Downtown sculpture back in the public eye

Robert Graham’s sculpture of Quetzalcoatl in downtown San Jose’s Plaza de Cesar Chavez has always perplexed people who care about public art.

It is a monument to the plumed serpent of native North American myth, an entirely fitting subject in San Jose. But in its coiled form, it looks very much like a large animal dropping.

Largely ignored for years, Quetzalcoatl is back in the news these days, an old acquaintance with a new calling card. The 1994 sculpture has just gotten a cleaning, and the plumed serpent was the subject of a panel discussion last week at San Jose State University.

With the controversy enveloping the Christopher Columbus statue at City Hall — which looks destined for somewhere else — Graham’s sculpture can’t quite escape lazy comparisons.

The line of the politically incorrect goes like this: If we remove Columbus for his sins toward Native Americans, shouldn’t we look hard at the god of a people who practiced human sacrifice?

It’s an invidious argument. Among other things, it makes too easy an analogy between a brutal and inept administrator and a god seen as a source of power and prosperity.

Former councilwoman Blanca Alvarado, the most eloquent advocate for the Quetzalcoatl sculpture, says she’s heard of no movement to remove the plumed serpent. And that’s a good thing, not least because this particular work owns a fascinating and checkered story.

It begins in the late 1980s, when thenMayor Tom McEnery pushed for an equestrian statue to honor Thomas Fallon, the pioneer who lifted the American flag over San Jose in 1846. (McEnery had done a book on Fallon, an Irish-American whose home still stands downtown.)

The redevelopment agency commissioned a sculpture from the Nairobi-based artist Robert Glen, who produced a superb work of two men on horseback.

You can see it today at the place where St. James Street approaches the Highway 87 freeway.

At the time it was completed in 1989, however, small but vocal minority in the Hispanic community argued that it depicted white seizure of Mexican territory.

So the Fallon statue was consigned for more than a dozen years to a warehouse in Oakland, at a hefty cost never disclosed. In McEnery’s memorable phrase, Thomas Fallon went into a witness relocation program.

In the wake of the Fallon fiasco, the redevelopment agency and the city’s public art program embarked on projects designed to highlight San Jose’s ethnic quilt and cultural heritage.

One of the first was Quetzalcoatl, designed for the southern end of Plaza de Cesar Chavez.

Robert Graham’s initial conception depicted a soaring plumed serpent with outstretched wings. Six weeks or so before the unveiling, he let city officials know his idea had changed. The statue instead was a coiled snake that had an unfortunate likeness to a dog dropping.

I’ve talked to redevelopment agency officials who believe the final result was a deliberate insult by Graham, who grew up in San Jose. In their telling, the Southern California sculptor was angry that the city had canceled a contract for him to design four “gateways’’ into downtown.

Graham, who was married to the actress Anjelica Huston, died at age 70 in 2008.

Though we have no confirmation from him that the story is true, I tend to believe it. Quetzalcoatl was far from his best work (To see a better Graham, see his delicate bronze of two nudes at the western entrance of the federal building at 300 S. First Street.)

At the San Jose State panel last week, Dr. Roberto Gonzalez talked about how Quetzalcoatl has emerged as a mainstay of popular culture.

A version of the plumed serpent adorns Aeromexico planes. Japan has an angular Quetzalcoatl sculpture. You can even order Quetzalcoatl socks.

Well within this playful international mix, Quetzalcoatl deserves to stay at the Plaza de Cesar Chavez.

vAs Alvarado argues, it celebrates a native cultural heritage. Its quirky story of origin reveals much about San Jose, too. And that’s worth more than anything else.