Explore the Critical reception of this artwork, Urban Light.
Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Hawthorne described Urban Light as "a kind of pop temple, deftly straddling the lines between art and architecture and between seriousness and irony. It's also a joy to walk through, but there's no getting around the fact that it turns what might have been an actual public square along Wilshire—a space defined from day to day by the people using it—into an outdoor room for one sizable and very insistent piece of art."Hawthorne argued that Urban Light was the first of four large-scale installations at LACMA in which Michael Govan challenged and undermined "the polite axial symmetry" of the master plan he inherited from Piano and his patrons." Those installations also include Tony Smith's black aluminum sculpture, called "Smoke", that fills the atrium of the Ahmanson Building, a palm garden by Robert Irwin installed along the edge of the Resnick Pavilion, and, just north, Michael Heizer's Levitated Mass.Christopher Bedford of the Baltimore Museum wrote that Urban Light, "embodies a civic ideal rarely realized in public art projects" that succeeds as both a social statement and public art work.Michael Govan believed that Urban Light imparted a "feeling of walking through an ancient temple", one that echos the Greco-Roman temple facades of many East Coast museums. Those facades "are really faux; they’re neoclassical,...and here [Burden has] assembled an honest-to-goodness Los Angeles temple made of local materials, in our time."
Baltimore Museum Levitated Mass Los Angeles Times Michael Govan Michael Heizer sculpture Robert Irwin