ART REVIEW : 2 SAN DIEGO EXHIBITS MISS THE MARK

Two juried exhibits now in Balboa Park will expose you to as much mediocrity in visual art as you might have hoped to avoid in a lifetime.

One is the annual San Diego Artists Guild Open Juried Exhibit at the San Diego Museum of Art, which features works by members of the Artists Guild and by independent artists from San Diego and Imperial counties.

The juror was William Peterson, editor and co-founder of Artspace, a leading journal of contemporary art, who selected 63 works from more than 600 submissions. Award winners were Laurren Pilarczyk for a wall relief in wood and Jesus Dominguez for a vertical column in granite.

The other event is the 32nd annual Juried Art Exhibition at the San Diego Art Institute, with works from throughout the United States. This once was a local-only competition, then for several years it was statewide, but this is the first time that it has been extended throughout the nation.

The juror was Charles Arnoldi, a major bicoastal American artist who is much admired for his innovative painted high reliefs in wood. He selected 99 works from more than 1,000--roughly one-third from San Diego, one-third from elsewhere in California and one-third from the rest of the country. Arnoldi designated David Moen’s oil-on-paper painting “Skeleton No. 4” as Best of Show among nine award winners.

With two such respected and knowledgeable jurors, how was it possible that two such uninteresting but taxing exhibits should have resulted?

The reason in part was doubtless the many works submitted and the practical necessity for the jurors to review them initially in slides. It is a commonplace observation that jurors (even practiced professionals) judge the slides and not the works. Jurors are frequently surprised by what they have selected through the medium of photography and generally reserve the right to eliminate works when they have an opportunity to view them during a second, personal survey, as both of these jurors did.

Slides and other forms of reproduction are indispensable for art education. But they are no substitute for real works of art. They have about the same relationship to “real art” as instant coffee has to the real thing.

It is also apparent that the mediocrity of the exhibits is created by the reluctance of many of our successful artists to submit to the jurying process. Few of the artists selected have regular exhibits in the area’s significant galleries.

It is understandable that professional artists are disinclined to allow their works to be shown with those of, frankly, “Sunday painters,” who are invited to exhibit, as in the Artists Guild show.

A way around this dilemma is to organize an “invitational” exhibit for critically acclaimed artists as a standard of comparison for those selected for the juried exhibit.

It is not appropriate for artists of a certain stature--Walter Wojtyla and Ethel Greene, for example--to enter competitions year after year. An invitational exhibit coinciding with the juried exhibit would provide such artists with an opportunity to keep an interested public acquainted with their work. Now to the exhibits themselves, both of which had works ranging from superb to dreadful, averaging out at mediocre.

Most of the paintings are competently made, whether abstract or representational. They would be pleasant to live with, and that is the problem. They do not present any challenges to viewers. They represent accepted answers to problems of aesthetics. (What is beautiful? A bird on a rose, as in Tony Lunde’s “The Magic Rose.”) They do not attempt to present new answers. They do not generally dare to offend, as did Shelley Hill in her painted wood and wire wall construction (vaguely resembling an oil derrick), “When You Reach the Bottom Line,” chosen by Arnoldi, not coincidentally, for the first-place award in the sculpture category at the Art Institute.

At the museum, John Brodie, one of San Diego’s finest and most neglected artists, is represented by a haunting, shaped painting entitled “The Twisted Man”; Tom Frankovich by a sinister construction whose media mix includes razor blades and feathers; Eugenie Geb and Louie Gonzales by masterful works on paper; David Reutter by a photograph strong in composition, and Nancy Kittredge by a characteristically bold figurative painting. The fresh vision of Lynda Rae Ross appears in both exhibits in mixed-media wall reliefs with electric lights.

Clint Stoddard’s painting “Chair,” in which the form, floating in layers of thinned orange pigment, is a symbol for a daringly precarious compositional balance, is outstanding but difficult to view in the crowded installation.

For exemplary egregiousness in this exhibit, I nominate the artists who use rabbits among their images--the symbolism of abused innocence. They just look like bunnies.

The Art Institute show is even more of a disappointment. It is possible to ask not only why some of these works were included but also why they were made in the first place.

Nevertheless, there are a few works of outstanding artistic merit, including figurative paintings by John Abel, William Barnhart, William Glen Crooks and Karl Nicholason. James Thomas’ series of 12 small landscapes on mahogany panels, entitled “Euclid’s Gift,” is among the most beautiful and visually nourishing works in the show.

Also outstanding is Mari Omori’s large graphite drawing of a man’s shirt, which is the perfect visual realization of its title, “My Husband Who Lost His Memory.”

The subtlety of this imagery is in marked contrast to the sincere but vacuous spiritual statement of Bryen Kirk in “Sugar Samadhi” and the political statement of Roberta Weslly in “Myopia.”

There is something terribly wrong with an exhibit that can elicit this response from a visitor: “I think I’ll become an artist. It’s so easy.”

Both exhibitions continued through Nov. 2.