Little Peace Around These Pieces

It isn’t easy being a statue in the city of the arts.

Two sculptures in Laguna Beach have been turning heads -- and raising a few eyebrows.

One is an “interactive” granite artwork unveiled Thursday in front of City Hall. The other is a refurbished concrete likeness of the “Greeter,” an iconic Laguna character, at the former site of the Pottery Shack.

The City Hall sculpture, titled “The People’s Council,” features three figures sitting around a black obelisk that serves as a sundial, casting shadows over such words as “happiness,” “freedom,” “fertility” and “safety.”

“What a piece of junk!” sniped a letter to the editor in the Laguna Beach Independent newspaper. “Get the jackhammers and get rid of it.”

Another critic blasted city officials for spending $80,000 on the sculpture after last year’s Bluebird Canyon landslide.

“The mayor went crying on television about how much her community needs our assistance with the landslide victims, and now she’s silent about the city purchasing abstract art?” a blogger wrote last summer at occourant.blogspot.com. “If the community wants art displayed in public places, it should form a nonprofit to raise the money.”

But passersby on a recent weekday mostly praised the piece. The sculpture, by artist Linda Brunker of Wildomar, was purchased with developer fees and hotel-tax money earmarked for public arts programs.

“It fits the vibe of this area,” said Lou Whites of Huntington Beach, who works in Laguna.

Michelle Barisoff, a middle school art teacher in Long Beach, applauded the work’s “meditative” ambience. “It makes you think as you go around reading the words.”

But others labeled the piece confusing, stark or out of sync with the surrounding Spanish architecture.

A few miles away, at Brooks Street and Pacific Coast Highway, stands a reincarnated statue of Eiler Larsen, the wild-eyed, wild-haired Danish immigrant who spent 31 years shouting “hello” to motorists along the highway.

The statue, like Eiler himself, had been a fixture in town, pointing people to the Pottery Shack, which closed in 2004. As part of a plan to reinvent the funky ceramics shop as a chic restaurant and retail center, the new owner hired artist Mike Tauber to refurbish the weather-beaten figure.

Tauber sandblasted layers of paint, studied old photos of Eiler and then applied canvas portrait techniques to the sculpture.

To give the wild-looking Eiler a “friendlier, jovial look,” Tauber changed the statue’s eyebrows, rounded the cheekbones and upturned its smile. But, he said, the alterations didn’t change the integrity of the original sculpture.

Nevertheless, one letter writer to the Independent said the sculpture’s creator, Charles Beauvais, was still given short shrift because he wasn’t mentioned in any of the fanfare surrounding the updated statue.

Public artwork often meets resistance when it debuts. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Eiffel Tower had to overcome initial skepticism and ridicule.

“Time is the true test of art,” said Las Vegas public arts coordinator Lisa Stamanis during a recent visit to Laguna Beach.

California beach cities have a conflicted relationship with outdoor art. In Carlsbad in 1999, after six years of criticism, officials ripped out a $338,000 oceanfront assemblage of concrete and steel bars that critics had dubbed “The Jail With a View.”

Huntington Beach officials planted a 2,800-pound statue of a nude surfer near the shore in 1973 after deciding the bronze piece was too risque for the entrance to their civic center.

More recently, the city commissioned a sculpture with fake whale bones that played recordings of foghorns and seagulls. But officials abandoned the idea for a Stonehenge-style circle of concrete surfboards.

Laguna Beach, an artists colony, has also wrestled over outdoor art. “It’s very hard to please everybody,” said Dora Wexell, a member of Laguna’s Arts Commission.

The sculpture at City Hall replaces a modern-art fountain built in 1991. Although the fountain was supposed to be stainless steel, it soon rusted and leaked, said Sian Poeschl, cultural arts manager for the city.

Because of state and federal laws that protect the rights of artists, getting the piece removed took three years.

Poeschl wasn’t shocked that the new granite sculpture drew scrutiny. “The site has always been controversial,” she said.