The Architecture of "Urban Light"

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-chris-burden-architectural-intelligence-lacma-20150511-story.html#page=1

Urban Lights
Chris Burden, 2008
collections.lacma.org

Hello Everyone:

On May 10, 2015, the art world grew a little dimmer with the death of Chris Burden.  Chris Burden was best known for his installation Urban Lights (2008), located in the Renzo Piano-designed piazza between the Ahmanson Gallery and the Resnick Pavilion.  The late Mr. Burden first made his name as a performance artist, in the early seventies, with the piece Five Day Locker Piece (1971). His most famous piece was Shoot (1971), where he was shot in the arm by an assistant.  Trans-Fixed (1974) was his most reproduced performance piece, making its way into eighties popular culture via the lavishly produced "Wild Boys" video, by the English quintet, Duran Duran.  Rather than use this space to write an obituary to Chris Burden, Blogger would like to focus on Chris Burden's architectural sensibility.  Our guide for today is our favorite critic Christopher Hawthorne and his recent article "Chris Burden's architectural intelligence."  It is an timely ode to Urban Lights and its function within the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Chris Burden among the lamp posts
latimes.com

Christopher Hawthorne writes, "I remember very clearly the first time I heard Renzo Piano describe the new plaza he was planning...he wanted to create a spacious classically proportioned space stretching between the museum's new ticket kiosks and Wilshire Boulevard."  The late Mr. Burden and LACMA director Michael Govan had a different conception.  Mr. Burden had been collecting vintage cast-iron lamppost around Southern California and storing them in his compound in Topanga Canyon.  He painted over 200 of these lampposts a uniform gun metal grey, arranged them as an abstract open-air building, and named the installation Urban Light."  Mr. Govan's decision to place the work in the middle of Mr. Piano's recently finished plaza, essentially wrecked the whole piazza concept.  However, something else, you might say, something serendipitous happened: a public space that tried to ape its European ancestors made itself at home in Los Angeles.

Watts Towers and Urban Lights
lacma.org

Christopher Hawthorne writes, "Here were deeply familiar symbols of car culture brought together into a quasi-architectural shaped and use, without sarcasm or apology, to suggest an emerging role for the pedestrian and public realm in 21st century Southern California." While the installation piece was not an announcement that the automobile was done, what Urban Light did, at the very least, was herald "new era require new monuments."

Urban Light has become one of the most photogenic places on the museum campus but more than that, it "...has given a significant boost to LACMA's goal of activating the long-dormant seam between the museum and the boulevard."  In other words, Urban Light has become a selfie magnet, which in this day and age of instantaneous fame, seems only natural.

Posing at Urban Lights
en.wikipedia.org

The basic architectural nature of Urban Light is found in Chris Burden's description, a building with a with roof of light.  Investing his work with an architectural character was not an out-of-place thing for the late artist.  In 2003, he told an audience at the Southern California Institute of architecture,

Originally I was going to study architecture...Pomona College didn't have a specific architectural program, so you took physics classes and art classes, and that was considered how you got your BFA in architecture.  As time went on, I realized that I wanted to be an artist, mostly because I had worked a couple of summers in an architectural office and seemed  then to me that you had to be my age--that I am now--before you got to make any decisions.  Whereas in sculpture I could get something done right away.  So that's the path I chose.

If you examine the oeuvre of Mr. Burden's work, you can find a running theme of architecture and urbanism, with the wink/nod approach to the relationship between the structure and art-making suggested by the installation.

Chris Burden added, Also, the physics at Pomona got harder and harder and I was competing with sort the whiz kids of the physics world.  They were content to spend 30 to 40 hours on a calculus equation.  That wasn't interesting to me."

Wexner Castle
Chris Burden (1990)
Columbus, Ohio
flawedart.net

Some of Chris Burden's work was explicitly architectural and others were more akin to architectural criticism.  One example was Wexner Castle (1990), for the Peter Eisenman designed Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio.  Mr. Eisenman clad the building in brick fragment, invoking the memory of the armory that once stood on the site.  However, for Mr. Burden, "...the brick towers were too smooth and abstract, missing crenellation and other details."  Mr. Burden added those features to the façade; a gesture of the sculptor adding architectural details to work of architecture "he found too blithely and lazily sculptural."

An exhibit from "Extreme Measures"
October 2, 2013-January 12, 2014
New Museum
newmuseum.org

In 2013, Chris Burden was the subject of a major exhibition by the New Museum (http://www.newmuseum.org), in New York City, titled "Extreme Measures." In his initial discussions with the museum's curators, Mr. Burden said, "he wanted to the leave the galleries virtually empty and and instead hang a range of large pieces, including another collection of lampposts, on the facade of the New Museum's six-year-old building." In the final presentation, the galleries were stocked with the sculptor's works and only two pieces were attached to building's exterior.

Ghost Ship (2005) was an boat that was sent on an unmanned voyage, controlled from the off the coast of Scotland.  This boat was attached to the façade of the New Museum.  On the museum's roof was a tribute to the destroyed World Trade Center Towers titled, Quasi-Legal Skyscrapers, work with deep roots in the Topanga Canyon experimentations of Mr. Burden.

Close up of Ghost Ship (2005)
Benoit Pailley/New Museum
observer.com

In the early nineties, Chris Burden made sketches for a project called Small Skyscraper, a representation of the tallest structure that could be built in Los Angeles without a permit.  Mr. Burden worked with architects Linda Taalman and Alan Koch to build a scale version of the tower and place on exhibition, 2003, at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, where it was displayed on its side; then upright at One Colorado in Pasadena.  Quoting Ms. Taalman, Christopher Hawthorn writes,

"Burden carried out" a kind of outsider architecture practice...Small Skyscraper, at its core came down to evading building inspectors.  If someone didn't like it, you could take it down and it could pop up somewhere else.

Commenting on the attraction of Urban Light, Ms. Taalman added, It's amazing the way people are drawn to that sculpture...It never stops. People are like moths, drawn to those lights.

Trans-Fixed (1974)
wtfarthistory.com

Chris Burden, unlike Renzo Piano or Peter Zumthor, understood that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Wilshire Boulevard were not voids, rather they are magnets.  Mr. Piano referenced the European piazzas, which offered relief from densely populated cities and the weight of architecture. Places where the city can stop to catch its breath.  Los Angeles is the opposite, we have a lot of empty spaces-mostly parking lots-therefore, an open space is not much of an attraction.  Chris Burden said it best on more than one occasion, L.A. is short on both monument and gathering spots.  For now the people, like Linda Taalman's moths, are drawn to the Urban Light.