Ambitious Laguna Canyon Road Art Project Faces a Big Detour

Last December, Jerry Burchfield and Mark Chamberlain made a “garbological study” of Laguna Canyon Road, collecting trash along its winding, eight-mile length and then photographing their finds.

Earlier, in September of 1983, they had “painted the canyon,” traveling the road on a flatbed truck with a police escort and 64 volunteers with a camera and colored lights to illuminate the passing scenery. Stopping every 45 seconds, they took a series of photographs from which they created a single, scroll-like picture of cows, trees and roadside brush that is 516 feet long.

Now the two Laguna Beach artists have a new project, a $200,000 “muralscape” that would be eight feet high and 300 feet long, consisting of huge photographs of the canyon to be placed along both sides of the road.

This “corridor” of photographs, planned for the summer of 1989 to coincide with Orange County’s centennial celebration, would be the largest photographic mural ever made and the most complex piece in their 10-year work, “The Laguna Canyon Project--The Continuous Project.”

By offering an image of the rustic canyon to people driving through it, the murals would “jog the mind,” Burchfield says, forcing travelers to consider “a surrogate landscape, a surrogate reality.”

Reality Intrudes

But this week, another reality intruded on the project.

On Sunday night, within sight of the proposed muralscape, three people were killed and a fourth was critically injured when a speeding car swerved into oncoming traffic north of El Toro Road. It was the latest in a string of accidents along Laguna Canyon Road, where more than 30 people have been killed in 10 years.

And on Tuesday, the Laguna Beach City Council refused to approve the project, calling the location unsafe and suggesting it should be moved--perhaps to a former city parking lot near the road, in an area called Sycamore Hills.

If the murals are to be built at all, they should be placed “a ways off the road,” Mayor Neil J. Fitzpatrick said after the meeting. His concern is that it could distract drivers. “I don’t want them studying it as they go by,” he said. “But if you know it’s (in a side area), it would be no worse than having a drinking fountain over there.”

But Burchfield and Chamberlain have planned a project with considerably more presence than a drinking fountain.

‘Interesting Comment’

“If we wind up being shunted off the road into a nonexistence space . . . a cul de sac where the only visitors will be coyotes and people with shotguns, we’ve lost,” Burchfield said. “But that will make an interesting comment about the state of art in Laguna Beach.”

Leah Vasquez, chairwoman of the city Art Commission, agrees. She calls the council’s action “capricious.”

“Someone sees a great piece of sculpture and crashes?” Vasquez said. “But what about a girl in a miniskirt? . . . What about the driver’s responsibility?”

For now, the artists say they will try to meet the city’s demands.

And city approval is just the first step in a two-year process. Over that time, they also must secure approval from the Orange County Centennial Commission, the California Department of Transportation and possibly also the major private landowner along the road, the Irvine Co.

The Worst Part

Because of the bureaucracy their art entails, Burchfield and Chamberlain sometimes compare themselves to Christo, the artist who draped Marin County with yards of nylon to create the “Running Fence.” But unlike Christo, who secured landowners’ permission and government approvals for his work, they don’t consider the laborious permit process part of their art. “For us, the consenting process is the worst part of it,” Chamberlain growled.

Burchfield, 39, and Chamberlain, 45, are serious about their art. Both are part-time photography lecturers at local colleges. They are also partners in BC Space Gallery and Photographic Art Service, a small gallery and printing shop in downtown Laguna.

Laguna Canyon Road and their photographic study of it have consumed their lives for the last 7 1/2 years.

They admit that they are in love with all eight miles of its asphalt roadbed, from the San Diego Freeway to the sea.

Chamberlain speaks of feeling a “subtle form of communion” with the road. Burchfield agrees and quotes a former Laguna Beach mayor who compared driving the road to having a cocktail after work: “It was this soothing, tranquilizing experience.”

In their effort to photograph the road and document its changes, Burchfield and Chamberlain say they hope to tell “something about our past, present and future, from its journey from the freeway to downtown Laguna to the sea.”

Begun in April, 1980, the Laguna Canyon Project has been through seven phases so far. The artists have photographed both sides of the road during the day and at night. They have created a work called “The Middle of the Road,” in which they photographed the pavement and yellow median strip every quarter of a mile.

There was also the “garbology” study in which they took trash from the road and photographed the objects in their studio to produce an abstraction covered with splotches of red, white and blue.

Over the years, art critics and museums have taken notice of the project. Prints from the different phases are in collections at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, the Newport-Harbor Art Museum and the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies.

‘Phase VIII’

The muralscape, said to be the most ambitious project in the series, was planned as “Phase VIII,” one of the last pieces in a project to be finished by 1990. In addition to displaying huge photographs of the canyon, the two murals are to function as “historical documents.” Inset in the landscapes will be smaller photographs that show the history of Orange County, Chamberlain and Burchfield said.

For all the concern about the proper site for the murals, both artists say they were well aware of the dangers of the road. During a nighttime shooting session in 1980, they came upon a traffic accident in which two people were injured.

“We heard the crash. . . . The car was well off the road, flipped over to one side in a totally unlit area,” Burchfield said. “We found the people and hailed traffic to call police.”

So when they planned their murals, Burchfield and Chamberlain said, they thought they had found a safe spot, a straight section of the road where their exhibit would be visible from some distance away.

Now they will try to accommodate the city, they said, because other permits may hinge on Laguna Beach’s approval. But if their project gets pushed too far away from the road, they may not want to build the murals at all, Burchfield said. The point is to create public art, he said, not something hidden away.

“We hope this would be a public thing, to raise some of the public consciousness,” Burchfield said. If the only site they’re allowed is back in a canyon somewhere, “maybe not doing the project in itself will become an interesting statement.”