To Have and Have Not

Imagine a warehouse full of ideas that nobody wanted--or rather, ideas people thought they might want, until it came time to pay for them and defend them against the slings and arrows of public opinion.

That warehouse actually exists in “Unbuilt Southern California,” an exhibition at Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery of drawings and scale models for rejected public-art projects. Jampacked with 57 projects by 43 artists or teams, the show offers a rare opportunity to examine public art in a broad context, as the flawed and curious phenomenon it is.

An accompanying essay by Seattle art critic Ron Glowen adds perspective on the pitfalls of the public-art selection process, which generally involves evaluation of artists’ proposals by a panel of art experts selected by an arts agency that reports to a city council.

The show, organized by gallery director Richard Turner, has one major drawback: It is frustratingly incomplete. Many of the models lack supporting documentation describing the site, the scale of the piece, the parameters set by the sponsor and the artist’s intent. It also would have been useful to know what pieces did win these contests and--if the artists ever found out--specifically why these projects were rejected.

The one solidly documented project in the show relates the strange fate of a proposal by Rod Baer for a water-and-power plant in Pasadena. Selected by the duly appointed art panel, it was ignored by the city’s arts commission, which instead chose a piece by an obscure elderly artist who casually proposed using “Mexican-American labor” to keep costs down.

But even when there are no obvious irregularities in the selection process, the bureaucratic types who make the rules--and the final decisions--seem disinclined to favor quirky originality.

Given the panels’ usual concerns about cost, safety, technical resources, perceived public taste and the artist’s track record, it’s no wonder that big commissions tend to go to artists who have produced sturdily innocuous work for the public arena.

Yet the most appealing rejected projects are largely about giving people alluring, unusual experiences. These works, often quite modest in scope, subtly transform a given site with color, light, sound or unusual metaphoric imagery without imposing a narrow point of view.

Carl Cheng’s “Blue Lagoon,” for a desert site near Tejon Pass, would have involved adding water-soluble blue pigment to a 100-foot-diameter excavated area; when rainwater evaporated, the blue tint would remain as a sort of mirage.

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Ellen Phillips proposed flooding the undersides of Interstate 5 overpasses in San Diego with colored light, dutifully pledging (in her prospectus) that it wouldn’t shine in drivers’ eyes.

Despite a clunky design, James Christensen’s giant lantern for San Diego International Airport incorporates an appealing atmospheric light component that would shift from blue neon during the day to a ruby halogen glow at night.

Roger Feldman designed several unusual bus stops, one with a loudspeaker as an extension of the roof (“Sound Stop / Bus Stop”) for Santa Barbara.

Amusingly, Lynn Sucholtz and Aida Mancillas decided to take the term “traffic island” literally for a piece they designed with small islands built into a San Diego traffic median; too bad the rendering doesn’t really capture the fancy of the idea.

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An elaborate proposal for Union Station Gateway in Los Angeles, designed by Daniel Martinez and Renee Petropoulos with architect Roger White, includes roadways suspended on scaffolds in the shape of giant words, evoking the stuff of urban commerce and upbeat descriptions of rail travel--a sight at once relevant and fanciful.

Helen and Newton Harrison are at the forefront of public-art projects that achieve ecological goals in low-key, visually appealing ways. In 1987 they proposed a series of gracefully interlinked ponds surrounding the basin of a lake at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains in Pasadena. For reasons the artists’ narrative doesn’t explain, the city twice unsuccessfully attempted to carry out the project and is trying again.

Public art with a social program sometimes works most effectively by example. James Brown’s heated park bench for the homeless is appealing in its simplicity, compassion and tacit suggestion of human potential. Intended for Juarez Park in San Diego, the bench was to be positioned directly across from a statue of Benito Juarez, the Zapotec Indian who became a great 19th century Mexican political reformer.

The most engagingly subversive piece is Nina Karavasiles’ “Helios San Diego,” a 4 1/2-foot-tall red metal device topped by a solar panel that would power a long, spiked arm gradually describing a 12-foot circle on the surrounding sand.

In her prospectus, Karavasiles describes the “gladiator” quality of the piece and remarks that “the site must be able to accommodate the philosophy of danger in the public [sphere].” Needless to say, this philosophy won’t be embraced any time soon by a litigious society.

On the other hand, it seems just as well that some of the projects illustrated in the show were never realized. It’s depressing to see the sort of safe, recycled ideas that smack more of bureaucratic apple-polishing than artistic innovation.

Terry Braunstein’s “Westside Area Monuments” for Long Beach, inspired by a vintage motif on a welding company building, substitutes cutesy nostalgia for a contemporary solution.

Joe Lewis leans on Southern California cliches--oranges, palm trees--for fountain designs. Barbara Grygutis combines palm-leaf motifs and a trio of “Mission-style” curves into the blandest of gateways for San Diego International Airport.

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Other artists seem hellbent on teaching the public about matters historical, geographical or cultural. This approach, often involving tedious texts, boring, obvious imagery or mysteriously arbitrary symbols, can seem forced and awkward. Once the viewer has absorbed the information--sometimes an iffy proposition--there’s nothing left to feed the eye and the imagination.

Terry Schoonhoven’s tile painting for the Chatsworth MetroLink Station in Los Angeles, “Portola’s Wheel,” involves a fanciful time-travel motif. But the lack of racial diversity among the people portrayed, coupled with the heroic image of a Spanish conquistador, smacks of cultural insensitivity.

Nobuho Nagasawa’s 13 sculptures for the Little Tokyo Historic District (including “a steel table with a bamboo look” to represent the area’s early furniture shops) have the stillborn quality of ideas that haven’t taken flight from the raw facts of historical research.

Still, it’s perfectly all right if we’re not convinced that all these projects should have been funded. It’s much more important that they help us question what we want from public art, and whether we’re getting it.

* “Unbuilt Southern California,” through April 8, Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. Hours: Noon-5 p.m. Monday-Friday; 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday. Free. (714) 997-6729.