Taking Blandness to the (Speed) Limit

It’s not worth getting in a car and driving across town to see the seven sculptures the city of West Hollywood has commissioned and installed along Santa Monica Boulevard. But if you happen to be traveling down the recently renovated street, the silly works that make up the “Edges and Hedges” project provide a few moments of diversion.

Designed to be seen at the speed of traffic, these temporary pieces are not meant to be contemplated the way art in galleries or museums is. And if you don’t give them a second thought, they’ll fade into the background of a generically pleasant experience.

But if you get stuck in traffic, you’ll have plenty of time to think about how they aid in the transformation of this stretch of West Hollywood into a drive-through mall, a complete shopping experience whose every detail is beginning to feel as if it’s the result of some corporate study about enhancing blandness and creating an atmosphere that hastens the disposal of your disposable income. As for the art, it’s innocuous, poorly designed and constructed in such a rudimentary fashion that it borders on being crude.

Doheny Drive marks West Hollywood’s border with Beverly Hills, and the first piece you see traveling east is a 1959 Pontiac StarChief convertible that Seattle artists Laura Haddad and Thomas Drugan have transformed into a planter. Parked on the median, the badly painted vehicle conjures images of traffic moving so slowly that a lot more than moss has begun to grow on the cars. Screaming “stop and smell the flowers,” their recycled gas guzzler is also a flowery revenge fantasy, a 3-D image of organic matter reclaiming an icon of American mobility.

Two hundred feet down the road stands a 6-foot-tall table and six mismatched chairs made of welded metal. Plastic flowers and real cacti cover half of Keith Sklar’s giant dining room set, which resembles a low-budget float abandoned by its fabricators. Like the comfy chairs and sofas that are arranged in tasteful clusters in the corridors of the Beverly Center, the L.A. painter’s dysfunctional furniture reveals how domesticated so-called public space is becoming.

No well-meaning art project would be complete without a token of wilder times gone by. Michael Stutz’s giant coyote, made of interwoven strips of lacquered cardboard, serves this function. Loping along the median near the intersection of Palm, the aloof scavenger appears to be unimpressed with the trappings of civilization that surround him.

The opposite end of the nature-culture spectrum is represented by Sheila Klein’s hefty earrings, which hang from the fronds of three palm trees where Croft Street, Holloway Drive and Santa Monica Boulevard meet. The sentiment that inspired the artist from Washington state to dress up the trees mimics the city’s desire to dress up the street with a handsomely manicured median. Unfortunately, Klein’s elephantine jewelry pales in comparison with the Christmas ornaments it recalls. Its tacky glamour makes her work look cheap.

Just across the intersection, on the north side of the street, L.A. artist Blue McRight has installed an industrial-strength lawn chair. The project’s solitary concession to pedestrians, in that you can actually use it, her steel and Astroturf chaise longue is wide enough for a couple. It’s perfect for people, both tourists and locals, who like to make a spectacle of themselves. Such posing may be a cliche about narcissistic Angelenos, but that doesn’t make it any less pathetic or depressing.

Bruce Odland’s “Tonic” requires passersby to get out of their cars. Installed behind the bus stop at the southeast corner of San Vicente and Santa Monica boulevards, its primary audience is bus riders.

The New York artist’s piece consists of a pair of audio speakers hidden in two cement blocks mounted on the sidewalk. Hidden microphones pick up street noise, and a computer transforms it into a rumbling melody with a poppy beat. A bit rambunctious for an office elevator, Odland’s agreeable music is a marked improvement on the sounds of buses braking and accelerating.

About a mile to the east, in front of the new West Hollywood Community Center at Plummer Park, is a sprawling abstract sculpture by Stephen Glassman. Made of long sections of bamboo that have been lashed together with rope, the spindly structure embodies some of the taut, utilitarian elegance of low-tech sailboats from the South Pacific. Unfortunately it also appears to be the watered-down offspring of a Modernist sculpture from the 1970s or a section of construction scaffolding from Southeast Asia.

As a group, the works that make up “Edges and Hedges” are too cutesy and clever to be much more than gimmicks. They have the presence of afterthoughts, incidental extras tacked on to show how perky a street can be. When art enters the picture only after it has been recommended by consultants and approved by government committees, it’s almost always out of touch with the vital street life it pretends to represent. The process is akin to forming a regulatory commission to ensure that people are spontaneously enjoying themselves. It’s a no-win situation.

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“Edges and Hedges,” Santa Monica Boulevard, West Hollywood. Free. Through November.