MOCA

It’s not that I don’t believe it, but rather that it all seems quite useless. This metal, plaster, plastic and canvas, materials decorated and enlarged and bejeweled by the color palette of free marketing. What are we looking at here? Guidelines we must follow, but what for? What does it mean to stand in front of melted metal? In a circle we walk, all people of different paths, we walk and observe and make simple remarks about the inability to feel anything when considering the portrait, the painting, the structure, all indifferent. Great art is suffering, yet nothing screams here. All too quiet and polished. Your friends are bankers and restaurants, hollow apartments of parked currency and expensive motels. Your neighbors are parking lots. No one stays but moves on to work or loiter or beg for change. I repeat, who is this for? Your neon sign reading, “No Struggle/ No progress,” while just outside your doors is a vagrant chugging peach and orange flavored juice and staring at his phone like it holds arcane magic. What does steel do for me? Or rather, the drips and swirls of inky stains, no purpose and no direction, what does it do for me? I care not for the blank canvas entitled “Work in progress” as if something greater were waiting. But this is it! MOCA, Museum of Contemporary Art, contemporary meaning now, modern, usual, normal, and if that harbors a reflection of the state in which we live then I find nothing but mundanity–Disney colors and minor outbursts of internal textiles. This is all boring.

We suffer greatly just existing, our everyday lives have been reduced to electrical impulses, ravenous desire, and insatiable cravings. We are hungry for more, obsessed with finding our limits and barreling past them. Thus great art teaches one about suffering, how to do it with honor and beauty. We’ve since displaced these sentimental notions of artistic creation/perfection for the market scheme, vague idealisms, and pop politics. Everything is surface level and requires no further investigation. We look to great art for answers to the unanswerable, the vagaries in every moment, every second, by which the tolling bell is heard more clearly. But we will not find empathy behind this steel, and these walls, except in small fragments. I was deeply moved by the photography of John Valadez. Like an anthropologist he documents the streets of East LA as it lived and breathed in the 70s. Here we have portraits of what seems to be normal individuals in typical situations. What heightens the tension between viewer and viewed, investigator and investigation, is that Valadez promotes no sense of instigation or control. The ultimate voyeur lacks compassion and empathy, but Valadez makes his camera a source of mythmaking, a tool one understands masters utilize when creating masterpieces. There is no feeling of pressure, of weight from the lens, instead every subject looms large, centered in the certainty of themselves and their location. My mother lingers in the photos, on the streets of East LA she used to walk with her cousins. In them she recognizes some faces, cars, and buildings. Nothing like this exists for her anymore. It's all been reduced to melted metal, to bejeweled steel. This is where I feel something, like a riddle suddenly unwinding in my mind, I find an answer.

Who is this for? Someone like me? A complainer, a drifter, a wannabe? I am just another lost soul, taken by death and looking for answers. This is why we visit museums, is it not? And why the word so closely relates to that of mausoleum. Within those walls are ghosts of history, ancient myths and heroes, primordial love and anger. We go because we are called by the sensations of wanting more. Life has starved us of energy and creativity, so it is stored behind glass and metal, melted and then reaffirmed by our conviction this is a creation born of those divine energies. We access those ancestral tombs of symbols and perhaps, by the smallest of chances, we will find our face on the walls.