A Public Outcry : ‘Moon Dial’ Puts Beverly Hills Art Critics in Orbit

“Moon Dial” is the kind of sculpture that brings out the social set.

“That monstrosity is absolutely disgusting!” Lee Minnelli, widow of film director Vincente Minnelli, declaimed in an interview. She lives in Beverly Hills, a few blocks from the park where “Moon Dial” sits. “You call that art? It looks like the bulb in my toilet tank!”

“Moon Dial” inspires poetry.

The City Fathers

Should be more cautious

And avoid such art

That makes one nauseous

The verse, by Alfred J. Hyman, appeared in the letters column of the weekly Beverly Hills Courier and ended with the line, “This monstrosity has got to go!”

And “Moon Dial” is the kind of art that brings a community together.

“I don’t even know how they get my number, but perfect strangers are calling me, writing to me, saying they want to help out,” said Betty Aidman, a choreographer who lives a block from it. “We’re going to go to City Council meetings. We’ll write letters. We’ll make phone calls. We’ll get petitions. We’ll all pool together and do whatever it takes. This thing is going to come down!”

The thing, the monstrosity, the sculpture that nauseates was fabricated from rusty ocean buoys, windowpanes and other junk-yard gleanings by George Herms, a Southern California artist whose work has been shown at museums around the country.

It was happily borrowed by the Beverly Hills Fine Art Committee, a group of art patrons who believe their community has been woefully behind the times when it comes to civic art.

It has been roundly denounced by people who believe it is an offense to their cultural sensibilities and have vowed to banish it from a park that’s pratically in their back yards.

Now it is being, if not exactly abandoned, then viewed askance by a city government anxious for compromise and edging toward the hecklers.

The Fine Art Committee was formed in 1982, its volunteer members appointed by the city. Their job was to enforce an ordinance requiring developers of commercial buildings to spend part of their budgets on artworks accessible to the public. Everything went smoothly until the committee embraced a suggestion by its chairwoman, Joan Quinn, after she visited an arts center in upstate New York called Storm King.

“I drove up to Storm King a few years ago with David Hockney to see their wonderful sculpture garden,” said the flamboyant Quinn, who has streaks of purple in her black and silver hair. Storm King exhibits works on loan from artists. This gives it a continually renewed sculpture garden at low cost.

“I thought,” Quinn said, “why can’t we do that in Beverly Hills?”

The art committee liked the idea. So did the City Council, which approved the project in May, 1987. The committee invited prominent Southern California sculptors to lend works for 18 to 36 months for Beverly Gardens Park, a narrow stretch of greenery that runs along the north side of Santa Monica Boulevard for almost the entire length of the city.

“Billboard,” a creation made of brightly colored anodized aluminum strips by Jay Willis, and “Jatay,” a sedate metal and rock structure by Woods Davy, strutted their hour with little public comment.

George Herms, a 53-year-old West Los Angeles artist known for his work in assemblage, came next. The materials of Herms’s art have included old Coke machines, bed springs and mannequin parts. Times art critic William Wilson once described them as “a swap-meet array of wonderful old junk.”

Herms’s works have been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and two pieces just went on display at the James Corcoran Gallery in Santa Monica, part of an exhibit called “Lost and Found in California: Four Decades of Assemblage Art.”

At a January meeting with the Beverly Hills committee, Herms offered to loan the city a new sculpture he would create specifically for a spot in the park near Palm Drive. He showed a model and drawings of his proposed work and Polaroids of the materials he would use, including old buoys from a marine supply yard in Wilmington. The sculpture, he explained, would evoke the image of a machine, now weathered and rusted, that had perhaps been used by an ancient civilization to track the moon through the heavens.

The yes vote was unanimous. Herms helped pour the concrete bases and install his creation in April. The outcry soon followed.

“I pass that corner almost every day,” said Aidman. “I thought they were redoing the street or removing some rusty pipe. Then my husband rode past it on his bicycle and saw that it was set in concrete. We were horrified.”

Michael Cart, director of the Beverly Hills Library and the liaison between the art committee and City Council, took the calls. “People reacted to it very viscerally,” he said. “Some of them were greatly mollified when they found out it was not permanent and that the city didn’t spend money to buy it.” The only costs to the city, he said, are for maintainence and insurance.

Many callers were not satisfied.

“Nobody asked us if we wanted that thing,” Aidman said. “The park is an absolutely lovely place. Then suddenly there are five rusty balls sitting out there. Who is that committee to determine what we have to look at?”

The committee is seven unpaid art-lovers, each chosen by a member of the City Council. Two, Quinn and Arnold Ashkenazy, have well-known personal collections. Quinn is on the California Arts Council and chairs its Art in Public Places Committee.

“We were appointed by the City Council because they trusted our experience and our taste,” said Ashkenazy, who with his brother Severyn operates several hotels including L’Ermitage, Le Mondrian and Le Bel Age. Some of their art collection, worth an estimated $14 million, is displayed in the hotels.

“If everyone would have had a vote on what art should be displayed, we would have no El Greco paintings, for example,” he said. “They would have been burned long ago.”

Another member of the committee goes so far as to welcome the controversy. “I think this is the best thing that has ever happened to this city,” said Ellen Byrens, who teaches adult education classes in Beverly Hills and travels widely with her husband to view art. “Finally, people here are at least talking about art. This is a cultural wasteland. All you can do in Beverly Hills is shop and get your hair done. There is not a major museum. There is not a concert hall. It’s a disgrace.”

Committee member Janet Salter, whose husband, Maxwell, was elected to the City Council after her appointment, has misgivings about “Moon Dial.” Although she admits Herms showed them photos of the materials before they approved the work, she says the finished sculpture surprised her.

“I wasn’t quite aware of the extent of the rust ,” she said. “Personally, it’s not my favorite work of art in the world.” In the future she would like to see the completed work before voting.

Other officials are looking to the future also, in a way that has some people nervous.

The City Council withstood the first wave of criticism, but those cards and letters kept coming. And the city blinked. On June 7 Mayor Robert Tanenbaum appointed two council members to meet with the artist to see if a compromise could be reached and to formulate guidelines for the future. Allan Alexander, one of those council members, believes the answer to the “Moon Dial” problem is to move it to a less visible spot. “It should be somewhere more compatible,” he said. “Somewhere not quite as public.”

(Caltrans estimates that 35,000 vehicles a day pass the location. Some fans of “Moon Dial” think it would be better loved if the public could give it more than a passing glance.)

Herms fiercely opposes his work’s being moved. “It was created specifically for that very spot,” he said. “That location is part of the artwork.” He also says he will fight against its being dismantled earlier than the 18 to 36 months in his agreement with the committee. “That would be quitting. What’s the point of working for 30 years to develop your skills and reputation if you’re not willing to stand behind them?”

Part of the mayor’s directive on formulating guidelines has some members of the committee worried. “I would suggest the committee have more precise guidelines to eliminate the more controversial pieces of art,” Alexander said. “What they choose should reflect the attitudes of our constituency.”

This hint of taste regulation worries Quinn. Like almost everyone involved, she believes the city erred by not having public forums to discuss modern art and involve a wider segment of the community. But she resists the notion that the community should be able to turn down a work the committee believes is valid.

“You have to remember that these major artists are loaning us their work,” Quinn said. “If we change the game in midstream, would it discourage these artists from becoming part of this program? What would they think of Beverly Hills?”

Aidman counters that “Moon Dial” has made Beverly Hills a laughingstock. She says that she and her supporters will settle for no compromise that does not call for the sculpture’s prompt banishment from Santa Monica and Palm.

“I did not force this sculpture on anyone,” Herms said a few days ago, paternally watching over his sculpture as a group of yarmulke-clad children played around it. “I was invited here.”

He is clearly hurt by all the angry criticism of a sculpture he believes expresses the themes most dear to him. “A basic tenet of my work is that everything we make is eventually reclaimed by nature,” he said. “All material things decay. The only thing that lasts forever is the creative spirit.”

Herms sometimes sits by the statue and answers questions posed by passers-by, but he doesn’t always get philosophical. “People want to know when I’m going to paint the buoys, get rid of the rust,” he said, his smile returning. “I just tell them I love these colors.”