Death and Life, in that order, at LACMA

Poet Susan Stewart once wrote a fascinating essay called "Death and Life, in that Order, in the Works of Charles Willson Peale" on the tensions between the impulse to preserve and the act of destroying in the museum of Philadelphia-based, nineteenth century artist Charles Willson Peale. That article came to mind while visiting an exhibition now on at LACMA examining another nineteenth century artist from Philadelphia: Thomas Eakins. If the image above does not make the point sufficiently, let me make it crystal: the place was deader than a doornail!



So, Old Ken decided it was time to take a stroll around the museum campus, passing by the famous La Brea tar pits.



Well, as yours truly was doing so, I happened to glance up at the modernist pavilion that caps the top of the little hillock overlooking the tar pits. "What a ridiculous, heavy monstrosity," I found myself thinking. "Not only has it created this absurd band of stone in the air ...



... but it has marshaled a graceless army of girders to do so. And still the vegetation keeps getting the best of the situation." Such, at least, was the spirit of my musings.



But, as I made my way around to the west corner of the pavilion where the light was more favorable, I happened to look up at this frieze I had been internally ruing. It is truly a morbid spectacle! Here, saber-toothed tigers fight over rights to a poor mammoth trapped in a tar pit.



There, in a veritable tableau to the tune of "et in Arcadia ego," a cattle skull at lower left and hungry vulture above signal the inevitable fate that awaits both the blithely grazing horses and us gazing viewers.

Of course, we might say, all of this incessant artistic representation of death and coerced reflection on mortality is only too appropriate at LACMA. Our attention is being called to the pre-historic deaths that produced the rich petroleum deposits, which lie below our very feet. Without these deaths, there would be no fortunes reaped by J. Paul Getty and his buddies that could, in the midst of LA's post-War explosion, deliver LACMA and its artful bounty.



Indeed, once you begin to notice it, this apologetic narrative seems to be sprouting up everywhere across the LACMA campus. This work of genius by Didier Hess is called Food Pyramid. It reclaims land consecrated to the sublimely useless (art) to produce that which is (theoretically) edible: fish tacos.



This apparently self-sustaining ecosystem grows all the materials required for fish tacos, including the jalapenos we see here.



While the most relevant project of this variety is Lauren Bon's Reclaimed Strawberries—she's made a self-sustaining "flag" of strawberries with found fruit and collaboration with casualties of the military—easier on the eye is Fallen Fruit's on-site garden tressel. Even though gained at the cost of death, in other words, art making life right before our eyes.

Now, it might be interesting to consider this almost compulsive performance of artists' ability to create (or facilitate) life against the waning of older ideas about art's vitality or liveliness. Not only am I thinking of ancient and early modern tropes of images so illusionistically rendered that they seem to be alive, but conversations certainly present through Abstract Expressionism about the art-object as a living being. Has a loss of belief in art's vitality, in other words, come to compel these concretized performances of its alive-ness?



Strolling back into the museum with these admittedly mandarin questions in mind, this object brought the issue right down to brass tacks. Described in the gallery (but in much more detail here) only as a "Skull Rack" from Papua New Guinea ...



... this stylized, quasi-humanoid art object has reduced the humans to rat-like skulls with cowrie shells for eyes. And it literally has them by the nose. Old Ken doesn't know too much about the art of New Guinea, but I'm guessing that you don't need a PhD in anthropology to begin understanding who controls death and life, in that order, in this piece. If only that LACMA was equally transparent about the issue!