Whaling Wall : Frank Stella Tackles His Largest Project Downtown

Frank Stella has a very big project in the works and he loves it. “I can’t fake artistic serenity or indifference. It’s too exciting, what’s going on,” he said, grinning broadly about the fun of it all.

What’s going on is a gigantic mural, covering more than 40,000 square feet of wall space in downtown Los Angeles.

Is it the world’s biggest mural? No, but it’s the largest project ever tackled by Stella, a leading contemporary artist who is known for his prodigious output as well as his artistic foresight. Furthermore, it’s the world’s biggest abstract mural. “That’s the great thing about being an abstract painter: You can set records,” Stella said, cheerfully deflating his image as a fearsome New York aesthetician.

The mural was commissioned for the 52-story Gas Co. Tower, under construction at 555 West 5th St., but it is being painted on the south and east walls of the adjacent Pacific Bell/AT&T; Building, at 433 S. Olive St. When complete, in mid-November, the 300-foot painting will be visible from Pershing Square, on Olive Street and Grand Avenue (between 5th and 6th streets) and through the lobby and office windows of the Gas Co. Tower.

Funds for Stella’s mural were provided by the Percent for Art program of the Community Redevelopment Agency. The Gas Co. Tower was required to put 1%, or $2.3 million, of its $230-million budget into public art. Sixty percent, or $1.38 million, of the $2.3 million was designated for art on the site. The remaining 40%, or $920,000, went to the CRA’s trust fund for downtown arts projects. The total cost of Stella’s mural and a sculpture by James Carpenter, to be installed next spring, exceeds the required $1.38 million, according to project manager Daniel R. Kingsley, but he declined to state the exact price of the artwork.

Four muralists, under the direction of Joseph F. Sansone, are painting the mural with rollers and airbrushes while scaling the walls on rope-suspended rigs. The team is painting a greatly enlarged version of a montage that Stella composed of paper collage and photographs of a metal construction. Called “Dusk,” the abstract mural is part of Stella’s ongoing “Moby Dick” series, loosely based on motion and travel rather than episodes of Herman Melville’s classic adventure story.

The original montage is an artwork in itself, but Stella delights in seeing it transformed. “I can praise it because it’s not my work,” he said, peering at the mural from various angles. Having collaborated with master printers and metal fabricators for many years, Stella has no difficulty working with technicians--or appreciating their expertise.

“Look at him roll that on. I love it,” he exclaimed from a rooftop vantage point, as a painter applied a swath of bright pink.

In another part of the mural, it’s the black passages that knock him out. “That black is just dynamite. I didn’t expect it could come out like this,” he said, rushing over to a window to admire a dark, sweeping arc. “Who could know?” he asked, explaining that no one could predict exactly how the original artwork would translate when photographed, enlarged and painted on a stucco wall.

The transformations are striking. Simple scraps of torn paper in the montage become furling forms with dramatic shadows in the mural. Red lines that appear straight in a working photograph of the original artwork have grown into crooked paths with shaggy edges. “I asked Frank if he wanted those lines straightened out, but he liked them as they are,” Sansone said.

“Joe has a tremendous touch,” Stella said. “Magnification makes it in some way more interesting, but the mural has more art quality than reproduction quality.”

In accepting the translation from montage to mural, Stella may shock those who have watched his work since he emerged in 1959 as a 23-year-old Wunderkind . But nothing is more characteristic of Stella than his inability to sit still. At 55, he’s a wiry, curly-haired, perpetual-motion machine. He can appear ill at ease in polite company, but he has enormous energy and he’s said to play a mean game of squash. Once he gets going on the subject of art, he spits out killer sentences that say more about his intense engagement with art than about any specific issue.

Thrilled by the variety of surface effects and the visual motion in the mural, Stella struggles for a word. “ Inflection , that’s what I’m looking for,” he explodes. “Everything in the mural is inflected and the inflection carries over into the enlargement, which I think is the best part of the mural.”

In his art, Stella is noted for taking abstraction to one limit after another. After coming on strong in the early 1960s with flat, black canvases, he transported painting to new extremes of high color and glittery surfaces. A longtime partisan of abstract painting, he found truth in Caravaggio’s realism--during a 1984 sojourn in Rome--and told the world about it in a highly publicized series of lectures at Harvard University.

Now, in “Dusk,” Stella has turned the tables again. After pushing painting into the three-dimensional realm of sculpture, he has returned to a flat surface. What’s more, he has embraced trompe l’oeil effects. Pushpins, curling strips of masking tape and crumpled bits of marbleized paper are being writ large in an illusion of high relief.

“They’re rendering dirt there,” Stella said of a section where the painters have transformed detritus from his studio floor into landscape-like expanses of gray and brown. “To make collage work, you have to use paper that has fallen on the floor and then been revived. Resurrection is the theme,” he said.

All this from an artist whose 1964 statement, “What you see is what you see,” became a Minimalist dictum.

But Stella had already moved to a less restrictive point of view when his Minimalist quote began to be repeated. He has been harshly criticized for taking sharp turns, but he has never been given an art-world parking ticket.

The Gas Co. Tower commission was a challenge, however. The site--a sort of alley, except for a wrap-around section that boldly faces Olive Street--is far from ideal because there is no way to stand back from the mural and get a good view of the whole thing. “I thought it was crazy at first. It seemed hopeless,” Stella said of the project. But in the 3 1/2 years since developer Robert F. Maguire, managing partner of Maguire Thomas Partners, first contacted him about the mural, Stella has come to terms with the site.

Now, as the painting progresses, he points out unexpected bonuses. He likes the way interior architectural elements pave the way to the mural, for example. Channels of water under thick glass panels in the lobby floor lead to a wall of windows, where the lower part of the painting can be viewed. Wood-encased light fixtures running between banks of elevators also direct visitors’ eyes to the mural. One chunk of the painting appears in a window at the top of an escalator that leads to the lobby, one floor above Grand Avenue and two levels above Olive Street.

“We talk about this stuff--formal elements leading into the picture--in art history classes, but this is the real thing,” Stella said. Indeed, viewers in the lobby are likely to feel as if they are inside the enormous painting.

Columns in the lobby interrupt a continuous view of the mural, but Stella is unperturbed. These intrusions and pedestrians’ ever-changing viewpoints make the art akin to narratives or film frames, adding a dimension to the viewing experience and relating to the “Moby Dick” theme, he said.

The image of “Dusk” has remained quite constant since Stella first responded to Maguire’s query with a proposal, but ideas about reproducing have changed along the way. “We tried a computer-controlled method used on billboards, but this project was too big. The technology defeated us,” Maguire said.

Sansone’s Phoenix-based company, Architectural Wallcoverings Installations Inc., eventually got the job. Sansone, who has painted murals since 1952, began producing gridded transparencies of the montage on May 31. About a month later, he and his crew started to project them on the downtown building’s wall and outline the forms in charcoal. Working with rollers and high-volume, low-pressure airbrushes--developed so that the paint doesn’t blow into the atmosphere--the painters consult photographic enlargements of the montage as they fill in colors and model forms. They can control their airbrushes to produce everything from a pencil-width line to a wide fan of color, Sansone noted.

The central section of “Dusk” is expected to be finished in a week or two. A second large strip, to be painted over a recently resurfaced wall, will likely take about six weeks to paint. The final section, on Olive Street, will require a few more weeks of work.

The arena of public art can be fraught with problems, including graffiti. Since the mural is well above street level, the artist anticipates no problems with vandalism.

Stella admits that he had to shift gears to bring off this mural, but he appears to have no regrets. “This is public art in the best sense. It’s available. It has no pretentions. We’re not making great claims for it. This is art for the public to see and enjoy,” he said.

Part of his delight over “Dusk” is simply seeing it come to fruition. “Ninety-nine out of 100 of these things end up as proposals. They never get done,” he said. “My motto is, you can’t lose them all.”

He’s prepared to lose the mural after a few years, however. Despite improvements in mural paint, 10 years is about the maximum life expectancy. “That’s long enough,” he said. “If people like it, they can continue it (by repainting it). If not, they can try something else, give somebody else a chance. Somebody else might have a better idea.”