Urban Light - History

History

Burden viewed Urban Light as a formal entry way to the museum on Wilshire Boulevard: "I've been driving by these buildings for 40 years, and it's always bugged me how this institution turned its back on the city."

Burden first began collecting street lamps in December 2000 without a specific work in mind. He would continue collecting them for the next seven years. He purchased his first two lamps at the Rose Bowl Flea Market after bargaining down the price from $950 to $800, each. He purchased about 60 from contractor and collector Anna Justice, who was instrumental in the restoration: sandblasting, recasting missing parts, and rewiring to code, then painting the lamps a uniform grey. As Burden's collection grew, the ground around his Topanga Canyon studio became littered with parts, which the artist referred to as "lamp carcasses". Most of the street lamps came from the streets of Southern California, including Hollywood, Glendale, and Anaheim. Some came from Portland, Oregon. Among the 17 styles represented are the Outpost, Hollywood and Pacific Twin. The largest, most ornate, called Rose Poles, were from downtown Los Angeles; a few can still be seen at the corner of Broadway and Sixth.

In late 2003, Burden discussed installing a hundred of the lamps at the Gagosian Gallery in New York, but the gallery eventually balked at the cost. While he later sent 14 lamps to an exhibition in London, his goal was to keep as much of his then 150-piece collection together as possible. To that end, he invited visitors to view them outside his studio, where he had installed some in dense rows. Among the prospective purchasers in mid-2006 was The MAK Museum for Applied Art in Vienna and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, represented by its new director, Michael Govan. He visited the studio at twilight, and from the driveway, saw the lights lit and concluded that the installation would be a perfect fit. Govan was followed by Andrew M. Gordon, a Goldman Sachs executive who would later become chairman of the museum's board. Gordon approved the purchase through his family foundation for an undisclosed price.

The Urban Light installation took place amid changes to the LACMA campus, which included a new building, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, and two new open spaces. The sculpture dominates one of them, a forecourt located between Wilshire Boulevard and LACMA's entry pavilion. Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Hawthorne gave the arrangement a mixed review, describing Urban Light as "a kind of pop temple, deftly straddling the lines between art and architecture and between seriousness and irony. It's also a joy to walk through. But there's no getting around the fact that it turns what might have been an actual public square along Wilshire -- a space defined from day to day by the people using it -- into an outdoor room for one sizable and very insistent piece of art." Hawthorne also argued that Urban Light was the first of four large-scale installations at LACMA in which Govan has challenged and undermined "the polite axial symmetry of the master plan he inherited from" architect Renzo Piano and his patrons. Those installations also include Tony Smith's black aluminum sculpture, called "Smoke", that fills the atrium of the Ahmanson Building, a palm garden by Robert Irwin installed along the edge of the Resnick Pavilion, and, just north, Michael Heizer's "Levitated Mass".