MOCA - Geffen Contemporary

I visited the Geffen Contemporary gallery at MOCA in downtown LA. There was a wide variety of 2D and 3D artwork, including many different types of unusual media from computer parts, to dirt, to christmas trees. One of the strangest, yet interesting things on display was a white, rotating disc, installed flush with the white wall so that it was barely discernible. Although you could hear the motor running, you could not visibly see the disc rotating because there were no marks on the disc to follow it around. The security guard warned us not to touch it or it would burn your finger, so we remained skeptical as to whether the disc was actually rotating at all. Some of the contemporary art on display seemed like an even farther stretch of what might be considered art. There was a piece titled, "basket of nothing" in which there was simply an old wire basket bolted to the floor, filled with rusty tools and miscellaneous junk. Some of the exhibits showed interesting ideas with the use of unusual pairings of objects. One such display featured a regular wooden table with ordinary objects on top of it, including a vase with flowers, a place setting, etc. Such a normal looking arrangement of objects was slightly baffling to witness in the middle of a contemporary art museum, but a glance underneath the table revealed a maze of computer gadgets and microchips on the underside of the table surface. Similarly, another artist chose to take a cut out plot of land that resembled an unweeded garden, and prop it up on a laboratory-like table, as if being displayed for scientific study. There were also many more traditional media works such as photography, pencil drawings, and painted canvas, but few were as memorable as the items mentioned that I did not expect to see in an art museum.