Long Beach’s best art is right in front of you

VILLA RIVIERA by DANIEL DEBOOM

The most stunning, exciting, and effective piece of visual art in Long Beach today is at the corner of Ocean Boulevard and Shoreline Drive. Draped in black, a blank space rich with possibility, it will frighten, enchant, and roil within you thoughts of death, rebirth, and the very nature of art itself. Other features include hardwood floors, coved ceilings, and art deco bathroom tiles.

It is the Villa Riviera condo complex—and no, it is not because the 16-story building is one of the finest examples of the Chateauesque style to be found. That Villa Riviera is not around. Several weeks ago it was covered in black mesh tarp as its exterior is being scraped for renovation. So what now stands in its place is a 16-story billowing black entity clawing at the sky, both demanding and shunning our attention.

I first saw it a little more than a week ago. Ironically, I was driving from a local museum where I’d been sent to review an exhibition. Turning onto Alamitos Avenue, I saw the Black rising above the horizon, set against a brilliant blue sky and I was immediately drawn to it—initially flashing on the monolith from 2001 and thinking how funny it would be to get someone involved with the renovation to talk about the building as an art piece. That is, until I recognized that the closer I got to the object, the harder and deeper my heart seemed to beat, the more other things seemed to fall away, and I realized that this moment viewing the Black—no more than three minutes—had affected me more than anything I’d seen in an hour-and-a-half in the museum. It made me shrink away and drew me to it. I saw in it—more correctly, I felt—a host of things that I remembered feeling as a child when such things went wonderfully unnamed.

Now, I know what you’re going to say: that I was simply overwhelmed by the size of the thing. I won’t deny this. But you can’t deny that art is not only about light and color but proportion and scale—which is why David is 17 feet tall, why Oldenburg’s household objects are the size of skip-loaders; why, for that matter, Bosch’s pictures teem with demons or Van Gogh’s with glops of paint.

Yes, size matters, but only so far as what you do with it. Would we get the same effect from the Villa if it were covered in light blue? A patchwork? If the tarps had a builder’s logo stamped on them? Doubtful. There is something about this Black, very black and uniform so that it appears both dense and silky. Nancy Peters, the administrative assistant for the board that runs the building, said that though she knew the covering was coming, the first time she came upon the covered Villa she “was startled. I remember thinking that the black looked like the building was shrouded, and yet it was really kind of beautiful, too”—beautiful, she said, because it anticipated the building’s rebirth in 14 months, with gleaming paint, restored windows, and gargoyles.

One thing I will not cop to is your next point: that what I am reacting to may be interesting to look at but is not art because the people who created it had no intention of creating art. First, my life is not so teeming with visual stimuli that I am able to dismiss something so affecting as happenstance. Second, I think intention is what kills modern art. Modern art is lousy with intention, with artists using text—words!—to tell us what their paintings are about. (Doesn’t conceptual art begin and end with intention?)

It’s the Black’s lack of intention that gives it its power and makes it much more effective than any of the Christo pieces you’ve been thinking about while reading this—especially the draping of the German Reichstag in material. Christo’s work has always seemed so contrived: art by way of press release, done specifically for our attention, like the kid who eats bugs.

The Black does not deign to entertain. In fact, it asks absolutely nothing of us. It goes about its business, beautifully, passively, aggressively, like a waterfall, a big black waterfall, reminding us of our place in the world and that the processes of that world are beyond puny constructs with puny names such as ‘ethics,’ ‘morality,’ and ‘time.’ Death comes as quickly and suddenly and inevitably as life. And life is beautiful, and terrible, and everything, and everything lies in the black.

Tags: Long Beach, the black, villa riviera