Car Designer Hit a Bump in Road With Sculpture Choice

Gerald Hirshberg expected controversy. But not the vicious resistance he ran into.

As chairman of the arts advisory board for the San Diego Unified Port District, Hirshberg, a relative newcomer to San Diego, guessed that the Ellsworth Kelly sculpture approved last month by the Port District might draw fire. But he thought it might be along more scholarly lines.

Instead of reasoned debates in learned art circles, the Kelly controversy degenerated into scurrilous name-calling. Before it was over, the design conceived for a Port District park near Seaport Village by Kelly, a world-renowned minimalist artist, was dubbed “the San Diego shaft” by some and “ultra junk” by a City Council member.

At the height of the controversy, Hirshberg, the brilliant, easy-going chief of Nissan’s international design studio on Campus Point Drive in Sorrento Valley, received threatening letters and phone calls at his home.

“My kids were expecting to see crosses burned on our lawn,” he said, only half in jest. “But I really think that the people who wrote those nasty letters were a small minority.”

Like Lou Cummings, the former Crocker Bank vice president who helped turn around the San Diego Symphony when it was in financial distress a few years ago, Hirshberg is a businessman who has eagerly spent his personal energy in support of San Diego’s evolving cultural life. He has discovered in the process that balancing business demands with volunteer commitments is neither easy nor widely appreciated.

Hirshberg, who winces when he remembers being called “an idiot” by City Councilman Bill Mitchell, has been the port’s point man in the verbal melee surrounding the Kelly sculpture. He shakes his head at the slings and arrows that seem to come with public service.

“I look at guys like (Port Commissioner) Bill Rick, (Mayor) Roger Hedgecock and (Centre City Development Corporation Executive Vice President) Gerry Trimble as they walk into the furnace every day and come out smiling,” he said. “I don’t know how they do it. When I’m shot full of arrows, it hurts.”

A quicksilver talker, Hirshberg, 46, moved from Detroit to San Diego five years ago with a keen appreciation of the cultural arts and a sizable reputation as a Motor City hotshot.

This ebullient whiz kid had rocketed up the ranks in Detroit, becoming a Big Three chief designer faster than anybody before or since. He was in charge of the design studio for General Motors’ Buick Division when Nissan chose him in 1980 to head what has become a trend-setting international automobile design studio.

Nissan thought so highly of Hirshberg, a one-time rock ‘n’ roll singer, that it broke GM’s fabled “golden handcuffs”--seductively manipulated salaries, bonuses and stock options--to get him. Nissan, the world’s fourth-largest motor vehicle producer, wanted Hirshberg as the creative chief of its new brainchild, a design facility for the automobiles it makes for Japan’s export market.

At Nissan Design International Inc., Hirshberg presides over 30 designers, sculptors, modelers and engineers who work in “as close to a designer’s dream as you can get.” That dream includes an extensive physical plant in the Golden Triangle area that houses three design studios and a viewing patio the size of a football field outfitted with two turntables for observing how full-scale models adjust to a natural environment.

“The only thing this place produces is ideas,” Hirshberg said while seated in his spare yet inviting office. Although the first Nissan consumer products designed in San Diego won’t roll onto the street until next year, Hirshberg is understandably proud of his team’s premiere creation. That was a non-production model designed for the 1983 Tokyo international automobile show. The editors of Road and Track magazine chose it as one of the greatest show cars of all time.

Hirshberg has shoehorned his volunteer arts activities into a packed schedule made tighter by his increased responsibilities and the special situation at Nissan, which he calls “an incredible adventure in inter-cultural creativity.” With Nissan Design International President Kazumi Yotsumoto, Hirshberg administers the San Diego operation, concentrating primarily on the design efforts. Building the products in Japan becomes a formidable process with an ocean, cultural and language barriers to overcome.

“Yet a higher percentage of what we are conceiving here is making it through the engineering and production system than ever occurred at General Motors during the 15 years I was there, and we spoke the same language,” Hirshberg said.

The differences between the cultures are significant and can’t be ignored. “If two cultures are saying let’s design a better saltshaker and one says, ‘I know what it ought to be,’ and the other is saying, ‘Well, we don’t particularly like salt’ . . . what do you do then? Not what you might have done on Thursday in Detroit, that’s for sure.”

A key difference is the creative process. The Japanese, Hirshberg said, go into lengthy, exhaustive research as opposed to what he described as the Americans’ more hit-or-miss technique.

The Japanese “will study the entire history of the development of the automobile. It seems to us that quite near the end of the process they make a decision, slowly, gradually and forever: Boom. Like the Sumo wrestlers who have all the ritual and nothing much seems to happen by our eyes, except, then they move, and it’s over. One wins and one loses.”

The problem is, he says, that during the process when he and his team communicate with their counterparts in Japan, each perceives the other’s question with dizzying paranoia and fear. “We’re saying, ‘Hey! We need to know what the rear suspension is. We’re about there.’ They’re saying, ‘Rear suspension? We’re to the point where we’re studying the history of the development of the door handle in Greece and wondering if we need one.’ ”

The outcome is the same and the two methods achieve their designs on time, he said.

But the result of the cultural clash is a new perspective.

“We’re constantly forced to look at things from a fresh vantage point and so are they. The Japanese have adapted to our ways and we’ve adapted to theirs,” Hirshberg said. “It’s what I call ‘creative abrasion.’ When those abrasive wheels are oiled and tuned, we’re flying off in all kinds of directions.”

Coordinating the design efforts requires that Hirshberg visit Nissan’s design studio in Atsugi, Japan, three times a year, in addition to other trips he is constantly making to cities in this country and Europe. He still has found time to serve as a trustee of the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art and as a member of the Mayor’s Growth Management Task Force for San Diego.

His experience with the Kelly controversy has left Hirshberg “dismayed but hopeful.” The blue-ribbon arts advisory board he helped pick has come in for abuse, having been called elitist and too small to be representative of San Diego.

Arts patron Danah Fayman and CCDC chief Trimble asked Hirshberg to form a small, select committee to advise CCDC on commissioning art for Horton Plaza and other downtown redevelopment areas. Later, when the Port District was looking for arts advice, the decision was made to use that existing body, composed of Hugh Davies, director of the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art; art critic Isabelle Wasserman; sculptor and former architect Russell Forester; Mary Beebe, director of UC San Diego’s Stuart sculpture collection, and Hirshberg, who also is an accomplished painter.

“We all travel. We all keep current in the world of art,” Hirshberg said. “The idea was to form a group that was small, agile and primarily brilliant--I exclude myself from that. Trimble and Danah Fayman wanted background in art, taste and judgment. We interviewed and found a group that forms a treasure house for San Diego. This kind of group cannot stay together forever. They’re too energetic and explosive and diverse.

“There was an immediate chemistry among us, but we rarely agree on anything. I think the Kelly is the only thing we’ve agreed on.”

Some of Hirshberg’s comments about the Kelly sculpture angered opponents, who saw them as elitist and responded critically. But his experience as the front man for the Kelly proponents has not made him comfortable with being a public target, Beebe said.

“Gerry has a very thin skin,” Beebe said, laughing. “He gets upset when he’s beat up in public. We admire Gerry, but kid him a lot about it. He’s very smart and upbeat and optimistic--but then you have to be optimistic in public art. We work hard, tease each other a lot. Nobody in this group gets away with anything. We all give each other a hard time.”

Negative comments attributed to members of the San Diego arts community regarding the Kelly sculpture have particularly distressed Hirshberg.

“A lot of the letters that were written to the Port District were curiously alike,” he said. “We found out later that they were being signed by a lot of people in retirement homes.

“A lot of people call themselves artists. I have categories: mall artists, galleries for tourists, black velvet paintings, doe-eyed waifs and imitation-watery-day-in-Paris scenes. I don’t call any of that art. I don’t denigrate it. I don’t put it down. But it’s not what I call art.

“Most people confuse the right to have their own taste with any kind of qualitative judgments that are apropos to the arts. And there are qualitative judgments that must be made.”

Hirshberg despises the notion that public art should be popular. “If the motivation is to please the masses, then that means the most successful art on the face of the earth is Russian peasant art. It’s art to educate, art to motivate, art to make us proud. That’s not art’s purpose.

“The impulse to make art doesn’t come from surveying public opinion. It comes from the need to do it, the need to express yourself. I paint portraiture. When you’ve got a sitter, you don’t think whether or not that person is going to like it. Even if they complain that their nose is too large afterward, what they’re paying you for is your eyes, your vision. Sure, you hope that afterward you find an audience somewhere.”

Hirshberg lives in Del Mar with his wife and children. Both of his teen-age sons are emerging rock musicians. Hirshberg likes that, although he prefers to listen to his collection of more than 5,000 classical records.

“It’s ironic that they’re playing the guitar now,” said Hirshberg, who as a college student in the early 1960s sang and played with a group that warmed up the screaming fans for acts such as Paul Anka, Bobby Riddell and Frankie Avalon. A group he played with also recorded several songs, one of which, “Sparkling Blue,” made the national charts.

A classical clarinetist who studied music composition and conducting at the Cleveland Institute of Music beginning at age 6, Hirshberg used to gather musicians for private recitals in his Detroit home. So far there hasn’t been time for that in San Diego.

Nor has he had time for his painting. Like much of Hirshberg’s life, his painting mixes seemingly incompatible elements. “I’ve painted portraits all my life. It’s never seemed like a secondary art form to me.”

But there’s another instinct. “I do abstract work. I love the creative health and diversity of the two. I love to put things upside down, to use mirrors or turn around fast to see it for the first time. It has something to do with keeping me fresh.”

The same applies to his passion for design. “I never thought I would stay in Detroit. I was brought in as a renegade, someone who was hostile to Detroit,” Hirshberg said.

He was hired as an experiment, not the usual automobile designer with gasoline in his veins. He was a generalist. “Most of the people there loved to design cars. I was doing cars because I loved to design.”

The notion of diversity appeals to Hirshberg, who maintained his own design firm during his Detroit years. “I’ve always felt the automobile industry is too isolated from industrial design.”

Nissan shares Hirshberg’s ideas about diversity and encourages its San Diego team to design a few products for other companies--medical products for IVAC, audio equipment for Polk Audio in Baltimore and graphics for a scientific firm in Los Angeles.

“We keep it to a critical variety to keep our people creative. Unexpected things happen when you’ve been designing medical instruments and then you’re asked to do a car interior,” Hirshberg said.

Hirshberg has found the real San Diego a tad different from the advertised land of free-thinkers and diversity.

“We like to think of ourselves as remarkably open,” he said. “We’re trend-setters. We are responsive to all kinds of individual statements and hosts to diversity. That’s what I heard, read, and the only person who didn’t believe it in the East was Woody Allen.

“Yet when I came here, I wondered, ‘Where is that? Where’s the sculpture? Where are the fountains? Where’s the contemporary art on the scene?’ There wasn’t much being said about art. Now people are writing letters to editors about the symphony. They’re trying to save theaters. Art is in the news. Something’s happening.”

While the approval of the Kelly work as a landmark on the local public art scene, Hirshberg is enough of a realist to believe that the port’s next public commission may be no easier.

The uproar surrounding the selection of the Kelly sculpture has made one difference. Hirshberg acknowledges there may be a need to rethink the advisory board’s composition and to vary the methods used in commissioning works.

He is quick to point out that there is no “right” method of choosing public art. Competitions--open and by invitation--and a selection of several works from which the public “votes” have their uses. But the concept of popular art is anathema to him.

“I think the idea of designing for the mass of people is more elitist and cynical than having a Kelly. It assumes that people aren’t capable of reacting to the best,” he said. “I think that San Diego will grow to love the Kelly. But not all San Diegans, nor is that what we’re doing. We want to provide diversity.

“It’s not until we have many sculptures that the isolated pieces will cease to be quite so damned important.”