Veterans sculpture is ‘plop art’ and Ellen Beraud was right to oppose it, expert says
Of political reactionaries, it is often said they never learn anything; they never forget anything.
So it is with Al Fonzi’s last-ditch effort to smear Ellen Beraud’s candidacy for 5th District county supervisor (Rebuttal, Tribune, Feb. 26).
Regarding the real issue here, the Faces of Freedom sculpture group, I write as an art curator/art historian.
My colleague in art, Army veteran Tim Anderson, an artist and former exhibition installer at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, was asked to advise the memorial’s proponents in 2007.
When they met to tell him their plans for a large sculpture of combat figures in action, he cautioned them that it could be perceived as glorifying war and encouraged a monument more like the universally loved Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C.
Anderson’s counsel went unheeded, and he was not invited back. When he saw the final design, he told me it reminded him of a junior high school boy’s idea of a war movie.
Tribune readers need to know that when large-scale projects and works of art are placed on public land, there always needs to be a vetting process — a call for entries.
The multiple entries are then assessed by an arts committee whose members have aesthetic expertise. But this wasn’t to be. The memorial’s uber-patriot faction aggressively pushed only the sculpture group by local artist Mark Greenaway.
Many others in the community voiced their objections, first to its placement in the historical Sunken Gardens as was originally proposed, and second by those who recognized the obvious failures of the sculpture itself.
At Beraud’s correct procedural recommendation, an arts committee was formed. According to member Stephen P. LaSalle, former president of the Atascadero Historical Society, all five members originally opposed the sculpture on the basis of its confused design and pointlessly aggressive content.
LaSalle told me the charging infantryman recalled the plastic toy soldiers of his childhood. Others objected to the mash-up of military heads fused onto the American flag — their pie-eyed faces staring blankly at who knows what. My dismay was reserved for the monstrously scaled eagle head that appears about to sink its beak into the derriere of the running warrior.
But the hardball tactics of the right-wing faction of the veterans group prevailed, pressuring City Council members to abandon their better judgment, abetted by Atascadero’s legacy of provincialism.
Beraud’s decision to stand on procedural principle was the sole courageous vote, representing the wider public’s chance to have a voice in the selection of a sculpture of excellence instead of the bollixed bronze behemoth we got.
The sad thing about this dredged up non-controversy from 13 years back is that, originally, the entire community was supportive of a veterans memorial site, including those who later objected only to the failed sculpture.
But the Fonzi faction putsch was not to be denied, and so we ended up with a piece of plop art that mars forever the sacred space where we gather to honor the service of Atascadero’s military veterans.
Gordon Fuglie has worked at the J. Paul Getty Museum, UCLA’s graphic arts collection, Loyola Marymount University’s Art Gallery and the San Luis Obispo Art Center.