Putting finishing touches on LACMA's addition

"I love it that the first visitor was the fire marshal," Govan said. "It was like some kind of apparition."

So was LACMA. On Wednesday, just a day before its unveiling for media from around the world, the museum's revamped campus was still a work in progress. Buzzing around its centerpiece, the $56-million Renzo Piano-designed, travertine-covered Broad Contemporary Art Museum, an army of workers fine-tuned metalwork from cherry pickers, dealt with a forest of two-story palms and worked all night on an elevator shaft that frames a Barbara Kruger mural with haunted eyes and a George Orwell warning from "1984": "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face forever."

In this maelstrom, the Jeff Koons sculpture "New Hoover Deluxe shampoo polishers" -- aesthetically anointed cleaning equipment lined up on a blanket on a gallery floor -- was easy to confuse with one of the piles belonging to the construction crew.

Jasper Johns' iconic 1967 painting of an American flag was accompanied by a dissonant anthem that could have inspired John Cage. Drills whined, hammers pounded and loud unidentified booms resonated as workers consummated the myriad details that will culminate in the "Birth of BCAM," which opens to the public Feb. 16.

"It's exciting," said Lynn Zelevansky, contemporary art curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

"A little too exciting?" Govan asked.

Apparently not. The night before, "with great trepidation," Govan said, he and his staff had asked installers who had hung and labeled works by Warhol and John Baldessari to switch the paintings to opposite ends of the vast third-floor gallery.

Now, Warhol's sexually charged, gunslinging Elvis ambushes viewers at close range, leaning against a wall to the right as they walk in, instead of far across the gallery, where a Baldessari now proclaims: "Everything is purged from this painting but art, no ideas have entered this work."

Out on the plaza, the 46 1/2 -foot-long "Firetruck" rested on its big rubber tires, while its sculptor meditated on the uses of his art.