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Meir's travertine-sheathed Modernist forms (Photo by S.Frances/Esto) |
| Archmodernist meir's work takes an unexpected turn toward kitsch. The fantasy was this: against the uniformly dreary assessments of the Getty Center I'd rise in defense of a project that couldn't possibly be that bad. After all, it has been branded in the press as the product of everything from cultural imperialism to elitism, autoplagiarism, and gigantism. Burdened by a huge budget, an extended gestation, and its brush with the millennium, the Getty has also been saddled, it seems, with a duty to account not just for its place in Los Angeles but in the culture itself. Some of these criticisms would have been made about any project representing such a huge concentration of resources. The relevance of the Getty's old-fashioned style of bigness and its Olympian character in a city of sprawl, where needs and neighborhoods are so evidently dispersed, has been legitimately questioned. I, however, have never had any problem with the idea of a big complex on that Brentwood hill. The site is superb and commanding, clearly no place for false modesty. And I'm down with the Acropolitan solution, pristine temples artfully deployed and glinting in the sun. Nor does the institutional magnitude of the Getty trouble me. Much of the criticism of the project, understandably, has equated the museum component with the institution itself. Although the collection isn't fabulous (despite quite a few wonderful top-dollar items), its strengths are those of an academic collection rather than a concentration of masterpieces. The ancillaries, though, are what make this an amazing place: the superior research labs, the luxurious scholars' center with its excellent library, the public education programs, grants, and conservation subsidies. There aren't many institutions like this anymore, and the creation of the center is more akin to the founding of a university than to the opening of a museum. One of the strongest arguments for the consolidation is that the Getty's various components work synergistically, in peripatetic, cross-fertilizing interchanges. Of course, the museum is the focus for most visitors, and it is easily the weakest architectural piece of the complex. Indeed, it seems willfully so. The logic is to concentrate painting on the upper level and to create a sense of intimacy by breaking down the scale with a set of semi-connected pavilions. The result is a cumbersome and confusing circulation pattern, which--given the proportions of the buildings--accords de facto privilege to the vertical. I found myself in a circulation yo-yo, taking too many long hikes up and down stairs, confronting too many elevators. Another problem is the size of the galleries themselves. The lofty skylights and high pyramidal ceilings in the upper rooms are based on John Soane's beloved little Dulwich museum--Richard Meier himself allowing the historicist camel to poke its nose through the flap of the tent--but here they mainly seem too small, wrested from a building of a different scale. This strategy for intimacy is both out of sync with the grandeur of the Getty's enterprise and cramped in practical terms. On a Sunday, with thousands of visitors, it's a jungle (never mind the acute shortage of bathrooms). To be sure, the natural lighting is appropriately elegant and pellucid, but the cost in scale and proportion inside and outside is simply too high. The vertical attenuation and scale breakdown are exacerbated by the quality of the gallery spaces themselves. Much has been made by a variety of writers (including Meier, who issued an unprecedented book-length apologia) over the imposition of a decorator--Thierry Despont--who was responsible for doing up the period rooms in period style. I'm strictly with Meier on this one. I've got no problem with museums installing period rooms from the period, but the ersatz is just tacky. Even the relatively undecorated rooms are done in lugubrious colors and unimpressive detail. It all feels wrong. Hardly an original insight, but the Getty is in Brentwood, land of O.J. and Monica Lewinsky. In this enclave of parvenu posh, the reigning sensibility is the decorator's, and the Getty certainly begs the alpha question of Angelene decor: Consistency? Brentwood answers with a kind of radical eclecticism in which anything goes with anything as long as someone's sanctioning taste is involved. This is more or less the strategy at the Getty (and at most old-line museums of encyclopedic grasp), which collects all over the map, from Louis XIV bric-a-brac to Old Master paintings to the jugs and shards of Classical antiquity. Ironically, the decorator rooms resurrect the specter of kitsch that the institution sought to escape in its move from its previous quarters. The mainline Modernism of the complex stands in deliberate contrast to the legendary kitsch of its predecessor, the reconstructed Roman villa (complete with underground parking) overlooking the beach at Malibu. (That museum is itself being renovated by architects of Classical proclivities, who are treating the phony villa as if it were in fact an archaeological site, a truly poisonous conceit.) There's another much spoken-of intrusion on the Meier project that also raises the kitsch quotient. At some point in the development of the buildings, the museum--worried, it seems, about the project's remorseless stiffness--decided to invite the artist Robert Irwin to create a large formal garden in the cleft between the museum and the scholars' center. Meier had already designed this space, and he was reportedly furious to have yet another collaborator foisted on him. The two were apparently so overcome with mutual loathing that they were unable to integrate or even connect their two projects. Indeed, the most symbolically fraught moment in the whole complex is the dirt DMZ (as everyone refers to it up on Parnassus) that stretches between Meier's plaza and Irwin's garden. As a result, on a rainy day one walks in the mud. Irwin does his bit to advance the kitsch by producing an unusually vulgar piece of work. Tiny mounds of earth are retained behind enough inch-thick Cor-Ten steel walls to build a battleship. Hundreds of plant species have been assembled and laid on like a smorgasbord, echoing the grab-bag diversity of the institution itself. The geometric layout might seem to tithe Meier, the master geometer, but the scheme is klutzy and overwrought, filled with circles and switchbacks and a surfeit of undercooked detail, the antithesis of Meier's cool grids and curves. Most striking, though, is that Meier himself has produced a kind of kitsch. Modernism--in its austerity and rationality--is the historic enemy of kitsch, but as Meier's particular brand of Modernism becomes increasingly self-referential, it enters a territory where relevance is adduced through excess and sentimentality, the nurseries of kitsch. The Getty is nothing if not excessive. Meier's kitsch involves both the number of built elements and the extreme deployment of his regular kit of parts--the orthogonal grid, the piano curve, the pipe railing. This sheer repetition of detail--however artful--dulls the sense of the particular that is central to artistic achievement. What seemed precise in Atlanta's High Museum or the New Harmony Center becomes a blur when multiplied to enormous proportions. Travertine is a beautiful, sensuous material, but the acres of it at the Getty--used simply as surface--are just gross. The neighbors also contributed to this failure. Meier--whose whole career has been devoted to making white buildings--was obliged to promise that he wouldn't do so here lest the locals be blinded by reflected light. Bad move. White is the most volumetric color, emphasizing shape over detail, and it is Meier's signature. The royal road to disaster in this project undoubtedly began with the demand that the buildings be beige, the first decorator compromise. Most of the metal cladding panels are an ambivalent tan, suggesting shade where there is none, dulling the crispness of the buildings' edges, and adding complication to an architecture that has always sought to pare. The buildings display their sentimentality by self-consciously evoking the icons of the past--the Acropolis, to be sure, the whiff of Tuscany in the plaza and framed views, Hadrian's Villa, Soane's museum--but most especially in the almost parodistic use of Corbusian forms. One has the sense that the referent long ago ceased to be Corb and has now become Meier's riff on Corb. This impression is heightened by the many Meier buildings on the hillside, facing each other in various juxtapositions. Completely lacking in irony, Meier's compulsive repetition produces Meierland. Searching for a reading of multiple buildings, we rely on certain paradigms--the acropolis, the campus, the office park, the theme park. The Getty elides them all. Certainly, it's the shining temple complex at the brow of the hill, collegiate in both form and purpose, but it also recalls corporate headquarters designed in the Seventies and Eighties. And with its mechanically controlled sequences--from car to garage, to robot train, to plaza, to café, to attraction--it offers more than a suggestion of the theme park, a reading reinforced by the touchy-feely ad banners suspended from thousands of L.A. lampposts, picturing a young African American boy and offering the invitation to visit "your Getty." In 1967, I spent some months living and working on a kibbutz. Shortly after the Six Day War, I went to the newly united Jerusalem to check things out and offer my services. The task I was assigned was helping to clean up the old Hebrew University campus on Mount Scopus, which had been abandoned to the Jordanians in 1948. Like the Getty, the complex enjoyed a certain Acropolitan splendor, crowning the little mountain. The buildings were also the product of one hand, that of Erich Mendelsohn in his Holy Land phase. They were earth-toned, as well, clad in the luminously golden local stone. Although I was unenthusiastic about the rough dressing of the stone at the time--I was into a more Meieresque, machined look in my impressionable youth--I came to appreciate the complex for the way it appeared to be not on the hill but of it. The Getty does have its visual pleasures. The views over the city are marvelous and the landscaping luxuriant. The complex organizes many wonderful vistas: the view from the delightful cactus garden through the museum court to the drum of the rotunda is one of the best. The scholars' building is a very good piece of Meier--which means a very good building--and is clearly the privileged working environment in the complex. These pleasures, though, are obscured to nuance-dulling extent by the repetitive details, by the fact that the complex doesn't grow from the site but overwhelms it. In the end, the Getty isn't the Acropolis, the summary artifact of long cultural development, but an act of recall. We'd been hoping for a vision. |
Keywords:
Getty Center, Los Angeles, Richard Meir, kitsch