Like Kids in an Eye Candy Store

It’s late afternoon a couple of weeks ago at LACMA West, and two young kids are passing time waiting for their mothers by swinging on swings in the middle of an art show.

Psychedelic images flow across a screen in front of them and loud tones emanate from speakers just above--all triggered by the duo’s irregular to-and-fro motion. It’s a hypnotic combination, and the kids are mesmerized. For a moment. Then, in typical kid style, their attention moves on, and they begin to make shadow puppets for each other from behind the screen. Then they run into a nearby pillow room to punch some punching bags and throw themselves off a ladder. And then they’re off to something else.

This is not business as usual at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and these two kids not only know it, they have no problem figuring out exactly how to relate.

It’s fun.

At the time of the kids’ run-through, installation of “Made in California: NOW” was only about half finished, and as construction continued all around, Robert L. Sain stood by and laughed with glee. The former director of San Diego’s much praised Children’s Museum came to LACMA just over a year ago with a mission to create a new kind of exhibition space for children of all ages.

He said he would employ artists to make real art that would engage both kids and their parents. He hoped to generate new ways of thinking not only about art but also about family activity and about museums as institutions for learning. LACMA provided Sain with 10,000 square feet of open galleries and the charge to create his first show as part of the interdisciplinary exhibition “Made in California: Art, Image and Identity, 1900-2000,” which opens later this fall in the museum’s Hammer and Anderson buildings across Ogden Street.

Today, Sain’s new gallery, dubbed LACMALab, opens formally to the public with new work by a diverse group of 11 artists--nine from Los Angeles and two from San Diego--working in virtually every possible medium. Many of these artists are very well known in the art world, but none is known for making work specifically for children. For the artists, as for LACMA itself, Sain’s vision required a leap of faith.

The goal is to break down barriers and make art more accessible, and the museum has chosen to do it not just in word but also in action: LACMALab will be up for an entire year and is free to all. And as an extra bonus, anyone who visits the space at LACMA West will get a pass to visit the rest of the museum free also.

This show is big and noisy and has lots of touchable and climbable elements, along with a handful of quieter moments. But if Chuck E. Cheese or the Discovery Zone come to mind, that’s not Sain’s intention. This is not just a place to send kids off into their own frenetic world, he says. It’s a place where children can play and learn about art and, if all goes as planned, grown-ups can share that experience. There’s not only stuff to look at and toy with, there’s also a studio for making artworks, inspired--or not--by what’s in the gallery.

LACMALab and its maiden voyage with “Made in California: NOW” represents a new approach to what museums are about, Sain says. “Can we develop an experiential installation that really engages adult and child equally? So that it’s not just a place where kids are having a ball and the adults are bored witless? Or vice versa?” A place that, in the words of LACMA-Lab’s mission statement “blurs the boundaries between the exhibition, the artists’ commissions, the studio workshops, and in turn, aspires to transform the relationship between the museum and the next generation.”

It is, says Sain with an almost missionary zeal, “a quest.”

The artists each were given a stipend as well as funds to cover materials and were asked to develop new work for kids (primarily elementary to middle school age) in keeping with the rest of their own artworks. Accordingly, each approached the project differently.

Here, in their own words, six talk about the experience. In addition to the following, the exhibition includes work by Eleanor Antin, Michael Asher, Martin Kersels, Dave Muller and Erika Rothenberg.

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Victor Estrada, 44, “Reflections on Poetry”

Best known for his surrealist cartoon-like sculptures, Estrada has created a sandbox on the north lawn of LACMA West in the shape of a figure in a Jackson Pollock painting. Forty red playground balls scattered on the grounds also are part of the work. Inside LACMALab, a Pollock painting is on view, as well as a display of Estrada’s drawings. There’s also a sand table and a place where kids can make their own cutouts.

Museums basically tell you what you’re supposed to be looking at and thinking about. I wanted to give the children space to use imagination rather than to control it.

I was reading an article on Jackson Pollock, and I saw the shape and I thought it would be a good one to use for the sandbox. It’s an art historical shape by an American artist who is tied to the mythology of the American West. He embodies a very romantic notion of art and also the “my kid could do that” idea. I also wanted to activate the whole yard, to go spinning out. With the balls, the kids function as [Pollock’s] drips--they’re running around, and you don’t know where they’re going; the balls allude to the notion of action that occurred in the paintings.

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Jacob Hashimoto, 27, “Watertable”

Hashimoto’s emerging career has seen just a handful of exhibitions, for which he mostly made sky-scapes with thousands of delicate kites. Here he has created an undulating floor of 130 18-inch-square boxes pushed together and covered with green indoor-outdoor turf.

Small latched openings in the surfaces reveal a series of surprises underneath.

I think the big thing the kids are going to dig is that they can actually run all over it. They can also open all the doors; you won’t know what’s underneath until you open them up. The ones with water inside you can really get into and muck around. Some of the others are filled with the tops of artificial flowers that have been liberated from their bases.

The nice thing about the piece is it can continue to grow. Some things can change, but some things are permanent. Inside one, there’s a huge rock, and you can’t get it out through the hole. The ones with fountains will always have fountains, but the nature of the fountains can change.

When I was invited to be in the show, some people said to me, “You realize this is a show for kids?” And I said, “Yeah, but it’s an art show.” It’s really sad when you see people come to the museum with their kids and all the alarms are going off and the guards are jumping on the kids. If this provides a good memory for some kid, then I think it’s great.

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Jim Isermann, 45, “Untitled (Plock) (1000) 2000”

Patterns define the surfaces of Isermann’s art, but those surfaces can be as varied as the world around us. In the past he’s made both furniture and wall coverings, and at LACMA he’s done both. A 20- by 80-foot wall that spans the exterior facade of LACMALab is the site of Isermann’s latest decalcovered mural, whose geometry is defined by a repeating pattern of primary-colored circles and squares, punctured with cutout openings that reveal the raucous doings of the gallery inside. Isermann also has created an interior lounge in the gallery, echoing his mural’s palette and pattern while adding shaped cushions that can be moved around.

I really felt here like Bob [Sain] and LACMA were my client. They came to me with really specific requests about what they wanted. They were familiar with the decal pieces I had done, and they wanted a decal piece for the wall, but they wanted a lounge, as well, that could function as a resting place within the exhibition, a place to sit down and take a break.

It was up to me to figure out how to link the two pieces, but I really felt like I was solving a very specific problem. I like working that way; I approach all the installations I do that way to some degree or another.

The one thing that’s a little bit different about this piece is there are very specific clues about how the pattern works. It’s always very clear to me with all my work as to how it works, because there’s a very rigorous logic, or path, to the way the color’s laid out and the way the patterns repeat, but people don’t always see that.

In this piece, when you see the concourse wall, that’s very unclear, but when you go into the lounge, each wall is one of the four sets of repeated shapes and colors. The whole thing is just circles and squares in three different scales, and the positive and negative versions of that. When you’re in the lounge, you see them separated, and the movable cushions will give the kids a chance to change the pattern, to rearrange it.

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Allan Kaprow, 73, “No Rules Except . . . “

Kaprow is known as the inventor of “happenings”--spontaneous theatrical art events that became emblematic of art in the 1960s. Among his seminal works is a walk-through rubber-tire piece recently re-created at the Museum of Contemporary Art. For LACMALab, Kaprow collaborated with his son, Bram Crane-Kaprow, 11, on a spinoff of the tire piece. Pillows line a small room’s walls and floor, with ladders to jump from, ropes to climb and two large punching bags that swing. Lights flash and noise blares. It’s a gym and playroom all in one.

I told Bramy about the show, and he said, “Let’s do something like your tires, where you could throw things around.” He came up with a pillow-fighting room. For kids, it’s the process of making things or doing things that they enjoy, and that’s something I’ve learned very pleasantly from children.

I really don’t have any highfalutin ideas about art, even though I have been trained in it and was required to teach it in the past. I’ve never been anti-art, but I was very interested in leaving art aside. Instead of being militant about it, I wanted to be just simply playful. I think of it as a liberation, because if I don’t do that, and revert to some kind of high-art standard, it becomes overbearing. You’ve always got to be better than you were last time--more serious, and that drives me up the wall.

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John Outterbridge, 67, “A Third Eye Dreaming”

An assemblage artist and teacher, Outterbridge has created work throughout his career that is closely linked to his African and African American heritage. He also served as director of Watts Towers Arts Center from 1975 to 1992, developing community and children’s arts programs. Here Outterbridge has created a boat whose colorful fabric masts echo the forms of Simon Rodia’s famous mosaic-coated Watts Towers. In LACMALab’s studio, children will make their own mosaics, inspired by both Outterbridge and his mythic mentor.

I wanted to focus on a treasure in Los Angeles--the Watts Towers and Simon Rodia, who built them. He came from a region in Italy where as a kid he watched a festival for which groups of artists competed by making elaborate vertical architectural gestures that today would remind you very much of Watts Towers. The structures were so huge that at least 200 men were needed to carry them through the streets. And in each of those structures, the image of a ship always appeared.

Today, we don’t look at the Watts Towers as a ship, but that’s what it is. The triangular shape of the towers represents the masts, and when you go inside the towers, it’s actually a ship’s insides.

Making a ship is my way of saying hello again to Simon Rodia, and elevating a little-known part of the treasure that most of us know as the Watts Towers.

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Jennifer Steinkamp, 41, “Anything You Can Do”

Steinkamp’s computer-generated moving fields of color often are triggered by sensors; in collaboration with composer Jimmy Johnson, she also often incorporates sound into her work. Here the pair has created a two-swing playground that faces a screen filled with ever-changing images, with sound coming from speakers above. The pace and interface of Johnson’s music and Steinkamp’s patterns are affected by the swinging--everything changes with each new user.

Steinkamp also designed the canopy entrance to LACMALab, both its form and the projections on it, all of which play off Isermann’s mural.

Prior to this work, the Children’s Museum in Belfast purchased a piece, which made me realize that you can do these works for kids and they really enjoy it. But it doesn’t have to be aimed at kids, like making Barney hop around. It doesn’t have be dumbed down, or made boring. I have a video of my work with a lot of kids running through the pieces, really playing with the shadows.

The only thing I don’t like about the swings is they limit the number of people who can experience the piece. When the sound is changing as you’re swinging, and the image is changing, that experience--your swinging, your body moving--it takes you somewhere. It’s weird. I was amazed, it was such a plus.

On the canopy, I used the computer to pre-visualize and think through. It’s a shape you wouldn’t think of without the computer. I had a basic opening to work with, and there was a dimension to Jim’s pattern, so I stayed within that. I modeled it all on a computer, and played around with different shapes. I teach a lot of really advanced architecture students, so I felt really self-conscious designing something architectural. It really pushed me to make something more unusual and perhaps related somewhat to what’s going on in contemporary architecture.

BE THERE

“Made in California: NOW,” LACMALab’s inaugural show, is in LACMA West, at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, today through Sept. 9, 2001. Hours are Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays noon to 8 p.m.; Fridays noon to 9 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Free. (323) 857-6000 or https://www.lacma.org.