Michael Govan

EO

How did you come to art?

MG

Ever since I was a kid, I drew constantly. I made things. I wanted to be an artist. For a while, I got interested in math, science, early computer science—but art was the through line. When it came time for college, the question was: do you go to art school or a liberal arts college? I already knew how to draw—though you can always get better—but the real question was about ideas. Time. How could I investigate the content of what I was interested in? That’s what led me to Williams. At big schools, you often have to specialize. If you want to use the studio, you have to be an art major. But at Williams, the goal was to explore broadly and channel that thinking back into the work. I ended up double-majoring because I saw art history as a way to better understand how to see. And then there was the Clark Art Library. Have you been to Williamstown?

They have this extraordinary library at the Clark Art Institute, and a graduate program. I started taking grad classes as a freshman. I petitioned my way in. I had access to an incredible library and people thinking at a very high level. Then I graduated—and you have to make a living. I started working on the college newspaper. I had a journalism minor. I redesigned the paper, worked as features editor. I was doing what you’re doing now—but at a much lower level. [Laughs.]

EO

Hopefully one day I’ll be doing what you do.

MG

Exactly. I’m hoping that, too. Sooner rather than later would be good. [Laughs.] Then I got a job working at the school’s museum, just to have a job, and I had to stay the summer. I asked the president of the college for money to create a magazine—you’ll appreciate this—on the arts at Williams. I needed a job in Williamstown, and I wanted to make my own. I felt like the arts weren’t well promoted.

EO

Was the arts at Williams known outside of the community or was it more of a secret?

MG

It was both known and unknown. There was a great theater, and the dance program had an incredible director. I walked into the president’s office—innocently, before I understood politics—and said, Here’s my plan: I want to make a magazine to promote the arts at Williams. I’ll do all the design, writing, and photography myself. I just need $5,000. They gave it to me. When I went to the first arts faculty, they said, What the hell? Why did they give you the money? They’d been asking, too. [Laughs.] Still, I met with all the department heads, including Tom Krens, the museum director—you might know him. In those early interviews—like the ones you’re doing—I realized he was thinking much bigger about what the museum could be. He liked the magazine and offered me a job designing posters and catalogs.

So I did graphic design. I also programmed computers—whatever paid. I redesigned the museum’s logo, produced brochures, everything. Then I needed more money and asked, Can I get paid to screw in light bulbs? [Laughs.] I did every job: packing, crating, lighting, installation. When I graduated, I asked if I could curate an exhibition.

EO

On your Wikipedia, it says that you worked as a curator for the museum?

MG

So that was the story. From my undergrad and grad coursework, I had written a paper on Picasso’s Minotaur print—pretty obscure now—but I had organized new research on the relationship between Picasso’s prints and Rembrandt. I asked if I could make an exhibition. I was 22. Tom Krens said, “Sure, if you can figure it out and raise the money.” So I did—I got the loans, wrote and laid out the catalog, printed it, and made the show happen. I think it was that first summer out of college. Then he said, “You know what, we don’t have a curator right now. Why don’t you be acting curator? I’ll give you a full-time job at the museum. But you’ll have to help me manage the building construction project.”

EO

Which meant what?

MG

We were building an addition onto Charles Moore’s existing design for Lawrence Hall, which was the old library. It was an early twentieth-century building, maybe even late nineteenth. Moore, the postmodern architect, had already done one addition, and I was asked to help manage the second. At the time, Tom Krens was getting his business degree, so he wasn’t in Williamstown much. I was just there. I lugged in light bulbs, designed posters and catalogs, programmed the collection database, cleaned the bathrooms—whatever needed doing. [Laughs.] I had curated a show, but weirdly, I became the generalist while he was gone. I ended up doing more work and forming closer relationships with artists, conservators, curators, architects.

EO

Was that the moment when art and architecture converged for you? What were the psychological or even psychosocial aspects of managing a construction project while curating the space itself? Not many people witness the building of an institution—or the construction of a building, period. Did that experience leave a lasting imprint?

MG

Definitely. I was curious. You’re doing the work, but you’re a voyeur. As a kid, I liked art and I really didn’t like museums. I was like I love art. Museums are putting it in a cage like a zoo. They were restricting it. I loved the art, but didn’t love the container [Laughs.]

EO

What did institutions and museums mean to you growing up?

MG

I grew up around Washington, D.C., so you end up going to the Smithsonians and the national galleries. There were some smaller art galleries and artists, but mostly you had these giant institutions with a real institutional presence. It’s funny—I’m now a Regent of the Smithsonian Institution, as a way to give back, because those museums were so formative in my childhood. I was shaped by going to all of them: the Hirshhorn when it opened, the Air and Space Museum. And then architecture became central for me because we were actually building a building. I was 23, actively managing a museum construction project. Around that time we also mounted an exhibition called Revision of the Modern, which came from the Deutsches Architektur Museum. It featured all those architects—the first wave of so-called “starchitects”: Morphosis, Isozaki. They called it the Revision of the Modern. They didn’t want to call it “postmodern.”

EO

When was this?

MG

I think the show was in 1985. It was still while I was there—during the time we were building the museum, in the mid-’80s. Heinrich Klotz, who directed the German Architecture Museum, was the reigning world expert on museum architecture at the time. The show wasn’t entirely about museums, but his role was foundational—he had started the Architecture Museum, built the O.M. Ungers building, and later founded the ZKM, the museum for architecture, design, and technology. He was an older man, a really interesting character. I learned a lot about architecture through him. And then I got very involved with artists and travel. I worked with Andy Warhol briefly—he helped design a poster for our opening. I spent a lot of time at the Factory.

EO

Oh, my God. He did a show at the museum?

MG

No, we just bought a self-portrait. I asked the director, Tom Krens, if I could go see him—see if Andy might design the poster for our opening. You can find it on eBay. So I went to the Factory and worked with Fred Hughes, got to meet Andy. He said, “Sure, I’ll do it.” I remember he handed me an eight-and-a-half by eleven sheet with his name written twenty times—Use the signature you like. I left it at the museum instead of keeping it.

Around that time, Tom was also working on a show about museum architecture. Those were heady days in Germany—every city was rebuilding, post-war. All the Richard Meier museums, that whole 1980s generation. And the galleries—Paul Maenz, Michael Werner—Sigmar Polke and the German expressionist scene were exploding. Tom needed a research assistant, so I started going to Germany. I probably went twenty or thirty times in the ’80s and visited every artist of that generation. I was a conceptual artist myself, not a painter, but I found painting incredible. I met Kiefer, Baselitz, Christa Näher, Polke, Penck. There was such force and optimism in that world—it was growing fast. Then I’d come back to New York and see the next wave: Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl. I went to those early shows of Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Jenny Holzer, talked to Mary Boone. Those were heady days for art. My own work was quieter—more like Sherrie Levine, I guess. But that was the moment I realized: I really, really wanted to go to graduate school for art.

EO

After having been institutionalized. [Laughs.]

MG

It was just too much. Actually, my thesis project at Williams was about museology, in a way—I made a catalog, a book, and placed it in boxes at the center of the room. But I also made a show of paintings based on the pages of the book, reversing the relationship between original and copy. Very simple, but it was nice. I took great pleasure in painting on cardboard. The idea was that after the show, you’d throw the paintings away.

Anyway, I wanted to go to graduate school for art. The whole art world just felt so heavy. I’d met incredible artists—Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, and so many others. It was all amazing, but I needed a break from both the New York and European art worlds. So I chose the University of California, San Diego.

EO

When did you start there? I know Lorna Simpson went there around that time.

MG

Yes, 1986 or ’87. We were a year apart. I think she was finishing as I was starting.

EO

Why did people gravitate to it as an institution?

MG

It was considered the think tank at the time. You had Eleanor Antin and David Antin. Eleanor’s work was this really interesting take on feminism, narrative theater, and photography—she’s still alive, and I actually did a project with her at LACMA. David Antin was a poet and art critic who contributed to the Duchamp catalog and was especially influential in the poetry world. He made these “talk poems”—very Lacanian in a way—just spoken performances that would later be transcribed in all lowercase with unusual spacing. He was well-known and definitely an interesting character. Allan Kaprow was there too; he was the one who recruited me. I was also really interested in Helen and Newton Harrison—they were the first of what you could call environmental artists. They were making work about climate change in the late ’70s. Harold Cohen was there too—we just did a show on computer art that included his work. He was training computers to paint.

They also had critics and theorists like Sheldon Nodelman, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Bebette Mangolte. Gorin had been a cinematographer for Godard. That was a time when the California school system was paying absurd salaries to bring in the best thinkers and artists to Southern California. That’s when Baudrillard came to teach at UC Irvine. For someone like Lorna or me, when you were looking at grad schools, the choice was kind of stark: you could go to Yale, which trained you to be a money-making professional artist, or you could go to San Diego—which was for misfits, or people with a more conceptual bent.

EO

What was happening on the ground?

MG

All those professors were in the later stages of their careers. They were elders by that point. I had amazing studio critiques from Allan Kaprow—they were performances. [Laughs.] He would talk about art in terms of which part of the body it came from. The catch was that Kaprow, being a conceptual artist, was particularly interested in my museum work. When it came up, he proposed that my role at the Williams College Museum could function as a kind of hybrid—that I could get credit for working at the museum as part of my graduate art education.

Kaprow had once proposed that the Guggenheim be left empty—that the emptiness itself would be the show. He was genuinely interested in the museum as a site of conceptual thought. So I split my time. I’d spend two weeks in San Diego, then two weeks back in Europe or New York, always on the road.

EO

Talk about having it made in the shade. [Laughs.]

MG

Oh, no. It was actually quite stressful. [Laughs.] After a year, the wear and tear on my mind and body—doing frenetic work, then flying to San Diego—really caught up with me. I’d get up, grab something to eat, sit on the beach at Torrey Pines reading Lacan, then head to my studio, which I kept empty as a conceptual gesture. I would make empty paintings. [Laughs.] My entire portfolio was designed to fit on six sheets of paper that could be folded and tucked into a single folder. As a magazine maker, you’ll appreciate this.

I was just so sick of the apparatus of the art world—its weight, its cost. So I created a fictional artist. I would rent things to photograph, write an article about this fake artist using the images, design it in the format of Artforum, and then make bad photocopies—with fingers in the frame on purpose.

EO

Residue.

MG

A lot of my art at the time engaged the notion of the copy. The idea was that my entire year’s work could fit on six photocopied sheets of paper. It was a schizophrenic existence. Around then, Tom Krens had been named director of the Guggenheim. I guess he asked three or four people to join him—at least one other person seriously—and none of them said yes. So he asked me if I’d come help him for a few years. He needed a Deputy Director.

He was leaving Williamstown and heading into a completely new environment. And he needed a few people he trusted.

EO

What did being a deputy at that time mean?

MG

It ended up meaning I was assistant director of the Guggenheim Museum—and I was still 25. It made people inside the museum crazy mad. I didn’t care, because in my head I was only going to do it for a few years and then go back to art school. So I don’t know what to say. The rest is history. I got deep into it because of the work—building construction, the Frank Lloyd Wright building. I started collaborating with artists and curators, and eventually we figured it out. I stayed for six and a half years.

EO

I need to know about Bilbao.

MG

We were renovating the Guggenheim in New York and had just acquired the Panza Collection of American Minimal art. I got beaten up in the press in the early days. Around that time, we were trying to figure out whether we could show that collection at MASS MoCA—which was the project we started in the early ’80s.

EO

Wait, you helped start MASS MoCA?

MG

Yeah—Tom Krens, Joseph Thompson, and I started that project in 1983. I was still a student, Joe wasn’t, and Tom was director of the Williams College Museum. The architects we worked with on the schematic design were Frank Gehry—this was ’83–84—plus Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, and David Childs. Frank wasn’t famous yet. Denise and Robert were defining postmodernism, and David Childs was probably the most successful corporate architect in the world, as head of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. The idea was to bring MASS MoCA under the Guggenheim’s wing, because we needed more space. Contemporary art was already exploding in scale—site-specific installations, massive works. The Guggenheim just wasn’t enough, even though we were activating the entire building. The early Jenny Holzer show used the whole spiral. Mario Merz drove a motorcycle around it with Fibonacci numbers. Coosje van Bruggen and Claes Oldenburg leaned in too. We pushed that building as far as it could go.

To get to Bilbao—we were already thinking about space, about scale. We were renovating New York, planning MASS MoCA, and then Carmen Jiménez brought us this idea. She was one of the four curators we hired—Germano Celant from Milan, who founded Arte Povera; Norman Rosenthal, who had curated the Jasper Johns show and lived in Philadelphia; and Carmen, who was based in Madrid. She told us that the government of Bilbao wanted to build a museum as part of their urban renewal plan. They had already commissioned Rafael Moneo to redo the airport. Carmen brought the idea to us, and she and Tom went to visit. I wasn’t on the early trips. Eventually, they made a deal for the Guggenheim to be the partner. We held an architectural competition. Frank Gehry won—right around the time he had just been fired from Disney Hall.

EO

Did you see the writing on the wall when you all conceptualized the project?

MG

It was driven by Tom Krens having a global view. I was always struck by his globalism.

EO

Did you think that came from his time at business school? What was driving his sensibility?

MG

It came from him being a kid riding his motorcycle around Europe and working in archaeological digs in Turkey. He was comfortable riding a motorcycle around Europe, working in an archaeological dig. He saw the world as a very big place. Of course, he’s working with Iris Love, a famous archaeologist, and she was one of his mentors. She’s talking about world art history. You’re living it; you’re looking at it. So he is an American who is in Europe.

EO

In The New Yorker piece on Peter Zumthor, you both talk about the new building being about adjacencies. That, to me, is really what resonates with the Guggenheim having a mirroring institution that was both of New York and adjacent to it.

MG

Unfortunately, this is a boring story of logistics and time and place—of how things happen—but the ideas are more important. If you travel a lot and see how different things are in different places, you see the world as a big, complicated place. I mean, Krens had that. He felt comfortable in odd corners of the world. One of my first projects was working on an exhibition of Russian avant-garde art with twelve curators: four Russians, four Germans, four Americans. You can imagine how politically and aesthetically fraught that curatorial group was as a committee trying to organize an exhibition.

Meanwhile, we were going back and forth to Russia to negotiate loans. One day, Carmen Jiménez walked into the office and said, “The city of Bilbao and the Basque Country is trying to create more independence.” The ETA—known as the separatists—were trying to separate the Basque region. The government was trying to find peaceable means to create a new identity. They knew they needed more space for art and sought out international partnerships. It wasn’t a hard leap for us, whereas most people might have said, “What? An industrial city in the north of Spain, where there’s terrorism? And we’re going to go?” [Laughs.] But for him, that was cool. Then I was assigned to help negotiate the architecture for the project. I went to California to work in Frank Gehry’s office. Many other things happened during this time. I also proposed that we bring the curators to work downtown. SoHo used to be a place where there was art—whether it be in galleries, etc.

EO

Right. The Guggenheim used to be stationed above the Prada store on Broadway in SoHo.

MG

Yeah, that’s a long, separate, and sad story that I don’t know I want to go into. When I proposed it, I had a slightly different vision for that space. It was supposed to be a competition for the Dia Art Foundation. Rough and rugged. Simple. At the time, I had this idea of the world as a big, complicated place with different points of view. You’re spending time in Russia. At that time, Japan was raging in art. We were sending shows to Japan, to Australia. The Mori Museum was just in conception—they asked us to consult on its early stages. Real estate in Japan back then cost more per square foot than a whole small city in the U.S. in the ’80s.

When you’re traveling, you get this curious sense of how vast and different every part of the world is—and every place has culture. Museums were starting to become a thing. I mean, now they’re really a thing. Look at the M+ in Hong Kong. Look at the museums being built in Delhi. Museums are now expressions of power, but also doors open for diplomacy.

EO

What was that quote by Allan Kaprow? You said you staged that show, keeping the Guggenheim empty.

MG

Yeah, he wanted the museum to just be a thing—an object to be understood. I mean, this is my training. Everything is contextual. All definitions are contextually defined, in context.

EO

As everything should be.

MG

Glissant isn’t even popular yet at this time. By the time I was 30, I’d traveled the world, met with government leaders, worked on museums, worked with Aldo Rossi in Italy, and by then with twenty of the so-called ‘starchitects.’ I’d worked with Hans Hollein in Salzburg—that was Tom’s project. But that’s when I met Max Hollein. He was my intern at the Guggenheim.

EO

You were there for six and a half years. Then to Dia.

MG

Well, I was going to go back to art and finish my degree. That was the plan.

EO

You never finished your degree?

MG

No, I couldn’t because I got tired. My body could not take the two weeks here, two weeks there. It was just frying my body and brain. I just couldn’t do it. I figured, a lot of artists become artists in their 40s and 50s. I’ve got time. I had to do one or the other. And my fiancé was in New York. [Laughs.]

I had planned to go back to school. We reopened the Guggenheim in Soho. We restored it. Bilbao was not up and running, but it was on its way. Salzburg had failed. I was like, I got to go back to school. Then Charlie Wright called me about Dia. He was the former director, and they were looking for a new director. I got curious because Dia was about artists and crazy projects. It was the opposite of museums. It was not about architecture and buildings. It was about artists making space. I mean, rough warehouse. Museums designed by artists for artists.

EO

I became really curious when I learned that Robert Irwin helped with the design of Dia Beacon. What was that about?

MG

Dia had this crazy history. Donald Judd, Marfa, Texas. James Turrell, Roden Crater. These were the anti-museums—giant projects where art was placed into nature or abandoned buildings. Dia was the anti-institution. It held the artist’s vision first. The word Dia comes from the Latin via—the Greek version, meaning “way” or “conduit.” I thought, cool, maybe this will give me a minute to look at the other side of the culture world before I fully commit to going back to art school.

I’d worked with a lot of those artists in the Panza Collection. I knew Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Bruce Nauman, Carl Andre, Joseph Beuys. It was mostly men at the time, but that was the group. So I thought, Dia—what the hell? I didn’t know it was about to go out of business. It had no money. That short tenure became eleven, twelve years because I had to rebuild the institution financially.

EO

You caught a bunch of flack for shutting Chelsea down.

MG

[Laughs.] I’ve gotten flack for everything. I got plenty of flack before then. But Dia needed space. When I moved our staff to Chelsea, everyone wanted security and private cars because it was dangerous. There was an article in The New York Times recently about how it’s now the epicenter of the art world. Charlie Wright told Matthew Marks to come to Chelsea.

But by the time I left, it was becoming gallery central. We discussed it as a staff—the galleries were doing bigger shows than we were. They had more money. They were free. We had to charge admission. I had worked with the city to get the space at the end of the High Line, where the new Whitney is now. That was going to be the new Dia. I had to convince the meat markets to do that.

Long story—Dia Beacon was truly found from one of my little airplane trips. The curator Lynne Cooke, Richard Gluckman, and I were on our way to MASS MoCA to see if we should forge a partnership. They were struggling, and we had a big collection partnership—but it didn’t work out. I remembered the building we saw on the way over, and the rest is history. Then Lynne and I worked together.

EO

I found Dia Beacon so funny because it was a Nabisco factory. It’s so Warholian.

MG

It’s beautiful. Lynne and I said, “Well, if we’re going to do this—if it’s truly going to be Dia, because it has to be an anti-museum museum—we should have an artist work on it.” We had commissioned Robert Irwin to do the project at Dia Chelsea and suggested he be the architectural thinker. Much has been written about that. That was the way to make it an anti-museum museum, in the spirit of Dia.

More people went to Dia Beacon than to Dia Chelsea. When we said we were closing Chelsea, the entire staff understood. We were still operating on a TCO, and more people were going to Beacon.

EO

What does that mean—TCO?

MG

Temporary Certificate of Occupancy. That building needed everything, and it was a $30 million renovation. We all thought it might be cool to start fresh because the galleries were taking us over. That’s when the High Line idea emerged. By the way, the High Line is the train line that connects to Dia Beacon. Nabisco cookies were baked just on the next block. There was this poetry—the High Line, the train line, connecting Dia Beacon and Dia Gansevoort Street. Anyway, it’s a long story. I had a whole building designed. I left the cows on the back so it would be a hidden building. It had no facade. It was a weird, wonderful building that we planned for there. Then—I’m not going to go into the details—but the L.A. thing came up.

EO

What’s the L.A. thing?

MG

LACMA, in 2000. By that time, I knew a lot about museums and the world. I had traveled. I had worked with artists.

EO

What came up with LACMA?

MG

Ten people turned the museum down. They didn’t have a director...

EO

What was LACMA at the time and why were people turning it down?

MG

I don’t know when you were in L.A., but at the time, it wasn’t a very desirable job. MoCA was the thing—not LACMA. They didn’t have anybody. Long story short, I had spent so much time by then thinking about the anti-museum, about artists, time, history, and traveling the world. The encyclopedic museum still felt problematic to me.

Rem Koolhaas had suggested in 2001 that you needed to tear LACMA down because it didn’t work seismically. It was too expensive to renovate. I talked with my artist friends who were from L.A. I took a deep breath and thought, This is the only city. It’s the new city. It speaks 200 languages. It sits on the Pacific Rim between Asia and Latin America. It’s the media capital.

EO

We have entertainment. It’s money adjacent.

MG

Everybody told me not to move there because there was no money for art. But I was more interested in the idea. I thought, Don’t museums need to be reconsidered from the ground up? Would there be another city in the world with a collection of world art where you could change the frame? I figured either I would totally change the frame, or they would fire me quickly. [Laughs.]

EO

You came in and you knew immediately that you wanted Peter Zumthor, but how did you know that?

MG

Lynne Cooke had pointed me to the building in Bregenz that he had just built, which was a marvel—and every artist loved it, or at least a lot of artists did. At Dia, we were going to build buildings for Walter De Maria’s Ching piece and for Louise Bourgeois—we were talking about her large sculptures. Walter happened to have read an article about Peter Zumthor and loved him. That’s how I got to know Peter—because Walter said, “Oh, I love his work. He’s the only architect I follow.” He had kept a file of clippings about him. So we traveled to see all of Peter’s buildings at the time and met with him.

EO

Why did you decide to leave Dia?

MG

I decided to go to LACMA when I realized those buildings weren’t going to be built. They were too expensive for Dia. You need conceits for creative thought. You need to start somewhere. I thought, Oh, the Ching is a square. They were building a parking lot in the center of Hancock Park. What if you came up from your car into this light-filled space with the Ching—which is chance, all possibilities, a kind of East-West hinge on the edge of the Pacific?

Maybe this artwork belonged in Los Angeles, not New York. And Peter should build this building. I should just bring it to L.A. as a way to start a new conversation. It was impossible, physically—engineering-wise, it couldn’t fit on the site, all of that. That’s why the Resnick Pavilion is a square. I asked Renzo to continue that form to create a courtyard. I made a lot of architectural changes to make that courtyard—where we’re going to have two or three thousand people for the jazz concert tonight. I wanted a civic space. So we built the square with Renzo, not Peter. That’s why it opened with the De Maria—as a nod to this idea of a big open space with a floor sculpture. The 2000 Sculpture isn’t about all possibilities. It means something different. But it has that same meditative quality.

EO

You knew that you were going to have to eventually rebuild the museum after the initial rebuild. But in your mind, that temporary build was like a business card—a proof of concept to further fundraise and finance the full rebuild you’d imagined back in 2000.

MG

The place had tried and failed many times to raise money. The last campaign had failed. You have to walk before you run if you’re raising money. You need a bite-sized project before you take on knocking down LACMA and rebuilding. This was my way of changing the point of view. It became the Resnick Pavilion.

I was talking with Peter, and one of the problems with the encyclopedic museum is that it uses a Cartesian, God’s-eye-view time-space grid. It’s the grid that allows colonialism to map and conquer the world. Many cultures have other models of time—models that are circular. Glissant talks about travel and about discarding. There are so many references. But the Cartesian space has to be broken in order to decolonize art history. The time-space grid is the issue. Peter’s work uses other principles: unconscious memory, materiality, ephemerality, shadow—not light. In Praise of Shadows. All of these tools in his building practice undermine the idea of a Cartesian order. I mean, unconsciousness is just one way to look at it. I’m not even sure that’s the right word. But I knew he had the ability—especially when you’re staring at the La Brea Tar Pits. You’re kind of staring into the darkness of...

EO

This material substance that represents the absence and presence of time.

MG

At the time, I remember Werner Herzog made that movie about the Chauvet caves, the 35,000-year-old cave paintings that look a little like Picasso—but they’re proto-cinema. They’re the same animals that are in the Tar Pits. And you start to realize: the Tar Pits aren’t prehistory. They’re coincident with art history. You’re staring into this Ice Age—the origins of human creativity.

EO

It’s like this hall of mirrors for binary thinking. It confronts the logic of linear time—of the past’s place in the present, and vice versa.

MG

If you have to smash up the Cartesian space grid, this is a damn good place to do it. [Laughs.]

EO

I grew up really close to Miracle Mile in Los Angeles, and the way Peter Zumthor talks about space and art—it’s profound. He was talking about museums being in palaces or in inaccessible places, like the Getty. It’s crazy, because the museum is both the manifestation and the collision of time, space, and history. Like, Walt Disney Hall was conceptualized in 1983, Gehry didn’t submit plans until 1991, and it wasn’t finished until 2003. It followed a similar timeline to the Getty. LA has so few real architectural anchors.

MG

It needed one. And it needed one that had a point of view. I also wanted one that wouldn’t be copied. That’s the problem with the world and with travel—things move fast. Once someone likes a Renzo Piano building, two minutes later there are twelve.

I knew Peter Zumthor takes twenty years to design a building. I knew his age. I figured this would be a weird, unique, never-to-be-repeated artifact.

EO

It is a vessel you pass through. It currently feels archaic. It feels like Egypt—in the sense that there are these fallen temples, and you can visit them, but you’re not threaded at LACMA in the same way. The weight of the Tar Pits feels like Century City. Being at LACMA currently feels like Century City.

People are so literal in trying to map space. But you can’t map space. You have to conceptualize the experience. So you lose 4,500 square feet—but it changes the psychology of how you experience art in the city. It’s like encountering the divine from multiple vantage points at once.

MG

These are all the conceptual considerations behind trying to come up with a new time-space model. I don’t really know if the word decolonize works anymore, because you can’t go backwards. But you can restructure.

If you can reorganize identity—because history is made of cultural identities, plural—if you can reorganize them around present and future values, rather than trying to preserve them, that’s where change occurs. History is always changing. We’re always rewriting it. So if you understand the power...

EO

‘Decolonize’ is too affixing.

MG

We just don’t have the right language for it yet.