FINE KNOWS HOW TO SPIN IDEAS, POLES

SAN DIEGO —  Artist Judson Fine wrestles thick, 200-pound power line poles around an art gallery as readily as he twirls theories on the nature of art in his head. Building heavyweight installations is no big thing for this man who has built a complete house and a studio, from the ground up.

He only regrets that the time and energy on those projects could have been put into his art.

Yes, Fine gets physical with his often complex art theories which, he admits, are not easily understood. But the resulting sculptures, paintings and installations have brought him a reputation as a fascinating artist. A perfect example of Fine’s blend of art and theory is the show that opened Friday at Installation Gallery, “Jud C.Q. Fine: A Physical Narration--Without Plot.”

He works out of a studio in Venice, but has spent this week at the tiny downtown gallery here on 5th Avenue where he and a crew were working on the installation. Most of the floor Tuesday was knee-high in power poles provided by San Diego Gas & Electric Co., on top of which lay a graceful 17-foot steel canoe he had fabricated. Later, Fine and a group of helpers used a chain saw to cut the poles into specific lengths and arranged them in a controlled jumble, virtually filling the gallery. The 500-pound canoe was placed amid this construction. “It won’t be a sea of heavy timber,” he said. “It’s not supposed to represent an ocean or look like the ocean. It just is an ocean,” and the boat should recall a vessel in a heavy sea.

Fine lettered the inside of the boat with brightly colored mirror images of island names in English and Polynesian. He also painted the entire gallery floor with a text from his earlier artworks, which focused on comparing native Polynesian and western methods of navigation.

“Polynesian navigation is a primary information system, compared with celestial navigation. In celestial you use a sextant, which is a secondary artifact, and plot positions using books and charts, which are secondary information. The Polynesians could just sit there, paddling their boats, and take the information in directly (from their environment). The only time the system would fall apart was if they fell asleep. That’s why on long voyages, they took two navigators.

“It’s interesting that Western anthropologists, as recently as 15 years ago, doubted that they could navigate from Tahiti to Hawaii even though there was conclusive proof. Their boats were three times faster than European sailing vessels of the period, so they could make the trip quicker--in two weeks. Theirs was an amazingly precise navigation system, much more accurate than European navigation.”

So what does that have to do with art? Fine has been absorbed with the ways different societies work within their physical environments. “Very few people are aware that when they sit in a room, the room--its size, the walls--can affect the way they feel. As we get older, we lose touch with our physical faculties that can tell us that.

“In our society, people tend to confuse secondary information with primary information. They think that by reading the newspaper they are reading the truth. And that’s not necessarily so.”

Fine uses art as an example for isolating primary and secondary forms of information. It’s a vehicle for exploring the ramifications of each physically, rather than in theory. All art, he says, is secondary. “There’s no brush stroke that hasn’t been done before. It’s all derived.” The resulting work of art, though, can be essentially unique.

“If you take two bodies of information and shove them together, at the points at which they come into contact, they often produce a third entity which is equal to the two progenitors. You could call that the spark of progress. Art can be an analogy of that. My art tends to be.”

Fine didn’t become interested in art until he was in graduate school studying cultural and intellectual history at UC Santa Barbara. At that point, he realized that his future would be spent “looking for a job at a junior college and cranking microfilm for 10 years” working on a book. Instead, he looked for an academic field in which he could “hypothesize a theory and not have to prove it, but let the force of my conviction carry the weight of proof.”

Art won over literature and philosophy, but his early interests have colored Fine’s art. Within two years of getting a masters degree from Cornell, Fine found himself catapulted “from obscurity into shows.” In 1972, he had three exhibits: the Mizuno Gallery and Brand Art Center in Los Angeles and the Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York City. Since then his career has moved steadily forward.

Fine’s most recent exhibit was at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. His sharply observed intellectual curiosity, transformed into myriad art forms, has found a home in such collections as the Guggenheim Museum, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum Lodzi in Poland and the Power Art Institute in Australia.

“Physical Narration” at Installation Gallery is typical of Fine’s robust style. It is less a visual work than a physical work which fills the space and may require viewers to duck under or climb over it.

He is less concerned with answers than with posing questions. A feisty 40 years old, Fine doesn’t require that the viewer understand his work. “You should be able to go into a space and enjoy it. It doesn’t matter whether you understand it.”

It is, for instance, impossible to read all the words which he has drawn in the gallery about navigation. Their meaning is intentionally obscured. The idea, he says, is to give a gist of the subject matter. “The words are just a travel device. They allow the head to leave this space and go to the South Seas.”