A Wide Array of Sites to Behold

SAN DIEGO —  In art today, is anything more difficult than commissioning new sculpture for a public setting?

It’s hard enough just to buy a significant outdoor sculpture that already exists and then site it well. Starting the process from scratch, on the other hand, with only an advisory committee and a gifted artist and vague idea of location in mind, creates a wide margin for error. A casual survey of public art projects in American cities from coast to coast shows that what can go wrong often does.

Given this degree of difficulty, the Stuart Collection at UC San Diego is nothing short of miraculous. At least 10 of the 15 sculptures commissioned for sites around the sprawling campus in La Jolla are nothing short of first-rate. Eight even deserve to be included among the best extant works by their respective artists. Sculpture parks and gardens of assorted types and various degrees of success will be found elsewhere; but there is simply nothing comparable, anywhere in the nation, to this exceptional assembly of commissioned works.

This weekend, the Stuart Collection celebrates its 20th anniversary with a series of receptions, a panel discussion and the publication of a handsome, highly informative new book that chronicles its development. “Landmarks: Sculpture Commissions for the Stuart Collection at UC San Diego” (Rizzoli International, 264 pages, $65) includes illuminating essays by Stuart director Mary Livingstone Beebe and Museum of Modern Art curator Robert Storr, along with perceptive artist-interviews by independent writer Joan Simon. It lays out the working process that brought into being superlative works by artists Robert Irwin, Terry Allen, Bruce Nauman, William Wegman, Michael Asher, Alexis Smith, Kiki Smith, John Baldessari and others.

Averaging the debut of one new work every 16 months, the Stuart Collection has a remarkable record of achievement. At the start, though, the project looked rather shaky. Its success was anything but preordained. Three inaugural projects were completed in fairly quick succession, and only one turned out to be artistically exceptional.

First came “Sun God” (1983), a monumental, brightly painted mythic bird perched atop a vine-covered archway by Franco-American sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle. Since the unveiling it has become, for students, a landmark of the “meet me at the ... “ variety.

Next came Robert Irwin’s “Two Running Violet V Forms” (1983), a sky-borne, zigzag fence constructed from chain link coated in bluish-purple vinyl and stretched atop stainless-steel poles. The angled planes of transparent color hover nine feet above the ground in a eucalyptus grove, subtly revealing the orderly rows in which the silvery gray-green trees were planted a century ago. Beneath the fence, flowering ice plant adds a seasonal range of earthbound color to the shifting palette of Irwin’s environmental sculpture.

Finally, Richard Fleischner completed “La Jolla Project” (1984), an assembly of pink and gray granite posts, lintels, columns, doorways and other mostly rectilinear architectural forms arrayed across a gently rolling lawn. A kind of “Minimalist Stonehenge,” although absent any ritualistic functions, the sculptural arrangement subtly establishes sight lines and viewpoints for locating oneself in the organic landscape.

Of these three initial projects, only Irwin’s represents a major achievement. “Sun God” and “La Jolla Project” are conventional examples of public sculpture in general, and their respective artists’ work in particular.

“Two Running Violet V Forms,” by contrast, represents a significant expansion of Irwin’s challenging art. His fence transforms a conventional barrier into a device to emancipate discernment. Together with another chain-link-and-trees project in Seattle, also finished in 1983, the Stuart Collection environment shows Irwin melding the natural landscape and the perceptual landscape in unexpected ways--a process that would later culminate in his remarkable garden for the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

The most distinctive works in the Stuart Collection share this expansive, boundary-pushing quality. The collection is at its best when it’s not just business as usual.

Performance artist and painter Terry Allen never even liked outdoor sculpture. But his resistance to the genre proved salutary in the production of three lead-covered eucalyptus trees, two of which are wired for sound. Sited along campus pathways, the “memorial vegetation” spontaneously seems to speak poetry and sing songs to passersby.

William Wegman is a painter and photographer famous for his fusion of humor and pathos in pictures and videos of Weimaraner dogs. For the Stuart Collection he unexpectedly made a sculpture based on roadside tourist stops for taking in the vista--although his bluff-side viewing stand turns its back on the magnificent Pacific Ocean. You gaze eastward instead, overlooking the exploding suburban sprawl of North San Diego County.

Bruce Nauman had worked with neon since 1966, but he brought it to a stunning crescendo in 1988 with a monumental display of colored words flashing a list of contested “Vices and Virtues” around the top of a science building. The electrified entablature, at once classical and vernacular, temple and truck stop, may be the best work in the collection.

Michael Asher’s Conceptual art tends to be ephemeral. By contrast, his elegant, razor-sharp insertion of a granite-clad, office-style drinking fountain into a plaza that already included a military memorial and flagpole absorbed them both into a permanent ensemble. Asher, like a latter-day Bernini, crafted a public fountain whose form is appropriate to our administratively obsessed times. The plaza now commemorates the site’s transformation from former Army post to current university.

Alexis Smith has produced more compelling public art than most contemporary artists, and her double-edged “Snake Path” (1992) ranks among her best. A stone sidewalk designed like a snake winds its way up a hill toward the campus library, symbol of accumulated knowledge. Along the path a large granite book, reminiscent of a tombstone, features a chiseled quotation from Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” The work’s Garden of Eden imagery takes conflicted aim at the university setting, suggesting how school can be both refuge and prison. It gently urges flight: Take what’s been learned and go forth into the world.

And so it goes, time and again in the collection.

At its best--which is to say, often--there’s a sense of artists recognizing an unusual opportunity, then stretching themselves to take advantage of it. Sometimes the experimental process fails, as when painter Elizabeth Murray made an awkward foray into traditional sculpture. But even here the attempt seems admirable, just because it’s so unexpected.

No formula exists for the successful commissioning of sculpture. It’s obvious that you’re not likely to get great art from a mediocre artist, but the sustained excellence of the Stuart Collection demonstrates something rarely acknowledged: The quality of the patron is just as critical.

UCSD has clearly been a rare and enlightened patron. The project idea and its funding mechanism, begun by philanthropist James Stuart de Silva and his wife, Marne, was developed over years of careful consideration before anything took shape. The project production apparatus, overseen by sculptor Mathieu Gregoire, is capable of supple inventiveness in fabricating unusual or complicated sculptures. And project development, guided by Mary Beebe, is a model of aesthetic sensitivity, insight into bureaucratic reality and sheer, necessary patience. These are people for whom the artists plainly wanted to work.

Nauman, for instance, made his first visit to the campus in early 1983. His neon piece underwent endless revision in form and location, taking more than five years to complete. The masterful result was worth the trouble and the wait.

Now that the Stuart Collection has reached the age of maturity, it will be interesting to see how it might grow into the future. The collection does represent a distinct generation. These artists’ work developed fully in the 1970s and 1980s, just before and during the project’s launch. (Upon completion of their commissions, the average age of the artists was 51.) As a new century begins, a generational shift might be in the offing.

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The Stuart Collection, UC San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, (858) 534-2117. Open daily.