July 10, 2025
Peter Zumthor
David Geffen Galleries
LACMA
June 26 - July 6, 2025
David Geffen Galleries at LACMA
John Cage created the musical composition 4:33 in 1952. It consists of a pianist sitting at a piano and playing nothing for the duration of the work, four minutes and thirty-three seconds. This piece was motivated by Cage's encounter with Robert Rauschenberg's white paintings — canvases without imagery of any kind — as well as his encounters with an anechoic chamber, a room designed to stop sound. In the silence, Cage wanted people to become hyper aware of what surrounded them, the shifting of the audience in their seats, their coughs or sighs, and the sounds within the concert hall that had never been considered "music."
The experience of Peter Zumthor's architecture and the empty David Geffen Galleries at LACMA is reminiscent of 4:33. Because there is no art to see, the space becomes the work. Each wall and corridor is an abstract composition with varying textures and tonalities, angles and reflections. The building is designed in the Brutalist tradition — minimalist, bare building materials with raw concrete and angular geometric shapes. Encircling the structure are large banks of windows with views of the environment around the museum — Wilshire Boulevard, the La Brea Tar Pits, the other LACMA buildings. The structure is a dominant presence. It asserts itself. Empty of art, it raises questions. It is beautiful and eerie, complete and incomplete. Like 4:33, it calls attention to what is not there. No music was played in Cage's composition and no art is on view in LACMA's preview, yet the experience is totally immersive and satisfying.
The details — whether the treatment of the concrete, the triangular pattern within the ceiling, the fixtures both recessed and hanging, the shadows and the variations in light as morning transitions to afternoon and evening — make the experience complete. The windows function as frames capturing what appears outside: the urban and the natural environment coming together, isolated and distanced.
Postcards can be collected and QR codes scanned to illuminate where the "art" will be and how the completed museum will showcase LACMA's expansive collection. But now, devoid of art, the building sings. It allows viewers to set their imagination free and engage their mind's eye in ways they never dreamed.
David Geffen Galleries
LACMA
June 26 - July 6, 2025
David Geffen Galleries at LACMA
John Cage created the musical composition 4:33 in 1952. It consists of a pianist sitting at a piano and playing nothing for the duration of the work, four minutes and thirty-three seconds. This piece was motivated by Cage's encounter with Robert Rauschenberg's white paintings — canvases without imagery of any kind — as well as his encounters with an anechoic chamber, a room designed to stop sound. In the silence, Cage wanted people to become hyper aware of what surrounded them, the shifting of the audience in their seats, their coughs or sighs, and the sounds within the concert hall that had never been considered "music."
The experience of Peter Zumthor's architecture and the empty David Geffen Galleries at LACMA is reminiscent of 4:33. Because there is no art to see, the space becomes the work. Each wall and corridor is an abstract composition with varying textures and tonalities, angles and reflections. The building is designed in the Brutalist tradition — minimalist, bare building materials with raw concrete and angular geometric shapes. Encircling the structure are large banks of windows with views of the environment around the museum — Wilshire Boulevard, the La Brea Tar Pits, the other LACMA buildings. The structure is a dominant presence. It asserts itself. Empty of art, it raises questions. It is beautiful and eerie, complete and incomplete. Like 4:33, it calls attention to what is not there. No music was played in Cage's composition and no art is on view in LACMA's preview, yet the experience is totally immersive and satisfying.
The details — whether the treatment of the concrete, the triangular pattern within the ceiling, the fixtures both recessed and hanging, the shadows and the variations in light as morning transitions to afternoon and evening — make the experience complete. The windows function as frames capturing what appears outside: the urban and the natural environment coming together, isolated and distanced.
Postcards can be collected and QR codes scanned to illuminate where the "art" will be and how the completed museum will showcase LACMA's expansive collection. But now, devoid of art, the building sings. It allows viewers to set their imagination free and engage their mind's eye in ways they never dreamed.