The hall mark

Do you know about the Dept. of Redundancy Dept.? It’s the official (if fictional) place to go to accomplish something needless, and to get it done double-time. The Dept. of Redundancy Dept. is good at glut, superb at superfluity. Excessive duplication is a specialty.

Surely the department is behind the commission to erect a monumental sculpture at the corner of 1st Street and Grand Avenue, at the entrance to the splendid new Walt Disney Concert Hall. At that specific spot in our otherwise beleaguered civic landscape, the glorious view of Frank Gehry’s critically acclaimed building is so drop-dead impressive that putting an enormous sculpture out front to mimic the instant-landmark’s buoyant curves can only augment the magnificence. Don’t you think?

And look at the subject! A white wing collar and black bow tie, tossed to the wind! Carefree audacity, in fiberglass and steel.

The sculpture is being fabricated now, and it won’t be installed until next summer. But based on a digitally fabricated picture of the sculpture on-site, it works like the giant Carpeteria genie or Michelin Man outside a rug shop or tire store -- sculpture that functions as a sign. In less than a year, Disney Hall has become perhaps the most famous building in Los Angeles, which means one of the most famous in the nation. You wouldn’t think it needs a sign.

The stainless steel concert hall is a wild abstraction, which wraps the most genteel and tradition-bound of all the performing arts within the computer-plotted cloak of radically progressive architecture. The sculpture is a parody of that distinctly modern tension, rendered in representational terms. Never mind that the conventional sartorial requirement for a philharmonic orchestra is white tie, not the black tie that this sculpture proposes to cast aside. Amy Vanderbilt is dead, and pedantry is a bore. The Dept. of Redundancy Dept. knows what it’s doing, and furthermore is doing what it knows.

It knows that a Pop sculpture by the New York husband-and-wife team of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen -- the OldenBruggens, to simplify -- is practically a requirement for a Gehry building in L.A. This will be the third example.

“Collar and Bow” joins the giant pair of binoculars at the former Chiat/Day Building in Venice (one of the famous duo’s best works) and the toppling stepladder and spilling paint can at Loyola Law School near downtown (among their worst). Gehry recommended the OldenBruggens for all three projects.

Since 1976, they’ve erected more than two dozen Pop sculptures in urban settings across the United States and Europe, as well as in Tokyo, and of those I’ve seen, misses have outnumbered hits. Manhattan, where the artists live, cannot boast a single large-scale, permanent, site-specific work by the team. Maybe that’s just because New York can’t seem to get a major building erected by the most important American architect of our time.

L.A. might be overrun with major artists, including sculptors of colossal talent who have worked here for decades and built international reputations of the first rank but who haven’t had an opportunity to erect a major sculpture on prime local real estate. But safety counts when redundancy matters: Do not take chances, especially on culture.

Stick with the predictable. Certified out-of-town art celebrities are a warm security blanket, because you don’t have to put your own taste on the line and then defend it. Yes, there is irony here. Gehry was in an identical position when he got the coveted 1988 commission to design Disney Hall -- local genius, ignored by cultural pooh-bahs locally. His hiring was a miracle that set the town giddily on its ear. Apparently that out-of-character artistic event hasn’t had long-term consequences for civic self-confidence over at the Music Center.

Plus, “Collar and Bow” is safe because partly pretested. The sculpture is a variation on a dull 1994 piece, commissioned for a sidewalk outside a major bank in Frankfurt, Germany. (Banks take no more chances than music centers do.) That corporate sculpture did to a man’s traditional business attire -- dress shirt collar and striped tie -- what the Disney sculpture plans to do for masculine formal wear: toss it aside.

Frankfurt’s “Inverted Collar and Tie,” like much of the sculptors’ work, also gives an inanimate object human attributes. The two ends of a tall striped necktie are flung apart in the air, like acrobatic legs somersaulting in the street. At Disney Hall it’s the wing collar that will do the aerial splits, with the looping bow tie swooping through the middle.

Parting legs are a standard feature of the OldenBruggen repertoire. Creation defines art, and it’s a sexual trait too. The anthropomorphic aspect of their work typically has an erotic dimension. The binoculars that hilariously straddle the entrance to the Chiat/Day parking garage form a wacky triumphal arch, through which to enter the modern magic kingdom of an advertising agency. But it’s also an automotive Colossus of Roads [sic]. You get to drive between its “legs,” while the prospect of scrutinizing that view with binoculars generates an eye-popping guffaw.

Voluptuous breasts, engorged phalluses and other bodily allusions abound in the OldenBruggen’s most vivid work, and a 65-foot-tall sex act on the corner of 1st and Grand would sure stop traffic. Yet the blandly veiled “Collar and Bow” is unlikely to scare the horses.

Thing plus person, inanimate but vital, art object and sex act -- double entendres are a trademark of their approach. Oldenburg’s earlier, pre-Van Bruggen sculptures were often small articles (electric plug, clothespin, pool balls) made huge, or hard things (telephone, toilet, typewriter) made soft. Linguistically a double entendre is an indelicate pun, in which a single word can suggest multiple meanings. Pop art is a punster’s paradise.

At Disney Concert Hall, a bow might describe a necktie, but it’s also the name of the wooden stick that musicians drag across violin strings. Pronounced another way, bow is what conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and company do at the end of a performance. The bow is also the forward part of a sailing ship, and billowing sails and jibs are Gehry’s stated inspiration for the design of his curvaceous building.

Last and probably least, a collar is a band -- like the philharmonic. “Collar and Bow” makes a chic wisecrack. Regrettably, gigantic tonnages of steel and fiberglass make bubbly witticisms elephantine.

Groaning is not encouraged by the Dept. of Redundancy Dept., but an aura of mystery is. The undisclosed cost of the big, privately funded joke out on a public sidewalk is apparently a state secret, ranking right up there with who leaked Valerie Plame’s identity as an undercover CIA operative.

A generous Music Center couple is picking up part of the inevitably hefty “Collar” tab. The rest is being taken by the J. Paul Getty Trust. (Music Center president Stephen D. Rountree is the trust’s former chief operating officer.) Bold commitment to audacious art -- old or new -- hasn’t been much of a priority at the Getty Trust, so a cautious blue-chip project like this is ideal.

As a corny sculptural sign for an iconic building that has no need for one, the lackluster “Collar and Bow” proposal is a classic gambit of the Dept. of Redundancy Dept. But that’s not its only failing. It’s also a monumental sign of an intractably timid, clubby state of mind.