Angelenos Tear Down a Facsimile

• OPINION NOVEMBER 17, 2009 Angelenos Tear Down a Facsimile By TOM L. FREUDENHEIM Los Angeles Political events have often made for good happenings—even before Allan Kaprow coined that art term in 1957. What better example than the bevy of world leaders gathered in Berlin last week to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Even Mikhail Gorbachev was there, and no one seemed to be arguing about whether the absent Presidents Kennedy or Reagan deserved credit for the dismemberment of a political system that was actually collapsing from within. L.A. Reimagines the Berlin Wall View Slideshow Wende Museum Almost 6,000 miles away, the Berlin Wall was being reimagined and strangely re-created across Los Angeles's Wilshire Boulevard near the city's County Museum of Art. Which raises questions about whether all happenings can or should be understood as art events. Good intentions of using the occasion for combining art with commemoration fizzled a bit. The ambitious West Coast project hardly drew the passionate crowds that flowed from east to west on that fateful Nov. 9, 1989. A hefty proportion of the several hundred enthusiastic L.A. spectators were probably preschoolers at the time of the event being celebrated and appeared more curious than knowledgeably commemorative in spirit. As with all political demonstrations these days, there was at least one unrelated cause on display: a small group of anti-Chinese signs and demonstrators wearing T-shirts reminding us not to forget Tiananmen and the Olympics. But hey, it's not every day that you get to see one of our great city's major thoroughfares closed down and walled off, albeit only for a few hours. And there was no denying the muted power of that statement. As for the L.A./Berlin Wall itself, there were two versions. On a nearby lawn were 10 echt Wall segments, still impressive and frightening for their heft and scale, despite the gaudy graffiti with which they were adorned. More palpable than the postreunification souvenir Wall fragments that seemed endlessly to surface as earrings or table decorations, these large concrete segments are from the collection of the Wende Museum (www.wendemuseum.org), which sponsored the event (along with appropriate and necessary civic and German organizations; closing a street is no simple administrative task). Founded in 2002 by a farsighted young Angeleno, Justinian Jampol, the Wende consists of a vast archive of material culture gathered from the former East Germany and other countries from behind the Iron Curtain. Located in Culver City, it's a serious place, working with high-level museum standards in cataloging and storing a wide range of fascinating material that will likely provide important research fodder for generations of scholars and exhibitions. From Erich Honecker's diaries, secret police files and socialist-realist Soviet Bloc art to an endless array of kitsch souvenirs, the Wende Museum provides remarkable access to Cold War culture. Wende is the German word meaning "turning point," and it's generally used by Germans as shorthand for "reunification." Judging from its brief history, the museum promises to be a major asset to that new institutional category, "Sites of Conscience," which has creatively expanded the museum field in recent years with such additions as the Terezin Memorial in the Czech Republic and the District Six Museum in South Africa. Los Angeles isn't all that far-fetched a venue for this commemoration, having been Berlin's sister city since 1967, and sharing with its German sibling a sense of endless sprawl and multiple city centers. When Mr. Jampol talked about "tearing down the walls in our lives," he probably wasn't referring to the endless walls that have made canyons of L.A.'s freeways. But it's difficult to think of walls metaphorically when the real things remain painfully evident, from L.A. to Jerusalem. Such thoughts were kept at bay as the German singer Ute Lemper gave the festivities a feel of Berlin legitimacy with extraordinary renditions of "Lilly Marlene" and "Mackie Messer" ("Mack the Knife"), and a pre-event benefit party managed to suggest the cabaret scene that we still associate with another era's Berlin. Getty Images - A mock wall falls on Wilshire Boulevard. But this was an evening of symbols rather than authenticity. The 80-foot-long barricade that was torn down at midnight consisted of 10-foot-tall plywood sheets painted by local artists, with a "removable" midsection of softer materials. If this viewer had a sense of nostalgia, it was more for Jean-Michel Basquiat's graffiti art, since there was a ponderous sense of nongraffiti in the art produced for the boulevard barrier. In true Los Angeles fashion, it had been assembled beforehand by Spanish-speaking workers, and despite actually blocking most of Wilshire Boulevard, the scale relationship between the very broad street and a mock plywood wall emphasized its symbolic nature and accentuated the power of the real concrete segments nearby. In line with the law of unintended consequences, the most unexpected showmanship of the evening belonged to Chris Burden's signature assemblage of street lamps ("Urban Light," 2008), which tries in vain to unify the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's several unsuccessful attempts at architectural statements. The intense glow of the lamps and the monumental scale of Mr. Burden's work almost made it feel like a Los Angeles pendant to Berlin's monumental Brandenburg Gate. That, in turn, gave to the commemoration a sense of place that's usually hard to find in Los Angeles, and definitely a cause for celebration. —Mr. Freudenheim, a former art museum director, served as the assistant secretary for museums at the Smithsonian Institution. .

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