If the Majic Wand does return to Long Beach after a long absence, it will be a case of art imitating life. Because when Rockne Krebs arrived in LB to install his laser art project in 1992, it wasn’t his first time here.

In the early ‘60’s, Lieutenant Rockne Krebs of the United States Navy, serving aboard the USS Bennington, was stationed in Long Beach. It was only fitting, if completely accidental, that his ship shared its name with a famous liberal arts college, since Krebs by that time already had a BFA in sculpture from the University of Kansas. Other than that, his experience here was perhaps little different from thousands of other sailors.

Unlike other sailors, however, when Rockne Krebs returned to Long Beach in 1992, he could boast, as he did to the Press-Telegram, “I’m the first person on the planet to create urban-scale laser works.”

He began working with lasers shortly after he finished his naval service. By 1968, Krebs created the first three dimensional laser sculpture. He was only thirty. A long and distinguished career combining art and technology followed.

On the artistic side, Krebs’ work has been displayed in major exhibitions in 25 cities around the world. As for technology, in 1977 Krebs was awarded a patent for his process of use of multiple reflection of laser beams to produce visual effects.

And by the time he returned to Long Beach in 1992, he’d also acquired in interesting bit of cultural baggage.

Almost twenty years later, it’s hard to convey the heat and the venom of the so-called “Culture War” at the end of the ’80’s and beginning of the ’90’s. Angry conservatives– appalled that after eight years of Ronald Reagan in the White House, the world didn’t resemble their fantasies of what 1950’s America had been– mounted a crusade against any work of art that couldn’t have been featured on Leave It to Beaver. Indignation flowed freely, and every week seemed to bring forth a fresh opportunity for conservatives to be outraged.

One of the more famous battles in the Culture War took place in 1989, when the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. was about to open a retrospective of the work of the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Part of Mapplethorpe’s work had a strong homoerotic component, some of it quite explicit. (The most discussed/shrieked about photograph in the exhibit featured a nude male model with a bullwhip sticking out of his ass.) The rightwing exploded in well-choreographed fury at the prospect of such naughtiness being shown in a gallery in the nation’s capital. Led by North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, who owed his political career to his fierce defense of segregation during the ’60’s and ’70’s, the Culture Warriors howled that the exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s works, all of which had been already been publicly displayed, would irreparably damage America. The Corcoran, demonstrating the courage institutions typically showed during the period, timidly backed down and canceled the exhibition.

This time, however, some artists fought back. Rockne Krebs was one of their leaders.

When night fell on June 30, 1989, Krebs used his lasers to project huge versions of most of Mapplethorpe’s work on the outside of the Corcoran. (Certain photos, like the famous man with a bullwhip, were omitted.) The country survived. So did Krebs’ career.

If Krebs’ act of defiance and his support of Mapplethorpe were still controversial when he switched on the Majic Wand in December 1992, there was no mention of it in the newspapers. Of course it is the fate of almost every successful artist to become thoroughly respectable, if he or she lives long enough. Consider how Judith McCrea, then Chair of the Department of Art at the University of Kansas, described Krebs, when he returned to his alma mater as a visiting artist in 2005: “Rockne Krebs is an innovative artist who has been very successful in securing major grants and commissions to support huge installations of his laser sculptures.” It sounds like he should be teaching in the College of Business instead (very successful in securing…). It sounds like a description calculated to reassure worried parents of art majors that their children won’t necessarily starve.

Very successful– it certainly describes Rockne Krebs. Whether or not it will describe his creation the Majic Wand remains to be seen.

Tags: bullwhip, Culture Wars, Jesse Helms, Judith McCrea, lasers, Leave It to Beaver, Majic Wand, public art, Robert Mapplethorpe, Rockne Krebs, Ronald Reagan, U.S. Navy, University of Kansas