ART REVIEW : ‘TREES’ INTRIGUE PASSERS-BY AT UCSD

They sing and talk and make music. They even look as if they’re dancing. Mostly they look like trees.

They’re works of art to experience, not just to look at.

They’re components of a tripartite sculpture titled simply “Trees” by multi-talented artist Terry Allen. It is the newest addition to the Stuart Sculpture Collection on the UC San Diego campus. It will be formally dedicated today.

The forms are real. They’re the remains of eucalyptus trees that were removed to make way for UCSD’s Magnetic Recording Research Center. After Allen selected them, they were cut into pieces and chemically treated for preservation, as if they were telephone poles. Then they were reassembled and covered with small squares of lead. The now gray, seemingly gesticulating, forms were erected some distance from one another. Standing 30- to 40-feet tall, each tree is set in a concrete base and certified to be earthquake proof.

One of Allen’s trees, the silent one, lifts its leafless limbs like a Martha Graham dancer on a slope to the right of the main entrance of the university’s Central Library. It glows grayly with sparkling pinpoints of light, reflections from the heads of the many nails attaching the lead bark to the trunk and limbs.

The other two trees stand in a eucalyptus grove near the Mandeville Center not far from the Robert Irwin “fence,” added to the Stuart Collection some years ago. So indistinguishable are they from their living neighbors that visitors scarcely notice them until they are close by, and they are first alerted by the sound.

These are the noisy trees. Poetry, stories, Western songs, Thai music and Navajo chants seemingly coming from nowhere puzzle then intrigue passers-by. The effect is the same even if you are informed enough to anticipate the experience. This sustained ability to surprise is just one of the qualities that Allen’s “Trees,” his first permanent outdoor sculpture, share with all significant works of art.

They are beautiful to see, grotesque but not threatening, and beguiling to hear. Allen himself, his wife Jo Harvey Allen (a remarkable performance artist and writer in her own right with an international reputation) and many others, including well-known northern California artist William Wiley (singing “Ghost Riders in the Sky”!!!), have taped music, songs, stories and poems that are played in the campus Media Center and transmitted through the university utility system to custom-designed speakers in the trees. Allen will record new tapes for future playing.

Allen is remembered in San Diego for his 1983 exhibit “Rooms and Stories” at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. It was a multimedia experience, combining the visual arts with music and theater, that expressed Allen’s aesthetic, which ranges from the sleazy to the sublime in its inclusiveness.

Allen is known as an artist to whom nothing human is alien, and not much that is sub- or super-human, either.

As a combined visual artist, writer, composer, dramatist, performer and director, Allen has few peers. Since his student days he has striven to create total works of art, multimedia collages of drawings, sculptures, objects, texts and music that correspond to the collage-like, layered character of life, perception and memory. His themes are the great themes of all the arts--life, death, love, hate, survival, pain, honor, ambition, war, peace, comradeship, sex, separation, ego and power. He creates his works in the idiom he knows best, that of the southwest corner of the United States, from Texas (he was reared in Lubbock where there are no trees, he claims) through Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Southern California into Mexico. Despite his work’s regional look, its character and meaning are universal. Allen has lived in Fresno with his family for the past 12 years and says it reminds him of Lubbock.

The strength of Allen’s work has always been its directness as an expression of his artistic vision. This directness is so extreme that his forms, often objects themselves--beer cans, cigarette butts, condoms, or, in this case, trees--are misread by viewers for their metaphorical rather than their real meanings. With Allen it is always prudent to start with the thing itself and then move on to possible allusive meanings. These are just trees. But some, perhaps many passers-by surely will wonder at their barren forms and question why they should be works of art when other trees “lifting their leafy arms to pray” are not.

These works should be especially accessible and appealing because of their verbal and musical content. The words and music will make us pause and engage us in the total experience that Allen has set up for us.

His works have been exhibited at such major institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Pasadena Art Museum, the Portland Center for the Visual Arts, the Nelson Gallery and Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Mo., and the UCSD Mandeville Gallery.

At 4 p.m. today at Mandeville Center Recital Hall, Allen will lecture about his new installation. Allen’s talk will be followed by a reception at the site of the work, in the grove of eucalyptus trees southwest of the UCSD Central Library.