ART REVIEW : ‘SITINGS’ UNFETTERS THE UNTRADITIONAL VISION

Ever since one flank of contemporary artists left the company of museums for the streets and pastures of the real world, the Establishment has been trying to figure out what to do about it.

No right-thinking professional disapproves of the move; some of the most interesting work of the last 20 years has been done in unconventional settings. The trouble for institutions is that it’s impossible to give the art its due in the confines of a museum or gallery.

Many have tried, usually amassing overwhelming loads of photographs, diagrams, models and documents that impart information about the art but no experience of it. The latest to round up a scattered batch of “site-specific” artworks inside a building is the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, which gives us “Sitings,” through May 25.

Essentially a show of drawings by Alice Aycock, Richard Fleischner, Mary Miss and George Trakas, “Sitings” is not as dull as it sounds. For one thing, the drawings are themselves works of art and a good deal more revealing of aesthetic sensibilities than the usual documentation.

For another, the group of artists is fairly cohesive; they tend to build architectural structures of ordinary construction materials, often in urban areas.

And for a third, all four artists have projects (either completed or in process) in the San Diego area. Fleischner has installed stone markers to “define” a section of the UC San Diego campus. Miss is working on a group of platforms and landings on a steep slope at San Diego State University. Trakas is redesigning the La Jolla museum’s south garden, adding paths, stairs and seating to make it “more habitable.”

Aycock has enlivened the exhibition immeasurably with an imaginative sculptural installation that nearly fills one large gallery. Called “The Glass Bead Game: Circling ‘Round the Ka’ba,” this giant, circular thingamabob of blue, gray and white painted wood and metal is an amalgam of contraptions both seen and imagined. Its slanted base might be borrowed from a carnival’s tilt-a-whirl, except that curved risers above it also suggest an amphitheater.

No? Well, maybe the piece is a takeoff on a child’s top or a spinning game board, all cut up and reshuffled. But then what’s that houselike affair with a table on its roof doing in the center of the sculpture? Aycock isn’t telling, in a literal way, but she does say the piece was inspired by such things as game boards, Middle Eastern architecture, celestial imagery and astronomical instruments.

Aycock concocted “The Glass Bead Game” specifically for the room it inhabits and, true to the spirit of the exhibition (organized by museum Director Hugh M. Davies and senior curator Ronald J. Onorato), it won’t travel to other locations. Instead, Miss will build a work for the Dallas Museum of Art when “Sitings” is there from June 8 to Aug. 3; Fleischner will do the same at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Sept. 16 to Nov. 16, and Trakas at an undetermined location in New York in 1987.

Even without the dynamic presence of “The Glass Bead Game,” Aycock stands out as the visionary or fantasist of the group--and thus the most engaging. She mines historical, literary and architectural sources to build improbable structures charged with psychological twists and peppered with a universe of references.

In the past, some of her work has exuded an awkward element of danger; to enter her buildings has been to risk being trapped or falling. Now Aycock seems to have mellowed and flowered; eclectic scholarship and playfulness are the prevalent traits of her work in “Sitings.” Two circles open like a hinged compact revealing an “India World View” in one large drawing. Others depict a “Tower of Babel,” a little house planted atop two fat columns and the letters of the Rosetta Stone expanded to become buildings in a city.

The point of the exhibition is to present the flip side of the portable easel-painting tradition in works conceived for a particular location, whether permanent or temporary. Aycock’s drawings are so inherently engaging that their sitings seem secondary, but the other three artists clearly use landscapes or urban settings as a primary given.

Working with conte crayon and pencil on diazo prints, Fleischner sets forth his “La Jolla Grove” proposal as a romantic environment in which simple block furniture provides a quiet place to commune with lush verdure and to see it as a contained structure.

Trakas gets so carried away with the voluptuousness of nature--at least in his drawings--that the structures he imposes on ravines and waterfalls seem a way of celebrating their organic force by straddling and embracing it.

Miss’ “42nd Street Project” fills a space between two old buildings with a “vest-pocket park” combining platforms, stairs, a pool and theatrical sets. Her drawings--often including inset photographs of models or actual outdoor projects--are the most mechanical-looking art of the lot. All straight lines and sharp angles, they set forth intricate wood constructions of towers, stairs and walkways.

The message behind this exhibition has been widely noted but remains unassimilated: While museums still function as repositories of portable cultural treasures, they must also serve as study centers for art that has left their protective cover. How to do that and give visitors the visual gratification they have come to expect from immediate contact with artworks remains a problem.