Museum Appetite 5: Going Inside

Every time I’ve visited the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), I’ve wandered through the first floor of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum like a weird moth to a weird flame.   The flame, in this case, is two giant sculptures called Sequence and Band, by an artist named Richard Serra.   Both are copper colored, made out of steel, and fill an entire gallery.   They are twice or two-and-a-half times as tall as me, and they are made to be gone inside of.   That is to say, the sculptures by design invite you inside; in order to view them, you must enter them.

The first time I went inside Bend, I remembered a sculpture in the Centre Pompidou, the contemporary art museum in Paris.   I visited the Centre only once, in the summer of 2000.   I was 14.   My little brother was 12 and my little sister was 10.   My mother led us through the museum, most of which I have forgotten, and into a large white sculpture that looked to 14-year-old me like what a really cool, abstract igloo would look like if Pablo Picasso painted it, then someone made a sculpture out of the painting.   My mother took a picture of my brother, sister, and I in the sculpture.   I don’t remember the artist or what the sculpture was called, but I remember being tired, and I remember enjoying the rest of sitting inside the sculpture, swaddled by the dome over my head.

I remember only two works of art from the Centre Pompidou: the red bull because it’s on all of the Centre’s advertisements and is really ostentatious looking, and the sculpture I sat inside of.   The sculpture is memorable because it makes you interact.   Your memories of the art aren’t just mental, they’re physical.   When your body is forced to interact, your subjective experience of the art is more vivid, more personal, more functional.

Two years ago, I visited the “first significant survey of the work” of the artist Karen Kilimnik at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (MCA).   I had never seen Kilimnik’s art before, but I loved it.   I wandered through the galleries of her “scatter-art installations of various bits of pop culture detritus” and lingered in front of her paintings that “combine art historical tradition, modern topicality, and an awkward intimacy and fragility.”   My favorite part of the exhibit was “The Red Room.”   The circular room was actually pink, not red, and the walls were covered with around 50 smallish paintings.   In the center of the room was a round circular couch, and I sat on it and starred at the paintings for a while.   I didn’t want to leave the room.   I liked the way it made me felt.   I let Kilimnik’s aesthetic define my space, my body, my experience — I liked the kind of person that I was when I sat in her room.

In an interview on the LACMA website, Serra said of his sculptures: “The content or the subject to a great degree is you.   And that subject is your experience, and that experience is not prescriptive, nor is it depictive, or illustrational, nor is it representational, but it’s your experience–

“I’m not building playgrounds, and I’m not building theaters, and there’s no beginning or end, there’s no narrative here, there’s no hierarchy in terms of parts or wholes.   I mean, it’s up for everybody to go where they want, or not go, so you’re not programmed in anyway about the beginning or the end or whatever.”

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Unattributed quotes are from the MCA’s website.

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Catie Disabato lives 2 miles from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2,044 miles from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and 5,700 miles from the Centre Pompidou in Paris.   She has written essays and conducted interviews for The Millions and The Rumpus and writes about music for Venus Zine.