Art Buffs Back Buff Art

People are complaining about a new cover up at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

This one involves a mural that has been covered up at the transit agency’s new Union Station headquarters because of employee complaints about its depiction of a naked man.

“You can’t really see anything. . . . I guess you can see his rear end,” said an agency spokeswoman.

Some workers see the furor as silly since the controversial scenes of a naked man running are reproductions of a photographic series taken more than a century ago by pioneer photographer Eadweard Muybridge. The photo collage also includes hundreds of colorful postcards of trolley cars, buses, cars and trains from the present and past that appear below NASA pictures of the planets.

Workers recently draped a black plastic sheet over the mural after receiving a handful of complaints such as: “I would not want to bring my daughter in to see this type of art” and “disgusting.”

The reaction from workers has ranged from disbelief to outrage. Some joke not to expect Rodin’s “The Thinker” ever to show up on MTA property. Others say that some bus ads are more risque.

But it’s no laughing matter to the artist or the art community.

“I’m stunned,” said artist Patrick Nagatani.

Officials commissioned the $50,000 mural without ever seeing a drawing because, they said, they did not want to stifle artistic expression. They are considering forming a panel of experts to decide “whether or not this is good art,” said a spokeswoman.

The artist said he incorporated Muybridge’s photos titled “Human Locomotion” because “the center of transportation is man’s own movement, intellectually and physically.”

“Only at the MTA, after these photos appeared in 1887, can they make this a controversy in 1996,” said one employee.

“I suppose the person responsible for this outrage would cover up Michelangelo’s ‘David’ with a bag, too,” said another.

After the first rumblings, the agency’s arts office put up a placard near the covered artwork noting, “Cultures worldwide have used the nude figure in public settings,” citing nude figures outside the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, on the Bunker Hill Steps and at the Roybal Federal Building.

“Personally, my view is that the Sistine Chapel has 10 times more nudity than this,” said MTA board member Nick Patsaouras, chairman of Union Station Gateway board. “Art should provoke debate,” he added.

But Patsaouras said that since the building is a public institution, he must consider the public’s sensibilities.

“I think art is greatly misunderstood,” said Julie Lazar, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, “due to a lack of education . . . and a lack of dialogue between artists and the public.

“We have a lot to learn from our critics. On the other hand, people who are critics have something to learn from us,” she said.