A Cast of Hundreds : Orange County’s public sculptures range from a handful of old-fashioned monumental statues to more common abstract works. Oh, and one very big duck.

Two high-school girls were viewing the concrete statue of explorer Juan Cabrillo, dressed in his Spanish armor, that stands in the courtyard of Santa Ana’s Bowers Museum. “My,” said one, “Mr. Bowers was a handsome man, wasn’t he.”

Well, monumental statuary isn’t Orange County’s long suit anyway. Scattered here and there are statues of heroes and heroines: Padre Serra, Madame Modjeska, Richard Henry Dana, Albert Schweitzer, even John Wayne. But modern Orange County goes more for public sculpture as corporate gesture.

Take the latest: “Defending the Pond,” a menacing, eight-foot bronze duck outside the Anaheim arena where the Mighty Ducks play their hockey games. Unveiled last month, (2/3/95) it stands with hockey stick in hand, the embodiment of Wild Wing, the team’s cartoon mascot.

Imposing? You bet.

A reflection of the state of Orange County’s public sculpture? Pretty much, says Tony DeLap. A longtime art professor at UC Irvine and a prominent sculptor of outdoor works, DeLap says that with rare exception, public sculpture is erected here by corporations that have no real artistic purpose in mind. They are interested in enhancing their images and playing it safe, he says.

“I think when we start identifying our cultural best against this kind of thing, it’s really rather sad. I think there’s probably room for everything, but often there’s the misconception that maybe this is the best there is to offer. Anything that’s more serious--and frankly, more important--is not even known of.”

Save Outdoor Sculpture!, working with foundation and Smithsonian Institution funding, is inventorying virtually every work of outdoor sculpture in the nation. Its incomplete survey already lists a surprising number in Orange County: 206. Most are relatively new--only 13 existed before 1970--and more than half are in Brea, where since 1975 the city has required builders to include a public sculpture with any commercial or multifamily development costing more than $500,000.

Few are of the traditional statue-in-the-park variety. Orange County grew too late to get in on that trend.

“We have found a definite correlation between population, wealth and sculptures,” says Julie Silliman, SOS’ project director for California. “If an area had a population and wealth early on, there are sculptures. In the rural counties, you’ll find nothing at all.”

Orange County was mainly rural as late as the 1950s. During the time when Boston and New York were erecting statues to historical and religious figures, public sculpture in Orange County had only reached the stage of suspending papier-mache or plaster horses over livery stables.

“Generally speaking, public statuary, apart from cemetery plots, was kind of reserved for the two cast-cement lions that flanked a number of front-porch stairways--the public library kind of junk,” says historian Jim Sleeper of Tustin.

“Once in awhile you’d get a little innovation. H. Clay Kellogg (a prominent engineer in Orange County) had a couple of polar bears when his house went up in Santa Ana. But outside of some birdbaths, that was about it.”

Probably the first local attempt at genuine public sculpture occurred in 1889 after the death of James W. Layman, a pioneer saloon and innkeeper in Santa Ana. Survivors erected at his grave an eight-foot marble statue of “Hope,” a woman with one finger (now missing) uplifted toward heaven. The statue is still there in section J of the Santa Ana Cemetery.

It was a rather trite example of the classical style, but “Layman’s monument was considered the best sculpture ever to come to the county,” the Santa Ana Standard observed a few months later. It was not a difficult distinction, since the new county of Orange was then less than a year old.

It took quite a while for the county to do better. Publicly displayed sculpture often was used merely as a business gimmick.

In 1928, promoters of the land development that became San Clemente mass-produced and displayed 1,500 small bronze statues depicting St. Clement I, the fourth Pope and namesake of their budding town.

(An eerie replay occurred in 1990 when Catholic gift shops in the county reported an intense run on statues of St. Joseph. In the midst of slumping sales, real estate agents were burying the statues beside their for-sale signs for good luck. A real estate association in Westminster bought 50 statues and distributed them to its members.)

In 1943, a hot dog stand in Laguna Beach began displaying notable sculptures by Peter Paul Ott, a local sculptor of some significance. The reason: Ott himself was running the stand because the sculpting business was so bad.

By that time, some traditional memorial statuary had appeared: Padre Junipero Serra, founder of the California missions, at the Mission San Juan Capistrano (1914); Helena Modjeska, the celebrated 19th-Century actress, in Pearson (formerly Anaheim) Park (1935) and Cabrillo at Bowers Museum (1939).

Others followed: Richard Henry Dana, author of “Two Years Before the Mast,” at the harbor that bears his name (1972); actor John Wayne at the airport that bears his name (1982); Albert Schweitzer at Chapman University, the campus that adopted him as a sort of patron saint (1992).

Padre Serra got his second statue at the mission in 1994, which brought him even with Eiler Larsen, the eccentric “greeter” who spent more than three decades waving at passing cars in downtown Laguna Beach. Larsen was the subject of two statues along Coast Highway in Laguna Beach (in the 1960s and in 1986) and for years was the only person so honored in Orange County.

Sculpting human figures seems to be making a comeback, says SOS’ Silliman, but most of Orange County’s public sculpture is abstract. “It just depends on what’s the popular style at the time the sculptures are done.”

In Orange County, public sculpture started to become popular in the 1970s, when local corporations became concerned about projecting a world-class image. Works were commissioned for major office complexes, the outstanding example being “California Scenario” by Isamu Noguchi, a 1.6-acre “environmental sculpture” that adjoins the Great Western Bank and Bank of the West buildings east of South Coast Plaza, Costa Mesa.

Planned along with the buildings, costing the developer, C.J. Segerstrom & Sons, more than $3 million, “California Scenario” opened in 1982 as an abstract depiction of California’s varying landscape. It remains the only artistically important work of public sculpture in the county, says art professor DeLap.

“It is quite well known internationally,” he says. “It is certainly a prestigious sculptural project and interesting because it creates an attitude. It’s not just one piece of sculpture stuck someplace.” Though DeLap has created outdoor sculpture in Orange County, he concedes “there is nothing here that equals that kind of integration of an area of that scope.”

The reason, says DeLap, is that CEOs and corporate presidents are rarely educated in art, rarely willing to take a chance, rarely willing to foot the bill.

“These people simply don’t know anything about art,” DeLap says. “You can have a meeting with a corporate president, and unless he happens to be very unusual, he doesn’t know a single name you’re talking about--great American sculptors and painters.

“In the big cities like New York and L.A., the difference is those people know they don’t know, so they go to the Guggenheim Museum or something of the sort and say, ‘We have a big project here and we want somebody nifty to do it.’

“But elsewhere, they are very often bullheaded. In business, their area of expertise, they’ll bring in the best experts for advice. But in art, an area they know nothing about, they won’t seek the best professional advice. They just will not do it. It happens over and over again.”

Often it is merely an afterthought or whim and not integrated into the building design, DeLap says. Even though notable artists sometimes are commissioned, only $15,000 or so typically is allotted. The minimum for a serious outdoor sculpture nowadays “is more like $100,000,” so the result has been “small, individual pieces that are just stuck in the out-of-doors,” DeLap says.

According to a City Hall spokeswoman, most outdoor sculpture in Brea has cost developers between $20,000 and $35,000 but sometimes as little as $5,000.

The approach has been different in Anaheim, where a city-appointed arts committee was allotted 1% of the construction costs for both the city’s arena and its downtown redevelopment project. The result has been commissions for public sculpture projects that have had significant budgets, by Orange County standards.

Only a month before the hockey statue--designed and paid for by the team--was unveiled, an arts committee project, “The Anamorph,” was dedicated nearby. It had cost $200,000. The Mighty Ducks decline to say how much they spend for the duck.

Outdoor sculpture is expensive, DeLap says, because it requires special attention. It must withstand weather and vandals, so pieces must be particularly well constructed of resistant materials and protected where possible. They demand much more maintenance, something they often do not receive, says Gaido of Save Outdoor Sculpture!

The foot of one of three bronze sky divers installed in 1967 at Fashion Island Newport Beach has nearly corroded away, she says.

And “Two Figures,” a couple in painted steel installed at Nita Carmen Park in Laguna Beach, is “in very bad condition,” she says. “The paint is peeling off. There’s grass clippings all over them. They’re rusting. They’ve been there only a little over 10 years and they just look terrible.”

“They advertise that Laguna has the best public art, but this is the worst case of neglect I’ve seen in all Orange County.”

To some in charge of outdoor sculpture, maintenance is merely a bother.

“They (art supporters) are always after to me to repaint it,” says one corporate executive in charge of maintaining his firm’s on-site sculptures. “And when I do paint it, they say it’s the wrong shade of purple. Purple is purple. They drive me nuts.”

DeLap has a word to describe the Mighty Duck now standing guard in Anaheim, but propriety forbids. Art, he says, simply doesn’t figure in to the vast majority of public art in the county.

“I realize that when you start talking about sports, you’re often talking about sacred ground. I don’t have anything against hockey. If that image makes people happy, if that’s what they want, that’s fine.

“But don’t confuse it with art, because it’s not.”