Low hanging objects

So this morning I drove downtown and parked near the Walt Disney Concert Hall. It was designed by Frank Gehry in his "deconstructed organic" style.

Then I walked over to the LA Museum of Contemporary Art to see the two shows I'd read about.

The first show was called "Masters of American Comics". It was awesome but probably of limited interest to anyone reading this but me. They had original work by Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, R. Crumb, Chris Ware, and Art Spiegelman. Chris Ware and Jack Kirby were my favorites.

In an adjoining room they also had some of their permanent exhibits. The surreal childhood portraits by Loretta Lux give me the kind of creeps that takes days to wear off.

The second show was entitled "Ecstacy - In and About Altered States" and had a theme of drugs and well, altered states. It was in a gallery ten blocks away in a huge converted warehouse in little Tokyo. So I started walking.

They wouldn't let me take any pictures in the exhibit so I'll explain what I can. (It goes without saying that many of the students touring the gallery had obviously taken drugs to "deepen the experience". Consider the added effect of this when you read on).

In the center of the room was a pile of pills spilled on the floor.

On the left, a large crystal fountain recirculated a liquid that an affidavit stated to be LSD, although this seems totally illegal.

Directly on the right were the detailed diary entries of a Danish artist who had documented the effects of a seven-day drug binge. A new drug each day, taking enough of each drug to maintain an elevate state for 14 hours a day. The entries were short and brutally honest.

The first installation I saw was in a pitch black room. In the center was a low table with an array of tiny coloured spot lights above and about a dozen cushions all around on the floor. As people sat and watched, a fog machine sent dozens of wisps of smoke through tiny holes in the table as the lights changed in time with a classical music piece. It was like time slowed down and your total focus was on the amazing movement of these wisps of smoke.

...

And after about half an hour I moved to the next piece.

The next two rooms were painted black and linked by a black hallway.

The first room flashed thick rings of monochromatic light on one of the black walls. The brief flash took my dilated pupils by surprise and left amazingly coloured echoes on my retina. The pulses were at a high enough frequency that the moving image left in the darkness was recharged. The result was a melting of colours in total darkness. After a few cycles the colour of the flashing light would change and the negative colour left in my eyes would change too. White made blue and green made purple.

The second room had a simple setup. Five white strobes flashed at once on a sheet of water droplets falling from the ceiling. It was like stopping time in a rain storm. I felt like I could almost reach out and grab a single drop.

There were no direction arrows in the gallery and people were moving throughout the exhibits along different paths. I walked by an old couple who are obviously not enjoying the show. I guess they were having a bad trip.

I sat down on a bench in front of a massive five-canvass painting of dozens of vibrantly coloured mushrooms. Any space on that didn't have a mushroom painted on it had been painted silver. It almost hurt my eyes to stare at it...and then without warning the bench started to slowly move to the right. I started laughing from the surprise. It eventually came to rest at the other end of the painting and proceeded back to the start.

At one point I looked down a dark hallway at a large black woman who I thought was an attendant. As I walked up to her to ask if there was a piece down this hallway, she started saying something. It wasn't so much saying something as making the strangest noise. The sound was like a cat coughing up a furball. Before I was able to ask if this section was open she said:

"Be careful" and started barking again (I started to think it might be turret's).
"Be careful of what?"
"Low hanging objects"

The barking continued as though I was the only one that could here it and I decided that I was just going to see what was so dangerous that they needed to employed a barking lady to protect the public.

The corridor walls, floor and ceiling were all painted white. At the end there was a hairpin left then another long stretch another hairpin right and so on for five or six times. I was almost ready to turn around when the hallway opened up into a large low ceiling room. The only lighting in the room came from floor panels and there were about half a dozen giant red and white mushrooms hanging from the ceiling and slowly spinning. It was surprising and dizzying.

In another white room there was just a large photo portrait of a man on the wall. It seemed oddly normal in this strange exhibit. As I got closer to the picture I thought that it had a slight warp, like it was taken with a fish-eye lens but then I noticed that the middle on the picture seemed slightly closer than the top and the bottom. It wasn't a camera effect, the image itself was bowed out. I looked at the side of the frame expecting to see it be wider in the middle and narrower at the top and bottom. It wasn't, the frame was the same thickness the whole way down . That's when I realized that it wasn't that the picture that was warped, it was the wall. The whole God-damn wall that this picture was on was bowed out a good six inches, matching the picture's bow, and gave a depth of field confusion that felt like a hallucination.

There were many other installations. These are just the few I can explain. Some of the best ones I can't even begin to describe. I don't really have the words to convey the sensations. Excitement, disgust, paranoia, confusion, synesthesia and finally exhaustion and that vague feeling that it was fun but it'll be a while before you want go back in there.

I think it was the best nine bucks I've ever spent in an art gallery.