers erupted from the hundreds of people who’d waited through the night to greet it. The piece, which is due to be completed in late spring or early summer, is the most recent — and by far the heaviest — of several monumental works to be installed at the museum since the arrival of Michael Govan as director in 2006. The last five years have seen the installation of Chris Burden’s "Urban Light" at the Wilshire Boulevard entrance to the museum; Richard Serra’s "Band" on the ground floor of the Broad building; Barbara Kruger’s "Untitled (Shafted)" in that building’s three-story elevator shaft; and Tony Smith’s Smoke in the atrium of Ahmanson building. Developed in tandem with Renzo Piano’s comprehensive redesign of the museum’s 20 acre campus (still ongoing), the works point to the ambitious scale of Govan’s vision for the museum and its campus.
The day before the boulder’s arrival, ARTINFO Los Angeles spoke to Govan about how "Levitating Mass" figures into this vision.
What role do you see these big, iconic sculptures playing in shaping the institutional identity of the museum?
I’ve always been interested in the relationship between art and architecture in the making of place, metaphorically and practically. It’s a very ancient tradition. When we worked with Chris Burden to create "Urban Light," I took the glass off Renzo Piano’s planned entrance, pushed it back and put "Urban Light" out front. We’re making an image, a sense of place, a statement. My dream was that the images of the museum that would be in the guide books would be art works, not buildings.
I have an immense fascination with architectonic artworks. I think that they can engage the public in a different way. People don’t have to drive by and immediately say, “Oh, that’s an artwork.” They see 202 street lamps lit up [in "Urban Light"] and then start to think about that, and of course the more you think the more you get out of it. There are 202 19th-century street lamps; they were public art before there was public art; they’re installed in the form of a temple or an arcade. There are so many layers of meaning. And I think the Mike Heizer project works in the same way. When he proposed it, I knew it was the perfect. We had this big space on 6th Street, the park side of the campus, and I loved the idea of being able to exploit that sense of space that you get in the west — the desert, openness, flatness. You can see the sky everywhere there. Try that in New York City.
How do you see these big works balancing against the museum's other functions — the galleries and other collections, for instance?
One line of thinking since I got here has been about trying to leverage the outdoors in a way that would be meaningful — not just a big plot of grass with what I call plop sculpture. These sculptures work really well because they blur the line of where the museum is inside or outside. I do want to blur these lines more and we will further over time. In ancient times, a lot of art was outside. It’s a relatively modern idea that you make interior spaces and bring in paintings and frames. I don’t think of what we’re doing as very radical, it’s actually trying to channel some of the more fundamental ideas about art that are contained in our collections, since we have art from every time and place.
What have you made of the popular response to the rock, in the media and on the streets?
Mike Heizer and I knew that you weren’t going to move a 340-ton object without being noticed. We knew it was something complicated and interesting. But I don’t think anybody imagined that Bixby Knowles [a neighborhood in Long Beach where a celebration was held for the rock on the afternoon of March 7] would be attracting 15,000 people.
I thought it would be more controversial than it is. It seems mostly that when people get close to it, they’re just fascinated. Not many of those people have the big picture, but they are definitely going to coming to LACMA to see the piece.
What do you say to people who say it’s an extravagance?
I actually enjoy that question, because there’s a very direct answer. Museums spend a lot more money than this on art all the time, often buying objects from other countries where the money goes away. Even that is justifiable. But the great thing about this piece is it’s like a WPA project in a tough economy. We’re putting artisans to work. An artist and concrete workers and steel workers and truckers and engineers and architects — we’re putting all these people to work. How much did the Getty just spend on their Turner painting? A lot more. It’s easy to respond that not only is it a justifiable expense — it’s what museums do — but it’s a building project, so it’s funneling all that money to a diverse group of people. Also it will bring people to LACMA for a long time who will spend money. So it’s a great benefit to the economy that’s going to pay back a lot more than it’s spent, which you can’t say directly of every painting you acquire.
It goes back to your original question of the motivation for doing these things. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that the museum has a role not only to show art but to facilitate the making of art. Maybe that’s my Dia experience. There’s no reason that a metropolitan museum of our scale can’t also be working with artists to facilitate the creation of art as well as acquiring finished objects to hang on the wall.