Viewer’s Discomfort a Natural Reaction to the Neon in UCSD Theater Sculpture

It never ceases to amaze those of us involved in the arts how much controversy is stirred by the gentle aesthetic impulse that moves the artist to creative expression. Controversy is certainly not the intended reaction, but it is a testament to the expressive power of art, and the vulnerability of all of us to that power.

I am delighted at the prospect of a Bruce Naumann sculpture on the Mandel Weiss Theatre at UC San Diego. Naumann’s expressive world is particularly appropriate both to the theater (which will be its site) and to a university campus. Why, then, has this piece stirred so much strong feeling in the community?

For a variety of reasons, Naumann’s work seems at first to make many people feel uneasy.

Those who like to organize their aesthetic experiences into comfortable niches find that his work defies easy categorization. He shares this characteristic with many late-20th-Century artists. Naumann is a sculptor, “painting” in a medium popularly associated with advertising (neon), in an architectural environment! Obviously, we must approach such a work without much concern over rigid categories.

Furthermore, Naumann’s imagery is both abstract and literal. His neon forms can be experienced simultaneously as clean, exhilarating strokes of pure color and as words with all their associative connotations. (The sculpture for the five-story Weiss Theatre at the southern edge of the campus would wrap around the building and flash a multicolored list of the Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Virtues.) This tension between the abstract and the literal further stretches the orientation of our aesthetic response.

Having to “see” words in both of these contexts is remarkably appropriate to the activities of the theater building on which the piece will exist, since theater itself asks us to respond to words both denotatively and connotatively.

The work further challenges those for whom the artist’s evident craft and dexterity are of paramount importance. Naumann is essentially a conceptual artist whose genius lies in his ability to visualize an idea in relation to its environment and orchestrate its realization.

He shares this orientation not only with other late-20th-Century artists, but also with theater and film directors, choreographers, performance artists, orchestra conductors and even design directors, whose abilities to imagine, direct, shape and organize an aesthetic experience are their sole artistic contributions.

A further problem for many people is the use of neon as a legitimate expressive medium. Neon carries with it all the baggage of its non-art-related associations: cheap flashing hotel signs, garish advertising signs, gaudy billboards, etc. But it is precisely the ability of the artist to “see” the familiar in a new context that enables him/her to broaden and enrich our “visual vocabularies.”

All such creative steps feel uncomfortable at first, as we strive to overcome previous associations.

Similar resistance was felt by those first viewing previously unacceptable “common” objects such as shoes (Van Gogh) or soup cans (Warhol). As artists employ new media to expand their palette, there is again some early discomfort, as when composers and musicians utilized electronics, or designers embraced plastics, or artists created collages, making anything valid for use. All the controversy over these issues has died, and what is left today is a wonderful body of works whose validity and ability to move us reside not in their novelty, but in the power and beauty of their conceptions, and in our own enlarged visual horizons.

This stretching and blurring of boundaries in the arts mirrors a parallel blurring of boundaries in the sciences and in society in general. It is in this way that art not only mirrors something about ourselves and our realities, but by which it gains much of its feeling of pertinence and evocative power.

Naumann is an artist of international stature, and while it is certainly not realistic to expect uniformly positive responses to his (or for that matter any other artist’s) work, the only issues that are germane ought to revolve around the rich diversity of associations and reactions that his vision will generate.

That kind of ferment will always surround the arts and is part of art’s excitement.