“I certainly hope they don’t build over the tar pit. Aesthetically that tar pit is neo-surrealist in the way people stand around it as if it were some ancient religious shrine and watch the bubbles come popping up. Perhaps they could put a building around it.”
It was that kind of sentiment that prompted Peter Zumthor to retrace the contours of his proposed LACMA building. The words above are quite a bit earlier, though, being part of MoMA director Alfred Barr’s first reaction to the brand-new LACMA of the 1960s.
The Barr comment (reported by L.A. Times art critic William Wilson) appears as a yellowed clipping in LACMA’s one-room historical exhibition, “Various Small Fires (Working Documents).” It intersperses archives and artworks to tell such tales as the robocop security guard that was terminated after it bumped into a sculpture; the nearly-all-bogus Chinese sculpture collection of J.W.N. Munthe; the Jackson Pollock drip painting that trustees acquired on the condition that it not be shown to museum visitors.
There’s quite a bit about tar, actually, including a couple of tar-themed artworks. Above is a cartoon by the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner‘s Karl Hubenthal. To show you how prehistoric it is, it dates to an era when the city had two big newspapers. The Herald-Examiner rejected Hubenthal’s cartoon on the pretext that “newspaper executives didn’t feel it presented quite the proper image.”
The Herald-Examiner was part of the Hearst empire, and William Randolph Hearst had been the Los Angeles County Museum’s greatest art benefactor.
