ART REIVEW : LIFE’S RANDOMNESS IS TV’S SPARK

The Stuart Foundation is creating one of the great collections of public art in the United States at UC San Diego.

The most recently installed work, and possibly the most problematic for the public, is “Something Pacific” by Korean-born artist Nam June Paik, a resident of New York since 1964.

Paik came to sculpture from music through the medium of television. He used TV sets in his musical compositions for their random sounds, as John Cage some decades before had used radios. Television, however, is a visual medium, and Paik moved into visual art.

Paik’s piece, inaugurated last week in conjunction with UCSD’s Pacific Ring Festival, is installed in and around the courtyard entrance of the Media Center.

You might, while casually heading for the entrance itself, notice peripherally one or two small statues facing dead television sets--surely the work of a campus prankster.

Inside the Media Center door, however, you find a confrontational bank of 24 active but silent television sets stacked right-side up, upside down and in various other positions, simultaneously playing a variety of Paik’s videotapes. Viewer participation is possible through image manipulation on a synthesizer. The visual effect is rather like that of a huge kaleidoscope and is equally fascinating.

The difference between Paik’s installation and a mass of sets playing in a sales outlet is the resourceful artist’s ordering of the randomness of daily life. Paik has successfully used a contemporary medium, now so banal that we forget its ingenuity, both conceptual and material, to create a new visual experience, one that is both instructive and enjoyable.

Now reconsider what you have seen in the courtyard. There are seven related parts, some of which you must seek out: Buddhas staring at dead TV sets, a small facsimile of Rodin’s “The Thinker” apparently engrossed in the blankness of the tiny screen of a Sony Watchman; a vine-covered, concrete replica of a floor-model TV; a TV graveyard, and more. The works, initially engaging for their ostensible silliness, are nevertheless singly and as a group profoundly existentially evocative, rather like the comments of Lear’s Fool.

Paik’s piece is the fifth work of public art installed by the Stuart Collection on the campus. Just a month ago, a tripartite sculpture by Fresno-based artist Terry Allen, entitled “Trees,” was inaugurated. Two dead eucalyptus trees covered in lead have been wired electronically, one to tell stories, the other to sing songs, in a grove north of the Mandeville Center for the Arts. A third tree near the Central University Library simply stands, poised like a dancer.

The Stuart Collection began in 1982 when the University of California Board of Regents signed an agreement with the Stuart Foundation, representing San Diego businessman James DeSilva and Marne DeSilva, for use of the UCSD campus as a site for contemporary outdoor sculpture.

Mary Livingston Beebe, formerly director of the internationally respected Portland (Ore.) Center for the Visual Arts, heads the collection, which is governed by an international board of distinguished artists and art professionals.

The first sculpture placed on the campus was the “Sun God” by French artist Niki de Saint Phalle. Wings outstretched, a giant, multicolored, cast fiberglass bird with a gold crown sits atop a concrete arch rebuking the austere angularity and dreary coloration of the academic buildings across the field from it.

It is an ironic measure of the success of the Stuart Collection that the “Sun God,” now the mascot of the student body and impersonated at athletic events, was greeted by many students with hostility and given such epithets as “the KGB Chicken on Halloween” and “Ronald McDonald with wings.” This year marks the campus’ fourth annual “Sun God” festival.

If the “Sun God” outraged the visually naive populace of the UCSD campus, the second addition to the Stuart Collection bewildered it. Robert Irwin’s “Two Running Violet V Forms” consists of two 30-foot-high structures made of stainless steel poles supporting expanses of cyclone fencing, painted an intense blue high above the ground. Viewed straight on, the fencing appears as a haze among the leaves of eucalyptus trees in the grove where the sculpture is located. Viewed obliquely, however, it looks like a solid form cutting through the grove.

The Los Angeles-based artist created a masterpiece of perceptual art for the UCSD campus. Nevertheless, it has been jeered as a “volleyball net” and a “giraffe catcher.” Still, some students are beginning to call the grove where it is situated, near Terry Allen’s trees, “The Enchanted Forest.”

Rhode Island sculptor Richard Fleischner’s “La Jolla Project,” on the lawn south of the Humanities Library Building, is the most traditional-looking work in the Stuart Collection because of its material and the architectural configurations of its parts--71 pieces of pink and gray New Hampshire granite in compositions resembling posts, lintels, thresholds, doorways and windows.

Fleischner, who has a genius for creating a sense of place, has brought life to a formerly neglected area on campus. His installation has become so popular that it is now often the site for concerts, dances, weddings and other ceremonies.

Beebe has commented proudly of the collection: “This is a unique opportunity to create an in-depth collection of contemporary, site-specific works of art. UCSD is on the cutting edge of research in the sciences and it is appropriate that it should be on the cutting edge in the arts as well.”