Pacific Design Center Also Has a Satellite of the Museum of Contemporary Art

Installation view of One 24-hour interval at a Fourth dimension: Kahlil Joseph's Fly Paper, Nov 17, 2018–Feb 24, 2019 at MOCA Pacific Design Middle (PDC) (epitome courtesy the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, photo by Zak Kelle)

LOS ANGELES — 1 summertime nighttime in 2010, actor James Franco jumped from a ledge of the monstrous Cesar Pelli-designed mall in West Hollywood in forepart of cameras, bewildered bystanders, and the staff of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles. Franco was playing an artist in an episode of the lather opera General Hospital, while simultaneously trying his hand at performance fine art correct outside MOCA'south smallest location: MOCA PDC, a mausoleum-like, stand-alone, cast physical gallery nestled in the shadow of the three massive, shimmering Crimson, Green, and Blue Buildings that starchitect Pelli envisioned as a blueprint complex, known as the Pacific Pattern Heart (PDC), back in the 1970s. New, presently-to-exist-embattled MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch had green-lit Franco'south art-for-Tv set functioning, and peradventure Deitch'due south critics, already frustrated by the director'south analogousness for celebrity culture, sighed with relief when they learned the soap opera was filming not at either of the better-known downtown locations but at this evasive outpost.

MOCA PDC never acquired a defined identity, but it was endearing and accessible as an art space. An awkward, ii-floored gallery on a street with easy-to-find weekday parking, it offered free admission, unlike the downtown spaces. It also hosted some infrequent exhibitions over its 19-year run. Its final testify, of Kahlil Joseph's striking, immersive film Wing Paper, ended February 24, and, midway through last week, a manus-drawn, blue-marking sign taped to the museum's door read "CLOSED."

(photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

The closure came equally a surprise. In January, MOCA and Charles Cohen, the developer who bought the PDC in 1999, announced that the satellite would shutter after nearly two decades in operation. The agreement Cohen and the museum renewed back in 2008 specified that MOCA would continue programming the space through 2023. But the printing release issued in January said the "agreement between the two organizations has reached the stop of its term." When I reached out to MOCA's communications managing director, Sarah Stifler, she said she could not annotate further on the closure, citing legal reasons, and Karen Peterson, a spokesperson for Cohen and the PDC, said "we do non yet take comment" on "what will become into the MOCA edifice" in the future.

Perchance the agenda of Charles Cohen, who is no longer on MOCA's board, inverse. The PDC too recently ended its DesignLAB program, which brought a scattering of galleries to the building's second floor at a time when the economic downturn left it full of vacancies. (The plan "reached its natural conclusion," said Peterson.) Mayhap newly appointed MOCA director Klaus Biesenbach nixed the PDC building, or maybe closure plans predated his arrival. Whatever the reason, MOCA PDC deserves parting attending, largely because its evolutions, successes, and sometimes confounding programming often reflected metropolis-wide cultural identity crises.

MOCA PDC officially opened in 2001 with Takashi Murakami's Superflat exhibition — banners stretched beyond the edifice's exterior featured Murakami's now ubiquitous floating cartoon eyes. Within, piece of work past 19 Japanese artists, designers, and animators colorfully highlighted flatness in Nihon'due south visual civilization. Jeremy Strick, the MOCA managing director who would resign seven years later amidst fiscal scandal, had just taken the helm, and agreed to accept over the Murray Feldman Gallery at the PDC, named after the complex's first director and home to various blueprint-related shows over the years (Christie'southward held auctions there). MOCA board member, ad-human Cliff Einstein, who then worked out of a PDC office, pushed for the partnership and Cohen offered the space rent gratis. Strick claimed PDC exhibitions would characteristic "the well-nigh avant-garde artists in the fields of architecture and blueprint."

Brooke Hodge, who came to MOCA from the Harvard Schoolhouse of Design in January 2001, became the museum's first official curator of architecture and design tasked, in role, with programming the PDC. Her get-go evidence What's Shakin' opened in September 2001 and included studies and renderings for ambitious, in-progress projects metropolis-broad. The PDC installation featured Frank Gehry's Disney Hall and the soon-to-open Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, designed past Rafael Moneo — both buildings, under structure downtown, weren't necessarily on Westsiders' daily radar.

At this betoken, MOCA remained one of the but downtown art institutions. Most galleries were on the Westside, and now MOCA PDC was too, with Margo Leavin and Regen Projects just around its corner. "Until Disney Hall really got established, people were kind of afraid to come downtown to things," recalled Hodge, who is at present director of fine art and design at the Palm Springs Art Museum, over the phone. Michael Darling, now chief curator at the MCA Chicago and then a curatorial assistant who organized multiple PDC shows, said by telephone, "I even retrieve information technology was difficult to get trustees who lived on the Westside to come to MOCA for sure events."

What's Shakin' set an aggressive tone for MOCA'south Westside presence: it bridged design worlds while imagining the future of a city in flux. But and then the dot com crash and the September 11 attacks tempered optimism and funding. In 2002, MOCA PDC hosted merely one exhibition, a testify of recent acquisitions. In 2003, the PDC hosted two shows, including a mid-career survey of artist-designer Roy McMakin curated by Darling. McMakin designed industrial shelving, installed capricious piece of furniture (a credenza with peep holes in it), and hung intimate pencil drawings in the vestibule-like ground flooring gallery. Hodge remembers that testify working particularly well. "If you worked with one artist or ane designer or a firm and they could really retrieve about the space," she said, the PDC "lent itself really well to that."

But already the architecture and design mandate seemed to have slipped — MOCA hadn't hired any new staff for the PDC besides Hodge, who curated across all locations, and the space became something of a catchall. A bear witness of Ernesto Neto work from the collection followed the McMakin testify; and so came Jean Pouvre, a smart Eric Wesley installation, and a testify of MOCA's Mark Rothkos. In 2005, fine art volume doyenne Dagny Corcoran opened her Fine art Catalogues shop on the ground floor, increasing foot traffic.

Past the time Cohen and MOCA renewed their contract in 2008, the Los Angeles art world had started its shift. Immature galleries and project spaces that would eventually start the downtown boom (The Box, Ghebaly) were opening, the Westside condign less central to high art. Cohen and Strick made it sound similar MOCA PDC was a brand-new good thought: Strick talked nearly shifting focus toward presenting innovative exhibitions for "the compages and design community of W Hollywood" and anticipated "playing an even more vital office in the life of PDC." Charles Cohen said, "I take always envisioned Pacific Design Center equally a nexus for civilization and creativity, and a magnet for creative professionals." Hodge began planning shows for the PDC that explored technology and craft, and curated one, a triumph of a site-specific installation past young architecture firm Ball Nogues — 3,000 carefully dyed lengths of twine hung from scrims, creating a delicately loftier-tech ecosystem. Merely Strick, who had used part of MOCA's endowment for daily performance, left months later and Hodge'south position was eliminated (no contemporary art museum in Los Angeles has hired a pattern and compages curator since). The board hired Deitch, a New York dealer with no institutional fundraising experience.

Installation view ofCameron: Songs of a Witch Woman at the MOCA Pacific Design Heart (photo by Brian Forrest)

The Deitch era was a surprisingly good one for the PDC, non because its identity necessarily crystallized but because it hosted modest, visually pleasing shows and served equally a reprieve from all the drama surrounding the downtown programming. The claustrophobic partitioned rooms of Ryan Trecartin'due south over-stimulating Any Ever (2010), each filled with videos and brand-new run-of-the-mill furniture, poked at the PDC'southward oversized, elite galleries. Miranda July put climbable, wearable sculptures on the grounds. Archival shows mined West Hollywood's queer history, similar Bob Mizer & Tom of Finland. And Cameron: Songs of a Witch Woman, initiated nether Deitch, chronicled the work of an excluded from the canon merely key to many iconic histories: it was her drawing, of an conflicting penetrating a serpent-tongued woman from behind, that prompted the LAPD Vice Squad to raid Ferus Gallery in 1957.

Installation view of One Day at a Time: Kahlil Joseph's Fly Paper, November 17, 2018–February 24, 2019 at MOCA Pacific Design Heart (image courtesy of the Museum of Gimmicky Art, Los Angeles, photo by Zak Kelle)

By the time Philippe Vergne took over as MOCA's managing director, the Broad Museum was underway beyond the street from MOCA on M Avenue and the gallery scene was expanding exponentially into neighborhoods all across the metropolis. It no longer mattered so much where the PDC was, and through 2017, the museum connected to apply information technology as something of a spill-over space (a Catherine Opie installation too pocket-sized for MOCA downtown; a showcase of Marlon Riggs). Then, in 2018, the programming seemed to turn toward a smart, though rubber, cohesion. Fashion exhibitions, likewise small-scale and deadline commercial to work in the downtown space, played well; Décor: Barbara Flower, Andrea Fraser, Louise Lawler toyed with presentation modes in a concise, visually lush fashion. Kahlil Joseph's Wing Paper commanded the infinite with only ane screen and audio. Then the PDC era abruptly ended, merely every bit WeWork offices moved into the Carmine Building next door.

MOCA PDC's closure doesn't represent a loss of something that tangibly existed as much as the loss of an almost-realized fantasy even more than attractive now, when the by-date Wide Museum and Marciano Foundation bring more wink than content to Los Angeles'southward institutional landscape: a museum space with no lines, ticket offices, or barriers to entry, with modest, serious programming informed by its neighborhood.

coxprach2000.blogspot.com

Source: https://hyperallergic.com/489638/a-goodbye-to-la-mocas-pacific-design-center/

Share this post