Art in Flux (in L.A.) L.A.-based Artists at The Broad

Art in Flux (in L.A.) from Rick Meghiddo on Vimeo.

The long-titled exhibition at The Broad, “Desire, Knowledge, and Hope (with Smog) “, drawn from John Baldessari’s monumental work of 1985. It is an eclectic assemblage of over 60 works by 21 artists across varying generations who live or have lived in the Los Angeles area. In other words, it is art in flux from a city in flux. It signals the diversity of the city’s art. The works span abstract and photorealistic painting, photography, and sculpture.

The artworks are drawn entirely from the Broad collection and have been curated by veteran curator Ed Schad and a young assistant, Jennifer Vanegas Rocha. Some artists, such as John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, Barbara Kruger, and Mark Bradford, are well-known to the public. Others are flourishing now, and their work is shown for the first time in the museum.

The show provides the visitor with a panoramic sample of diversity, even if major artists living in Los Angeles are not represented, such as Paul McCarthy, the Ball-Nogues Studio, Nataša Prosenc Stearns, and young emerging artists in multiple media.

The exhibition is educating the general public, and it may open the appetite to learn more.

Art for Everyone? Keith Haring at The Broad

The documentary “Art for Everyone? – Keith Haring at The Broad” illustrates the largest solo exhibition of his work in Los Angeles. The film’s title question mark tries to bring attention to the misconception that his art is simple; it is not. Haring’s work is very complex. His commitment to a free and happy life is only understandable against his concepts of power and threat, death and deliverance, religion, sexuality, heaven, and hell. These subjects do not appear in isolation from each other but interact and almost inevitably overlap one another.

Keith Allen Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) was an American artist whose pop art emerged from the subculture of the 1980s, particularly in New York. Why does his work remain so popular over three decades after his death at thirty-one? His art, instantly recognizable, is everywhere in garments of easy consumption. It is simple and cheerful: radiant babies, barking dogs, hearts, and a three-eyed smiling face.

His stated goal was to create art that was accessible to all beyond the walls of museums and galleries. He wrote a manifesto-cum-self-definition that included the words: “The public has a right to art/The public is being ignored by most contemporary artists/Art is for everybody.”

This premise was not new. In the early 1600s, Caravaggio broke dependence on commissions from the church, which dictated themes and censored results. He opened the road of individualism. Mexican muralists such as Siqueiros and Diego Rivera strove to create public art. The Communists used art to convey ideological propaganda, and Roy Lichtenstein made large-scale public art on popular subjects consumed by the public.

 

There are several reasons for Keith Haring’s continuous success in the 2020s. The sexuality of his paintings relates to openness towards LGBTQ. The apparent simplicity appeals to people with a short span of attention. His figures lack discernable ages, races, or identities. Their vitality and joy speak to people of all ages, all backgrounds.

Keith Haring at Pop Shop, 1986

Art for Everybody? from Rick Meghiddo on Vimeo.

Israel 75 Israel Multi-layered Complexity: People, Environment, Architecture.

ISRAEL 75 from Rick Meghiddo on Vimeo.

Israel 75 Card

The State of Israel is seventy-five years old. The Jewish nationhood celebrates the rebirth of the People of the Book’s physical, spiritual, and political sovereignty, based on secular principles of freedom and equality of justice for all.

This event happens while there is turmoil within and without Israel. From within, democracy is in peril. Its check and balance laws are under attack. From the outside, Israel must confront viral anti-Semitism (frequently masquerading as anti-Zionism) and a conspiracy of delegitimization.

The short documentary accompanying this blog tries to give an idea of Israel’s multi-layered complexity. As an architect, my observations mostly look at the environment, the diversity of people, and some selected works of architecture.

The Land of Israel remains subjected to two truthful and mutually contradictory narratives. The Jewish narrative relates to its ancient history, to the Land of Israel, to Hebrew as a spoken language, to multi-cultural traditions, to dispossession, persecution, massacres, and reemergence.

The Arab narrative tells of its prolonged residence in the land that the Romans renamed “Palestine” to erase the memory of the Jews’ presence, sovereignty, and attachment to Judea. They referred to it as “Judea Capta,” captured Judea.

For real peace to be possible, both narratives must learn to tolerate and internalize the other side’s narrative. This will need education on both sides, and it will take, most likely, several

Art in the Desert Site-specific Art Biennale in the Coachella Valley Desert

Desert-X Howl from Rick Meghiddo on Vimeo.

The relevance of the 2023 Desert X Biennale goes beyond the exhibition of site-specific artworks by emerging artists; their input is spread across an arc of over twenty miles. This action raises our territorial consciousness of art relating to the environment.

Art in the Desert

Land Art artists such as Robert Smithson, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and Arakawa & Gins, have related to the natural and the built environment with large-scale interventions. In Desert-X an entire area is a stage for individual artists, each approaching the surrounding environment differently.

Susan Davis founded Desert X six years ago and is its director. This fourth edition was co-curated by Neville Wakefield and Diana Campbell, who presented twelve artists from Europe, North America, and South Asia. No one imposed a theme on them.

Area of Desert X artwork’ location.

Rana Begum’s (No.1225 Chain-link) is a London-based artist from Bangladesh. She created a chain link maze-like series of concentric rings inspired by the surrounding mountains. This work is engaging; it is a metaphor for chain links’ positive and negative uses. The yellow color emphasizes the positive. 

Torkwase Dyson (liquid a Place) created a monumental sculpture that is a poetic meditation connecting the memory of water in the body and the memory of the water in the desert. Her abstract work contrasts built and natural scale.

Mario Garcia Torres (Searching for the Sky while Maintaining Equilibrium) gets his inspiration from bulls’ movements and rodeo riders trying to maintain balance. The setting of these mechanical sculptures brings art-related technology to the desert.  

Matt Johnson’s odalisque-inspired (Sleeping Beauty) assembling of shipping containers framed by a railway and a freeway represents a criticism of movement-globalization of goods. Its architectural scale produces a strong statement.

Gerald Clark transforms a traditional Cahuilla basket {Immersion) into a giant game board, using didactical cards of his creation. According to the game rules, somebody can only reach the center by answering correctly questions relating to the traditions and histories of the Cahuilla Indians. 

Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser (Hylozoic/Desires – Namak Nazar) is a sound sculpture in the form of a salt-encrusted telephone pole equipped with loudspeakers, resembling a flowering cactus. The speakers broadcast the voice of Himali Singh Soin’s poetic declamation.

Lauren Bon, the creator of the Metabolic Studios in Los Angeles, is an artist who works with architecture, performance, photography, sound, and farming, to create urban, public, and land art projects to galvanize social and political transformation. Here she creates an object (The Smallest Sea with the Largest Heart) that represents a Blue Whale’s heart.

Paloma Contreras Lomas (Amar a Dios en Tierra de Indios, Es Oficio Maternal) addresses topics such as patriarchy, violence, class segregation, colonial guilt, and middle-class identity with humor.  An absurd array of tangled limbs of two mysterious characters wearing long hats sprawl out of the car and onto the site’s pristine, manicured grounds.

Tschabalala Self (Pioneer) sculpture focuses on the foremothers, the largely unidentified Native and African American women whose bodies and labor allowed for American expansionism and growth. It visually represents their birthright and place within the American landscape.

Héctor Zamora’s (Chimera) is a performative action in collaboration with street vendors who are omnipresent in the Coachella Valley but often invisible in the landscape. The artist’s work provides opportunities to use materials differently, in this case transforming street vendors into walking sculptures made of balloons. 

Tyre D. Nichols died in January of 2023 after police beat him following a traffic stop in Memphis. The billboards is a tribute to his aspiring photography. This makes a strong statement in direct contrast with the commercial use of billboards and the impact of a freeway on the desert.

Marina Tabassum’sTabassum’s Khudi Bari (Khudi Bari, Bengali for ”Tiny House”) is a Bangladeshi architect who created a prefabricated house that is easy to assemble and disassemble, ideal for building in areas that are likely to be flooded. 

Desert X is an excellent example of the input of many artists, where the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Looking at its geographic scale stimulates our imagination for future invention.

An EYE on BERLIN Present, Memory, Architecture and Art

An EYE on BERLIN from Rick Meghiddo on Vimeo.

An EYE in BERLIN illustrates contemporary architecture and art examples within a consciousness of the city’s history between 1933 and 1989. It includes the Reichstag dome, the Jewish Museum, and the Sony Center. It also illustrates aspects of the city’s past and present and a visit to the Hamburger Bahnhof art museum and the German Historical Museum.

A City in Flux

Thirty years after the fall of the Wall, Berlin still struggles with its urban form. It is a city in flux, complicated, with an urban fabric that seems to resist all attempts to reorder it. It is a reminder of the more messy, contradictory, and organic qualities that all cities should have. It is charming and full of life, not for its beauty or wealth, but because of its vitality.

The city has become a mecca for artists, a place of attraction to architects and filmmakers, and recognized as one of the hottest cities of the 21st century. With an atmosphere buzzing with creative energy, serious members of the contemporary art world can only stay away from Berlin for a short time. It’s become an essential stop on the art circuit, as a junction between east and west.

Buildings in Berlin are manifestos, propaganda, memorials, and battlefields. The city as a whole is a disjointed urbanization in search of identity. Some areas seemed too large, flat, or insipid box-like structures produced as merchandise.

ARCHITECTURE

The Reichstag Dome: The People Above the Government

The Reichstag is the dominant component of a democracy of the troika, together with the Chancellery and the Paul Löbe parliamentary building. The dome sits on top of the Bundestag, the German parliament, symbolizing that the people are above the government. A mirrored cone in the dome’s center directs sunlight into the building. A large sun shield tracks the sun’s movement electronically and allows carefully filtered light to wash down into the chamber. The dome can be climbed by a vertiginous double-helix made of two lightweight steel ramps, which inspired Foster to design London’s City Hall.

Berlin Philharmonic

Berlin Philharmonic, Hans Scharoun’s masterpiece, remains as a reminder of great post-WW II architecture. Completed in 1963, it preceded Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall by forty years.

It embodies organic architecture principles, in which the buildings are designed from within. The sequences of spaces leading to the hall play with tension and release. Low, small entrance areas lead to a vast, multi-layered foyer.

The main hall presents a vineyard-style arrangement of the stage and audience, with terraces rising around a central orchestral platform. This feature led to the tent-like design of the hall’s ceiling, with a higher center draping down towards the edges.

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

Designed by architect Peter Eisenman, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is a vast field of concrete slabs in the historic heart of Berlin, which, before the Nazis came to power, had the largest Jewish population in Germany. Paradoxically, the monument is a few hundred yards from the site of Hitler’s bunker.

No other country had erected a monument to “the biggest crime in its history” in the middle of its capital. Covered with 2,711 concrete slabs arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field, the project was designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere. The whole Memorial aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason.

The Jewish Museum

The Jewish Museum in Berlin is the masterwork of the Polish-born musician-turned-architect Daniel Libeskind. The zinc-clad structure is designed to create a sense of disorientation interspersed with feelings of claustrophobia and panic. Corridors tilt, cross, and funnel to nothingness. The world outside is glimpsed only occasionally through slit windows.

Libeskind’s building has no entrances or exits of its own. There are promises of doors, but they turn out to be dead ends The floors slope. The concrete walls oppress. You are not in charge of your destiny.

The Garden of Exile denies us the relaxation we expect of a garden. It is a plantation of concrete columns from which Russian olive trees cascade. Nothing is as it should be here. The ground won’t stay still, and the sky itself appears displaced. People wander this disconcerting garden a long time, uneasy and reflective.

Sony Center and Potsdamer Platz

The Sony Center, designed by Helmut Jahn and Peter Walker as landscape architect, is one of Berlin’s most impressive public spaces. It is one of the few buildings in the area which offers a public plaza that is always lively and happening. An umbrella-shaped roof covers its vast atrium.

Potsdamer Platz, an important public square and traffic intersection in the center of Berlin, results from extensive competitions, designs, and planning. Nineteen of the buildings in the area were conceived and designed by an international team of architects headed by Renzo Piano.
Renzo Piano’s master plan for the area called for typical Berlin blocks courtyard buildings with a maximum height of 9 stories. British architect Richard Rogers designed a project on commission from Daimler Chrysler. It contains offices in the first two blocks and residential in the last block. Retail functions occupy the ground and lower floors. Rogers reinterpreted the constraints and designed courtyard buildings with an eroded corner. This would open up the courtyard, allowing sunlight and air to circulate.

D.Z. Bank

The DZ Bank Building is a mixed-use building comprised of a commercial component, housing the Berlin  headquarters of DZ Bank and a residential component consisting of 39 apartments.

A glass canopy covers the main entry to the building from Pariser Platz. A high-volume foyer immediately inside the main entry offers a view into the building’s large interior atrium, which features a curving glass ceiling and a curving glass floor. Office spaces are organized around the atrium, and are oriented inward to take advantage of the natural light that floods through the glass ceiling.

The building’s primary conference hall is located within a highly sculptural shell in the center of the glass floor of the atrium. Clad in stainless steel on the exterior and wood on the interior, the conference room is the physical and spiritual heart of the project.

German Historical Museum Extension Hall

Chinese-born, U.S.-based architect I. M. Pei designed a small extension to the German Historical Museum. The four floors of the Exhibition Hall are devoted to the Museum’s temporary exhibitions. The new building had to be connected with the baroque architecture of the German Historical Museum.

ART

Berlin is home to hundreds of galleries and art museums with unparalleled collections. Cultural projects are generously funded and supported by many large and powerful institutions in the city. The ever-so-avant-garde contemporary art scene can flourish in this environment.

The documentary includes the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, an original railway station from the mid-19th century, turned into an art museum in 1996; the Berlinische Galerie and the Konig Galerie; and the extraordinary and revealing German Historical Museum.

An EYE on PARIS People, Places, Architecture, Art

An EYE on PARIS from Rick Meghiddo on Vimeo.

What makes cities great? Streets, public spaces, and architecture physically express its residents’ values, belief systems, lifestyles, and self-expression through the arts. Lifestyle is expressed through our work, how we act, spend our leisure time, and follow social patterns.

“An Eye on Paris” focuses on observing daily life and on some new outstanding works of architecture, public spaces, and some museums (there are about 130 in the city) less notorious than the Musée du Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay.

View from the Centre Pompidou

LIFESTYLE

The French honor the time dedicated to eating. Sitting around the table for a meal is sacred in French culture. People are always concerned about the quality of their food ingredients. That is why they are loyal to their local farmers’ market and tend to do most of their shopping there.

Cafés in Paris have always served as social spaces, the classic Parisian meeting place to relax or refresh. During the summer, outdoor terraces are packed with people.

Paris has many outdoor events. In this documentary, we captured some of the yearly Day of Music and one of the many places offered to dance by the Seine, in this case, at the Quai Saint-Bernard.

PARKS

We studied three parks: the Park de Bercy, the Park de la Villette, and the Promenade Plantée.

 

 

PARC DE BERCY
Designed by architects Bernard Huet, Madeleine Ferrand, Jean-Pierre Feugas, Bernard Leroy, and by landscapers Ian Le Caisne and Philippe Raguin, the park is made of three gardens connected by footbridges: The “Romantic Garden”, which includes fishponds and dunes; The “Flowerbeds”, dedicated to plant life; and “The Meadows”, an area of open lawns shaded by tall trees.
In the north-east of the park stands the Cinémathèque Française (the former American Center) designed by Frank Gehry, and on the raised terraces are the 21 sculptures of Rachid Khimoune’s “Children of the World” installation, created in 2001 to honor children’s rights.
The park is adjacent to a major sports arena, the Palais Omnisports, with a sitting capacity of 20,000.

PARC DE LA VILLETTE

The Parc de la Villette is a 37-acre / 55 hectares area that houses one of Paris’ largest concentrations of cultural venues. These include the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie (City of Science and Industry, Europe’s largest science museum), three major concert venues, and the prestigious Conservatoire de Paris.

The park was designed by architect Bernard Tschumi in partnership with Colin Fournier on the site of the huge Parisian abattoirs (slaughterhouses) and the national wholesale meat market. He conceived thirty-five architectural “follies “to give a sense of orientation to the visitors. In architecture, a folly is a building constructed primarily as an ornament but suggesting through its appearance some other purpose.

Since the creation of the park, museums, concert halls, and theatres have been designed by several noted contemporary architects. These include the City of Science and Industry, La Géode (an IMAX theatre inside of a 36-meter / 118 ft diameter geodesic dome;) The City of Music, designed by Christian de Portzamparc, which opened in 1995 and it also includes a museum of historical musical instruments with a concert hall, also home of the Conservatoire de Paris. The Philharmonie de Paris opened in January 2015, designed by Jean Nouvel.

PROMENADE PLANTÉE

The Promenade Plantée is an extensive green belt that follows the old Vincennes railway line. Beginning just east of the Opéra Bastille with the elevated Viaduc des Arts, it follows a 4.7 km (2.9 mi) (2.9 mi) path to the Bois de Vincennes. At its west end, near the Bastille, the parkway rises above the surrounding area and forms the Viaduc des Arts, over a line of shops featuring arts and crafts.

The design was created by landscape architect Jacques Vergely and architect Philippe Mathieux. The Viaduc des Arts was designed by architect Patrik Berger, who also designed the recently completed Canopy of Les Halles. The project includes different types of gardens, it traverses existing buildings, and it crosses boulevards. Twenty years after its construction, the Promenade Plantée inspired the successful High Line in New York.

THE LOUIS VUITTON FOUNDATION BUILDING

The Louis Vuitton Foundation building was designed by Frank Gehry. It is a museum and cultural center like no other one. This unique 11,000 square-meter monument of 21st-century architecture was conceived as an iceberg surrounded by glass that takes the form of a sailboat’s sails inflated by the wind. The structure of the glass roof allows the building to collect and reuse rainwater and improves its geothermal power.

THE FOUNDATION JÉRÔME SEYDOUX-PATHÉ

Foundation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé

You can walk along Avenue de Gobelins and not notice a hidden gem of architecture designed by Renzo Piano. The clever use of the site includes a main entrance on a restored and preserved facade along the Avenue des Gobelins which features sculptures by Auguste Rodin.

The Foundation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé is dedicated to preserving the history of the French film company Pathè and to promote cinematography. It houses its archives and the foundation’s offices. It is located in the courtyard of a 19th-century block that includes a complex of historical Hausmann-era buildings. The 839 m2 headquarters is located in Paris’ 13th arrondissement. Its construction was completed in September 2014. The site’s major limits determined the peculiar design, which looks like a greenhouse.

NEW PALAIS DE JUSTICE – COURTHOUSE

New Paris Courthouse

The new Courthouse, located on the northern edge of Paris, is 160 meters high, have an internal area of around 100,000 m2 and accommodates up to 8,000 people per day. The complex reunites 90 courtrooms and about 1,300 offices under one roof. In developing the scheme, Renzo Piano sought to reduce the apparent scale of the building by breaking it down into four volumes of decreasing size. They include three roof terraces with 500 trees and other vegetation. From an environmental standpoint, the project employs a range of strategies including the use of natural ventilation, the incorporation of photovoltaic panels on the façade, and the collection of rainwater.

THE CANOPY OF LES HALLES

Canope of Les Halles

The long-awaited cultural center and metro station were created by architects Patrick Berger and Jacques Anziutti on the site of a historic Paris marketplace. The design at Les Halles is known as the Canopy due to its enormous umbrella-like glass roof, which comprises 18,000 pieces of glass supported by 7,000 tons of steel.

The completed Canopy and the center below replace a deeply unpopular concrete shopping complex – nicknamed “the hole of Les Halles” – which was built in the place of the market’s original 19th-century glass and iron buildings designed by architect Victor Baltard. They were demolished in the 1970s in an act many critics have described as cultural vandalism.

The creation of a humane urban quality does not depend only on the quality of a city’s buildings. The design quality of open public spaces, way beyond landscape architecture, is critical. It demands imaginative long-term thinking accompanied by the political vision and will.

Always Unfinished Anselm Kiefer in L.A.

Always Unfinished – Anselm Kiefer in L.A. from Rick Meghiddo on Vimeo.

The exhibition of Ansel Kiefer’s “Exodus” at the Gagosian Gallery in L.A., staged at the Marciano Foundation, exemplifies his breadth and originality. The documentary included here illustrates his work, thinking, and personality. Words matter. They inspire Kiefer’s output. He finds sources in the Old and New Testaments, in Kabbalah’s mysticism, and the poetry of Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. But it is not only words. Landscapes of nature, ruins of bombarded cities, and of cultural behaviors also converged into the reinterpretations and reassembling of his architect’s mind.

 

Kiefer’s use of straw in his work represents energy. He claims this is due to straw’s physical qualities, including the color gold and its energy and heat release when burned. The resulting ash makes way for new creation, thus echoing the motifs of transformation and the cycle of life.

 

Kiefer’s oeuvre encompasses paintings, installations, books, drawings, watercolors, collages, and altered photographs. The physical elements of his practice—from lead, concrete, and glass to textiles, tree roots, and burned books—are as symbolically resonant of complex events of history, memory, and the ancestral epics of life, death, and the cosmos. Full of symbolic thresholds between peoples, places, and times, the paintings are metaphysical allegories that meditate on loss and deliverance, dispossession, and homecoming.

 

Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945, a few months after the end of World War II in Donaueschingen, Germany. Following studies at different schools, he received his art degree in 1969. He lived about twenty years in Hombach (midway between Frankfurt and Stuttgart.) In 1991, the artist left Germany to travel around the world—to India, Mexico, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, and the United States. In 1992 he settled in Barjac, France (about 50 km from Montpellier and 100 km from Lyon.) From 2008 he lived in Paris, in a large house in the Marais district, with his second wife, the Austrian photographer Renate Graf, and their two children.

Anselm Kiefer

 

Kiefer fascination with Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, whom he considers “the best poets of the second half of the 20th century,” is revealing. The love affair between Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan constitutes one of the most dramatic chapters of literary history after 1945. The respective backgrounds of the lovers who came together in May 1948 in occupied Vienna could not have been more different: she, the philosophy student daughter of an early Austrian Nazi member; he, a stateless German-speaking Jew from Czernowitz who had lost his parents in a concentration camp and was himself a survivor of a Romanian labor camp. They both wrote in high German, frequently hard to understand even when knowing the language.

 

Two major recent exhibitions were a colossal installation at the at Palazzo Ducale in Venice (2022) and at Paris’ Grand Palais (2021.)

 

ZEVI – Our Story A Partially Autobiographical View of Bruno Zevis Genius


ZEVI – Our Story from Rick Meghiddo on Vimeo.

Poster of the documentary ZEVI – Our Story

Bruno Zevi (1918-2000) NOW – WHY? 

 

This is a time of major transformations: scientifically, technologically, demographically, and politically. Climate change has already reached a point where the question is not if but how we will cope. Bruno Zevi, an architect, historian, critic of architecture, writer, publisher, and politician, continues to be a source of inspiration for the invention of the future.

 

The documentary that leads this blog is partially autobiographical. It shows some samples of how ideas and a rich cultural environment such as that of Italy in general, and of Rome, in particular, can impact the minds of young people, as it did to us. It gives the audience a visualization of how a charismatic intellectual influenced his generation’s best architects and thinkers. Besides his knowledge of history, Zevi’s primary source of inspiration was Frank Lloyd Wright, the greatest thinker-architect of at least the last five hundred years. 

 

Zevi was one of the few critics of architecture that Wright respected. Still, many other architects in Europe, the United States, and Latin America admired him. Also, politicians listened to him, even those who disagreed with his premises. His capacity to communicate ideas and inject enthusiasm into architects of all ages – and not only to architects – was unique. At the base of his exuberance was a passion for questioning “assumed truths.” He brought to the surface what was meaningful about a particular place, time, culture, and architecture. He believed that culture and politics should be intimately related, with culture leading politics and not the other way around.   

 

While supporting the positive aspects of the 20th Century’s Rationalist architecture – the Bauhaus’ architects, Le Corbusier, and his followers – he acknowledged their limits. He knew that Frank Lloyd Wright’s principles of Organic Architecture were long-lasting because they were based on nature and history’s essentials. 

 

Zevi’s writings, like Wright’s, must be read. You can’t read Zevi’s books lying on a couch. They have to be studied. Similarly, the monthly magazine he published for fifty years, L’Architettura, was filled with content on projects of relevance. Architect John Lautner once said it was the only architectural magazine he read.

Zevi and Us

 

Our relationship with Zevi spanned over thirty years. To tell the many stories surrounding our bond through letters and one-to-one discussions would take many pages. Still, a few paragraphs can give an idea.

 

As a teacher, Zevi demanded to visit at least once all the important architectural monuments in Rome and many other across Italy. That meant intense traveling, photographing, writing notes, and drawing. 

 

In 1971, when we made our “Wright pilgrimage” across twenty-five states, Zevi introduced us to Edgar Kaufmann Jr., then the director of the Industrial Design Department at MOMA, who facilitated for us exclusive access to Fallingwater. 

In 1975 we won the first prize in a conceptual design competition on high density in Israel. He wrote about our project in an article published in L’Espresso magazine. When we finished our first tiny apartment in Tel Aviv, he climbed ten floors – the elevators were not functioning – to visit us. He asked me to send him photographs of it and a project for a memorial in Golan Heights, which we had not won. Over the years, he published several of our projects: our house in Westwood, which was the first on record to have had solar panels and a vegetable garden, and our Senior Housing project in Jaffa.

 

We met Zevi for the last time in 1998 when returning from a three-week workshop in Palermo between Italian, Israeli, and Palestinian architects. The news of his passing in January of 2000 reached us in Los Angeles while on a short visit at the turn of the millennium. When we returned to Tel Aviv, I wrote “Pronto Professore.” The poem was later on read at the Italian Cultural Institute in Los Angeles by poet-actor Jack Grapes. 

Sample of letters received from Bruno Zevi between 1973 and 2000.

The New OCMA A Placemaking Museum

The opening of the new Orange County Museum of Art is good news for architecture, art, and especially for community life. The museum has a poetic edge without being overwhelming; the space has flow and transparency, and artworks can be seen with good lighting and without distractions. More than a museum, it is an educational facility that stimulates social interaction.

Poster of The New OCMA documentary

OCMA Museum. Richard Serra’s “Connector” in the foreground. Copyright: R&R Meghiddo. All Rights Reserved.

Night view of OCMA from its terrace. Copyright: R&R Meghiddo. All Rights Reserved.

Orange County has grown from a semi-rural farming area to an urban development that includes the South Coast Plaza shopping center and the John Wayne Airport in seventy years. It has a balanced ethnic mix, with 66% of its population under 45.

OCMA’s pivotal location is relevant to generating a cascade of public spaces. The 53,000-square-foot new museum completes a cultural campus that includes the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, the South Coast Repertory Theater, the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, and the Samueli Theater. Richard Serra’s 64-foot tall sculpture, “Connector,” defines a clear point of reference.

OCMA’s project’s architect, Pritzker Price winner Thom Mayne, known for his “muscular architecture,” confronted the 73,000 square-foot site sensibly to its surroundings. He has produced here a more lyrical and well-balanced project. Brandon Welling was the Partner-in-Charge. The building’s primary structure is composed of structural steel and concrete.

A sculptural wing hovers over the lobby atrium. It is an inspiring, artful, and dynamic architectural space of curved walls covered with white terracotta tiles. A full-height irregular window overlooks the large terrace. Within the building, fluidity is stimulated by transparency. The relationship between indoors and outdoors is graceful at the terrace’s level.

The building’s entrance faces the piazza where Serra’s sculpture sits. The eastern elevation, facing Avenue of the Arts, has a street-lever curtain wall that shows artworks in conversation with the street. The other two sides (west and north elevations) are introverted. This design approach works particularly well in the rear, where the building’s identification is defined only by the OCMA sign. By doing so, the new building pays respect to Cesar Pelli’s Plaza Tower, the Samueli Theater, Peter Walker’s landscape design, and Aiko Miyawaki’s Utsurchi G1 sculpture.

The museum’s director, Heidi Zuckerman, started her new position at OCMA with an admirable job. In this exhibition, she was seconded by Courtenay Finn as the Chief Curator and a team of curators that helped assemble the various in-tandem shows. These include:

  1. “13 Women” pays homage to the 13 women who founded the Balboa Pavilion Gallery, the earliest iteration of OCMA, which opened sixty years ago.
  2. The “California Biennial 2022: Pacific Gold “exhibits sixty works of art, including ceramics, painting, sculpture, textiles, video, and large-scale installations. Some of these have been commissioned for this exhibition.
  3. Fred Eversley, a former consulting engineer for NASA, brings samples of his work at the mezzanine, which spans forty years of practice as an artist.

At the terrace, Sanford Biggers’ 24-foot wide by 16-foot-tall outdoor sculpture is a two-dimensional stage with an allegoric reclining black male figure that combines an archetype reclining male figure with non-Western culture symbolisms.

Director Zuckerman’s statement clearly defines OCMA’s direction: “Our mission here is to enrich people’s lives in a diverse and fast-changing community. We carry out this work with the conviction that access to art is a basic human right. And we want to provide that access in such a way that everyone feels welcome and at home.”

From Ukraine to Basavilbaso A Jewish Family Story of Emigration to Argentina

From Ukraine to Basavilbaso from Rick Meghiddo on Vimeo.

The horrors of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that enters our homes daily get mixed with a tsunami of domestic and international negative news. How to filter through these constructively?

The news from Ukraine triggered in me two sets of questions:  1. How does Ukraine not shown on television look like? What is its history, its geography, its art? 2. What is the link between the centuries-long Jewish presence in Ukraine and the story of my family’s emigration from Ukraine to Argentina?

The short documentary embedded here, “From Ukraine to Basavilbaso,” is a story of migration from a land afflicted by anti-Semitism to a land that promised freedom and opportunity. It is a story shared by millions of people.

Since the staging of my family’s story was Ukraine and Argentina, I wanted to link their story with a hopeful present. In contrast to tragedies and hardships, I framed the main story with images of the ongoing war at the beginning and present-day artists at both ends. Through my research, I discovered Daria Marchenko, Pazza Pennello, the DakhaBrakha–Monakh band, and Stepan Ryabchenko from Ukraine, to name just a few. From Argentina, I brought in the legendary conceptual and performance artist Marta Minujín and also a segment of the Argentum performance at Teatro Colon during the G-20 meeting.

When a couple of months ago, a cousin sent me from Argentina photos of his newly discovered graves of our mutual great-grandfather Moises and of our grandfather Aron in Basavilbaso’s oldest cemetery, I decided to connect the dots between my questions.

The photographs of my great-grandfather’s grave were particularly revealing. In it was written, in Hebrew: “Moises Frenkel. Born in Dubna, died (according to the Gregorian calendar) on February 24, 1917, at the age of 107.” Where is Dubna, I ask myself? One hundred and seven years old? That means that he was born in 1810, the year Argentinians celebrate the May Revolution, commemorating their detachment from Spain’s monarchy, which for me, as a child growing up in Buenos Aires, was “old history.”

Soon I discovered that “Dubna” was the Yiddish spelling of Dubno, a town whose history begins in the 1100s and where its oldest Jewish tomb dates from 1581. I also learned that in 1794 the first Hebrew printing press was established there and that in the 19th century, Dubno was a place of Haskalah activists. Haskalah was the Jewish Enlightenment movement in Europe that promoted rationalism, liberalism, and freedom of thought.

How did all these factors impact my great-grandfather’s upbringing? The little I know is that he had been kidnapped by the Russian Army when he was seven years old, which was not uncommon at the time, and was released when he was twenty. He then married but, not having children, he divorced. He remarried a widow with six children; together, they had four more children. Since grandfather Aron Frenkel was the oldest of these, born in 1870, Moises was sixty years old when Aron was born. Where did they live?

Aron’s wife, grandmother Catalina Torgavetzky, referred to the Kherson Gubernia as their place of origin. That is a vast area, about the size of South Carolina. Where in Kherson? Judging from the upbringing of the Frenkels offspring, the Frenkels were well-educated in both the Bible and the Talmud and Russian and Yiddish literature. They probably lived not far from Odessa, already a sophisticated city by the end of the 19th century with an imposing Opera House and large boulevards enhanced by Italian and French architecture.

The Kherson Gubernia was a part of the Pale of Settlement, the area where 5.3 million Jews were allowed to live within the Russian Empire. The Pale of Settlement included modern-day Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, parts of Poland and Latvia, and most of Ukraine. Their common language was Yiddish, a German dialect with words from Hebrew. They all suffered from anti-Semitic attacks and discrimination. Pogroms, the organized massacre of helpless Jews, were a common occurrence.

By the beginning of the 1900s, when pogroms became more murderous, Moises decided it was time to live, but where? The United States, “the Goldene Medina,” had strict immigration quotas that took years to qualify. Palestine was a poor land that had only Zionist ideals to offer. At the time, Baron Hirsch’s Jewish Colonization Association offered 150 hectares (about 370 acres) per family to settle in Argentina, subject to a down payment and repayment in 25 years, starting three years after arrival. It seemed like a definite possibility to sustain the livelihood of a large family.

In 1904 the Jewish Colonization Association selected one-hundred families in the south of Russia to settle in Argentina’s Jewish colonies. Where in the colonies? “Basavilbaso,” they were told. Basavilbaso was a train station of a major railway intersection, about 320 km from Buenos Aires. Founded in 1887, the Jewish immigrants called the colony Lucienville, about 40,000 hectares of cattle pasture.

The Frenkel’s accepted the offer. They moved to Argentina in 1904 as a group of about eighty people: Great-grandfather Moises, 94, and his married sons and daughters, already in their thirties, with their spouses and children. The whole family must have traveled by train to Hamburg in Germany to board a ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean in two to three weeks.

They reached Buenos Aires in June-July 1904. It was winter in the southern hemisphere. They had to endure several days of Argentina’s bureaucracy in crowded, terrible conditions. From Buenos Aires, they traveled 320 km to Basavilbaso, where there was not much more than a train station and plenty of mud. Basavilbaso was an Argentinean version of a small shtetl, yet the surroundings had wide horizons, and for the first time in their lives, they did not fear pogroms.

The Jews that settled in Basavilbaso were well-educated. Contrary to the romantic image generated by writer Alberto Gerchunoff of Jewish gauchos, the immigrants were not farmers and did not aspire to become farmers. They became farmers to make a living and to be able to provide their children with a good education.

Grandfather Aron chose to be a merchant rather than a farmer. He bought a lot in the new village’s center and built a house to accommodate his family. His son and two daughters born in Ukraine were followed by five daughters born in Basavilbaso, among them, my mother.

Stories tell that great-grandfather Moises built Basavilbaso’s first synagogue, Tfila Le-Moshe, completed in 1912. Yet religion was not central to the Frenkels. The food they prepared was not kosher, and they limited their celebrations to the High Holidays and Passover, yet education was an essential subject.

The Frenkel’s home had a well-supplied library with many books in Russian and Spanish. There was a pianola, and the siblings had to learn to play music and do their regular school chores. By 1900, the colonies already had twenty elementary schools teaching 1,200 pupils. The classes included Spanish, Argentinian history, and Hebrew and Jewish rituals. Children learned to read and write both in Spanish and in Yiddish. However, since there were no high schools in the vicinity, the new generation moved to Buenos Aires during their teens. Many became professionals.

My father emigrated to Argentina in 1925, when he was twenty years old. He was born in Kalarash, a shtetl located about 50 km from Kishinev, the present-day capital of the Republic of Moldova, which was called Bessarabia between 1818 and 1919.

His parents were poverty-stricken religious Jews with ten children. The boys all studied Hebrew at the local yeshiva, but my father also got a secular education by going to a gymnasium, the Russian high school. There he discovered his talent for math and memorizing long Russian poems. I was this unusual combination that would impact his future life. Although he dreamed of becoming a writer, he soon became a businessman using his learned skills to achieve his goals.

My mother, a heavy reader like my grandmother, became self-educated. She performed poetry declamations, wrote in impeccable Spanish, and sang with an opera-level mezzo-soprano voice. She married my father in her early twenties. I showed up eleven years later.

Today approximately 180,000 Jews live in Argentina, and about 140,000 in Buenos Aires. About 100 are part of my family. Most of them live in Buenos Aires.

 

Rethinking Symbolism Takashi Murakami + This Is Not America’s Flag at the Broad

Rethinking Symbols from Rick Meghiddo on Vimeo.

The “Takashi Murakami: Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow” and “This Is Not America’s Flag” combined exhibitions at the Broad bring us the power of symbolism and its interpretations through multiple artists and evolving cultures. Muramaki uses “augmented reality” to express trauma and disaster. The artists featured in “This Is Not America’s Flag” challenge the meaning of patriotism and one of its main symbols, the American flag.

The Octopus Eat6s Its Own Leg

 The curator of Murakami’s works is Ed Schad, whose extraordinarily well-curated exhibitions on Jasper Johns and Shirin Neshat I have covered. Sarah Loyer, the young curator of “This Is Not America’s Flag,” successfully orchestrates an ensemble of disparate artists, from Jasper Johns to Alfredo Jaar, to Vito Acconci, to Wendy Red Star. What is extraordinary about this double-feature show is that the two contrasting exhibitions blend seamlessly. Although each one could have a stand-alone in its own right, the synergetic togetherness demonstrates that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow

 Murakami’s work is powerful, whether he expresses himself at the scale of In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow, 984 x 118 inches (2500 x 300 cm), or in My arms and legs rot off, and though my blood rushes forth, the tranquility of my heart shall be prized above all. (Red blood, black blood, blood that is not blood), 32 x 27 in (83 x 70 cm,) or humorously is the Nurse Ko2 “ overly-sexualized” female nurse, a distant cousin of America’s Barbie Doll.

 

The “Not America’s Flag” exhibition holds its power as a whole. Although Jasper John’s Flag is a heavyweight, it is the multiple interpretations under one roof that forces us to rethink symbols at a time when “The Big Lie” is followed by 35 percent of Americans and over 80 percent of Russians approve of Putin’s war.

 

Watching on livestream Muramaki’s conversation with Etsuko Price (1) at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center in Los Angeles was instructive. Although known for his eccentric exhibitionism, listening to what he says (through translation) helps get into his mind and better understand the complexity of his multi-layered architectural thinking.

 

Note (1) During our trip to visit and photograph Frank Lloyd Wright’s Price Tower, I visited Joe and Etsuko Price at their house and gallery in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. The house’s architect, Bruce Goff, was there (some of our photos can be seen in https://archidocu.com/sideways-1971/ scrolling down to BARTLESVILLE, OKLAHOMA.)  

Takashi Muramaki in conversation with Etsuko Price, Japan House, Los Angeles, May 20, 2022

 

Ukrainian Bullets Young Ukrainian Artists at the Forefront of Art, Architecture, and Music

Ukrainian Bullets from Rick Meghiddo on Vimeo.

With the war in Ukraine entering most people’s lives worldwide, Ukrainian Bullets shows creative alternatives from life before the beginning of the war. In delineating a short documentary, I focused on contemporary young artists at the forefront of art, music, and architecture.

Artists

 

Daria Marchenko graduated from Kyiv National University of Technologies and Design. She is best known for her involvement as an advocate for public art in Ukraine. She has created wall murals in over thirty countries. In “The Face of War,” she portrays Putin made from 5,000 bullet casings. Trump’s portrait “The Face of Money,” made together with Daniel Green, is made out of mostly pennies, nickels, and poker chips.

 

Pazza Pennello (b. 1987) is a Ukrainian pop artist born in Odessa. She lives in Kyiv. Her artworks are part of private collections in Ukraine, France, Switzerland, and the USA.

 

Alina Samanova (b. 1993) graduated from the University of the Arts in London. She lives in Kyiv. Her paintings depict both confident and vulnerable women in their chosen environment.

 

Stepan Ryabchenko was born in Odessa (b. 1987) in a family of artists. Hi graduated as an architect.

 

Musicians

 

Antonii Baryshevskyi is a pianist and composer. He was born (b. 1988) in Kyiv. He studied music at the Tchaikovsky National Academy of Music of Ukraine and at the École Supérieure de Musique in Paris.

 

DakhaBrakha is a Ukrainian folk quartet that combines the musical styles of several ethnic groups.

 

Dakh Daughters is a Ukrainian music and theater project started in 2012 in Kyiv. The band consists of seven women who play various instruments and sing in different languages (English, French, Russian, German) and dialects of Ukrainian. Dakh Daughters has performed in various Ukrainian cities and Poland, the Czech Republic, France, Russia, and Brazil. 

 

Go_A is a Ukrainian electro-folk band first formed in 2012 sent to represent Ukraine in the Eurovision Song Contest 2020 in Rotterdam, Netherlands (canceled due to COVID-19.)

 

Architects

 

SPRW Architects, based in Kyiv, with architect Vitaly Vorobey and designer Aleksey Zvoliansky, conceived “Flatness,” an art gallery.