Lizards as Big as Fruehaufs

Welcome to hallelujah hallway: singing praises to a freeway canyon.

Probably nobody has to tell you when you're having a good time. You just know, right?

Me, too. And my mood always gets sparky and light when I drive on the 101 through Scottsdale, Arizona.

State road 101 is a late-'90s freeway that does a 66-mile circuit around greater Phoenix, three lanes mostly, down in a canyon for maybe half of its 7.8 miles through the city of Scottsdale. Traffic is often heavy, but I shrug that off because I know what's coming. As I near the city limits, I can feel my mood rising, as if some happy hand has reached down and turned up my knob. It's showtime.

Welcome to Hallelujah Hallway. The 101's walls, as it cuts deeply through the city, have been sculpted into a desert wonderland of artists' fantasies. I see long-tail lizards as big as Fruehaufs, prickly pears three stories high, and swoops, swirls, and saguaros. The colors are mostly dry desert hues, desiccated greens and sand tans punctuated occasionally with exuberant fuchsia and, rarely, fruit reds.

Hallelujah! Finally, a mass-transit corridor that's fun for the eyes and the mind. Roads are proof that we live in liberty; we can go wherever we want. And even in the everyday traffic slog, I feel the thrill; it's my foot on the pedal. But a freeway that avoids the suck tide of low-bid contracting and, instead, rises above the mandatory utility of it all to burst out in a splash of human exultation — can a metro artery jump for joy? — well, I just love this Scottsdale canyon, leapin' lizards and all.

Of course, mine is the philistine's view. Public art, you see, doesn't really belong to the public. What do we know about art? We might smile at super-sized lizards just because we think they're so cute.

Art is not supposed to make us feel good. No, for that you take pills. Art is the way artists make statements. It's the way they tell us what they're feeling. And we're supposed to react. Profound reactions are preferred. Do what you can.

To the art community, a freeway is an "alien space...the last place someone might want to spend time." That makes it perfect for an "intervention." Stand back, mouth breathers, so artists can swoop in, "help us gather knowledge of ourselves, the space we occupy, and the time in which we live."

That last bit I lifted directly from the "aesthetics statement" put out by the city of Scottsdale's Public Art Program in support of its freeway artwork. Like every art-crowd expression and excretion, this work has a name: The Path Most Traveled.


Freeway art does provoke reactions. The grouchy view holds that it harms the community. Only by keeping freeways unappealing can we discourage people from zooming about in cars.

There's gotta be a pill for such a sour outlook.

Still searching for the profound, I asked a real artist what he thought of the Path.

Tom Coffin is a fellow Plymouth owner, with a '67 Sport Fury convertible, and a painter and sculptor who lives in Scottsdale. He had reservations. Lizards and prickly pears have been done to death in the Arizona tourist shops — "tchotchkes," he calls them. True, but I suggested that these had been abstracted enough to lift them above the curio clutter. "Maybe" was as far as I could pull him in my direction.

I'm reminded that pros don't give easy answers. Ask a C/D staffer about any car, and you'll get 10 paragraphs of "buts" and "if onlys." What you won't get is "whoopee!" Coffin is a serious artist with years of study, observation, and creation. My question had him squinting decades into the future: What will social critics and Scottsdale visitors in the year 2037 say about giant pastel-green lizards embedded into the canyon walls?

Will it be "daring and inspired"?

Or will cute have curdled into cliché over the next 30 years? Will they be seeing the reptilian equivalent of Beanie Babies, a passing whim frozen forever in enduring concrete and paid for with the public nickel?

That's the agony of art. Nobody knows what we'll think when the surprise wears off. Boomerangs were so do wah diddy back in the '50s, and mostly out in the cold ever since. Howling coyotes have been off the cliché cliff for at least 10 years. On freeway walls, they'd now be regrettable. Will lizards and prickly pears fare better?

We'll see. But today, they delight me.

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