OPEN SPACES He was from New York and he was from Los Angeles, he embodied both. Just as the earth began to move in a 4.4 tremblor in Los Angeles on a Monday morning, Michael Govar boarded a plane to Cleveland. Handsome, with gray wavy hair and looking more New York than L.A., he spoke with a passion and vigor about the variant changes at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Seven years ago he had been appointed Chief Executive Officer at L.A.C.M.A. Trained as an artist; Govar lived and worked in NYC, until being wooed to the West Coast. Once a student of fine arts, Govan said, “I thought I would one day work in art on the creative side.” I found the comment surprising, even more so by the end of the evening, when he had conveyed his amazing creative zeal and thinking for the transformation of the Los Angeles museum. His passion for the creation of space to transform and interact with art, was a vision he saw to bring the intimate intersection of art, architecture and space. On a cool, late winter evening, during the second week of Lent, a full moon and melting snow hinted at my hopes of a conclusion to the most brutal winter I can remember since coming to Cleveland (from the West Coast). My husband and I drove downtown to attend an evening lecture with Michael Govar, as he shared his creative thinking upon arrival in Los Angeles, as he began re-imagining a new space for art in a Hollywood City. In order to “reconsider, recreate and re-imagine” it takes a paradigm shift, perhaps even an “ironic or eccentric” viewpoint. Reconsidering ways in which space surrounds art, one is attentive to the context’s ability to uphold and further reveal the beauty of the art, or the ways in which it may detract or distract from it. Hewn through years of art study, Govan uses ‘creative thinking’ to playfully re-imagine context. These artist methods include turning a sketch or canvas upside down—a different perspective which allows one to quickly see discontinuity in form, perspective and misshapen form. Using the upside down concept, Govan worked with the artists, showing the audience a slide of the museum’s new “upside down” room; clouds painted on the floor and the L.A. freeway on the ceiling. Returning to another artist trick—“inside out”, where the foreground recedes and the background comes to the fore, Govan worked with architect Robert Irwin. Irwin brought art to the outside, in a collection of palm trees from all over the world, carefully sculpted into the landscape they are now the first exhibit one sees, even before entering the front door of the museum. Along with the palm tree exhibition, there is also a new entrance on Wilshire Boulevard; artist Chris Burden restored 150 old streetlamps. This outside art is a beacon of iconic light. Art is a receptor of beauty and density, particularly when given vast spaces outside. Landscape sculptures in the middle of a desert, a crater surrounded by a cattle ranch, Govan shared photographs of art in landscape sculpted by man, nature and God. Robert Heiser’s lightning rods stand starkly vertical in a horizontal expanse of New Mexico desert. They are conduits for lightning storms—God and man ignite the canvas of sky in scraggly fractured zigs of white light. The artist moves into God’s space and co-creates, tapping into intuitive subconscious memories, when long ago “the earth was a formless wasteland” and God created. Govan uses creative thinking, working within a community that purposely lacks “certainty and hierarchy.” I listened attentively, aware of the force of the wind in his vision that seemed to stretch across a wide and fertile horizon. He concluded the evening with a lightning rod statement, one that illuminated a truth for my life, “I want to create a seamless transition to a contemplative space by being as open and available to failure as I am success.” The dark and long journey of Lent from winter to spring, from a Crucifixion to a Resurrection changes our spiritual space, widening the horizon, the context for love and faith to be re-imagined in our lives. It is prayer which creates a seamless transition to a contemplative, silent space of reverence and we can surrender to “Thine Will” and not the world’s definition of failure/success. Creating new space means transforming the context that surrounds God’s beauty within us. During this forty day journey I want to surrender the self-conscious formulating, controlling, cautious linear measures of my failures and successes. Can I prayerfully trust and surrender to God to recreate and re-imagine a new mystical space? This space will transform the present and open spaces in my heart for love. On the drive home we are quiet, the light of the full moon shines through the window. I wonder to myself if I can trust fully in the mystical, intimate and open space of God within my life? It is an unknown place, can God create an intersection of art, architect and space in my little life, in our lives together? Can I let go of my ideas of failure/success and surrender to God’s creativity in my life? Can I trust in the infinite space of eternal time that God will watch over us, through our earthly days? The creativity of God is born within this delicate relationship of trust, learning to listen to the whisper of angels, it is another language—less conscious, painted in broad strokes, in symbols that I struggle to taste, touch and smell in the physical world, but if I can re-imagine the transformation of a life through prayer, God will surely guide us in the beautiful space of our earthly lives and in the Divine world too. -debra See our web site for full article: themuteswan/blog
Posted on: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 06:12:42 +0000
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