HIGHSTEIN RETROSPECTIVE IN LA JOLLA

The La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art has organized a major, mid-career retrospective for New York sculptor Jene Highstein, who until recently had more exhibitions and received more attention in Europe than in the United States.

As is true of artists of merit, the uniqueness of his vision escapes strict categorization. Nevertheless, Highstein is known as a post-Minimalist, and that label helps to situate him relative to other internationally critically regarded sculptors who are his professional colleagues.

“I was never a Minimalist,” he said during a recent visit here. Nevertheless, he has adhered to a reductivist aesthetic. Visitors will find primal forms with a quasi-organic or quasi-geologic look that resemble objects such as totems, dinosaur eggs and mounds. They are made of a variety of materials, including cement, bronze, cast iron and wood. The inverted, somewhat altered base of a palm tree elicits ambivalent responses. Also exhibited are several large black drawings on paper.

The most imposing parts of the exhibition are in the museum’s west gallery, which has been divided into two spaces. In the smaller one, museum preparators have, through his courtesy, re-created an installation in the collection of famed Italian collector Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. “Single Pipe Piece” is nothing more than a 39-foot length of 16-inch-diameter pipe spanning the length of the room above head level.

The other space is nearly filled by a humongous black mound that resembles a turtle’s shell, hence its title, “Mound (Turtle).”

Such works differ from the 1960s Minimalist attitude, of which the La Jolla museum was a West Coast champion during the 1970s, in a number of ways.

Minimalism represented a dispassionate approach to art in reaction against the passionate Abstract Expressionists with their cosmic involvements and mystical yearnings. For the hot complexity of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism offered cool simplicity, and for feelings, ideas.

At the core of Minimalism was the concern for a single shape that viewers could immediately grasp without making any kind of referential associations. The ideal was a quasi-manufactured object innocent of the artist’s “touch” or idiosyncratic markings, an autonomous pure form. The sculptures of Donald Judd, such as columns of stacked rectangles or “boxes,” are paradigms of Minimalism.

Highstein has consistently used reductive forms, but he prefers handwork to Minimalist industrial fabrication and relies on intuition instead of geometric calculation. In addition, his works, even the largest, are always of a scale to mediate between the viewer and the environment, whether indoor or outdoor, architecture or nature. Finally, instead of non-referential clarity, Highstein offers suggestibility and occasions for allegory and mystery.

“Highstein has the ability to make abstract objects that remind us of ourselves,” critic Ted Castle wrote in Artforum’s November, 1979, issue. As viewers of the sculptor’s works, we know that we are in the presence of physical things that we can relate to, not of pure ideas.

Highstein came naturally by his interest in abstraction through the influence of his father, a Baltimore physician and painter. He majored in philosophy at the University of Maryland, then began graduate studies at the University of Chicago in the early 1960s--but also began to make art. He lived in New York in 1965 and 1966, studied art, and became acquainted with the city’s energetic art scene. In 1967, he moved to London to study at the Royal Academy Schools. In 1970, he returned to New York to pursue his career.

In 1974, he made a highly regarded installation entitled “Double Pipe Piece” at the 112 Greene Street Gallery using two lengths of 16-inch-diameter pipe. Spanning the width of the 84-by-34-foot gallery at different above-head-level heights, they activated the space and engaged visitors in experiencing it.

His first “mature” piece (and now the best known, but not included in the La Jolla Museum exhibition) was the “Black Sphere” of 1976, an object 6-foot-4 in diameter made of cement on an armature. It has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and is now in the collection of the University of Chicago.

“The ball may not sound very lovable,” Castle wrote, “and it would take four or five people to hug it, but there is something homey about it; it is a version of Earth that we can comprehend.”

“The thing I’m aiming at,” Highstein said during a talk at the museum, “is a relationship between you and the objects I’m making. It’s about getting you to see what I’m seeing.”

The exhibition was organized by museum director Hugh Davies and curator Lynda Forsha and is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue. It continues through Feb. 1, then travels to the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.