Frank Gehry has pulled out of a major architecture exhibition set to open June 2 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, a move that could force the show to find a new venue or face the prospect of being canceled altogether.
The exhibition... is an exploration of the last 25 years of Los Angeles architecture, with work by Gehry, Thom Mayne, Michael Maltzan, Barbara Bestor, Lorcan O'Herlihy and many younger architects.
— latimes.com
11 Comments
this picture as well as that of herzog and de meuron are not flattering. they look quite scary actually; grey white cold...corpselike. and why is his thin lips in focus, not his eyes. its scarier with his lips in focus. come, i eat you.
i think frank is a little to white, and a lot too old, to be practicing the rhythm method.
Frank dropped out when he found out that other architects were going to be in the show.
He underestimated the power of the Simpsons.. It must be like losing a finger in PR terms..
t a m m u z , I like that these pictures aren't traditionally "flattering". I think they're an attempt at showing honesty of form. What I don't like about HdM's is the one in front (I'm not sure which) looks so freakin' mean. I do wish his expression was a little softer!
It's pretty bold to pull out of an exhibit a few weeks before it opens. Gehry must have been very unhappy with how it was being done.
Donna, I don't believe there is any honestly in photography in the first place. some more red colour is as honest as more blue colour. its a photographic choice. same with focusing. why are gehry's eyes out of focus yet his lips and wrinkles very much in focus (basically, the mandible)?
personally, and especially when it comes to older people, i am not with fetishizing signs of their age at the expense of other features that pertain more to their personality. this approach has become a subgenre; "oh, great, s/he has wrinkles, take pic" there is no honestly there; its a choice of foregrounding at the expense of a background. gehry's pic is better than H De M,, true that. more delicate with the soft bokeh. but i think the focus is off (or wrinles/lips-baised). H & de M look more surreal as well as mean, do you think there was some HDR employed? certainly, very stylized. not my kind of thing.
You could play with this many ways. Add your own caption. "I was selected for what? Not interested". Or "I really have to go' Analyze the facial lines for inner thoughts. "not enthusiastic, seems disinterested?" Or better yet, shoot in B&W. Brings more character to the portrait.
It strikes me that if this were an article about a female architect pulling out of an exhibition and we ended up talking about how the photograph made her look I would be pissed. It's important to be honest about double standards.
So, in addition to talking about portraiture, let's talk about Gehry's reasons for pulling out of this exhibition: apparently he felt that the curator was approaching the architecture too much as sculpture/art and not enough as building?
Christopher Hawthorne's Twitter has links and discussion.
Let's not make Gehry the bad guy for pulling out from a superficial exhibition, more or less creating yet another Gehry piggybacking. From what I understood so far, and I have been thinking about this since they have announced the show while back, the show has no critical attributes. Even the title is problematic and bombastic. Is there an old sculpturalism? Do laser cutters and cnc machines account to new sculptural theory? And, what about the real artists and where their sculpture is now? This assemblage is essentially a surface survey show leaving out large swatches of development and arrival. It might be best thing happened to it that it now got attention via the cancellation issue.
couldn't agree more Orhan.......seems like the common thread on the guest list (new and old) is a complete denial of their fading relevance in the profession which is perpetuated by the insular culture of 'contemporary' LA architects. if the entire show was presented as a retrospective of 'the good 'ol days' when narcissistic architecture was all the rage maybe moca wouldn't be so concerned about drawing a crowd and covering their costs. LA is stuck in 2000..........as for Gehry, his connection to this lineage has always been a stretch (it's an east coast ideology that found a better fit in the west), why would he want to be officially crowned Godfather of something he didn't create?
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