ART REVIEW : Glossy Journey to the Center of the Earth

Public art is fraught with difficulty, not least because of the often unreasonable demands that are placed upon it.

Our expectations for the genre tend toward the woozy and the sentimental: We want public art to enliven an often drab corporate or civic environment, to provide education for the uninformed and soothing uplift for the haggard, to “humanize” bad architecture and brutally built spaces.

We want public art to accomplish these things largely because of fuzzy ideas that art is good for you, while the day-to-day urban environment is pretty crummy. So, as we cling tenaciously to an old-fashioned humanism, public art gets the usually thankless and always impossible job of putting a gloss on our civic life.

That it simply can’t achieve these feats, which are finally beside the point for art, except in rudimentary ways, is proven over and over again. A journey through the five Metro Red Line stations scattered about the central business district and ending at MacArthur Park demonstrates it one more time.

Admittedly, the nine artists who were commissioned to execute projects were at a disadvantage. They had to add their art to existing architectural designs for the stations. Common wisdom has it that the earlier and more completely artists are brought into the environmental design process, the better. In the Red Line, most all the art has a tacked-on, after-the-fact feel.

The six, “flying figures” by Jonathan Borofsky in the Civic Center station are an exception, perhaps because they are clever in playing off the transient subway passengers, rather than off the engulfing subway architecture. Life-size, the painted people (nominal self-portraits of the artist) are spread-eagle, as if in free-fall from on high, and they’re suspended above the platform, where passengers wait for their train. As you approach the descent to the platform you can already see these crazily zooming figures, which are resonant markers for your impending journey.

Those art projects that grab onto the architecture have a tougher time. Formally, few are well integrated into the architectural setting. The result is a stark self-consciousness--a “little moment of art” before the commute.

Roberto Gil de Montes’ suite of three, painted-tile murals in the escalator well at the Hope Street entrance to the 7th Street station is a case in point. Its “Heaven to Earth” imagery, beginning with constellations in the night sky in the top panel and ending with lush flora in the bottom one, loosely follows your actual trajectory into the underground. But the attempt to brighten an otherwise workmanlike descent into the subway is stilted.

Similarly, Therman Statom suspended sculptures in a flared, cylindrical skylight at MacArthur Park. A glass house and gemstone, a painted metal leaf or feather, a copper cone and a mirrored ladder tumble through the light-filled space. The meaning of these objects is surely loose enough to welcome diverse assignments from passing viewers; but, as public signs, they’re not specific enough to connect in any but the most arbitrary way.

The subway setting is a rough environment to deal with. Almost all the huge, cavernous spaces are architecturally blank. With the exception of the vivid red- and blue-tile walls at the MacArthur Park station, the experience is mostly of undifferentiated expanses of gray and beige, through which you wander.

Swallowed whole by this devouring space are Joyce Kozloff’s small, double rows of decorative tile borders, also at 7th Street. They feature mostly black-and-white drawings based on stills from science-fiction and horror movies: “Star Trek,” “Metropolis,” “The Bride of Frankenstein,” etc. (A second tile border by Kozloff is yet to be installed.)

A beautifully crafted tile mural by Terry Schoonhoven and a dozen abstract, neon sculptures by Stephen Antonakos are lessons in opposite approaches to grappling with the maw. At Union Station, Schoonhoven embraces invisibility; at Pershing Square, Antonakos tries for grandiose glitz.

Schoonhoven’s mural is located on an end wall facing a staircase. Its pale, pastel coloration, which keys off the station’s muted color scheme, attempts to dissolve the wall into transparency.

A device the artist has used before (see his “false corridor” mural painted on the Ahmanson Building at the L.A. County Museum of Art), it is here applied to a fantasy image of time travel, between 1750 and the year 2000: At the far left a Spanish galleon lies shipwrecked in the desert before a squatting American Indian; in the center Western motifs are arrayed; at the far right a wanna-be movie star in 1930s style sits forlornly on her suitcase, the pre-skyscraper skyline of L.A. displayed in the background. Your journey into the subway completes the timeline.

Antonakos’ big, neon lines and squiggles--red, blue, green, yellow--are affixed to six black and six gold transformer boxes in assorted geometric shapes. Suspended from the ceiling and affixed to supporting columns over the subway platforms, they are style-conscious decorative embellishments. The color is nominally welcome, but you could be just about anywhere: shopping mall, theme park, Postmodern bar-and-grill.

At Union Station Christopher Sproat provides a decorative amenity, in the form of compact yet monumental granite seats. Their style is adapted from the beautiful, wooden, Deco club-chairs in the old railroad station above. Borrowing heavily from the sculptural furniture of the late Scott Burton--a rather risky business for comparison, since Burton was the Michelangelo of the genre--Sproat has at least provided a place to rest in stations currently short on seating.

Of course, granite--under ground and devoid of sunlight--gets icy cold. How long your bottom can take it is a reasonable question.

Like the mural by Schoonhoven, but without its subtlety or skill, those by Cynthia Carlson (Union Station) and Francisco Letelier (MacArthur Park) also turn to history for their motifs. Letelier’s two, blandly drawn, tiled murals incorporate images connected to the MacArthur Park neighborhood, dividing them into a simplistic cosmology: “El Sol” (the sun) and “La Luna” (the moon) record male and female subjects, respectively. Carlson paints a big, simplified, aerial map of L.A.’s coastline--water is blue, land is green--from which 11 silly cutouts of angels’ wings gracelessly protrude, one for each founding family of the “City of Angels.”

The idea that public art creates a strong sense of place by acknowledging the sociology, topography and local history of its site has become a fixed convention of the genre. Like most conventions, this one is an impediment to imagination. The murals by Letelier and Carlson find their actual ancestry in the pleasantly illustrative, mostly forgettable post office murals of the WPA era.

These Metro Red Line examples of decorative, functional, educative public art are not unusual. You can see the same thing in lots of cities--so much so that they begin to blur together, becoming generic. They’re symptomatic of one way in which works of art, not to mention artists, have finally been normalized, institutionalized and made official in our culture.

Valorizing mass transit, which this public art program surely does, is a socially significant enterprise. But site-oriented conventions have coagulated into high-toned public service ads for the neighborhoods surrounding stations. I don’t mean this to sound like an inherently bad state of affairs, since some trait of advertising is not only inescapable, it can also be productively used by a clever artist. I do mean it to sound like something grave is missing.

What is missing is a quality that, unsurprisingly, has long-since been threatened in our ordinary social life. Public art is exceedingly difficult to make because our sentimental desires for it regularly smother, or at least obscure, its highest aspiration: Great public art articulates what it means to be a citizen in the public world. Everything else is a pleasant--or not so pleasant--gewgaw.

The works of a few of the Metro Red Line artists tangentially touch on the dilemma, although none is so bold as to engage it fully. Maybe that’s because, for quite some time now, being a citizen in the public world hasn’t meant very much at all.

Free tours of the Metro Red Line public art project, beginning at 7th Street/Metro Center, are available at noon on Fridays and 11 a.m. on Saturdays, through February. Reservations are required: (213) 244-6408.

All Aboard for Art Neon sculpture, murals and avant-grade artworks by nine artists are on display at five Metro Red Line stations. There artist are: 1. Cynthian Carlson, Christopher Sproat, Terry Schoovhoven 2. Jonathan Borofsky 3. Stephen Antonakos 4. Joyce Kozloff, Roberto Gil de Montes 5. Therman Statom, Francisco Letelier