The Wall Street Journal-20080213-A Cultural Conversation - With Michael Govan- Taking an Artistic Approach in L-A-
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A Cultural Conversation / With Michael Govan: Taking an Artistic Approach in L.A.
Full Text (1405 words)Michael Govan, now finishing his second year running the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, never wanted to be a museum director. "I was sort of anti-museum," he says. "If I was going to do anything, it was going to be a thorough critique of the museum."
He came from directing the Dia Art Foundation, an organization built, in Mr. Govan's words, around the assumption that "institutions would always screw up." Dia was established to minimize the heavy- handedness of the art market, in favor of giving artists sufficient money to have free rein. It still maintains some of the art world's most adventurous projects from the 1970s, including large-scale land art like Walter De Maria's "Lightning Field" in New Mexico and Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty."
Now Mr. Govan sits at the heart of the mainstream museum world, at an institution fraught with change -- undergoing hundreds of millions of dollars in upgrades to its disorganized and occasionally dilapidated campus, including a new building, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, opening this week; accused by some of giving one hardheaded board member, Eli Broad, undue influence; and needing to foster new philanthropists and art collectors in a city not known for either. Mr. Govan has tried to turn a seeming disadvantage -- his unusual background for heading a big-city encyclopedic museum -- into a cornerstone of how he wants to run LACMA.
Mr. Govan's collaborations with artists at Dia have shaped one of his central goals for LACMA -- to engage the artists directly with the museum's programming, when normally their involvement stops at the works hung on the walls. In one of his first directives, he redeveloped a long-planned exhibition of René Magritte by hiring a new, unorthodox curatorial adviser: conceptual artist John Baldessari. (Mr. Baldessari dressed the museum guards in Magritte- style bowler hats and carpeted the floor with blue sky and clouds.) Mr. Baldessari was also recently tasked with redesigning LACMA's logo. Mr. Govan is banking on the idea that artists can help us understand the history of art in a more enjoyable, productive way: "To create a lasting impression, my answer would be to employ artists."
Is this just the case of a contemporary-art curator who wants to push his area of expertise on a museum hardly known for its modern holdings? Mr. Govan insists it is not. He says that segregating the field of contemporary art rests on a "fundamental misperception," since all art "started out as contemporary." For him, a museum's engagement of artists isn't about providing charity to support them -- though one of Dia's cornerstones is funding artists whose work is financially unsustainable -- but about how best to show art. "There's a long story of artists being involved in shaping institutions, but somehow with the professionalization of museums, making them more like entertainment vehicles, artists haven't had the role they should," he says.
In some ways, this seems to recycle an idea from the 1970s, when Mr. Govan's interest in art was first burgeoning. Artists like Michael Asher regularly produced conceptual projects that involved toying with the museum, like temporarily relocating a few objects at the Art Institute of Chicago to change their context. Their goals are often described as subverting museums, but Mr. Govan argues that that's a misconception. "Actually their purpose is to create something meaningful," he says. "What I learned from that generation is it's not that they're against institutions: They build institutions." Even someone as supposedly opposed to the traditional authority of museums as Donald Judd created a museum of his own, the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.
One of the ways Mr. Govan will put his stamp on LACMA is through the overhaul of its campus, a multiyear, $156 million -- and growing -- project. This weekend the museum opens to the public the first phase, which includes a variety of campus overhauls, the new contemporary-art building and the reinstallation of several permanent-collection galleries. Somewhat frustratingly for Mr. Govan, the master plan was largely completed before his arrival. He quickly made one change, scrapping the restaurants and bookstores that were planned for inclusion in the lobby, pushing them to less prominent locations in the building.
In an era when museums often make the biggest headlines not for exhibitions but for hiring brand-name architects, it's easy to criticize the country-wide spate of campus expansions for valuing splashy building openings over quality spaces for viewing art. Mr. Govan hopes his use of artists can help compensate for that skewing of priorities. "I want the campus to be defined by artworks more than by buildings," he says. In one dramatic demonstration of this, he's commissioned a 161-foot-tall crane by Jeff Koons. "Everyone decorates their entrance with sculpture: big architecture and a small off-center sculpture," he says. "This crane reverses that hierarchy." Equally symbolically, the new contemporary art building's façade is covered by two works by Mr. Baldessari -- literally putting art ahead of architecture.
Still, minimizing the outsized aura of architecture will be a challenge given the museum's choice of architect, Renzo Piano -- beloved but arguably overused, increasingly a default choice for museums. (Among his recent projects: the renovation of Atlanta's High Museum of Art in 2005 and Dallas's Nasher Sculpture Center in 2003, and the continuing building project at the Art Institute of Chicago.)
Mr. Govan is prone to making broad connections in discussing his career, not dissimilar to the kinds he wants contemporary artists to forge for viewers at LACMA. A dropout from a doctoral program in philosophy who initially wanted to be an artist, he always locates art in a broader social context. His parents were both political scientists, and he says that politics and war shape his view of the importance of places like LACMA. "I always think about my cultural work in relation to that. More wars are fought over culture than over money," he says. "Artists are the proxy for a deeper understanding of the world."
One of Mr. Govan's key challenges is changing the dynamic of LACMA's board to make it more reflective of Los Angeles's overall community; today, it still heavily depends on old money and social power. In one recent shift emblematic of the kinds of changes Mr. Govan seeks, Andrew Gordon of Goldman Sachs became board chairman, representing a very different constituency than his predecessor, Nancy Daly Riordan, the ex-mayor's wife and a philanthropist. Mr. Govan has added 17 board members since his arrival, hoping to add 10 more seats to the 44- voting-member board. (L.A.'s opera company has nearly 90 people on its board; the symphony, 50.) Some of these new members have been high- profile picks from hot business sectors, such as MySpace founder Chris DeWolfe and author Michael Crichton.
One of the museum's trustees is Mr. Broad, and the institution's looming dependence on this one billionaire is a complication most museum heads don't have. Mr. Broad's fingers are all over LACMA's new contemporary-art museum: It's mostly his money and his art (he owns three-fourths of the 200 works that will be displayed at the building's grand opening), and originally he'd demanded a separate director for his building. Mr. Govan dismisses criticisms of Mr. Broad's role: "If someone offered you a collection like that and money to support it, there's not really much to do other than celebrate," he says.
Perhaps the most eyebrow-raising worry among art-world watchers is that Mr. Broad hasn't promised LACMA his collection. In fact, last month, on the verge of the new building's opening, Mr. Broad said he intended for his collection to remain permanently in his foundation, from which the roughly 2,000 works would be lent to museums including LACMA. (Los Angeles is still reeling from the disappointment that in 2005 Edward Broida, a local real-estate developer who died the following year, gave his coveted, 174-work collection of contemporary art to the Museum of Modern Art.) Mr. Govan counters that Mr. Broad frequently donates work to the museum's permanent collection, including a recent $10 million gift to buy a Richard Serra sculpture. He adds that Mr. Broad's decision may be emblematic of the concerns many contemporary-art collectors have in an era of so much art production. "It's clear that museums are not yet well-enough funded to swallow those volumes of works at this moment," he says. "Those are open, big questions."
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Mr. Russell, a former arts reporter for the Journal, is a writer in Boston.
