SOUND SCULPTURE’S GOOD VIBRATIONS

A looming, 17-foot sound sculpture, looking something like a sleek, space-age jungle gym and echoing the whoosh of the wind, is now keeping company with the more austere statues of war heroes in Pershing Square. But hearing the sculpture’s designer, Robert Wilhite, tell the story, it’s a minor miracle that the piece is standing there.

Wilhite’s biggest problem wasn’t the sheer mass of it. Or having the thick steel cut in a six-foot-tall cone shape at its top. Or having enough money to erect the thing in the first place.

His biggest obstacle was that he was flat on his back in a hospital bed.

“I had two surgeries and almost bled to death while the piece was being installed,” said Wilhite, 39. He suffered from an ulcer for six months, spent the better part of three months in a hospital and left the institution three weeks ago.

Wilhite’s “Gyro/Cone” is a steel-and-aluminum, electrically driven gyroscope that sits on a red steel cone and is propped up by three spindly steel poles. It stands--through February--at the corner of Fifth and Olive streets. (It was built in conjunction with New Music America last November.) The gyroscope vibrates while spinning, sending impulses to the cone, which acts as a megaphone to amplify those vibrations.

“Once I had the idea for the piece, I talked to Gary Knowlton, a tool and die maker in La Canada, and he and Joseph Hammer (Wilhite’s assistant) orchestrated the whole thing and installed it,” Wilhite said recently in the south Hancock Park duplex he shares with his wife, writer Denise Domergue, and 9-month-old son Axel. “I knew the piece so well that I could give instructions to him (Knowlton) on the phone.”

Wilhite, tall and thin with short black hair and blue eyes, was born in Santa Ana and attended UC Irvine on an athletic scholarship. As a student, his interests were divided between diving and art. After stints as a diver with a traveling water circus, a year of graduate school (also at UC Irvine) and working in a gallery in New York, he settled in Los Angeles in the mid ‘70s. He then made his foray into sound sculpture, which has run a gamut from a triangular gong to a wood cube equipped with a player-piano suction pump and bagpipe reeds.

“I played the guitar when I was younger and I liked that, but I was more interested in manipulating sounds,” Wilhite said. “I never really liked playing other people’s songs and I wasn’t that good at it. It seemed to me that a musician’s approach was who was the fastest gun--whether you can play all the licks. Their emphasis is on playing a set of music as well as possible. I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in the sound that objects make.

“I want to present objects to people that they haven’t seen before, have them be drawn to them and have them ask, ‘What’s this?’ Then they can make their own decision. If you take a non-traditional instrument like a cube, and it makes a sound, that’s the sound that it makes so you don’t question that. But if you took a guitar or violin and retuned it so that it was totally out of key, people would say, ‘Well, that doesn’t sound right.’ ”

Wilhite is also known for making light, flat, finely crafted furniture, reminiscent of the style of Viennese architect R. M. Schindler.

“You’ve got to leave yourself open enough so that you stay interested and not get backed into making the same thing over and over again,” Wilhite said of his flexibility. “That’s how I feel about the sculpture downtown. It’s the first sculpture I made that is out of metal, that’s outdoors. I want it to be something that people like,” something that has “a nice kind of cheerful, ‘up’ feeling to it.

“I want it to work not only as a piece of sculpture but also as something that makes a sound. Primarily, I consider myself a sculptor. I want this to be a strong sculpture that works whether a person hears it or not.

“I’ve always loved gyroscopes,” he continued. “And cones have been a recurring shape in my work. I wanted it (the sculpture) to be a color that jumped out. I didn’t really care what the sound sounded like, as long as it wasn’t offensive. It has the flavor of a gazebo, a little bit sci-fi, a little bit the feeling of a rocket ship. You really want to climb up and mess around with the gyroscope.”