Sticking with the concept of “where the streets have a name, and a pretty good one at that,” I found myself last Friday in downtown Los Angeles walking the really very short distance between Astronaut Ellison S. Onizuka Street to Traction Avenue. Unlike some fancily named streets there’s plenty of interest in both these places.
Ellison S. Onizuka was an American
astronaut of Japanese descent, who was one of the crew of seven who died aboard
the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986. That’s
him above, standing beside a model of the shuttle. And here in Astronaut Ellison S. Onizuka Street
there’s a very much bigger model:
It looks good, even reflected in a
puddle in the rain. Yep, it rained in
L.A. last Friday:
Traction Avenue is in the Arts
District, a terrible name for a district if you ask me – as though art needs to
be corralled into some ghetto. In any
case we’re given to understand that artists can’t afford to live there anymore.
Of course the
whole area has art coming out its wazoo – graffiti, street art, decorated
dumpsters (I intend to publish a short monograph – or at least a blog post - on
“the decorated dumpster”) and murals of course.
There’s this one of Ai Weiwei:
And I thought this was very fine, and
a new one on me, a kind of totem pole made using rubber tires:
This part of the perambulation
was something of a delaying tactic. I was in downtown to take a look at the
Triforium, a piece of “polyphonoptic” sculpture, built
in 1975, with 1,494 multicolored glass cubes designed to glow in synch
with music from a 79-note glass bell carillon.
It’s located well outside the Arts District.
It’s the work of Joseph Young,
and it’s located
in the unexotically named Fletcher-Bowron Square, and
actually sits on top of the incredibly bleak Los Angeles Mall. The mall’s architect Robert Stockwell was
responsible for commissioning Young.
These days the whole place looks like the mall that time forgot.
I admit that until recently
I’d never really been aware of the Triforium, and the Angelinos I’ve talked to, the ones who have any opinion about it at all,
seem to regard it as a likeable, though unserious, 1970s folly, and I’ve yet to
meet anybody who actually saw it in full functioning son et lumiere mode. It’s
certainly been neglected, and by some accounts it never worked properly even
from the beginning. It was, arguably,
ahead of its time and required some serious computer technology that it didn’t have.
On the other hand, the basic
structure seems to be in pretty good shape and if you stand in the right place
as the sun is going down you can see those glass cubes glow (kind of), although last
Friday the sun was long gone before I got there.
This was a special day for the
Triforium, a 40 year anniversary, and there was to be a “launch party” for its restoration. Festivities started at 4 pm, and when I
arrived, at 4.30 or so, a dj was laying down some cosmic space rock but the Triforium
itself was unlit. I assumed they were
keeping it this way so that at some point it could be turned on, lit up and the
music would be pumped through it. Was
this terribly naïve of me? Perhaps, but
I wasn’t alone in my foolish hopes.
Some official-looking young uns were sitting
at a table in the square, and from time to time people would come up to them
and say, “So when do you fire it up?” And the reply was that they weren’t
going to fire it up. The Triforium
doesn’t work, not the sound, not the lights, nuthin. Which was why they
were having a fundraiser. Oh. I was not alone in my disappointment.
But at least I did
get to step into the Triforium control room.
It all looked very Cold War. The
guy there said they’d had in various electricians and computer guys and none of
them could make the thing work, and as far as I could tell they didn't know how
it had ever worked. But as one of my fellow visitors pointed out, the system must
be in some sense “on,” since there are glowing lights, so obviously there’s
power getting in there, and somebody must be paying the electricity bills. How does that work? I have no idea.
Among the crowd was top LA
photographer and visual chronicler Gary Leonard, a pleasantly chatty man, and
he said he’d been there in 1978 for John Cage’s 75th birthday
party. Did Cage perform or conduct or
use the Triforium in some way, I asked. Maybe 4'33'? No, said Gary, but there was cake:
As I slipped away the Triforium looked like this:
The Triforium Project website is here:
http://triforium.la
