If you’ve been keeping up with our LA interview series this week, you may have noticed a number of common threads running through our conversations—there’s a lot of great hiking in Los Angeles; the ArcLight theatre is super; Cafe Gratitude is crazy/awesome; the weather is fucking ridiculous.
And LACMA—the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—is really rad. We can back our interviewees up on that last one as we were able to swing by near the end of our recent stay in LA to check out their current exhibition, Stanley Kubrick. And, man, are we glad we did.
The exhibition—extensive + detailed in its content—was massive + wholly engaging for any fans of Kubrick’s work. From the LACMA site:
“Stanley Kubrick was known for exerting complete artistic control over his projects; in doing so, he reconceived the genres in which he worked. The exhibition covers the breadth of Kubrick’s practice, beginning with his early photographs for Look magazine, taken in the 1940s, and continuing with his groundbreaking directorial achievements of the 1950s through the 1990s. His films are represented through a selection of annotated scripts, production photography, lenses and cameras, set models, costumes, and props. In addition, the exhibition explores Napoleon and The Aryan Papers, two projects that Kubrick never completed, as well as the technological advances developed and utilized by Kubrick and his team. By featuring this legendary film auteur and his oeuvre as the focus of his first retrospective in the context of an art museum, the exhibition reevaluates how we define the artist in the 21st century, and simultaneously expands upon LACMA’s commitment to exploring the intersection of art and film.”
That’s right—they used ‘auteur’ + ‘oeuvre’ in the same sentence. They’re an art museum. They can get away with that kinda thing.
For anyone who lives in LA and has yet to visit the exhibition or for anyone who plans to visit before the exhibition closes (June 30), we highly recommend attendance. It’s, in a word, stunning.
Photos below: Kubrick’s movie posters; an artist’s mock-up of the bomb-riding sequence in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb; a model of the command center from the same film; a slide viewer look at a still from Lolita; a quote from Mr. Kubrick; a scene from Unfolding the Aryan Papers, a video installation by Jane + Louise Wilson on the Aryan Papers, an unrealized Kubrick project on the Holocaust; a model from 2001: A Space Odyssey; one of the sculptures from the milk bar in A Clockwork Orange; a draft script excerpt from the same film (“WEIRD ELECTRONIC MUSIC” = awesome); rejected art from The Shining + the film’s famous creepy twins, axes, + typewriter; and a mask from Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.
