Thinking Out Of the Box

By BARBARA ISENBERG

Just hours before an international press event at Art Basel last June, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) director Michael Govan faced unexpected trouble. The architectural model highlighting LACMA'S renovation and expansion plans had arrived in pieces. So Govan got some glue and tweezers and set to work. "He was extremely calm and concentrating on the task at hand," recalls friend John Elderfield, chief curator of painting and sculpture at New York City's Museum of Modern Art. "He may be the big-picture person, but he's also able to jump in and do it himself when necessary."

Govan, 44, solves problems for a living. An East Coast art star who is best known for his work turning an abandoned factory into the Dia Art Foundation's showplace in Beacon, N.Y., in 2003, he was hired 22 months ago to bring his magic to LACMA, a museum that even its most prominent backer, collector Eli Broad, calls "very tired."

Set to open at LACMA in February is a new, $56 million, Renzo Piano-designed home for Broad's contemporary art collection. The Broad Contemporary Art Museum, which has 60,000 sq. ft. (18,200 sq m) of exhibition space, is key to a three-part transformation now under way to reconfigure and expand LACMA'S 20-acre (8 hectare) campus on Wilshire Boulevard and, it is hoped, revitalize its collections--and its reputation.

"We've only been on this site since the mid-'60s," says Govan, "and compared to institutions in New York, we're still coming into our maturity. LACMA is a sleeping giant in the sense that its potential is huge."

The new LACMA will integrate a cluster of disparate buildings, linking them with walkways, plazas and gardens. Piano's design was in place before Govan's arrival, but he has already convinced the architect to rethink the museum's new entrance and brought in the sort of contemporary artists who helped put his Dia:Beacon on the international map. Chris Burden is readying more than 200 historic lampposts, and Robert Irwin is curating a garden of palm trees. If all goes according to plan, expect a 161-ft. (49 m) crane dangling a 70-ft. (21.3 m) train replica courtesy of Jeff Koons, plus a 400-ton Michael Heizer rock, which Govan boasts will be "one of the largest monolithic objects moved since ancient times."

Heizer's rock is called Levitated Slot Mass, says Govan, unearthing a photograph of it from his very contemporary office. Across the room, artist John Baldessari's photograph of the New York City skyline doubles as a window shade through which to watch cars whizzing along Wilshire. A wall-size photograph displays what looks like the city's iconic Hollywood sign but is a replica created in Palermo, Italy, by conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan.

Appearances can be deceiving, the office says, and the same could be said of its occupant. Don't be misled by the movie-star looks, pilot's license and glamorous wife, LVMH communications executive Katherine Ross. "This is a substantive guy," says architect Frank Gehry, who worked with then Guggenheim museum deputy director Govan on the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. "He's got ideas, and he works hard to make sure they get implemented."

Govan has already implemented plenty of ideas at LACMA. The museum had been without an art expert at its helm much of the past 15 years, and Broad ticks off the tasks Govan took on. "We had to re-energize the staff, rebuild our board of trustees and make an architectural mess a more coherent campus," says Broad. "And we had to raise a lot of money to pay for all this. Michael was the ideal leader to make all that happen."

It apparently took a while to convince him. Trustees say they originally didn't think Govan would be interested, given his high-profile work as Dia's president and director, and the director concedes he resisted their overtures. But eventually Govan decided that he simply couldn't pass up the opportunity, citing everything from the city's ports to its diversity and, most passionately, the vitality of its visual-arts scene and plethora of filmmakers, designers and other creative people.

Southern California museums, galleries and art schools are thriving. Prominent New York--based art leaders like Ann Philbin and Gary Garrels are today director and chief curator, respectively, of UCLA'S Hammer Museum. James Wood, former director of the Art Institute of Chicago, arrived in February as president and CEO of the city's J. Paul Getty Trust. "Young artists no longer think they have to go to New York after they get their degrees," observes artist Baldessari. "For the galleries, it's like shooting fish in a barrel here--there is so much of a talent pool."

Reared in Arlington, Va., Govan taught drawing in high school, hoped to be an artist and double-majored in studio art and art history at Massachusetts' Williams College. There he met Williams College Museum of Art then director Thomas Krens who, spotting talent, soon had him designing brochures and posters. "He was fast, quick, bright and mature beyond his years," recalls Krens, today director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. "Michael seemed preternaturally sophisticated about art."

Govan got considerable on-the-job training with Krens during the expansion of the Williams museum and the creation of Mass moca, an enormous art and performance space nearby. Govan did some graduate work at the University of California at San Diego, but his advanced education has come more from life experience and particularly from mentor and colleague Krens. When Krens went off to run the Guggenheim Museum in 1988, Govan joined him as deputy director.

Instead of producing his own art, Govan has spent much of his career nurturing and learning from artists. At the Guggenheim, he came into contact with such artists as Dan Flavin and Donald Judd, and when he got to Dia in 1994, he helped his artists dream big. Besides offering them close to 240,000 sq. ft. (73,000 sq m) of exhibition space at Dia, he embraced such large-scale earthworks as Michael Heizer's City project and James Turrell's Roden Crater.

At LACMA, he has involved artists wherever possible. Sculptor Jorge Pardo is designing a reinstallation of the museum's pre-Columbian collection, while Govan and senior curator of modern art Stephanie Barron invited artist Baldessari to install last year's Rene Magritte and Contemporary Art show. Baldessari came up with a ceiling image of intersecting freeways and a carpet of sky and clouds. "Usually artists can't be compensated at market level for their time," observes Barron, "but Michael got Lexus to underwrite the installation. Michael's passion for art is infectious."

Govan has brought in new corporate sponsors and expanded the board to include such trustees as Barbra Streisand; Broad says trustee giving has tripled during Govan's tenure. Museum guards wore Magritte-style bowler hats for that exhibition and donned sunglasses for this summer's retrospective of neon artist Dan Flavin, which co-curator Govan brought to LACMA at the end of a world tour. "The Flavin exhibition was beautifully selected, installed and almost choreographed," observes artist Alexis Smith. "Its level of visual sophistication was doubly interesting because it was done not by a museum curator but by a museum director."

Change is everywhere. In the museum's ancient Greek and Roman gallery, for instance, the floor-to-ceiling windows had been walled up for 20 years. Comparing the light of Los Angeles to the light of Rome, Govan took down the wall. He also weighed in on the placement of key sculptures and, when it came to the gallery floor, encouraged curator Mary Levkoff to look at the ebony stain on the wood floor the director was having refurbished in his own home.

While he expresses particular interest in Latin America and Asia, given LACMA'S West Coast location, the museum has also recently made important acquisitions of work by such masters as 17th century painter Pietro da Cortona, early 20th century artist George Bellows and contemporary sculptor Richard Serra. Govan's notion of collecting iconic houses by such architects as R.M. Schindler, Richard Neutra and Frank Gehry remains under discussion, but Govan concedes it may not be realistic to expect such big-ticket donations. He seeks to preserve them, he says, but indicates as much interest in initiating the idea as in doing it at LACMA.

Better to concentrate on the LACMA campus, a place Govan envisions as the city's town square. "If you're going to rethink the encyclopedic museum for the 21st century, Los Angeles is the place to do so," says Govan. "This is a city that speaks a hundred languages and which everybody says lacks a center. The encyclopedic museum holds something for everyone, no matter where you come from."

The Annenberg Foundation has given the museum funding to study engineering and begin design of Koons' dangling Train, according to Govan, who is already calling the artwork his town square's campanile. "What a metaphor," says LACMA trustee Lynda Resnick, "for the way the West is chugging forth into the new millennium."