GSA, Artist Hope Talks Will Settle Dispute Over Sculptures’ Removal

A government official, who this week ordered that two nude figures be removed from a new federal building in downtown Los Angeles, will meet with the artist in the hopes of amicably resolving a dispute that has infuriated art aficionados and civil libertarians.

“We would like to meet with the artist, and he is evidently interested in meeting with us,” said Mary Filippini, representative for Edwin Thomas, Western regional administrator of the General Services Administration, which manages federal buildings.

Thomas ordered that the highly stylized nude figures of a woman and a baby be removed from sculptor Tom Otterness’ work shortly after receiving a complaint from Rep. Edward R. Roybal (D-Los Angeles). Roybal, who heads the congressional subcommittee that oversees the GSA, said the sculptures were inappropriate for a federal building that will be named after him when it opens next month.

Henry Welt, an attorney for Otterness, said GSA officials have emphasized that the controversial removal was not a final determination and that they have open minds.

“And that’s our attitude too,” Welt said.

The meeting is expected to take place late next week or the week after, when Otterness returns from opening two exhibitions in Europe. He has yet to comment on the dispute.

Thomas ordered the two figures from Otterness’ “The New World” placed in storage even though the work was strongly defended by Dale Lanzone, director of the GSA’s national arts and historic preservation office. Lanzone had praised the art as symbolic of “all the best things in this country” and found “nothing provocative” in it.

A spokeswoman for GSA National Administrator Richard G. Austin, when asked which official Austin sided with in what appears to be an internal agency disagreement, said Austin “supports the regional administrator.” Austin, a former regional administrator from Chicago, declined to be interviewed.

Until it was announced that the GSA and the sculptor would meet, arts and 1st Amendment experts had anticipated that the dispute might be resolved in court as a test case of the 1990 Visual Artists Rights Act, a complex law designed to protect artists’ works against mutilation or unauthorized alteration. The Los Angeles chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union said it would help Otterness if he chose to sue.

Roybal said he complained to Thomas about the sculpture in part because of a written complaint from U.S. District Judge Dickran Tevrizian, who will have an office in the federal building adjoining the courtyard where the work was installed. Tevrizian called the figure of the baby a “shrine to pedophiles” because its genitals were visible to passersby.

However, the baby would have been bathed in a fountain of mist by the time the building is to open in January.

“The New World” includes a 300-foot-long pergola classical colonnade with classical motifs carried out in a series of friezes high atop columns. Otterness’ work often represents universal systems of birth, life, conflict, resolution, death and rebirth. This particular work portrays a battle of the sexes that results in the birth of a new life, as represented by the baby.