ART / CATHY CURTIS : Anaheim Experiments With User-Friendly Work on Public Site

Last month, the Anaheim City Council agreed to put a canoe in a parking garage, install public seating that looks like nails and an anvil, provide permanent space for a clock balanced on a giant upright hammer, and allow the public to see what traffic engineers really do all day.

We’ll have to wait until next spring and fall to see how the first phase of the Koll Anaheim Center public art project will shape up along West Harbor Place (between Clementine Street and Anaheim Boulevard). But the artists’ plans for this $200-million retail and business development seem unusually thoughtful, cohesive and user-friendly.

The $300,000 art project, under the jurisdiction of the Anaheim Redevelopment Agency, represents a combination of private and public funding, and the involvement of advisory committee members representing city, corporate and neighborhood interests. The three artists--selected by a three-person jury of art professionals and conscientiously steeped in local history and lore--are Daniel Martinez and Noboho Nagasawa of Los Angeles, and Buster Simpson of Seattle. Simpson in particular has extensive experience in the migrane-inducing business of making viable art that is intended for the broadest possible audience.

These days, of course, public art is no longer a matter of putting up a statue of a famous person in the local park--or even plopping a modernist squiggle or cube in front of a building. Public art has come to be a much more ingenious and subversive thing, tailored to a specific site with its own history and its own diverse community struggling with the problems of urban life in the very late 20th Century.

Anaheim has plenty of history to draw on, beginning with the Indians who settled the area about 20,000 years ago and continuing with waves of immigrants from Mexico, Poland and Germany. The vineyards that attracted German workers in the mid-19th Century gave way (after a mysterious blight) to the Valencia orange orchards. Today, the city’s fame rests primarily on a single powerful corporate entity (Disneyland) and two massive structures catering to leisure and business pursuits (the stadium and the convention center).

The artists have dealt in an upbeat way with some non-controversial aspects of this history, which could be construed as taking the easy way out. It is tempting to speculate about how public art might constructively come to terms with historical embarrassments, such as the domination of the Ku Klux Klan in Anaheim city politics during the mid-1920s. Still, considering the Anaheim Redevelopment Agency’s need for broad consensus--and the overwhelmingly commercial profile of Koll Anaheim Center--humor and gentle metaphor was probably the only viable way to go. There is still ample room for other kinds of historically minded public art in succeeding phases of this and other Anaheim redevelopment projects.

In any case, the artists were not bound to make pieces that dwell on specific moments of the past. The “tool” imagery reiterated in the works sited at the corner of Clementine Street and Harbor Place, for example, serves most clearly as a generalized--and rather surprisingly old-fashioned--celebration of Anaheim’s industrious citizenry.

Martinez’s 25-foot-tall “Hammer Clock” will join a sculpture by Simpson in the shape of a grinding wheel and various kinds of seating devised by Nagasawa: “anvil” and “nailhead” seats, and a grouping of facsimile orange crates decorated with silk-screened photographs of old labels. (The description of a San Francisco journalist who visited Anaheim in 1858 and found the city echoing with “the sound of busy labor . . . the noise of the ax, the hammer and the anvil . . . “ will be sandblasted into the pavement.)

The golly-gee whimsy of these objects is somewhat off-putting. On one level, they sound like little more than “conversation pieces,” a timeworn gambit of insecure homeowners anxious to offer their equally insecure guests something to talk about. The built-in assumption here is that, because the clock and the seats depart so playfully from conventional models, they will give passersby a chuckle to share among themselves.

And yet the overwhelming goal of the art component of the project is to attract a diverse mix of pedestrians to the area, slow them down, involve them with one another, put them in a positive frame of mind and bring them back to the area again. In that sense, this corner may prove to be extremely successful. Only time will tell.

The other art components of the street include various types of street furniture and accessories (planters inspired by Mission Indian baskets, a fountain in the shape of a spiral, benches with supports in the shape of the letter A for Anaheim) as well as purely visual material with a historical twist (an early city plotting map sandblasted in the sidewalk along Anaheim Boulevard).

One of the more distinctive nods to history is Nagasawa’s “Sinking Canoe,” which will be “parked” in one of the stalls in the parking garage. The piece is a reminder of Anaheim’s earliest means of transportation along the Santa Ana River. (The Atilililipish --the Spanish called them Gabrielinos--were one of several tribes that pioneered the construction of wood-planked canoes in North America.)

At the same time, of course, the canoe is meant to be an oasis of surprise and delight in the midst of a purely utilitarian building--another “conversation piece,” but one that wanders off into a realm of poetic fancy. It isn’t clear why the boat is sinking into the garage floor (is there an ecological meaning here? a reference to the sorry history of American Indians?), but the quiet mystery of the piece has a strong appeal.

Marc Pally, the project art consultant, remarked recently that the city’s risk management people initially had several concerns about the canoe. Would people toss litter in it? Would street people sleep in it? Would it be a treacherous obstacle in the dark? So Nagasawa went back to the drawing board.

She added a group of parallel steel rods running crosswise across the boat to discourage loitering--which seems to do the design no harm. And a new lighting system adds another visual dimension to the simple but fanciful piece. Images derived from patterns on Gabrielino artifacts will be cut into steel plates on the bottom of the canoe. Lights under the boat will beam these patterns on the garage ceiling, as if they were reflected on a body of water.

Martinez’s “Water Wall”--a back-lighted sign board and text washed by a sheet of falling water--also sounds promising, but the details of the imagery and text remain to be determined. At this point in the project, his “Video Houses” seem likely to emerge as the most freewheeling and imaginative idea in the project’s first phase.

The “Video Houses” are four stanchions--positioned at four corners in the site--that will each hold double video monitors. One monitor will show the traffic situation at a major intersection in the city (whatever the traffic controllers are watching on their screens at that moment) while the other monitor will broadcast the computerized traffic analyses that the controllers use in their work.

People do tend to be utterly fascinated by video, no matter what imagery flashes over them, and, of course, traffic problems have become a major environmental plague. But the primary attraction of these pieces is that the public gets to look over the shoulders (so to speak) of the city’s traffic department.

Few among us would bother to hang out at any of these intersections simply to watch the cars go by (how boring can you get?). But once we know this is official information, being studied and controlled by “experts” paid with our tax dollars, it assumes a new relevance. And of course, the piece also brings the concept of “work” into our era of white-collar drones who pass their days scrutinizing data on a computer screens.

This is the sort of hip and savvy idea that manages to be broadly accessible, pleasing to the powers that be (“how nice that they’re interested in the work we do”) and yet also suspicious of easy answers and meaningless pats on the back. How viewers interpret their glimpses of the city’s mysterious workings is completely up to them--an act as personal as casting a vote.