A Tail of Obsession: San Diego’s cult of the dolphin
By Joanna Neborsky
The designers of a new mall in northern San Diego must not have doubted the wisdom of dolphin decor. A corner fountain advertises the delight of eight dolphins as they arch upward through its spray. Another one has a turquoise pair clinging to a beach ball. The critic, encountering this series, might choose to be grateful the subjects aren’t wearing sunglasses. Another might laugh a dispirited kind of laugh. Most people probably like what they see.
In the plazas of this city of two million people, one encounters with stunning frequency inanimate dolphins at play. In our waters they are less frequent. Though San Diego is not unique in this enthusiasm–see ancient Crete, contemporary Florida, and anywhere kitsch is bought and sold–it is distinguished. Across the county, dolphins are in fountains, in sculptures, on murals; I have even seen them hemorrhage out of an obelisk. Their ubiquity illuminates a puzzling consensus between citizen and committee: dolphins are good for art. It is axiomatic, however, that dolphins are bad for art. The beleaguered San Diego resident must inquire, then, into their claim on the affections of her fellow citizens.
As a species, dolphins’ primary virtue is that they don’t kill us. They can talk to each other (are social), recognize their own images in mirrors (self-aware), and be trained to fetch things for the navy (patriotic, too). Their acrobatics thrill. But most central to their appeal is that they look a little human: they seem often to be smiling, though their maws are more likely gasping for food. Dolphins are about as anthropomorphic as icky marine life gets, and thus enjoyable to a public that likes its animals humanlike, and less, well, animal.
This public has applauded the artmaking of Wyland, a painter, sculptor, and muralist who never met a mystical seascape he didn’t like, and who has, out of this preference, built a small empire: his swirling, reverential visions of ocean life pervade the galleries and public spaces of America’s coastal cities. Consider "Ocean Riders," a 1996 sculpture that marks the promenade leading up to the beach in a suburb of San Diego just north of the border. The piece has a more literal (dolphins: gray; water: blue) theory of color than the neighborhood, whose flirty pinks and oranges are borrowed from next-door Mexico. In the sculpture, we observe three dolphins bodying forth from the swell of a wave, but the freedom of these "Ocean Riders" seems to have inspired few. The Saturday I visited, a surfer was painting his surfboard nearby on the grass. People sat on benches. For an hour, the sculpture was dutifully ignored. Still, Wyland is a millionaire, so maybe people prefer his stuff as furniture, clocks, or meditations in waiting rooms.
If there is such a thing as successful dolphin art, it is one that people find useful. In a walkway linking Foot Locker, Victoria’s Secret, and Abercrombie & Fitch in another suburban San Diego mall, dolphins made of bronze dive and huddle in a series of oddly fragmented pools. Little children were cheering their stationary movements, undisturbed by the structural posts plunging into the animals’ bellies (used, by mystery creator "Marguerite," to support their mid-air posture). It was not just the younger set who endorsed this dolphin fugue. "It’s a nice, calming break from the mall," said a mom eyeing her busy child, now upside-down.
So: some people are soothed by these watery effigies, as doubtless many are by the dolphin creations across the city. We ought to desire an art that pleases many, provides repose. But must it involve friendly vertebrates? Is a democratic art a mediocre art? American critics have long tangled with this question, but to the embarassment of these same critics, cultural authority has passed from their hands, and there is no longer a corps of correct opinion animating people’s beliefs about what they should or shouldn’t like in the realm of culture. (In the first half of the 20th century, it was different.) So though we may desire to call the dolphin art by its true name–schlock, vulgaris triumphus!!–it is a prodigy of our open cultural market, still widening, bringing more voices to the table, including at times those that cry out for more dolphins. Taste, it’s been said, is a matter of taste, and dolphins in San Diego–as catfish in New Orleans, and Elvis in Graceland, and Texas in Texas–are part of the story of the rise of cultural democracy, one as citizens we must embrace, and as critics we must, on occasion, abhor.
