Panel Does a Double Take, Decides Kruger Work Is Art : Ruling: Building and Safety Commission reverses itself, unanimously declares mural is not a sign.

The Los Angeles Building and Safety Commission on Tuesday reversed an earlier decision and voted unanimously to declare a huge proposed mural by New York artist Barbara Kruger to be a work of art and not a sign.

The vote, which reversed a ruling a month ago by the same five-member panel, apparently permits the Museum of Contemporary Art to hire painters to install the Kruger mural on a 29-by-218-foot outside wall of the Temporary Contemporary museum in Little Tokyo.

“Do what you want,” museum officials were told by Tim Taylor, a top city department permit official, after Tuesday’s vote. “Get the paint brushes out.” The museum said the work might be installed within two months.

The tone of the encounter between Taylor and MOCA officials after the hearing was jovial, but the commission vote came after City Councilman Joel Wachs urged the board not to let the city government Los Angeles involve itself in controling the content of artworks.

Wachs’ plea came after commissioner Benito A. Sinclair bluntly told museum officials that they would have to provide proof that the Kruger work could be considered as art in order to avoid jurisdiction of a city sign ordinance that would have drastically reduced the size of the mural and altered its contents.

The mural is to be a red, white and blue work in a layout suggesting the American flag. In one corner, wording will identify the Temporary Contemporary. The area of the flag traditionally occupied by red and white stripes will be taken up by a series of nine politically provocative questions.

Wachs asserted that the building and safety commission could cause Los Angeles to enter the ranks of communities that have slapped controls on the content of artworks. Wachs specifically likened a decision to declare the proposed Kruger mural as a sign to the prosecution of a Cincinnati museum on obscenity charges over a show of work of the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

Wachs also urged the commission to take the action he advocated to avoid providing Congress, which may continue or expand content-controls on work funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional local precedents to justify legal regulation of what an artwork may say.

“I think it’s an extremely important issue for the city,” said Wachs, who has been an activist on the City Council in favor of ordinances to try to control the proliferation of advertising signs in Los Angeles. “No council member ever considered the work of artists like Barbara Kruger. We wrote a (sign-control) law that never contemplated this issue. It would be ironic if a law drafted to enhance the city was the reason for denying contemporary art of greatness.”

In its 4-0 vote Tuesday, the commission reversed its own April 3 decision in which it upheld a finding by the Department of Building and Safety that the Kruger mural should be treated as a sign and thus subject to an ordinance that limits the total space in a sign that can be taken up by its written message to 3% of the sign’s total area. The massive Kruger work, with letters six feet tall, would be almost entirely devoted to its text message--in keeping with an artistic style with which Kruger has been prominently identified.

The mural proposal, which was approved last December by the city Cultural Affairs Commission, had roused controversy in Little Tokyo last year after residents and businessmen objected to a plan to include the wording of the Pledge of Allegiance. After a series of meetings in the community, Kruger agreed to delete the pledge wording, which opponents said would be an bitter reminder of the forced incarceration of Japanese-Americans in internment camps during World War II.