Arizona Republic from Phoenix, Arizona • Page 51

Sunday, December 15, 1985 EDITIONS The Arizona Republic ALL Spotlight I tE.J. Montini Republic Columnist Pi The incredible, inedible aspects of bad public art I once heard a newspaper photographer complaining to an editor about the reduction of one of his pictures. He shouted, "Even the Mona Lisa would look bad on a postage stamp." What the photographer did not wish to acknowledge, however, was that the opposite can be true. Some images some works of art look bad no matter how much they are reduced. Consider the art accompanying this article.

mi i i ney are among my iavor- fu-HAv ite pieces of public art, the ftV i best of the worst. Thev represent only a sampling of the wide range of wonderfully bad art available for public consumption in the Valley, but it is not a complete catalog. That is not possible. Instead, what is shown here attempts only to demonstrate the diversity and vigor of the work. Bad art is like sharp cheese.

It is best approached h- JUT The Lions Suzanne StarrRepublic Alan Cook of KFLR is in charge of the latest link in the Family Life Radio chain. warily and consumed in small chunks, and even then it leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Or is it a lack of taste? And it is deceiving. Some bad art is meant to be good art. Some is not meant to be art at all.

(Intent, or lack of it, does not guarantee disqualification.) Some works of bad public art were created by private individuals, others were purchased for public viewing by well-mean ing corporate executives or public officials. I am grateful to them all. They have done our community a service. They have dared to create art or have it created for them, then further dared to put it on public display. With the possible exception of the flasher (a kind of performance artist), there is nothing so bold or egotistical or, perhaps, as self-fulfilling.

This, then, is a kind of Valley tip sheet for public art: 2727 N. Central, U-Haul vvy Towers Company chair- Family Life thriving on radio man aam bnoen returned from a trip to the People's Republic of China a few years ago with a voucher for 10 carved "dragon sculptures" from Tientsin Province. A spokesman for the company says, "They were incredibly cheap by Western standards. He got the whole bunch of them for about $21,000, including shipping. dramatically different from that offered by KFLR, but the FM will be "more music intensive than the AM," according to Cook.

"It's going to give us more music in the middle of the day and in the evening," Cook added, explaining that morning and afternoon drive-time shows will be simulcast. No attempt will be made to give KFLR-FM a more contemporary sound than KFLR, which has been in existence since mid-1978, when Family Life Radio bought then-KRIZ from Doubleday Broadcasting for $1 million. "We pretty well committed to what we are. The music on the FM will sound a little brighter (but) we aren't going up into KRDS' range. That's not us," Cook said.

KRDS (1190 AM) uses a contemporary-Christian format; KFLR is more traditional in its musical selections. When asked why KFLR-FM does not take a different, albeit still Christian, approach, Cook replied, "That's not our calling. That's not our ministry. It's to minister to individuals and the family unit. "Our target audience is (age) 28 to 54.

Our commitment is also to do a full-service approach to broadcasting, which is why we're heavy on news and information." Seventh station started by group of Christian-format broadcasters By BUD WILKINSON Arizona Republic Staff The Phoenix radio market got a 37th station and its seventh religious outlet last week when Christian-formatted KFLR-FM finally debuted, 16 months after the Family Life Radio chain received federal permission to construct a station at 90.3 on the FM band. The non-commercial station has been broadcasting since midweek, but it won't officially be dedicated until today. A special half-hour ceremony, which will air on KFLR-FM and be simulcast by sister station KFLR (1230 AM), is planned for 1:30 p.m. The dedication broadcast, hosted by station manager and morning announcer Alan Cook, will include a recap of how the station came into being, a look at the programming plans for both stations and a prayer of thanks. In attendance will be Family Life Radio president Warren Bolthouse, who oversees the radio chain now owns seven stations, including KFLT in Tucson, in; three states.

Programming heard on KFLR-FM will not be Under a federal rule, AMFM "combos," as jointly owned stations are called in the industry, may simulcast no more than 25 percent of their programming. Because of that restriction and the fact that staff size at the KFLRs is limited the stations have eight full-time employees and six part-timers management had to choose between the stations when deciding where to concentrate its manpower resources. The winner apparently was the FM station. Cook said greater live emphasis will be placed on the FM station because of that band's dominance in terms of listenership. The AM outlet is switching to automated operation during the midday and evening hours.

In addition, KFLR plans to tap into the Moody Satellite Network, a service of the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, for a one-hour phone-in talk show at 7 p.m. weekdays plus an overnight music show. KFLR-FM will also be looking for listener input during middays, Cook said. Bruce Thurman and George Tanner will host a new midday magazine show, which will offer interviews and listener calls as well as music. Thurman, who handles the news chores on the morning show, will he heard from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m., and Tanner will be on from 1 1:30 a.m.

until 1:30 p.m. "We feel there are a lot of interesting people coming Radio, C8 The funny thing was, we The Bird thought people might actually think they were garish or something." 241 N. Central, Valley Bank Center (Not shown) A bank guard prevented us from taking photographs of Ontogenesis, a 1-ton wall sculpture stretching 50 feet into the bowels of the tower near the main escalator. Promotional literature tells us that the 25 metal pieces and 14 tapestries which make up the sculpture portray "through metaphor, imagery, and recurring symbolism the growth and development of the Southwest, and on a broader scale, the inviolate cycle of life itself." In other words, imagine a giant pizza, still in the pan, with the works, crashing through the building an splattering against the wall. mmmmsmm 20th Street and Camel-back Road, Town Country Shopping Center There are no good Phoenix birds in the Valley, and this is one of them.

Positioned to face visitors approaching from Camelback, this bird rises boldly and badly above the rest at this time of the year, when it is covered in Christmas lights. 35 W. Dunlap, Sunnys-lope High School An enormous impaled (twice in The Viking the back) Viking, the school mascot, faces drivers along Dunlap. What more could one expect from an institution where the athletic fight call is, "Go Slope!" 2347 W. Thomas, Payless Aquarium and Pet Supply A harmless brick wall was transformed recently into a phantasmal mural featuring exotic birds, tropical fish, air bubbles and a castle.

An employee says, "A guy and his wife did it with spray cans, I think. We paid him to do it. I'm not sure, but I think his name was something like Lone Wolf." There are so many others, He had the whole world in his hands Burr Tillstrom, puppet troupe guided viewers in TV's youth Commentary By TOM SHALES Washington Post WASHINGTON For those old enough to belong to the first American television generation, a last link with childhood and with television's own bright youth was irreparably severed when Burr Tillstrom, the creator and most of the cast of Kukla, Fran and Ollie, died in Palm Springs at the age of 68. Except for a brief cameo he might make at the end of each show, we saw no more of Tillstrom than his arms from about the elbows out. The rest of him was hidden beneath the proscenium that framed his puppet repertory company, the Kuklapolitan Players in its way as gifted an acting troupe as any that trod the boards of any theater on Earth.

Kukla, Fran and Ollie was more than theater, though; it was group therapy, an education in sensitivity for us kids and our parents at home. During particularly tender years, it seemed to us we learned as much about life from Kukla, Fran and Ollie as from any other single source. Television was making its first incursions into the role of parent, and in this case, as in few other cases, it delivered us into good hands. Good hands and brilliant hands. Burr Tillstrom made some of the happiest art television would ever see, and like the new medium that delivered it, it was fresh and bright and spontaneous, and it was full of hope.

It was live in the fullest sense of the term. It was real in the fullest sense of the term. It was maximum minimalism. The Kuklapolitans went on the air in 1947, when television was still a curiosity in saloons and appliance-store display windows. The format was so-simple that there really was no format: Fran Allison, the sole non-puppet regular on the program, strolled each evening around 7 and.

at the Phoenix Art Museum, the Scottsdale Center for the Arts, near private homes (including the world's largest ball of barbed wire in someone's front yard), at shopping centers (the great Tower Plaza towers, for instance), and on and on. Our tradition is not so grand as some cities. Hartford, for example, paid $87,000 in public funds to artist Carl Andre for The Fish Puppeteer Burr Tillstrom with Kukla, left, and Ollie. began a conversation with Kukla, a pragmatic imp with a polka-dot nose, and Oliver J. Dragon, a gregarious and flirtatious lizard with long, soulful eyelashes and one wobbly tooth at the end of his snout With that tooth, he would frequently assault the irresistible target of Kukla's proboscis, but always playfully and affectionately, never with rancor.

Other characters included Madame Oglepuss, a pompous, aspiring diva with a pincushion bosom, and Beulah Witch, a sassy old battle-ax who blew in on her broomstick armed with spells and bromides. No one talked about superstars then, but there were( no stars more super than these. In 1983, the Museum of Broadcasting in New York paid tribute to Tillstrom and the Kuklapolitans, who all showed up to conduct seminars and host screenings. Robert Batscha, director of the museum, remembers Tillstrom's visit fondly. "The shows never had a script, of course.

They were all improvised, and he didn't have a script here, either," Batscha says. "He would go behind the booth and pull out his characters, and it was extraordinary how he would adapt to the audience and 1e funnynd clever and witty. He was much mot than a puppeteer." Author Max Wilk talked with Tillstrom for his important 1976 book The Golden Age of Television. Tillstrom recalled doing his daily live show from thp Merchandise Mart in Chicago. "We made up televij-sion," Tillstrom said.

"There was no influence to teach us. We weren't conforming to anything. California never bothered to develop any television techniques1; they just adapted films to television. But Chicago in those days was a very special place." Kukla, Fran and Ollie epitomized the Chicago school of television: relaxed, intimate, conversational. Spending a half-hour with Kukla, Fran and Ollie was as easy, and breezy as leaning over a fence to chat with neighbor.

Indeed, that's just what it was. Kukla and Ollie became '50s icons, along with Ike and Ed Murrow and the NBC peacock. They ventured outside their own program for guest appearances on such momentous television events as The Ford 50th Anniversary Show, the most spectacular of all "spectaculars," broaocast on two networks simultaneously on June 16, 1953. I Stone Field, a triangular arrangement of 36 boulders, which itself is small potatoes compared with the 73-ton, 12-foot high black steel wall called Tilted Arc dissecting a plaza in front of the Javits Federal Building in New York. More than 1,300 workers in the building signed a petition to have it removed, to which the artist responded, "It offends people to have their preconceptions of reality changed." We have preconceptions to change.

We are a young city, after all, and have not yet discovered the significance of Oscar Wilde's comment: "Art is to dominate the spectator the spectator is not to dominate art.".