ART REVIEW : Reflections on an Italian Gift

Los Angeles may be coming of age as a cultural center but its record on public art is faint-hearted. Our most vivid works in public places are populist in character--the Watts Towers and a number of boffo street murals. (The murals tend to disappear with every shift in the economic wind.)

Efforts on the Establishment side range from the silly (the Triforium) to the embarrassing (the Lipchitz at the Music Center), with a few interesting exceptions such as Robert Graham’s Olympic Gate and his athletic girls in Lawrence Halprin’s indoor garden at the Crocker Center. We lack anything with the landmark size or challenging character of Chicago’s Picasso. Our bland trajectory runs from the merely irritating to the hopelessly harmless.

A sculpture by Arnaldo Pomodoro just installed in the reflecting pool at the Department of Water and Power downtown does nothing to change that. It could at least have had the good grace to be infuriating.

Pomodoro is an experienced and competent abstract sculptor whose work looks a trifle dated. He probably cuts a bigger swath in his native Italy than here although he used to show at the old Felix Landau Gallery and his retrospective visited USC. (It received at least one scathing review.)

The DWP work was presented to the city by the Italian government to commemorate American aid given it by the Marshall Plan after World War II, certainly a nice gesture. The DWP building--as every romantic music lover knows--is one of the most felicitous spots in Los Angeles and looks great from the Music Center plaza lit up at night and reflected in its own vast lagoon-size pools.

It would take a truly huge and ghastly object to muck it up and a truly stubborn one not to be improved by the setting. Pomodoro’s little-bitty six-ton ornament lacks the power or the intent to do any damage and a gunny sack would look good covered in the pond’s rippling reflections.

The work is titled “Colpo d’Ala” (Wing Beat) and was palmed off as representing a stylized bird about to take flight. It is in fact a bronze pyramidal wedge with one flat side mounted in the pond balanced on one corner so it appears to hover above the water as it is about to fall into it. The whole is split up the middle by a huge cracked fissure.

If this lapidary work has any emotional character, it is one of elegant melancholy, like an operatic rumination on the Tragic. In its setting against the L.A. skyline, it could represent one of the nearby corporate towers rent asunder by an apocalyptic earthquake exposing the circuitry of its computerized soul as it crashes to watery extinction.

Not to worry, however. The whole evocation of disaster is shot in such poetic slow motion that any viewer touched by it is unlikely to murmur anything more alarmed than “Que bello. . . .”