Thanks to a tip from Aimee, I spent my lunch hour at LACMA yesterday, watching Fluids melt – and it was more exciting than it sounds. On display in the courtyard was a 30 foot long, eight foot tall rectangle of ice blocks, assembled that morning and left to melt over the course of the weekend, a “reinvention” of a happening by Allan Kaprow that was first realized in 1967 in Pasadena. The LACMA iteration was one of about twenty around L.A., and I went to see what it looked like just a few hours after it had been assembled. It was a particularly hot day, and by the time I got there, around 1:20 pm, one of the long sides had already collapsed, and the sound of the ice dripping was remarkably loud. I took some photos as I wandered around the structure, and stopped on the long side that remained. I took the photo below, and a few seconds later, the entire wall came crashing down, making a huge noise and sending shards of ice across the courtyard. The bottom photo is of the scene nine seconds after I took the first photo; I haven’t mastered the photojournalist’s skill of actually taking photos of the action rather than just standing, slack-jawed, as it happens.





After the collapse, everyone watching seemed to be waiting for another collapse, and though I don’t think it’s going to last all weekend, it didn’t seem like anything else was in imminent danger of collapsing without some more serious melting.

All of my photos here, and the LACMA Flickr group here.