Remember when a laser lightshow was going to save Long Beach?

IMAGE COURTESY ARTS COUNCIL LONG BEACH

Richard Florida was prowling the stage in a Hyatt ballroom, his every thoughtful chin stroke, reflective pause, and rim-shot wisecrack narrowcast over two state-of-the-art flat-screens at stages left and right for an audience of business types gathered to hear a certified thinker (a University of Toronto professor and the author of The Rise of the Creative Class) tell us that Long Beach matters.

We want to tell you more about the stagecraft, about the props to Florida’s left and right, the toylike skyscrapers, the featureless mannequins meant to symbolize you and me seeing bravely into a stainless-steel and, who knows, silicon future. We want to describe Florida’s televangelical style, including the fact that the city reportedly paid $50,000 for his hour-long talk on Nov. 14.

But this isn’t a story about Richard Florida so much as it is about the city’s habit of paying outsiders to tell us we’re important, about half-hearted attempts to be something we’re not by hauling into the public square stuff that says we’re a Real City without understanding the full cost of our commitment to an antique cruise ship, wooden aircraft, an aquarium, a Russian submarine, the publicly funded courtship of big-box retailers and maybe an NFL football team—and almost 20 years ago, the Majic Wand, a laser-light art installation on Pine Avenue that was going to change the city forever.

AN INCOMPLETE HISTORY OF THE MAJIC WAND
You’ve probably never heard of the Majic Wand, but it’s still listed on the Arts Council of Long Beach website, where it’s described in the present tense:

Beckoning visitors to downtown Long Beach with lines of intense green light, the laser beams of the Majic Wand project from the theater marquee, are redirected by mirrors above Pine Avenue and extend north beyond the downtown area and south toward Catalina Island. This three-dimensional light sculpture interacts with the city lights while reaching out far to sea.

So what happened?

The short, unhappy life of the Majic Wand began with a city Redevelopment Agency initiative called One Percent for Art. Under the program, real estate developers seeking loans and other support from the Redevelopment Agency invest an amount equivalent to one percent of their project budget on public art or cultural programs. You can discern the problems with One Percent for Art in the very language of the requirement: The developer promises to display and maintain the artwork for a period of time that is up to negotiation, and the developer gets to choose and commission the artwork.

The Majic Wand was the $184,300 art offering of the Janss Corporation, which received RDA financing to redevelop Pine Square.

It’s unfair to suggest that the Majic Wand is lampless, lightless, dimmed because it’s undeserving of our attention. The media traditionally measures the importance of a work of art by its price tag, and the Majic Wand cost six figures when it was installed in 1992—not Portrait of Dr. Gachet pricey, but respectable for an urban development project. And in purely artistic terms, the Majic Wand’s got what you’d call class: It’s the work of Rockne Krebs, one of the fathers of laser art.

In the early 1960s, Lieutenant Rockne Krebs served aboard the USS Bennington, then stationed in Long Beach. Unlike most other sailors, Krebs returned to Long Beach, in 1992, and unlike all others could tell 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 30. A long and distinguished career combining art and technology followed. His art has been displayed in major exhibitions in 25 cities around the world; in 1977, he was awarded a patent for his use of multiple-reflection laser beams to produce visual effects like the one that would be used in the Majic Wand.

And by the time he returned to Long Beach in 1992, he’d also acquired the sort of cultural cachet that might have assured you’d remember the Majic Wand.

NUDE ROCKNE
Almost 20 years later, it’s hard to convey the heat and venom of the so-called “Culture War” at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the ’90s. Angry conservatives, appalled that eight years of Ronald Reagan in the White House hadn’t produced a world that resembled their fantasies of 1950s America, 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., prepared a retrospective of the work of the recently deceased photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Some of Mapplethorpe’s work was undeniably homoerotic, and some of it was quite explicit. (Most favored in right-wing diatribes: a nude male with a bullwhip sticking out of his ass.) Rightwing politicians, leaders and radio tools 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, a man who owed his political career to his fierce defense of racial segregation, the Culture Warriors howled that the exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s works, all of which had 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.

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 local press. 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 art department 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’S ON
After the guerrilla Mapplethorpe exhibit, it’s arguable that the Majic Wand was Krebs’ biggest contribution to the street. When it debuted in 1992, the Press-Telegram declared it would “forever change the downtown night.” “Forever,” it turned out, meant less than three years.

The Press-Telegram wasn’t alone in its enthusiasm. In a 1994 story asserting that public art can revitalize an economy, the Riverside Press-Enterprise said the Majic Wand’s “beams of emerald-colored laser light that create geometric shapes in the Long Beach night sky” were more than just pretty, they were an economic development tool. The Wand had “made a dramatic difference in the downtown area, which had been in an economic slump.”

THE FUTURE DOESN’T AGE WELL
Art produced by laser light reflected by a complicated array of mirrors sounds like the stuff of the future, and it is. But unfortunately, the future doesn’t age well.

Lasers are temperamental, and those mirrors are vulnerable to birds, the weather, and the rest of the great outdoors. From the beginning the Majic Wand was plagued by maintenance problems. It went dark regularly. That’s why, while the Majic Wand was being installed in Long Beach, other cities were moving away from such projects. Any public art expert could have predicted the problems the Wand was likely to have, but the Janss Corporation wasn’t required to consult with any experts. It wanted a laser, and it got one.

The city got a commitment from the Janss Corporation to maintain and operate the Wand for five years. In the end, that five-year plan proved as wildly optimistic as the Press-Telegram’s prediction that the Wand would forever change the downtown night.

In 1995, shortly after USC’s School of Architecture gave the company the Parkinson Spirit of Urbanism Award—“in recognition of 100 years of innovative real estate development”—the Janss Corporation imploded. Bankruptcy papers were filed, the corporation dissolved, and along with the corporation its commitment to maintain the Wand and a sizeable chunk of the RDA’s money. Presumably, that wasn’t the sort of innovation USC had in mind.

The new owners of Pine Square were under no obligation to maintain the Majic Wand. So except for a brief period in 1997 when the Wand was reactivated, the city of Long Beach ended up with a privately owned $184,300 paperweight.

Fortunately for the RDA, neither the Press-Telegram nor any other newspaper noticed when the Majic Wand was switched off in 1995.

EPILOGUE
Despite its problems, the Majic Wand still has admirers. According to Leslie Markle, interim director of the Arts Council’s Public Art Program, RDA head Craig Beck is very interested in lighting up the Wand again, with the RDA footing the bill. The discussions are in an early stage, and there’s still a long way to go—everything from whether the laser is still able to function to who actually owns the Majic Wand remains to be determined—but Markle is optimistic about the return of laser art to Pine Avenue.

So maybe the Wand will get back to its mission of forever changing the downtown night. Just don’t expect it to magically transform anything about the way Long Beach does business.

Tags: lasers, Long Beach, Majic Wand, MAPPLETHORPE