Photos by Greggory Moore.
Someone might very well write a story about the many steps the City of Long Beach has taken to beautify itself.
This is not that story. This is a story about how what may have been the best of intentions translated into a large and completely uninspired piece of public art that has been sitting at one of Long Beach’s most highly trafficked street corners for years. Call this a cry for error correction.
Unlike the faux boxwood installed only steps away, it’s not like I had never noticed the mural painted onto the wooden screening that runs from the Convention Center’s promenade along Ocean Blvd. and then southward along Pine Ave. I’d seen it, snickered, and not given it a second thought. But noticing the faux boxwood brought the corner again to mind.
You know what the visual-arts scene in Long Beach loves? Long Beach. Take a mural-viewing tour of Long Beach and count how of them depict Long Beach itself. Walk into a sampling of art galleries and note all the photographs of the Queen Mary, the paintings of our not-exactly-awe-inspiring skyline. Appealing to tourism accounts for only so much. As regards the visual arts, Long Beach is sick with self-love.
But who am I to tell painters and photographers their business? At the end of his life Monet painted and painted his frigging garden (never mind that his subject was the changing light as much as anything else). Why shouldn’t Long Beach artists come again and again to the Villa Riviera, which is, after all, a magnificent piece of architecture?
Fine. I concede the point. But let us nonetheless consider that southeast corner of Ocean and Pine.
Yes, the mural at Ocean and Pine actually features a man standing at Ocean and Pine.
I don’t know traffic statistics, but my guess is that only the PCH traffic circle may get see as many vehicles on a daily basis. Add in foot traffic, and Ocean and Pine has to be the most seen spot in the city. That goes double (triple, quintuple) for out-of-towners. The Convention Center is literally right there. Aquarium tourists who stray away from Rainbow Harbor are going to hit Pine, one of Long Beach’s two centers for nightlife. Long Beach’s highest concentration of hotels centers around that intersection. Visitors for the Grand Prix, Gay Pride, the Performing Arts Center, the Sports Arena, etc., can’t miss that corner. It’s a face we show our guests.
What do they see? If a picture’s worth a thousand words, I’m being redundant in this space to opine that they find themselves looking at a piece of art memorable only for how provincial it is to be featured in such a prominent spot. “Silhouettes of people doing stuff!” a friend remarked with wry excitement as I discussed writing this piece. A guy squatting. A painter with a roller. A woman walking her dog. A man in a three-piece suit beneath Ocean/Pine street signs. What is the message here: We Long Beachers do all the normal things that people do everywhere?
The jejuneness is made more so by the inclusion of—you guessed it—more Long Beach landmarks. Hey, it’s the Villa Riviera! And the Queen Mary! And, and…. It gets so desperate that, there, in all its vainglory, is—it can’t be!—a representation of the fake roller-coaster that runs the length of the Pike bridge.
Even were these wonderful things to paint, why paint them there when people at that spot can see the actual things only blocks away?
It’s a question to which we will never know the full answer, because of the limits sometimes inherent to institutional memory. According to Jackie McCann, communication lead for Development Service, in this case the institution is the Redevelopment Agency (RDA), which we all know exists no more.
Do we really want our public art to celebrate the Pike traffic bridge’s faux roller-coaster?
What McCann can tell us is that prior to the wooden wall there was simply a chain-link fence, which was both unsightly and, more importantly, was an unsafe barricade between the sidewalk and the vacant lot. “It was a safety issue,” she relates. “We needed to get that fence out.”
So in 2009 the RDA contracted Phantom Galleries—who was doing some excellent work activating vacant retail space around town until there was no more money to fund their doing so—to decorate the fence. They, in turn, contracted a then-Long Beach artist (whose name I omit, since the point here is not to trash anyone’s reputation, but rather to improve our own) for the job. Et voilà.
McCann does not know how or whether the artist and concept were vetted, reporting that the staff presumably involved with those aspects of decision-making process are no longer with the City. It was, after all, almost an Olympiad ago.
But that means the mural has been sitting there a long time, presenting us to visitors as not an especially compelling town aesthetically. Which is a damn shame, because we’re so much more interesting than that, so much more beautiful.
The good news? Nothing could be simpler than a civic facelift. How simple? I’m neither painter, civic planner nor Arts Council member, and yet I bet I could get that corner repainted, with no greater cost to the City than the paint, by some rather electric local visual talent, repainted so that when people see it, they will view Long Beach in a far better and more memorable light.
Cities are not completely free to choose how they will self-determine. But with all of our limitations, we can do a hell of a lot better at Ocean and Pine.