ART : Newport Project Merits a ‘None of Above’ Vote : The three finalists in the McFadden Plaza competition all seem to miss the mark. The city should go back to the drawing board.

It’s hard to imagine a public art competition that didn’t involve loud harrumphs from people who don’t like contemporary art, complaints from people who don’t think public money should be spent on art at all, and assorted criticisms about the way the contest is run.

So there’s nothing surprising about the controversy surrounding the $90,000 competition for Newport Beach’s McFadden Plaza, which is supposed to yield a work of art dealing with the “historical significance” of the area.

Last week, after a flurry of grumpy letters to the Daily Pilot (not to mention disparaging remarks jotted down by people who dropped in to see the three finalists’ models on view at City Hall), Pilot Editor William Lobdell weighed in with his own view of the process as “the tyranny of the cultural elite.”

Finalists Donald Lipski of New York, Christine Oatman of Encinitas and Richard Turner of Orange were chosen in March from a pool of 204 competing artists who sent slides of their previous work.

The city’s Arts Commission wisely handed over the winnowing job to a three-person jury of art professionals: Marilu Knode, former Newport Harbor Art Museum associate curator; Mary Beebe, director of the Stuart Collection at UC San Diego; and Jill Hally, a Corona del Mar art consultant. Unfortunately, even as good a jury as this may not come up with winners.

At 10 a.m. this morning, the finalists will make public presentations at City Hall. On Wednesday, at a meeting of the selection committee--which has representatives from the Newport Beach Arts Commission, the Art in Public Places Committee, and the Newport Pier Assn., a merchants’ group--one of two things will happen. Either the group will select one of the designs (subject to City Council approval) or decline to choose any of them.

I hope they vote “no” on all the projects and decide to start all over--but not because the three works are too elitist or untraditional, or because $90,000 is too much money to spend.

The real problem is twofold. None of the projects (I’ll get to them in a minute) is especially inventive or striking, and none really addresses the peculiar, unstated requirements of a site bordered by a brash mishmash of shops and eateries catering almost exclusively to beach-goers.

There seems to be major confusion in people’s minds about just what the plaza needs--whether the piece should be:

(A) An aesthetically sophisticated, historically apt monument of some kind--the sort of “statement” meant to bring status to the city.

(B) A glorified historical marker soberly reminding visitors of the city’s origins.

(C) Another component in the kitschy, theme-park version of the past exemplified by the folksy images of dory fishermen--surrounded by flapping American flags--on the roof of the fish market.

I think the right answer is (C), and I don’t think that need be as bad as it sounds. The best solution, it seems to me, is to commission an artist--chosen by art professionals--whose work is brash, amusing, sophisticated and also wittily in tune with the soul of popular culture.

Would the result be a goofy likeness of the McFadden Brothers? A Red Car train whipped into a cartoon-style explosion? A giant beach towel? Who knows. But so long as the piece didn’t unduly obstruct pedestrian traffic, suffer from the effects of saltwater, auto exhaust and bird droppings or become a target for vandals, it might stand a good chance of becoming a popular local landmark, at least in the eyes of the younger generation.

It would be silly to invest this artwork with too much pomp and circumstance. After all, the reason the city is going to the trouble of acquiring art for the site has as much to do with commerce as with pride in local history. By lobbying the city earlier this summer for waivers of the city’s one-story zoning rule--in order to rebuild shops in a turn-of-the-century style--the Newport Pier Assn. is relying on a high-toned historical theme park approach to lure shoppers with money to spend.

In any case, the plaza already has the soberly factual side of local history pretty well covered with an explanatory plaque installed a year ago as part of the $3-million plaza development that also included new lighting and picnic tables. Another informative text was posted outside the dory fishermen’s market back in 1969, two years after the fleet was certified as a historical landmark.

A laid-back beachfront site is certainly no place for one of those ponderous hunks of abstract sculpture that dot our corporate lawns. And surely an arts commission with the sense to appoint a panel of art pros wouldn’t want to settle for a boring, traditional-style sculpture that says nothing about our own time.

Thoughtfully innovative contemporary art is about reinterpreting received truths in fresh, unorthodox ways that have to do with the history of styles and symbols in popular culture. That’s not at all the same thing as dutifully producing a three-dimensional version of local history as it is defined by civic boosters.

And yet (think of Alexander Calder’s jazzy stabile, “La Grand Vitesse” in Grand Rapids, Mich., widely jeered when it was installed in 1969 and adopted as the city’s official symbol only four years later), some works initially threatening to the general public do become fondly regarded local landmarks, as people come to appreciate what a whiff of humor and skepticism can do for a place.

A few words about the history of McFadden Plaza seem to be in order here. The pier is the legacy of Newport landowners and lumber merchants James and Robert McFadden. Anxious to capitalize on the building boom of the mid-1880s and stymied by the size of Newport Landing--a bay harbor unable to service all the schooners docking with lumber supplies--the McFadden brothers decided to develop an oceanfront location instead.

The wharf was completed in 1889. Two years later, the brothers’ Santa Ana-Newport railroad began offering service down to the waterfront. During the 1890s, the 11-mile line carried an annual load of 12,000 passengers and 70,000 tons of freight. The trains ran every day but Sunday, in deference to Robert’s religious scruples.

Later that decade, when a new deep-water harbor was built in San Pedro, business at McFadden Wharf began to falter and the brothers decided to sell out. A mysterious private buyer snapped it up, but within a few months the property was acquired by the McFaddens’ archrival, the Southern Pacific Railroad, which gave beach-goers a break by instituting Sunday service. Beginning in 1906, the Red Car trolley also served the pier.

Legend has it that in 1891 a Portuguese fisherman based at the pier began selling his catch from his dory--a flat-bottomed boat--rather than carting it to market. About a dozen fishermen still take their boats out to sea before dawn to catch the hundreds of pounds of crab, bonita, sculpin and other fish they sell daily from stalls in the small market.

A feisty economic venture in its own right, the market also offers both historical immediacy and sensual pleasure. Visitors can view and sniff the silvery piles of fish, watch quick hands turn them into fillets, and hear snatches of laconic conversation about a grueling and uncertain calling. The other living link with the past is the continued presence of pier fishermen (and a few women) who hunker down at the far end of the pier.

It was only to be expected that at least one of the proposed artworks would have a railroad theme. But Lipski’s “Zephyr” interprets it in a static and overly literal way. The piece consists of a giant brass propeller mounted on a railroad car base, which in turn sits on a piece of real railroad track. Lipski presents the unadorned propeller as though there were something innately compelling about its appearance--as if we were still in the 1930s, marveling at the glories of the Machine Age.

To my eyes, the arbitrary transition between the propeller and railroad car piece has the awkward look of a neckless body or a poorly designed children’s plaything. For some reason, the propeller doesn’t even revolve.

Lipski explains in his statement that he realizes steamship propellers would have been outnumbered by sailing ships in Newport’s early days. But his argument in favor of using a propeller anyway (“It is that organ of a ship which most intimately confronts the water”) isn’t convincing, and his remark that the piece “embodies the energy and motion that recalls the optimistic drive and spirit of Newport’s founders” is self-serving balderdash. He doesn’t even bother to indicate where on the plaza the piece would be sited.

“The Sea Shells,” Oatman’s witless concept, involves mounting two giant bronze “idealized” sea shells (18 and 9 feet tall) in upright positions on concrete bases, about 70 feet apart. To counteract a landscape she sees as “somewhat overbuilt and discordant in its mix of architectural styles,” Oatman proposes that the shells would “serve to visually and symbolically re-establish (the historic shipping and fishing) link with the sea.”

But this is sheer hyperbole--and pointless when you consider that a few dozen real, live “links” with fishing are going about their business just a few steps away. The silliest specification of the piece is that one of the shells would contain computer-generated wave sounds. Talk about bringing coals to Newcastle!

Turner proposes two separate groupings of sculptures: four bronze-cast objects whose geometric shapes would be based on fishing weights sold at nearby Baldy’s Bait and Tackle, and two fiberglass sculptures cast to look like brain coral.

He writes in his statement that the juxtaposition is supposed to “evoke thoughts of the natural beauty of undersea life as well as man’s work harvesting the bounty of the ocean.” Other aspects of the piece include sandstone bases for the sculptures, which are supposed to “remind us of the land in its semiarid state before the area was cultivated,” and steel rails embedded on the plaza to recall the railroad pier.

Turner’s project is the best of the three in terms of its creative interpretation of history. But I think the piece is too low-key, high-minded and subtly symbolic for this site. Only a boldly off-center concept will hold its own against the competition from those hokey fisherfolk on the market roof. Sometimes it’s a mistake to serve up poached salmon when hotdog-on-a-stick better fits the mood, the crowd and the place.