UCI Dickers for Unique Perceptual Art Museum

UC Irvine is negotiating with Italian Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, a major patron of contemporary American artists, to house works by seven Southern California artists from his collection in what would be the world’s first museum of perceptual art.

The negotiations are only in the preliminary stage and questions remain about how UCI would raise money to build a special museum for the art. But Panza, who was visiting UCI Tuesday, was hopeful that his collection could be shown permanently in a new campus museum.

At issue is the long-term loan--and possible future acquisition--of 10-50 “installation” works by contemporary U.S. artists who create sensory experiences with light and space. To date, no value has been placed on the works.

A fraction of Panza’s collection of more than 500 pieces, the works in question are by such renowned Southern Californian artists as Robert Irwin, Jim Turrell, Larry Bell, Eric Orr, Doug Wheeler, Bruce Nauman and Maria Nordman.

Turrell, recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” has probably gained the most media attention in recent years for “Roden Crater,” a gigantic project he is creating on an extinct volcano in Arizona.

But all of these artists had a share in creating a new kind of art, dependent on the personal experience of the viewer looking at (or walking through) structured spaces variously altered by patterns of clear or colored light.

The UC Irvine connection is extensive: Irwin taught at UCI, Turrell was the art department’s first graduate student, and Nordman, Orr and Bell all had exhibitions at the gallery during the 1970s.

In 1984, Panza sold 80 Abstract Expressionist and Pop artworks to the Museum of Contemporary Art for $11 million, giving instant stature to the fledgling Los Angeles institution. Several of the pieces proposed for a UCI museum were shown at the museum’s “The First Show” in 1983.

Because installation art is not a single item such as a painting or a sculpture, it doesn’t surface on the art market and therefore resists being assigned a dollar value. If a sale to the university is in the offing, Panza--who has accused the Italian government of not permitting him to donate his art abroad--has agreed to set his price according to an appraisal by one of the major art auction houses.

UCI Fine Arts Gallery director Melinda Wortz said money for the purchase of these works would be raised privately. William Parker, UCI’s associate vice chancellor for advancement, sounded more dubious Tuesday.

“I don’t know where we’d find the money to buy it,” he said.

Negotiations would not begin until the campus found a place to put these room-sized works. The 3,000-square-foot Fine Arts Gallery is far too small to house them.

Wortz said the university has already set aside a roughly 50,000-square-foot plot of land in front of the administration building for a “full-fledged museum.” Panza would like to see his works housed permanently in an “industrial-type building” of 50,000 to 100,000 square feet, which he estimated would cost $100-$150 per square foot.

Parker said the university was still waiting to hear Panza’s “requirements,” calling it “premature to talk about what might be done by way of housing the collection. . . . We haven’t seriously looked at funding sources.”

Wortz said she is also considering an appeal to major donors, whose names she won’t reveal, for $1 million to lease industrial space near the campus to house the collection until money is raised for a new museum.

Her friendship with Panza dates back to a trip to Italy she made in 1979. Visiting again last year, she broached the idea of having work from the collection shown in “the context in which it was made.” She also proposed that a study center devoted to the topic of perception be located within the new museum.

Other museums have also ardently wooed Panza’s collection. One is the planned Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and Architecture (MASS MoCA), designated to be built on the site of an old electric company in North Adams. Proposed at 435,000 square feet of gallery space, MASS MoCA would be the world’s largest contemporary art museum.

Another museum, this one an independently owned, nonprofit project organized by Thomas Krens, director of the Williams College Museum of Art in nearby Williamstown, has been promised a long-term loan of unspecified duration of 150-200 works from the Panza holdings that are in storage. No list of artists has been made public.

Panza has expressed the desire that all his works be shown together. But Tuesday, he said that despite MASS MoCA’s heroic size, it is “not the right place for everything” in his personal collection. Because the building has so many structural columns, he said, “it’s good for minimal sculpture and painting and conceptual art, but no good for environmental art.”

Closer to home, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art have engaged jointly in extended--but so far inconclusive--negotiations with the count for long-term loans of his art. Panza has so far refused to consider an outright sale of his art to these institutions.

He said Tuesday he has not ruled out loans or sales of his work to other Southern California institutions, but “the problem is the space. All the new museums are small, even MoCA. Even with two buildings (MoCA), is still not big. When you have to do many (temporary) exhibitions, you don’t have enough space for environmental art.”

Panza began collecting plans and proposals by Southern California environmental artists in the middle 1960s and subsequently installed many of the realized works in his villa in Varese, Italy. He has called the light-space artists “the greatest modern masters, combining art, philosophy and science.”

He said a museum of perceptual art at UCI would be “the first to specialize in this art, which is so difficult to see elsewhere, an attraction which would be unique.”

“However, it will have to be large. When an institution is large, it becomes immediately a strong magnet for . . . visitors from all over.”