The Public Eye

Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, Which Is the Prettiest Fair of All?

by Edward Goldman | ArtTalk

Love it or hate it, this city of ours is known and defined by perpetual driving along the miles and miles of its freeways. You want to have a perfect portrait of the city? Think about pulling, twisting, thrusting together all these roads. Then add the hundreds of thousands of cars rushing and whooshing around and around. Hmmm…interesting idea, isn’t it? But sorry guys and girls, someone has already beat us to it, and this someone is one of the best-known American artists, Chris Burden, who, last year in his Topanga Canyon studio, presented to friends and admirers his gigantic sculpture, Metropolis II. I saw it last January and loved this poetic metaphor of L.A. freeways with thousands of electric toy cars madly running every which way.

It took artist and a team of his assistants several months to carefully dismantle and pack this uber-complex sculpture. Then it took many more months to bring it to Los Angeles and reassemble it on the ground floor of LACMA’s Broad Pavilion. At the end of this week, his amazing sculpture, Metropolis II, will be shown to museum members first and then to the rest of the public. But that’s not all there is to this story….

Jump to continue ==>

Re-posted with permission from ArtTalk.