In 1986, Los Angeles's Museum of Contemporary Art opened its doors. Its inaugural show was buttressed by a lavish catalog in which MOCA administrators introduced the new institution to its public. In a keynote essay, Associate Director Sherri Geldin wrote the following:

Since first contemplating the amazing good fortune bestowed upon the Museum of Contemporary Art. . . I have been unable to shake an especially persistent metaphor. It links Arata Isozaki's building in California Plaza to a favorite film star of his, and goes something like this: . . . Isozaki's design embodies the exquisite shape and proportion of a Marilyn Monroe -- classic, voluptuous, and sensuously draped to enhance and tantalize . . . Isozaki fashions a stunning, sometimes elusive creature of the moment . . . whose allure and mystique are . . . certain to long endure.

Since Geldin was then a high-ranking MOCA official, her metaphorization of MOCA as the body of Marilyn Monroe warrants serious consideration. But although she promoted and disseminated the metaphor, Geldin did not engender this iconic sexualization of MOCA, for its source is attributable to MOCA's architect, Arata Isozaki, who, by his own admission, designed the body of Monroe into the museum's contours.

Isozaki's fascination with the movie star goes back to 1962, when he first saw Andy Warhol's Marilyn series of silk screen prints. Shortly thereafter, he had a pattern template made in the shape of Monroe's naked body as it appeared in a 1949 photograph by Tom Kelley showing Monroe naked, arching her back, accentuating the curves of breasts and buttocks. Isozaki's Monroe template picks up and echoes the provocative sinuous curve of the arched back and rounded rump. Over the next two decades, he applied the template to several of his designs, and then, in the early 1980s to a portion of the approach leading down into MOCA and to its entrance hallway. He therefore in-corporated Monroe into the museum's fabric.

In using Monroe's naked body as part of his architectural semiotic, Isozaki conforms to a tradition in architectural history, for the discipline's discourse has repeatedly postulated a relationship between the human body and the architectural monument. Mostly, the body that appears in architectural theory is male and stands for a perfect, abstract, symbolic order as, for example, in the writings of Vitrivius, Alberti, and Leonardo. Like these theorists, Isozaki directly projects a human body onto a building. But the motive force behind his projection is different from theirs, for where they sought to establish an authoritative, divinely grounded foundation for architecture, Isozaki engages in a witty parody, layering over the original classic meaning by replaying it in the form of a 1950s American sex icon. In so doing, he engages in what Craig Owens referred to as postmodernism's "allegorical impulse" -- that is, he causes the viewer to read meaning "otherwise" through a layered process of metaphorical reference. In other words, this "other" reading (made through the body of Monroe) is precisely not the unitary, abstract, rational harmony of a divine (always masculine) order but a distancing from that order, a highlighting of the postmodern architect's separation from the classical wellspring of his discipline.

Isozaki's sexualization of MOCA was by no means an isolated phenomenon, for, from its very inception, the new museum was discussed in sexual terms by the city planners, artists, donors, trustees, property developers, architectural historians, and critics who focused on it. The art community, for example, saw MOCA's birthing initiating a period of fecundity and promise that would contrast markedly with the cultural lack that then characterized Los Angeles. Indeed, MOCA's origin became fraught, linguistically, with the mythos of a major birth event that included a mother, an act of copulation, and even a midwife. Thus Marcia Wiesman, who first proposed the idea of the museum to Mayor Tom Bradley is known to some as "the mother of MOCA." Offering an alternate parentage, Bill Norris, MOCA's founding president, regards MOCA as the "offspring of [his] union" with his then-recent bride, art-advisor Merry, who held Norris to a nuptial promise that art would feature prominently in their marriage. The Los Angeles Times journalist who wrote an article on the proposed museum that drew the attention and subsequent funding deal by the Redevelopment Agency has been referred to as "the midwife of MOCA." Additionally, critics and architectural historians have described MOCA via a constellation of images evocative of female sexuality as, for instance, a "jewel," a "jewelbox," a "treasure," a "gem," "a walled-in . . . garden," and a "temple" -- images which hold erotogenic associations as euphemisms or metaphors for the female sex. Thus, from a variety of vantage points, MOCA became the focus of an erotogenic discourse.

The figuration of MOCA as woman, as object of desire and as erotogenic organ, is connected to its museological function, for museums are predicated on the principle of scopophilia. Places of exhibition(ism), they actively promote voyeurism -- silent looking without touching. Fetishism is an effect of their practice, for objects enshrined in museums are "adored" as signs of the abstraction of a money economy. The choice of Marilyn Monroe as the museum's analog and archetype serves only to entrench these readings, confirming the semiotic contiguity between the desired, untouchable, auratically invested female body and the auratic objects in the museum. The analogy serves to inscribe the museum with libidinal energy.

There is a sense, too, in which museums have traditionally served as spaces for eroticism, for they shelter and preserve images of female nudes, images whose pornographic salaciousness is supposedly sublimated via aestheticization into that which is morally edifying. Two decades of feminist discourse have shifted forever our perception of the genre of the female nude and have, in addition, deconstructed the art historical paradigm that promoted the male as creative genius while positing woman as passive cultural frame, as the inert space that contains genius, or as an object on which to inscribe genius. In spite of these advances, MOCA continues to operate within a traditional masculinist paradigm, for the metaphorization of the building as a woman's body that serves as context and frame for art is merely a variant on this tradition. MOCA's only deviance from the paradigm is in the form of its expression -- its embodiment in a building rather than on a canvas. The paradigm's fundamental structuring ideology remains unchanged. Indeed, with MOCA the paradigm is monumentalized, transubstantiated from canvas to architecture, transposed from the confines of a gallery space onto the topography of the urban.

By metaphorizing MOCA as Marilyn Monroe, Isozaki added to an already desire-filled discourse constructed by the different social groups who labored to bring MOCA to birth. At the same time, he perpetuated the sexist discourse of the male-dominant architectural profession. The metaphor is indeed redolent with meaning, for it highlights how deeply implicated our language and institutions are in structures of sexism.

Jo-Anne Berelowitz

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