spectacle

There was so little traffic - it being a Sunday morning - today that I had time to go for a walk round the La Brea Tar Pits - still bubbling, lethargically - reminding us that Los Angeles has a long, long prehistoric past.  There's oil about 1,000 feet down below these tarpits, and asphalt has risen to the surface periodically over the last 50,000 years, and trapped animals and plants ... so that there are many Ice Age fossils (mammoths! sabre toothed tigers - rather like Gramsci) and so on that have been excavated over the last couple of centuries.  I'm so excited to see what Mark Dion does with the installation based on the Tar Pits for PST 2024.  

And then on to LACMA - what's left of LACMA, before the new buildings go up - for the wonderful City of Cinema: Paris 1850-1907 show - in part curated by my colleague Vanessa Schwartz - and a wonderful assemblage of painting, film, photographs, advertisements, ephemera - really bringing home how much Paris in the latter part of the C19th was a city preoccupied with the visual and with the business of spectatorship.  I didn't nearly have time to take it all in, and I can't wait to return - but the gem of what I've seen to date is Louis Daguerre and Charles-Marie Bouton's Diorama of the Camposanto in Pisa, 1834 - oil on canvas, with - and this was the truly extraordinary part - illumination from behind.  Truly, there's so much to see - some C19th realist paintings that I didn't know at all - but this Diorama is extraordinary.