O.C. Art Review : ‘Music’ Achieves Harmony With Setting

After enduring numerous examples of bad public art in Orange County, some of us have come to be grateful for any work that isn’t hopelessly bland, inept, intrusive or improperly scaled to its surroundings.

So Nancy Mooslin’s new 12-part interactive piece for Fred Lang Park in Laguna Beach, “Music of the Spheres,” comes as a pleasant surprise even if it disappoints in one major way. Incredibly, it is Mooslin’s first piece of public sculpture.

The artist, from Newport Beach, won a $20,000 competition sponsored by the Laguna Beach Arts Commission as part of the city’s Art in Public Places program, which requires 1% of each major construction budget--in this case, the recent park renovation--to fund a work of art on the site.

Named for the ancient belief--bolstered by the findings of 17th-Century astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler--in a universe ordered by the same numerical proportions that produce musical harmonies, “Music of the Spheres” has several good things going for it.

Most obviously, the rainbow-hued arcs topping each of the 12 black poles are clearly visible from South Coast Highway. Rising 16 to 20 feet, the painted steel shapes give the park an enhanced public presence in a cheerful way suited to a place where children play.

Yet the airy, linear outlines of the piece don’t compete with the view of the ocean from inside the park. (Art trying to upstage nature tends to run into the same problems adult actors have when they share a scene with children or animals.)

On a metaphorical level, Mooslin--whose work has long been involved with relationships between music and arcs of color--described the piece in a statement as relating to “the rising and setting sun . . . the turning of the Earth on its axis, the phases of the moon, and the harmony and beauty of the landscape.”

Indeed, the arc described by the graduated heights of the 12 components of the piece can be likened to the path of the sun. The progressive narrowing and widening of the open space in the arcs serves as an analogy for the waxing and waning of the moon, and the slightly different spatial orientations of these colorful elements plausibly suggest the Earth’s 24-hour (12 times two) rotation on its axis.

The groupings of three colored arcs on each pedestal evoke the role of triads (musical chords made up of three tones) in traditional harmony. Harmony also emanates from the piece in a literal sense, from the three tubular metal wind chimes attached to each pole. If you run your fingers through the chimes on each pole, you get what sounds pleasantly like a rising scale.

But the sounds are too soft to compete with the traffic noise on South Coast Highway. It’s hard to imagine that even a major windstorm would coax enough “music of the spheres” to be heard even a few feet away.

Mooslin herself says the ambient noise problem was “the one thing I didn’t fully comprehend” when planning the piece in her Los Angeles loft. “It would be lovely if you could hear this ringing sound without standing five inches away,” she agrees.

Although the city has not complained about the sound level, Mooslin says she is planning to solve the problem by replacing the chimes with larger ones or with chimes that have an internal, bell-like clapper.

As is the case with virtually every public project, the birth of “Music of the Spheres” was attended by controversy and compromise.

Last summer, after a panel of art professionals whittled 93 entries down to five semifinal designs, the City Council raised a ruckus over the positioning of the piece.

According to the competition prospectus, the sculpture was to have been placed on or along the eight-foot chain-link fence that separates the park’s playing field from South Coast Highway. But City Council members and some residents voiced concerns about the dangers of a piece that might motivate youngsters to climb the fence, and the intrusion of the piece onto the playing field.

So the arts commission sent a letter to the semifinalists asking them to pay more attention to safety and durability issues and asking how they would feel about positioning their work in an unspecified location elsewhere in the park.

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In Mooslin’s original concept, the arcs were to rise out of the ground and bisect the fence. Bowing to safety concerns, she decided to lift the arcs above the reach of climbing children and make them completely free-standing.

“I really think the piece was visually improved by the need to solve the safety problem,” she says. “(The original version) wouldn’t have been visible from the street. And, because the idea has to do with the orbiting Earth, it definitely is appropriate for the piece to be up in the air.”

In the end, the city decided not to change the site of the piece, but Mooslin figured out how to anchor the poles just four inches from the fence so that they barely encroach on the playing field.

“Any problem is solvable,” she insists. “It just takes some compromise. What this has taught me is that it doesn’t have to mean aesthetic compromise.”

* “Music of the Spheres” is at Fred Lang Park, Wesley Drive and South Coast Highway in Laguna Beach.