Newsha Tavakolian. Untitled, 2011; inkjet print on Hahnemuhle paper.

Since she began her career as a photojournalist at the age of 16, Newsha Tavakolian has been capturing the essence of the modern-day Iranian experience through poignant photographs that challenge Western perceptions of the women of the Islamic Republic, while alluding to the intricate weavings of dialogue that shroud this forward-thinking and over-educated population. Her photographs capture the weight of the internal and external veils that, at first glance, seem to tether their subjects. Yet there is empowerment present in the faces of Tavakolian’s women, alongside determination, and a fiery tenacity that speaks of internal strength and defies subjugation.

Four of Tavakolian’s photographs are on display at LACMA through December 15, 2013. The fourth-floor elevator doors of the Ahmanson Building pull apart to reveal these somber-faced female protagonists who have been plucked from two different series: “The Day I Became a Woman” (2009) and “Listen” (2011).

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Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, "The Banquet of Cleopatra," 1740s. Courtesy National Gallery of London.

The word stature is one of those that’s meaning and sound do not completely agree. Say “stature,” and it sounds like you mean something serious, like stature is the same as status: “Her stature alone commands attention”; “He was a man of great stature.” But of course, someone could have small, wimpy or weak stature. When writer Judith Thurman reviewed a Cleopatra exhibition the Guggenheim hosted in 2007, she wrote, “There have been other great queens, but none of [Cleopatra’s] stature.” Then, in the next paragraph, she wrote, “That stature was petite — aristocratic women of her time were about five feet tall…”

So she was small, maybe even femininely delicate, but still commanding enough to prompt the Romans to inscribe on a stele carrying her depiction, “The queen himself.”

I have been thinking about stature because Michael Heizer, an artist of great stature (who is significantly taller than Cleopatra probably was) known for his earthworks and his secret City in Nevada, is making a work of stature. This work, if you have not heard, will be on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s campus and will involve a rock of great stature — 340 tons — that recently had to be moved from its point of origin in Riverside to L.A. This move, of course, involved street closure and hassle and quite a bit of spectacle. By the time it reached it’s destination, tens of thousands had come out to see the rock, which will ultimately sit behind the museum above a big concrete slot that viewers can descend into.

Night view of Michael Heizer's rock in transit, about to leave the Bixby Knolls neighborhood of Long Beach.

The rock has prompted extraordinary amounts of media coverage, but very little art criticism yet, understandable seeing as the work isn’t quite built. Christopher Knight of the L.A. Times finally did stick his neck out and offer some art critical thoughts on the rock and related fanfare. He’d wanted to dispel some of the rock-associated economic frustration, as the price tag hovers somewhere around $10 million — no taxpayer dollars were spent, LACMA and city officials assured the public as the route wound through the region. After making his money point, Knight wrote, “Besides money, what else draws easily distracted eyeballs toward budding celebrity? Ask Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian. Sex, in the case of the rock, requires a bit of explanation.” By “budding celebrity,” he meant the 340-ton rock; he referred to the whole transport as “the boy-toy.” He continued,

As a source of public fascination, art’s psycho-sexual position in American life matters. Art has a gender in popular consciousness, and that gender is female. Like it or not, art is presumed to be feminine, not masculine. Under those circumstances, if art in a patriarchal society is to have a prominent public life, femininity just won’t cut it.

His was a sort of vague argument, but the gist was this: if you were to assign gender to artworks, most would be girls. Unfortunately, femininity can’t hold its own out in public, however, which means all artists commissioned to make public work on LACMA’s campus were male: Chris Burden, Robert Irwin, Heizer, James Turrell and perhaps Jeff Koons. He called the boulder “just about as butch as it gets.” But I wonder if that’s true.

Michael Heizer, “Double Negative,” 1969. One of two slots in the Mormon Mesa.

The earthworks artists, their own gender aside, seemed always to be interested in crevices and nuances and indentations and interventions, even if they sometimes acted upon the landscape in  megalomaniacal ways (Heizer blasted out tons and tons of sandstone to make Double Negative, two deep slits in the Nevada desert). In contrast, Chris Burden’s recent sculptures have been interested in “erecting”–erecting cities or lampposts–and Jeff Koons makes aggressive stand alone work that has no interest in crevices. Heizer’s rock, despite it’s stature, has idiosyncrasy. Slated to hover over a deep dip into the ground (albeit a concrete-constructed one), it feels more gentle.

The 2009 Christmas House in Atlanta.

Over Thanksgivings, which my sister and I spent with our aunt and grandmother in Atlanta, all of us used to go to the Atlanta Christmas House. It’s always a big, newly renovated or newly built Victorian-style mansion in which everything is up-to-date and in its place. A local designer has decorated and furnished each room, and this means rooms don’t necessarily make sense together—you could cross a hallway and go from Ikea-style modernism to shabby chic.

My sister, then a Harvard student who joked about being in college for her Mrs. degree (“when I marry into money”), loved the house. She never meant it about the Mrs. thing, but there was something perfectly appealing to her about this big, sleekly assembled house. She liked it’s newness and scale; it connoted comfort and freedom from want (she’s in Thailand now, braving the floods—a far cry from Atlanta posh). I remember we couldn’t find her once, and saw her wandering outside, toward the gazebo as if in a daze.

Because she loved it so much, I tried not to say how much I hated the Christmas House. It was impossible for me to imagine living in those pre-made rooms that had never been lived in—even the artbooks on the table were the wrong kind; lots of Taschen and oversized Phaidon, the type you can find at most any urban Barnes and Nobles.

Charles and Ray Eames' living room, looking slightly tidier than it does at LACMA

These days, I don’t even like the historical tours of turn-of-the-19^th-century mansions, owned by former moguls or just well-to-do families. As a kid, I’d go through them and fantasize about living in that time, sleeping in those canopied beds, changing behind one of those decorative screens. But now? Most of those houses, like the Campbell mansion in Spokane or the Swan House in Atlanta, feel like they’ve been left with just enough character to evoke “how-they-lived-then,” and stripped of most idiosyncrasy.

Not so with the living room of designers Charles and Ray Eames that’s been painstakingly moved piece by piece, from the Eames house in the Pacific Palisades to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Despite the husband-wife team’s obsession with efficiency and championing of minimalism, the room is quirky and almost overstuffed (rugs overlap one another, and there are books galore). It’s the home of a couple that had too many interests and while, yes, the objects are expensive, I imagine the Eames living room would have looked somehow similar even if rugs had been out of there price range.

The highlight of LACMA’s current show, California Design, 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way, the living room has apparently been kept up by the same housekeeper who worked for the Eames when they still lived (he died August 21, 1978, her August 21, 1988). It’s where they entertained for thirty years, since building the house—#8 in their series of Case Studies, houses meant to meet the needs of inhabitants and jive with the environment— and moving in on Christmas Eve 1949.  The house had to “function as an integral part of the living patter of the occupants and will therefore be completely ‘used’ in a real and full sense,” read a 1945 brief in Arts and Architecture. “’House’ in these cases means center of productivity.”

Image from "Crying over Spilled Milk," 2011. Courtesy of Paul Pescador.

I wrote last week about “Situation Rooms,” places that set the stage or open up room for the unexpected to happen. I suspect the Eames house is one of them. You couldn’t walk into that room without having curiosity peaked about something. Billy Wilder used to visit—would his mood change when he walked through those glass doors?

There will be a different kind of situation room in Lincoln Heights tomorrow. At the small alt arts venue, workspace, artist Paul Pescador will perform along with four other artists (Karen Adelman, John Burtle, Alexis Disselkoen, and Christa von Sydow)  in What Have I Done to Deserve This. It’s the fourth in a series called Situating, where artists get together, perform around a loose theme and then interact with each other and the space they’re in for a drawn-out period. When Pescador organized his previous Situating at Human Resource, one artist proposed an all-encompassing work that would commandeer the space for a period. Another artist responded by giving visitors pink coats to wear; that way, she could assert herself in the situation without necessarily interfering with the artists who had claimed center-stage. If you’re in L.A. and you can, stop by worskspace sometime between 2-6 p.m., October 22^nd,  and check in on the atmosphere. The themes usually come first, even before Pescador has invited artists to collaborate with him, so What Have I Done to Deserve This promises some real intensity.