VISUAL ARTS / Leah Ollman : Annual Carlsbad Exhibition : The Successes and Failures of Public Art

“In a contest of entertainment between art and baseball, art will always lose,” artist Mary Miss wrote, surprising not even the most loyal of art fans. Miss’ concern was not for popularity contests, but for the troubled stature of public art. If baseball is America’s favorite pastime, public-art bashing comes in a close second.

More attuned to the passive absorption of electronic spectacles than to the often pensive and quietly visceral experience of art, the public deserves some of the blame for this nasty state of affairs. But what about the makers of art for public spaces? Shouldn’t they also bear the burden of this seeming incompatibility?

Most of the 11 San Diego and Los Angeles artists invited to participate in Carlsbad’s second annual Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition must assume a share of this responsibility, along with the show’s organizers, art consultant Annette Ridenour and marketing communications writer Terri Rodgers.

The 18 works selected spare the community the titular threat of “permanent public art” (they remain on view only through Jan. 5), but the nature of their display could not be more public, and the failures and successes of the show mirror those of public art in general.

“Public art needs more function or integration to maintain a truly public place for itself,” Miss explained, basing her assessment on nearly 20 years of experience creating work for public spaces.

Without function--psychological, spiritual and social functions as well as the purely practical--or integration with its physical and social setting, public art is mere costume jewelry, desperate decoration, a superficial salve for all of its site’s social and aesthetic wants.

Without function or integration, public art is little more than “plop art,” inserted thoughtlessly into an alien and unforgiving environment. Too many of the works in the Carlsbad show fall gracelessly into this category. Guy Dill’s black steel “Espejos Abstractos” sits on the edge of the lawn in front of Carlsbad’s City Hall, a puny dab of design dwarfed by the surrounding urban sprawl and the rush of cars speeding past it.

Betty Gold’s three geometric constructions stand equally abandoned to their unsympathetic sites, a strip of grass between the Carlsbad library and the adjacent busy avenue, and a nearly inaccessible plot of lawn outside the library entrance. All three suggest the rhythms of the human body through the angles of their planar surfaces, but, isolated from their source, they stand stifled and mute.

This problem was exaggerated to an even more unfortunate extreme in the Stagecoach Park placement of Donna Salem’s three playful figurative sculptures.

Each embodies a state of spirited exasperation, and their physical humor as well as their jungle-gym-like construction beg for proximity to the park’s play equipment. Instead, they are allowed to provide only a distant echo of the fun from their gratuitous, unused patch of landscaping beside the parking lot.

Several other works in the show suffer the same misfortune, but most would not look appropriate in any of the three appointed sites of the exhibition (Holiday Park is the third), because they were conceived in and for an aesthetic vacuum rather than for a living, changing, populated environment.

Only a few artists in the show chose to integrate their work with its site. Their results prove endlessly more stimulating, for, having engaged the physical and social characteristics of their surroundings, they engage their audience as well.

Tom Frankovich’s “Ghost Cowboys of Stagecoach Park” addresses the history of its site, a former station on the stage run between San Diego and Los Angeles. Adobe ruins of the station still stand in the park, enshrined within a bulky, protective cage. Frankovich’s single, silhouetted figure of a man sits on a crate just beyond the edge of the park, in the untended brush beneath a eucalyptus tree. The shadow of a former presence, he faces the ruins, as if ruminating on, and encouraging current users of the park to consider, the distance between the area’s past and present functions.

In “Public Trust,” located outside the library and City Hall complex, Mario Lara also stimulates questions about the nature of a particular place and the social functions it performs. Lara invites physical as well as intellectual participation in his work, a building facade made of wood and corrugated fiberglass, by running a red painted walkway directly through it. He subverts the comforting familiarity of the generic house form by framing its door and window with bands of diagonal yellow and black hazard stripes, and painting flames issuing from each of the openings.

By labeling the hazardous entry with the words “Public Trust,” Lara suggests that this arena is not the cozy, reassuring place it pretends to be, but a realm rife with tension, controversy and danger. The public institutions next to this installation house officials entrusted by the public to uphold the best interests of the community. In his usual concise, graphically bold style, Lara alerts us to the dangers inherent in handing over responsibility for our safety and welfare to the care of others.

Ellen Phillips’ “24 Palms” actively engages the natural resources of its site in Holiday Park. Phillips let the lawn next to a row of palm trees grow out to long, grassy tufts, then sculpted it in the shape of the trees’ shadows at a particular hour of the day. While the alteration of the usual appearance of the site is subtle, and may look arbitrary at first, the artist’s intent gradually emerges, giving the park-goer a rich experience of discovery within a familiar landscape.

Temporary public-art projects, like the Carlsbad show, “allow the investigation and development of a vocabulary--a chance to see what actually works for a site, a community, or a viewer,” Miss continued. They offer a testing ground for various modes of expression, while ultimately asserting that sensitivity to a work’s site and its audience is the only viable approach for truly public art.