‘FIRE BIRD’ SCULPTURE SOARS AT ARTS CENTER

Why would anybody expect a firebird to be anything but young? A firebird, after all, can be identified with a phoenix who finds nothing more rejuvenating than a nice bath in a blazing barbecue. A firebird is a piece of music by Igor Stravinsky that continues to sound fresh assaults on the Philistine ear after decades of performance. And, at the moment, “Fire Bird” is a monumental sculpture by Richard Lippold on the facade of the new Orange County Performing Arts Center.

All the same, the most startling thing about this bird is the youth of its conception. Richard Lippold is 71. He’s been around for decades, mainly making sculpture for public buildings. When his work has been criticized, it has not been for being too radical. If memory serves, his hallmark sculpture for New York’s Lincoln Center was drubbed for being too pretty and decorative.

If one expected to cringe at his work in Costa Mesa, the anticipation was based on a fantasy of some kind of Liberace gold star burst, glittering fussily like a brooch on a matronly bosom.

But behold, Lippold has gone Punk. Well, a little bit. “Fire Bird” is a 60-by-120-by-100-foot high-tech abstraction, swooping toward us out of the Grand Arch of the arts center. It is structured of a metal crisscross grid, divided in four V-shaped “wings” emanating from a roughly pyramidal “beak.” One set of wings angles back and appears at a distance to penetrate the glass facade, completing itself inside the center’s lobby where theatergoers lolling by the intermission bar can contemplate its charms. There are some nice angles inside. Forced perspective on struts makes space move rapidly. Triangular “feathers” look as if they might revolve like weather vanes.

Two things make “Fire Bird” relate to New Wave art and give it an unexpectedly sophisticated aura. Its metallic struts mix chrome, brass, red and an iridescent copper-to-maroon that toys with the energetic bad taste of tacky metal drinking glasses. Its form sits on the exact ambiguity of the border between abstraction and representation. Minimalist formalism flirts with the idea of becoming the symbolic distillation of one of those wonderful toy birds with the flapping wings. The whole conception hits at honed ideas that have been floating around in the ether of the art world for several years. “Fire Bird” gives gentlemanly consideration to far-out ideas about the confrontations between different visual dialects in the same piece.

“Fire Bird” is a very smart piece--particularly considering that it belongs to a genre of art normally quietly scorned in arts inner circles. It is “architectural sculpture,” which is a euphemism for all that hopelessly bad semi-anonymous art that gets plunked down next to buildings.

“Fire Bird” offers a bother or two. It is inside the building’s Grand Arch and looks like it’s about crash into the wall. Never mind--that may be part of the fun. How can a phoenix rejuvenate if it doesn’t go down in flames? Less easily rationalized is the fact that the illusion of the wings passing through glass is not very well realized. They just stop and take up again inside. Never mind; a nit-pick. Doing it right would have been a technical nightmare.

Fussing aside, “Fire Bird” is certainly a superior example of its genre. Its principal qualities are lightness, intelligence and grace. It contributes to the architecture by lightening the massive effect of the facade. It does its architectural duty without overasserting itself or acting wimpy. It’s a very diplomatic sculpture.

To introduce questions of profundity or confrontational originality here would clearly violate the rules of a game that is more like the collaborative ensemble play of the performing arts that the absolutism of radical visual art.

“Fire Bird” plays its part deftly at the arts center. It makes one think of the seamless slickness of an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. It already understands the new game called public art that is seeping into the rest of the art sphere. Public art is code for art that cooperates, adjusts, gets along. We will see more of it.