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 Urban Light - Los Angeles, CA Posted by:  DougK
N 34° 03.779 W 118° 21.556
11S E 374562 N 3769972
Gracing LACMA’s Wilshire Boulevard entrance, Urban Light, by artist Chris Burden, is a sculpture incorporating 202 antique cast-iron lampposts from various cities in and around the Los Angeles area.
Waymark Code: WMD4ND
Location: California, United States
Date Posted: 11/18/2011
Views: 21
Gracing LA County Museum of Art’s Wilshire Boulevard entrance, Urban Light, by artist Chris Burden, is a sculpture incorporating 202 antique cast-iron lampposts from various cities in and around the Los Angeles area.
A sign near the left front corner of the streetlamp collection reads:
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Chris Burden
United States, b. 1946
Urban Light, 2008
202 restored cast-iron streetlamps
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, made possible by the Gordon
Family Foundation's gift to Transformation: the LACMA Campaign
M.2007.147
Streetlamps are one of the essential features of the urban landscape and in the
early twentieth century were more than utilitarian objects that provided street
lighting. In describing the work the artist has said "Urban Light is an artwork that
I have created by amassing and restoring a huge collection of 1920's cast-iron
streetlamps from Los Angeles and its many adjacent cities. Streetlamps are one
of the fundamental building blocks of an urban metropolis. The richly detailed
fluted lamps are an ornate totem to industrialism and represent a form of public
art. My artwork, Urban Light, is ultimately about what constitutes
a civilized and sophisticated city, safe after dark and beautiful to behold.
"By placing the 202 human-scale lamps very close together and in long colonnades,
I have usurped the lamp's function as a streetlamp. Together they form a sculpture
which I call Urban Light. The viewer's experience of traversing through these tightly
spaced fluted columns is an exalted one that recalls the marvel of seeing and
walking through classic Greek and Roman architecture or a European cathedral.
The feelings of recollection and wonder transform the streetlamps, day or night,
into the sculpture Urban Light."
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From the LA County Museum of Art website:
This forest of city street lights, called Urban Light was created by artist Chris Burden. Despite initial appearances, the arrangement is not a perfect grid. Depending on where the viewer stands, the lamps arrange themselves in different angles and arrays. These 202 cast iron lamps once lit the streets of Los Angeles. Burden bought one at the Rose Bowl flea market, and soon collecting and restoring street lights became an obsession. He painted them all the same neutral gray, in order to draw the eye to all the different varieties of cast iron decoration. Burden says that street lamps like these were symbols of a civilized and sophisticated city—safe after dark and beautiful to behold. The lights all still work, and they are now powered by solar energy. They are switched on every night at dusk, until 10pm. At night, Burden says his sculpture becomes transformed into “a building with a roof of light.”
Price of Admission: 0.00 (listed in local currency)
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