When in Berlin several years ago, I was making one of my pilgrimages to the stunning Philharmonie concert hall in the Tiergarten area. A youngish orchestral musician sat next to me, and upon learning I was from Santa Barbara, he drifted off into a dreamy-eyed reverie, talking about his love for the antiquities at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA). He said the word twice, as if savoring a memory of an ultra-fine dining experience he hopes to someday replicate: “antiquities.”
Outsiders may know better than we the virtuous population of celebrated antiquities in the Ludington Court entryway gallery of the SBMA, an enlightened space some of us long-timers may take for granted. The story shifts dramatically at present, thanks to the artful deconstructions and imaginative treatments of mid-career L.A. artist Elliott Hundley.
Deep inside the museum, in the Davidson Gallery, we find a sizable survey of Hundley’s art, called Proscenium. Up front by the State Street entrance, though, Hundley, long obsessed with the lessons and characters in Greco-Roman mythology, has directly addressed — and redressed — the very reality of our museum’s existing art and artifacts in Ludington Court, in ways both reverential and post-modernistically mischievous.
