Saving the Million-Dollar Rocks

When we last heard of the MTA’s art rocks, they were upside down. And getting them right side up was gonna push the price tag to $1 million.

Those were the rocks, you may recall, that were supposed to hang from the ceiling of the subway station at Vermont and Beverly. They were “art” rocks because they had been designed by artist George Stone, no pun intended, and placed in the station as part of the art-in-the-subways program.

Do we really want art in the subways? A good question, and we’ll get to that later.

As for the rocks, naturally they got screwed up. Someone had flipped the drawings or looked at them cross-eyed or something, and the MTA was stuck with the megabucks fix.

Somehow it figured. This was the MTA, after all. Public agencies have a talent for self-parody, especially when they hit hard times. And the MTA, like the Chicago Cubs, seems to exist in perpetual hard times.

In any case, I went to see the rocks last week. I wanted to make a report on their disposition and also ask the above-mentioned question: Should we be spending millions to hang art in the most bedeviled subway system ever built?

Maya Emsden, the director of the subway’s art program, trudged with me through the construction dust. We stared up at some of the rocks already hoisted into place. Others rested on the subway platform, waiting their turn.

“I remember the day the news broke about the mistake,” said Emsden. “I thought, ‘Now we’re really in trouble,’ because the board was already thinking about cutting out the arts program. We were gonna be seen as just another MTA boondoggle.”

Screw-ups or not, Emsden loves the rocks. They do exactly what she believes subway art should do. That is, they startle you, make you think about the subterranean place you have entered.

“A lot of people think subway art is hanging paintings on the subway walls,” she said. “That’s not what we do.”

Certainly it’s not what they did at the Vermont station. The word “rocks” hardly defines these fabricated chunks of stone. They’re huge. The chunks jut from the ceiling and walls like pieces of the Earth’s crust poking their way into the station. They look so real that, at first glance, you assume the subway builders constructed the station around the rocks.

The verisimilitude has not come easy. A few months back, engineers were designing a sprinkler system for the station and proposed that sprinkler heads be installed inside the rocks with little trap doors to spring open in case of a fire.

“I was afraid that the doors would be visible no matter how well they built them,” Emsden said. “So I asked the engineers, ‘How would you rig the sprinklers if these rocks were real?’ They said they would run the system around the rocks.

“And that’s how we are going to do it.”

I had come to Vermont ready to hate the rocks. But within minutes they had won me over too. They have a brooding quality, and I guarantee that you’ve never seen a subway station that looks like the Vermont station. By the time you leave, you know that you’ve been underground.

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Still, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., managed to build modern subway systems without art, so why shouldn’t we? It turns out that the MTA’s art program is but a small part of a revolution in public art in America.

The revolution is known as the “percent for art” movement, and it’s been adopted by a couple dozen cities from Honolulu to Los Angeles and New York. Basically, it requires all large construction projects to set aside 0.5% to 2% of construction costs for art.

The MTA comes in at the low end: 0.5%. But because our subway was the first built-from-scratch system to adopt the rule, it will probably contain more works of art than any other system in the country when it’s complete.

Actually, “complete” is a relative term with the MTA, but you know what I mean.

In any case, the country has embarked on a grand, though little-noticed, experiment in public art that nearly rivals the WPA of the Depression years. Tens of millions of dollars are getting spent. And the MTA, because it’s building so large a project, has become a nexus of the experiment.

“When you set out to make public art on a large scale, you raise some intriguing questions,” said Henry T. Hopkins, director of the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art. “It’s not like museum art. You ask questions like, does it make the environment a more interesting place? Is it user-friendly? Will people still like it after years of passing by it every day?”

Traditionally, Los Angeles’ public art has failed miserably in those categories. Witness the sad Triforium or Little Tokyo’s space shuttle or the waterless fountains of the Civic Center. They all flunk Hopkins’ tests.

So pervasive has been this theme of gaudy failure that I expected the MTA to continue the pattern. But no. Incredibly, the art program may be the one thing that the MTA has done right.

As Hopkins says, “I like most of it. The art fits the function of the stations. You get intrigued by it.”

In case you’re one of the millions who have not yet gotten on the rail system, here are some examples:

* In Union Station, a large, stone cone rises from the floor. Embedded in the cone are artifacts taken from the Los Angeles River. Why the river? Because the station sits on the former bed of the river. You can sit on an adjoining bench and study fossils, ancient opium vials, horseshoes and even false teeth from our predecessors.

* At the El Segundo station on the Green Line, a giant steel hand rises from the platform. The hand delicately holds a paper airplane that is about to get launched toward the sites of the old factories that once defined America’s aircraft industry.

* At the Douglas station on the Green Line, the concrete steps have been embedded with snippets of late 20th century conversation, such as “Next time, maybe,” and “I sound just like my mother” and “You’re talking crazy.”

In other cases, the art probably will never be recognized as such. Like the shape of a canopy over a station that fills the interior with blue light. Or a bench along a wall that’s something more than just a bench.

As Emsden says, “Taking the subway sometimes means waiting. We are trying to make the waiting more interesting.”

Apparently even the artists have felt the pressure to produce works that will continue to intrigue MTA riders. Terry Braunstein, who did the Anaheim station on the Blue Line, says she normally never considers the response of the viewer when she works on a piece of art. But with the station, she did.

“I worried the whole way through it,” she said. “So many people will be subjected to my work every day, and they have no way to avoid it. I wanted them to enjoy my station.”

John Outterbridge, who did part of the Avalon station on the Blue Line, says much the same thing. “It’s tangible, touchable stuff. You have the chance to turn something bleak and mundane into something that blesses people’s lives. You want to get it right.”

*

From what I’ve seen, mostly they did get it right, and it’s worth every penny of the average $80,000 they spent per station. Because of the art, each station on the MTA lines is different, and each has its own intrigues.

So here’s my unsolicited advice to the MTA board: Forget the debacle with the rocks. In the end, it’s chump change. If you ax the arts program, you risk losing one of the few programs that’s going right.

Remember, you’re changing the landscape of Los Angeles and leaving a legacy. A few works of art is not so bad, legacy-wise.

Better than a sinkhole, if you know what I mean.