LAGUNA BEACH : Art Issue Raises Community Hackles

World peace wasn’t on the agenda, but that didn’t lessen the tension as residents, City Council members and arts commissioners squared off to wrestle with a question that has tormented others: Is compromise an option when art is at stake?

By the end of Tuesday’s special session, the answer had not surfaced, and the question still hung in the air like smog.

At issue is where to place a sizable work of art within Fred Lang Park, a South Laguna playground at South Coast Highway and Wesley Drive.

Should it be situated along a fence near an open grassy field, as understood by arts commissioners and by the 93 artists who submitted entries hoping to be commissioned to tackle the $20,000 job?

Or should the artwork, which could protrude five feet into the grassy field, be closer to the play equipment as the City Council had intended?

Or would it be better, as residents see it, to start from scratch with the project and find another artistic option that could be located elsewhere in the park, someplace where it would not pose a danger to children or block an ocean view?

“I think this is a really bad idea and it should be thrown out,” resident Carolen Sadler said.

The instructions to the artists challenged them to design art that would either incorporate or become a part of an eight-foot fence at the west edge of the park.

The five finalists have submitted conceptual renderings of their dramatically different proposals. The longest is 90-feet wide and the tallest is about 10-feet high, said Philip Hofmann, city liaison to the Arts Commission.

Parents, however, say it is dangerous to design a structure that would attract youngsters to the fence since it sits atop a slope above busy South Coast Highway.

While some council members favor starting fresh with the project, that option infuriates arts commissioners, who have worked on it for more than a year. To start over now, they say, would seriously damage their reputation with the arts community.

A solution that would meet the council’s requirements and salvage the five finalists’ entries--but would not address residents’ safety concerns--would be to install the completed project downfield. But arts commissioners say a work of art cannot be so casually relocated.

“The artist created site-specific art,” Commissioner Bobbi Cox said. “They’re interacting with that space.”

The art project springs from a city policy that requires 1% of the budget for major construction projects be set aside for the creation of artwork for public display. The art in question was required because the park was renovated, Hofmann said.

The glitch arose when arts commissioners misunderstood where the council intended the work to be placed. The confusion involved a slight but key difference in what Councilwoman Ann Christoph said in April, 1992, when she made the motion to approve the project and how that wording was translated in the minutes of the meeting.

The council wanted the artwork installed closer to the playground equipment, leaving the open field unobstructed, information that was not included in the minutes.

Cox attended the meeting but apparently also misunderstood the council’s intention. Commissioners say they relied upon the minutes.

After the discrepancy came to the council’s attention, Tuesday’s meeting was scheduled to try to resolve the problem.