ART REVIEWS: VARIEGATED EXPERIENCES : Santa Monica Place Offers Setting for ‘Sound Portrait’

“Listen,” say the signs that are printed in five languages and suspended amid pastel streamers at the Santa Monica Place mall. The instructions don’t refer to the usual din of shrieking children and rushing fountains. Instead, the white placards ask shoppers to tune in to “Santa Monica Sound Portrait.” The work by audio artist Bill Fontana broadcasts live sounds from the Santa Monica Pier throughout the airy, three-story shopping center.

A speaker planted by a tree in the atrium broadcasts a crashing wave. Eighteen other black boxes offer the clackety-clack of arcade games, grinding melodies of the carrousel, the roar of traffic and snatches of conversation. Because the sound depends entirely on what’s happening in the vicinity of the pier--where six broadcast-quality telephone lines are hidden--it varies greatly from one moment to another.

On a quiet weekday afternoon, you may stroll through the mall and hear only the soothing sound of water. During a sunny weekend, beachside activity accelerates so dramatically that even sympathetic listeners have likened the audio “portrait” to a noisy construction site.

It’s all music--or at least fascinating sound--to Fontana, an internationally known artist who is currently at work on an acoustical portrait of the Golden Gate Bridge. Traveling around the world, the San Francisco-based artist has sent the sounds of Thailand to the Bronx Zoo and celebrated the Brooklyn Bridge’s centenary by transmitting the sound of tires on the studded steel girders to a plaza at the World Trade Center. He also has temporarily restored life to a deserted train station in West Berlin by infusing it with announcements from Cologne’s bustling rail center.

In Santa Monica, Fontana has put the beach in a commercial context and upset some people who think there’s already quite enough noise at the shopping center. Whether or not they accept this sort of thing as art, many merchants aren’t convinced that shoppers really want to be accosted by a cacophony of piped-in sea gulls, faulty mufflers and family quarrels while trying to buy a pair of shoes or to relax with a cup of cappuccino.

But Santa Monica Place regulars should know by now that art has long since taken up residence at the mall. It emanates from a third-floor gallery space originally occupied by an outpost of the Craft and Folk Art Museum and more recently by USC Atelier.

Much of the time, Atelier director Noel Korten simply installs well-behaved exhibitions in the gallery, but he has an abiding interest in bringing art out to meet the public. Whenever he can manage it, Korten initiates projects that refuse to sit tight in the gallery. Fontana’s “Sound Portrait” (through May 17) is the latest and probably the diciest because it intrudes much more insistently than the more conventional sculpture and video monitors that have been installed at the mall by the Atelier.

That’s too bad, for the aggressive, “confrontational” aspects of Fontana’s art obscure a very gentle and intriguing sensibility. His passion for listening intently, isolating sounds that identify a place and orchestrating meaningful displacements are every bit as focused as a fine visual artist’s efforts to reveal hidden or unnoticed truths in painting or sculpture. Fontana finds art in noise, just as other artists discover art in scrap heaps or popular culture.

But he asks a lot by greeting shoppers with an unsolicited and often obstreperous distraction. As he overlays one milieu of sounds on another in a noise-polluted atmosphere, it isn’t clear that he reveals anything beyond a raised decibel level. Despite the obvious logic of relocating the sound of one part of a city in another and letting it listen to itself, the effect of Fontana’s work is much purer and more pointed when he introduces strange sound into a quiet space.

Which brings us back to the gallery, where “Santa Monica Sound Portrait” comes together in a row of speakers, and a modest display of photographs and printed explanations of other Fontana projects provides a documentary background.

Something curious happens inside this clearly designated art space. The noise that seemed rather threatening outside grows louder and more intense, but it’s also oddly comforting. The artist’s intention becomes clear and his concept is fascinating in an environment that fosters concentration. Suddenly the beachside “music” is as richly varied as densely worked painting.

This seems all wrong, like putting raw graffiti in chic Manhattan galleries, but the analogy doesn’t hold. Fontana is a sophisticated artist with a rarefied ear, and shoppers may be the world’s toughest audience.