"Collar and Bow," a 65-foot-tall sculpture of men's formalwear accessories, was supposed to go up in 2004 to provide a jaunty greeting outside Walt Disney Concert Hall. Today it rests in pieces behind a tomblike warehouse in Irvine.
Blackbirds are the main audience for at least $3.8 million worth of work by Pop Art eminences Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. The birds flit and twitter in eucalyptus trees behind a fence that separates the sculptural fragments from an equipment yard at Irvine's Public Works Department.
Meanwhile, the aborted sculpture's economic debris is being sorted out across the corner from Disney Hall at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse. The Los Angeles Music Center, which hired Oldenburg and Van Bruggen, is suing the married couple, along with fabricators and engineers who tried to assemble their work, in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
The damages, Music Center attorney David Lira said this week, come to more than $6 million, including payments for the sculpture, additional money for consultants and $600,000 that the Music Center plowed fruitlessly into reinforcing the sidewalk in front of the Frank Gehry-designed hall at 1st Street and Grand Avenue so the ground could support the heavy steel objects that never arrived.
The suit charges that when the final delivery deadline of Aug. 1, 2006, passed -- two years after the original date -- fabricators still had not solved technical problems that the Music Center said involved the white wing collar accompanying a giant black bow tie. In addition, "portions of the sculpture that were allegedly completed were literally falling apart" as surface skins came loose from underlying bones.
Oldenburg and Van Bruggen have festooned public places around the world with offbeat, brightly colored, gargantuan representations of everyday objects, including the massive binoculars that form the facade of the Gehry-designed Chiat/Day building in Venice; a sculpture owned by L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art that is a mammoth hybrid of a Viking ship and a double-bladed pocketknife plus corkscrew; and "Cupid's Span," a bow and arrow planted in a park with a view of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.
But Lira says the artists and their technical collaborators struck out on "Collar and Bow."
