COMMENTARY : Path of Disillusionment Leads to Roybal Site

Since August we have been watching the people of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union topple sculptures erected by government officials and bureaucrats as powerful symbols of state authority.

By stunning contrast, last week in Los Angeles we witnessed American government officials and bureaucrats topple a sculpture erected by the people as a powerful symbol of liberty and triumph over tyranny.

Forgive me for being dense, but isn’t something a bit out of whack here? Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around? Isn’t the United States supposed to be guardian of free speech and celebrant of liberty?

Apparently not, if the fate of Tom Otterness’ sculpture, “The New World,” is any guide. Last Tuesday, within hours of a complaint lodged by Rep. Edward R. Roybal, the federal General Services Administration removed portions of a sculptural ensemble designed for the plaza of its new, nearly completed building at the corner of Temple and Alameda streets.

Roybal, a 75-year-old Los Angeles Democrat, didn’t like portions of the sculpture, which has been in the process of creation and fabrication for about three years. So, down they came.

Let me quote the eloquent words of Rep. Les AuCoin (D-Ore.), who spoke at a public forum on censorship issues coincidentally held the very night of the day the story of the Otterness sculpture’s dismemberment appeared in the press: “Who in the hell elected Ed Roybal our Minister of Culture?”

Under cover of darkness, GSA workers removed one bronze-relief plaque and a free-standing bronze sculpture from the ensemble, which is dominated by a 300-foot-long frieze atop a graceful, semi-circular pergola. The frieze remains in place; without its two climactic elements, however, it no longer makes sense. Looking at the sculpture is now like watching a movie with no last reel.

Two interesting bits of information about Rep. Roybal’s relationship to the episode are worth noting straightaway. One is that the new federal building will carry the congressman’s name when it opens next month, thus giving his intrusive action an arrogantly proprietary air--as if it’s “his” building, so he can do as he pleases.

The other is that Roybal happens to chair a House subcommittee that oversees the GSA and its hefty budget, which may explain why the bureaucrats snapped to attention when Roybal barked his command.

One other bit of information should also be declared up front: I happen to have served on the panel of professional peers who selected Tom Otterness for this federal commission, and who later reviewed and supported the New Yorker’s proposal. Obviously, I think he’s a good artist; I also think “The New World” is an unusually resonant work of public art.

I might also say that I am not the least surprised at the events of last week. My work on the GSA public art panel was one of the unhappiest experiences of my professional life. Midway through the extended process, I vowed never again to accept an invitation to advise the GSA’s public art program. Their process is simply a sham.

And in public art, process means a lot. One element fundamental to making a work of art “public” is the deliberative process through which decisions regarding the commission are made. The client for any federal building includes “the people,” and those outside professional peers brought in to advise the agency on its art program are both responsible to--and representatives of--that diverse public.

At the GSA, the peer review system is a joke. Our panel was given numerous instructions to guide our deliberations, in which we were to select four artists for what was billed as the largest commission in GSA history. Among much else, we were instructed to include art both inside and outside the building, which already had been substantially designed.

After much discussion and review, our committee recommended two painters from Los Angeles and two sculptors from New York. All were artists we believed could eloquently address the specific site in which their work would be encountered--namely, a federal building in which courtrooms and immigration offices would be prominent.

Each pair further represented artists of two different generations, whose work could be seen as representing a development from one generation to the next. We hoped they might in this way make sense when seen together.

With these and other rationales, the recommendations were duly sent off to GSA headquarters in Washington, where the hatchet job promptly began. The two prominent artists from Los Angeles were summarily rejected--the then-head of the GSA had never heard of them, we were subsequently told, and besides, he had decided that a monumental sculpture by an artist he had at least heard of would be nice out there on the building’s plaza, seeing as how this project had such a hefty budget. It had to look like the GSA was getting its money’s worth.

There’s no need to continue with the specifics of this sorry tale of “glamour art by the pound,” and of the shocking news to the review panel that a government bureaucrat had unilateral veto power over the process. No need, that is, except to add that, as a result of the GSA’s antics, the National Endowment for the Arts, which has a record of integrity in administering public art programs, and which had been brought in by GSA to assist with this high-profile project, hastily withdrew its support, never to sully its hands with GSA mud again.

Before it was dismembered at the behest of Roybal, Otterness’ “The New World” told a layered narrative of particular significance. In the artist’s well-known figurative style--a sort of cartoon-like cross between the Pillsbury Dough-boy and Babar the Elephant--the frieze that climbs the pergola and spans its curve featured hordes of male and female figures converging in a rhythmic procession. The narrative is oblique, but a king is shown arriving in a motorcade, a scuffle breaks out, a building and a royal statue are toppled and, finally, a many-headed, multiple-armed being is held aloft.

Beneath this curious, Shiva-like victor, the central column of the pergola holds a bronze plaque on which a naked female figure is shown crouching in a cave and drawing in the sand. Clearly representative of an artist working in the illusionistic echo-chamber of Plato’s cave, she looks out to the center of the public plaza as the source of her drawing.

There stood a bronze sculpture of a baby girl, laying on her back and holding aloft a buoyant globe. The hopeful sculpture is (or was) the pivot around which the entire ensemble turns.

This narrative can be read in many ways, including as a battle of the sexes leading to reconciliation through art and the birth of new life. When first proposed, the GSA read it in a rather different way: Cartoon-like or not, they stammered, you can’t put up on a government building a work of art that advocates violent revolution.

I pointed out to the GSA that, unlike the frieze, the United States doesn’t have a king. (Ronald Reagan was still in office, but never mind.) I further pointed out that the reason it doesn’t is that we had overthrown one in a violent revolution a couple of hundred years ago.

Otterness’ frieze is a rather appropriate historical allegory out there on a public plaza of an American government building--especially a plaza where participants in the deliberations of justice and immigrants to a “new world” might be frequent visitors.

There is obvious irony in the two particular parts of this sculptural ensemble that have offended our government officials so heinously that they have been unceremoniously removed. (The king in his official motorcade has of course been left intact.) The artist, symbol of free speech and expression, has been silenced; the infant with a globe, symbol of a rejuvenating new world, has been spirited away in the night.

So, what are we to do? Simple. If Roybal does not like the art gracing a public building that will carry his name, there’s an equitable solution to his anguished dilemma. Even the GSA ought to be able to figure it out. He can take his name off the building, and they can put the sculpture back.