‘Puddles’: Light, Space and Zen Beat Bard

Everybody needs to take a shot at Goliath once, even if their pebble bounces off. In this case David is the noted L.A. artist Peter Alexander. Goliath is the multi-headed corporate entity that owns downtown’s Citicorp Plaza. The plot twist here is that the compliant giant actually sponsors people to take a crack at him.

Four years ago Citicorp unveiled the first phase of a public art project called “Poets’ Walk.” The brain-baby of art adviser Kathy Lucoff, it includes a vaguely subversive group of seven projects by as many teams of artists and poets. Scattered casually around the plaza, they tend to remind people there is more to life than the sterile giantism of corporate existence.

Alexander’s collaboration marks the finale of the enterprise and his first public art commission. Dotting the sidewalk on 8th Street near the northwest corner of Figueroa, it’s titled “Puddles.” That’s a most endearing word that rolls humorously off the tongue and makes a good name for a puppy. Alexander’s puddles are actually a couple of dozen thick pieces of cast translucent glass embedded in the pavement and illuminated from below by subtly colored fiber optics.

The piece is designed to be seen from dusk to dawn. Its principal audience will be wrung-out corporate factotums scurrying home. Its secret and perhaps most appreciative viewers will be those who wander the night streets because they have nowhere else to go.

Visited with normal everyday purposefulness, “Puddles” is vaguely disappointing. It doesn’t blink like a video game or play “Singin’ in the Rain.” Your foot doesn’t even get wet if you step on a puddle. They just lie there unobtrusively looking like tiny remnants of some massive ancient glacier. Pedestrians finding the work by chance tend to smile. Maybe they understand the message that the corporate glaciers nearby can also melt down one day. This hardly makes “Puddles” bad art. On the contrary. But it does make it a certain kind of art.

The principal clue to “Puddles’ ” intentional character is the identity of Alexander’s collaborator, Ikkyu Shonin. He was a 15th-Century Japanese Zen poet. Those guys tended not to give a rat’s whisker whether their verses survived the night, much less the ages. Ikkyu would be doubtlessly flummoxed to find one of his here, etched in glass and in English. Today many Japanese speakers can’t even read the originals since, back then, written Japanese incorporated Chinese characters.

We own their legibility to a free and exquisitely moving contemporary translation by Tim Rutten. Rutten, a Times staff writer, was a student of Beat poet patriarch Kenneth Rexroth. He did the adaptations from which this one was drawn as a private exercise and something to share with friends like Alexander. Reproducing the poem here would be akin to giving away the punch line.

Its meaning hovers around the existence of an Angel Town spirit that is larger and more real than its reputation for glitz and exhibitionism. L.A. is really populated by people with a passion for privacy.

“Puddles” also quietly encapsulates the history of art and poetry in this town. In the ‘40s, a movement to start a Beat colony in Venice Beach failed as a literary enterprise. Ever since, L.A. artists from George Herms to Alexis Smith have tried to take care of both Muses. With this work, Alexander returns to his roots as a light-and-space sculptor, melding the abstract tradition to that of the Zen Beat bard.

An exhibition of art related to the project can be seen in a gallery inside the adjacent 777 Tower. A documentary video made by Julia Alexander and Guido Santi has its own poetry. We learn that Alexander believes his aesthetic can be traced back to a shower of comets he saw as a kid one night at the beach.

* Citicorp Plaza, 777 S. Figueroa, gallery hours, 11 a.m.-3:30 p.m., closed weekends, (213) 236-3900.