ART / CATHY CURTIS : New South Coast Plaza Sculpture Is Both a Safe and Sorry Sight : Whatever philosophical basis ‘Utsurohi’ is supposed to have has been watered down and prettified into vapidity. Unfortunately, it’s pretty typical of corporate public art.

What’s right with corporate sculptures, those upscale objects permanently parked outside the buildings where number-crunchers and data-jugglers do their work? From an art point of view, not much.

Corporate art primarily serves as a big logo, an instant message about wealth, smugness and conventional good taste. A firm hires an art consultant to get ahold of a piece made by a dead “blue chip” artist (such as Henry Moore or Joan Miro or Alexander Calder--all represented in the South Coast Plaza commercial area), or possibly something cheaper by one of the myriad unsung artists who specialize in the abstract doodles, zigzags or cubes deemed appropriate for a no-man’s land of steel and glass.

Never mind that the vital pulse of contemporary art hasn’t been engaged with neat, clean abstractions for more than 20 years. Corporations--dedicated to cultivating a good image for the sake of the bottom line--feel comfortable with neat, clean abstractions. In much the same way, 19th-Century townsmen--dedicated in principle, at least, to high ideals--felt comfortable putting statues of famous men on horseback in the city park.

Last fall, South Coast Plaza gave itself its 15th piece of corporate art--that is, if you count the entire “California Scenario” garden by Isamu Noguchi as one piece. The newcomer, a ring of a dozen 10-foot-high beige tiled columns on the lawn next to Cesar Pelli’s stainless steel Plaza Tower (at the corner of Anton Boulevard and Avenue of the Arts), is the work of Aiko Miyawaki, a Japanese artist who happens to be married to world-famous architect Arata Isozaki.

The columns are topped with bands of stainless steel and bunches of looping stainless steel wires. On the inside surface of each column, a small rough-surfaced rectangular area contains a glossy relief image of one of the animals of the Chinese zodiac and a Japanese character. For some reason, each animal is also identified in Latin ( tigris, taurus, canus ) in highfalutin Roman-style lettering (the kind in which U’s look like Vs).

Miyawaki calls the piece “Utsurohi,” a word defined by a Japanese critic quoted in the press materials as “a state without stability, balance or quiescence.” He adds: “The changing colors of leaves, the sounds of a flowing stream, the evolving successions of moods, the intertwining of dream with reality--all of these are feelings of utsurohi. “

That’s all very interesting, but to these Western eyes, the piece looks boringly stable, balanced and quiet. The wires--which are supposed to move when Costa Mesa’s infrequent breezes blow--cannot wave freely because the opposite end of each one is poked back into the top of the column, or arched over to an adjacent column. The beige tiles are blandly self-effacing. Even the closed circle in which the columns are arrayed works against an unbalanced feeling.

Nowhere in this quiet but unsubtle piece is there a hint of the poetic states or moods of nature suggested by the Japanese critic. At the same time, the role of the zodiac animals in the piece remains undefined. They function as little more than timid little ornaments, like monograms on the pockets of business shirts.

Miyawaki’s expressed hope that her piece will serve as a “meeting place” seems rash, considering that there is no place to sit down, and office workers are unlikely to traipse onto the grass just for the experience of standing inside the columns (assuming anyone is permitted on the manicured lawn in the first place).

Miyawaki has been showing her work on the international circuit since the late 1950s, but--with the exception of her participation in “Japon des Avant-Gardes 1910-1970” at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1986--her recent sculptures have been exhibited primarily in her native Japan. Her works have been placed on university campuses, in cultural centers, government buildings, parks and corporate settings from Princeton, N.J. to Sapporo, Japan. “Utsurohi” is her first piece in California.

She does seem to have the corporate commission routine down to a T. The scale and materials of her piece were well chosen to fit with the scale and materials of the adjacent building housing offices and the parking garage as well as with the delicacy of the landscaping and the dazzling curve of the tower itself.

On the other hand, “Utsurohi” also demonstrates the tightness and polite rigidity that are the hallmarks of corporate art-- as opposed to the do-your-own-thing variety. Miyawaki’s piece satisfies the corporate urge toward closure and the corporate habit of showing the world a well-scrubbed public face.

Her piece, with its double references to Japanese calligraphy (in the zodiac names and the linear traces of the wires) also offers the sort of discreet internationalism that is welcome these days, so long as it knows its place. The thinking seems to be: How delightful--and so apropos after a decade of Japanese economic power--to inject a whisper of Japanese exoticism into a West Coast business park.

But whatever philosophical basis the piece is supposed to have has been watered down and prettified into vapidity. This is not the sort of sculpture that percolates in the imagination of the viewer. It isn’t even functional in the way that attractive benches or a fountain with seating would have been. In fact, the piece represents little more than a shiny hood ornament on the Rolls-Royce of Orange County developments.