BEACH BLANKET BUNGLE : When Nature’s Not Enough, There’s Art for Santa Monica’s Sake

San Franciscans love to boast about the natural beauty of their town, and there’s no denying that the place is both scenic and cute. We have no spectacular views of a bay, but we do have some spectacular hillside vistas of downtown and the Valley, and we do have something that the northerners are too proud to admit they covet: a year-round beach.

Granted, only the hardiest and most completely rubber-suited people venture into the water this time of year (of course, even in midsummer, braving the bacterial playground that is our ocean takes guts). And you won’t find the mob of young skateboarders, and the girls they’re trying to impress, crowding the beach now. During winter, the place belongs to the pelicans, the terns and the grunion. And to the joggers. And to the master builders of Santa Monica.

That community has stewardship of several highly attractive miles of California beach, the kind of seascape that the people of the state thought they were protecting when they passed the Coastal Act 15 years ago. Santa Monica’s northern neighbor, Malibu, has its newly incorporated hands full, trying to keep septic tanks from colorizing the sand; to the south, Venice is primarily concerned with the task of discovering how many T-shirt-and-sunglass stands an oceanfront walk really needs. Santa Monica is bent on an altogether different mission: decorating the public’s beach.

It seems to have started with the installation of two concrete “performance art platforms” at Ocean Park Beach. Heartened by the successful encroachment of concrete onto sand (although the only performance art seen recently around these gray piles has been a piece that might be called “Homeless Guy Sleeps Here at Night”), a local group conceived a plan to place sculpture and other “site-specific” art on the beach. Two of about 10 projected artworks have already been installed. One, a set of giant beach chairs that make a musical noise when the wind blows, can best be understood as Santa Monica’s answer to the Triforium. The other work, the “Art Tool,” is a steamroller-like apparatus that molds a miniature cityscape out of the sand when it’s allowed to chug down the beach, although most of the time it’s kept in storage.

People who’ve spoken out against this project, which also calls for a 70-foot-long jungle-gym-style thing called “Solar Web” sitting on the public’s sand, have been called “anti-art.” In some communities, that charge might be a badge of honor, but in today’s Santa Monica, it’s enough to get you kicked out of fine restaurants. If you objected to rock-and-roll being played on your lawn at midnight, would that make you anti-music?

But artwork can go only so far in decorating a beach, so the city has recently taken the next step. Santa Monica has just installed an impressive array of attention-getting signs, suspended between even more attention-getting thick stone posts. Replacing much plainer boards that stood on much less impressive poles off the beach, these signs tell you to have fun on the sand but not to drink or get naked. Additionally, planted on the beach every 20 yards are new signs on concrete poles that advise people walking on the adjacent boardwalk that they are, in fact, on a “Pedestrian Path.” The frequency with which these signs recur suggests that strolling next to the beach can trigger severe memory loss: “Where the hell am I? The bike path? Wilshire? Am I wet yet?”

It’s easy to make fun of a town that, immersed in an epic homelessness crisis, has the energy and resources to doodle on nature’s Mona Lisa. But the beach, and its accompanying water, are such a powerful reminder of human puniness that they stimulate an old, understandable impulse. From cave-wall drawings to subway-car graffiti, people have insisted on making a simple statement, sometimes poignant, sometimes pathetic: I Was Here. We still don’t understand artists whose work is temporary or designed to decay, because it lacks that ability to echo down the years. In our hearts, we are all pyramid builders, or at least pyramid designers (even in our hearts, someone else can lug the bricks up the darn thing).

So rather than poke fun or be outraged over the progressive cluttering of what little open space exists at the edge of our metropolis, let’s simply hear a small city’s plaintive cry. Yes, Santa Monica, you sure were here.