A change of weather? - art exhibits and museums in San Diego, California

Art in America, July, 1997 by Leah Ollman

Beyond their own intrinsic merit, the inSITE projects may have some educational use in the community. Their recurring, varied presence could help make public art more acceptable to the people of San Diego, where the record on art outside gallery walls is mixed at best.

Public Art

On the plus side of the public-art ledger is the Stuart Collection, which has transformed the 2,000-acre campus of the University of California, San Diego, into a canvas on which artists are invited to make their mark. Directed by Mary Beebe, the collection has commissioned 13 works since the public university and the private Stuart Foundation joined forces in 1982. The results have been engaging and provocative. Terry Allen's two lead-covered trees (1986) stand camouflaged in a grove of other eucalyptus, periodically making their presence known through the poetry, music and stories emanating from their hidden speakers. Alexis Smith's slate-tile Snake Path (1992) winds its way 500 feet up a gentle hill toward the campus library, passing along the way her huge granite sculpture of a book (Milton's Paradise Lost) before curling around an intimate, Edenic garden. The tall neon letters of Bruce Nauman's Vices and Virtues (1988) wrap around the top of an engineering lab, flashing a menu of moral options in the night sky [see A.i.A., Dec. '89, cover].

All of the artists represented in the collection are well known -- Nam June Paik, Robert Irwin, Jenny Holzer, William Wegman, Niki de Saint Phalle, Ian Hamilton Finlay -- but not necessarily for making permanent outdoor sculpture. Elizabeth Murray's huge, bulbous Red Shoe, installed last year, is the artist's first freestanding work. Fall '97 will see Kiki Smith's first outdoor sculpture inaugurated as the 14th work in the collection, a nude woman cast in bronze, with water cascading down her forearms and out of her palms into a bed of stones. In the planning stages are projects by John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha. Artists selected for the collection are given unusual latitude, which they repay with work particularly sensitive to the university's environment and its mission to stimulate and enlighten.

At the opposite end of the public-art spectrum is the San Diego Unified Port District's disastrous program, a prime example of opportunity wasted. In 1982, the Port District, which manages San Diego's airport and tidelands, voted to set aside three-eighths of one percent of its projected gross revenue annually for art. First, Ellsworth Kelly was commissioned to create a work for the bayfront, but after port representatives demanded too many changes in his design, he withdrew. A few years later, in 1988, port commissioners rejected as too controversial proposals by Vito Acconci and local artist Roberto Salas. The port's art advisory committee resigned in protest, and ever since, the program has languished under a black cloud, while its budget has continued to swell. By late 1996, the port's art fund had grown to $5.6 million.

Over the years, consultants have been called in, policies drafted, and small memorial sculptures ceremoniously installed here and there, but the port seems to regard its art budget as more a burden than an opportunity. Recently, port commissioners voted to spend nearly $2 million on a motley assortment of decorative flourishes -- all by little-known artists -- for an airport expansion scheduled to open later this year. The art amounts to little more than the visual equivalent of airport food -- convenient, overpriced and not very nourishing. After years of watching the port's pot grow, and with it, real potential, this retrograde purchase made one nostalgic for the good old days, when the art program was merely stagnant, and there was stir hope.