Toyotasaurus, Irving Victims of Censorship?

On one hand, artist Mark Chamberlain laughingly describes it as “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Orange County style. But on the other hand, he somberly sees it it as nothing less than artistic censorship.

Chamberlain, co-organizer of “The Tell,” an art installation cum anti-development protest piece in Laguna Canyon, returned from a short business trip earlier this month to find that a part of “The Tell” had been, well, towed away by the city of Laguna Beach.

“Toyotasaurus Tyrannicus” was the 1977 beige Toyota station wagon that Chamberlain had half-buried in a parking lot next to the 600-foot photomural that is the heart of the project. The car currently is impounded at Larry Hunt Auto Center in Laguna Beach. Worst of all, Chamberlain says, no one can find “Irving,” the manikin that sat at the wheel of the dilapidated automobile.

“This amounts to a form of censorship that I think was unnecessary,” the artist said Monday, claiming that he never was told that Toyotasaurus was in danger of extinction.

Chamberlain said that Laguna Beach City Manager Kenneth C. Frank recently told him that he “didn’t care for” the auto art and that “he would rather it wasn’t there. Frank’s words were, ‘There may be some art merit to ‘The Tell,’ but I’m not so sure about the car.’ But I wasn’t informed it was going to be towed.”

City officials disagree.

“Mark was told in a meeting that the car was going to be removed . . . he may have forgotten,” said Laguna Beach City Councilwoman Martha Collison, a staunch supporter of “The Tell.”

“He was told he had to get it out of there and that if he didn’t the city would have to get it out,” Collison said.

Frank, who said he authorized the towing, also recalls the meeting. “We all agreed that I indicated I would be getting the car out of there,” he said. “The council approved the mural, but they never approved burying a car in the ground as part of the project.”

Chamberlain--who said that the car did look like “a wrecked auto”--acknowledged that he was never given specific permission to bury an automobile in the ground. But, he added, “we were given permission to create the parking lot and (to install) indicators of how people should park. So I did that with subtle references like the Toyotasaurus.

“I mean, that’s the way I think.”

“The Tell” photomural is composed of about 60,000 family snapshots donated by supporters and glued by hundreds of volunteers to a plywood support structure. It stands at a point where the proposed San Joaquin Hills Transportaiton Corridor, a 14-mile tollway linking Newport Beach and San Juan Capistrano, would cross Laguna Canyon Road.

Close by is the site of the proposed Laguna Laurel project, where the Irvine Co. hopes to build more than 3,000 homes, 82 acres of commercial development and a 276-acre private golf course. Currently there are no homes or businesses in the largely pristine area. The Laguna Canyon Conservancy, an activist group working to block such developments, keeps an information booth at “The Tell,” which has served as a rallying point for protests.

“The Tell” is the latest phase of the “Laguna Canyon Project,” an artistic and documentary exploration of the canyon that Chamberlain and co-organizer Jerry Burchfield began in 1980. The main purpose of “The Tell” (an archeological term for a mound of buried artifacts) is “to get people involved in the question” of how to shape Laguna Canyon and, moreover, involved in the “issue of the human relationship to the land,” Chamberlain has said. The mural was begun--and the car was planted--on May 1. The mural still is being worked on and is slated to remain standing at least through mid-November.

“Toyotasaurus Tyrannicus” (which Chamberlain had driven before he buried it) had been posted with a sign explaining its “origins,” Chamberlain said.

“While excavating for ‘The Tell’ parking lot,” the sign read, “the artiological (sic) committee unearthed this Toyotasaurus Tyrannicus, which was in the Polluticus Medicus genus, that proliferated briefly during the late Cenozoic era (which is now), before it devoured its food supply and went into extinction.

“In the bones of this unusual beast,” the sign continued, “was discovered the long-sought-for Irvine Man which, you may recall, the Irvine Co. spent $5 million looking for along the north coast of Laguna Beach.” “The Tell” organizers named this man Irving.

“Irving had nothing from the waist down, his legs had atrophied from misuse or disuse and the tentative coroner’s report indicated he died of terminal congestion,” Chamberlain said.

The artist maintained that the car was a key ingredient of “The Tell” and ties in directly to the mural, part of which depicts a horrendous traffic jam and which, Chamberlain said, speaks of the possible desecration of the local environment. Automobiles are “a major culprit” in the destruction that Chamberlain said would result from development in the area.

“Our whole life style is wedded to the automobile,” he said, “the choice of homes we have, the method of building, the location, the arterial routes we create to get to and from home to job, to recreation, whatever. All (these factors) are predicated on the philosophy that the land is ours to spend, and spend it we will. . . .

“This was the reason for the Toyotasaurus. Everyone had to drive in to ‘The Tell’ and park next to this thing, and the suggestion I had been hoping to make was that they, just by the very method of transportation, were part of the problem.”

Chamberlain said he will probably leave the car to its fate at the impound lot but still wonders about what happened to Irving, “last seen wearing a three-piece brown pinstriped suit” when the car was taken from “The Tell.”

“I’m hoping he found his way to some archeological archives . . . maybe he needs to be lost to history.”