ISOLATION VS. STIMULATION : San Diego’s Cocoon Can Enrich, Smother Struggling Local Artists

Far from SoHo’s over-hyped art scene, Eleanor and David Antin live in a rustic, converted World War II building east of Del Mar.

Eleanor, a nationally recognized performance artist, and David, a respected art critic and improvisational performance poet, moved west from New York in 1968 to help establish the emerging UC San Diego art department.

Reachable only by dirt roads, their quiet county home base suits these cutting-edge, performance-oriented artists just fine.

“It’s really the old California--sage, chaparral, isolation,” David said of their rural hideaway.

The region’s solitude, isolation, natural beauty and proximity to Mexico have seduced a pack of artistic expatriates, who have fled the madding crowds of other cities to work in relative obscurity.

Mathieu Gregoire, an emerging sculptor who came here from Oregon in 1983, finds San Diego perfect for his needs, if not as perfect as local boosters claim.

“(San Diego is) certainly not America’s finest city, but you don’t have to contend with traffic and the horrid climate of galleries and MFAs (masters of fine arts graduates) desperate to make contact,” Gregoire said. “That kind of hype and tension and constant upheaval makes it really hard for the art to function in galleries. It’s too hard to move forward when under such scrutiny. Everyone hates you.”

Living and working away from the hectic gallery scenes of New York and Los Angeles has its advantages, artists say, such as a simpler life style that some artists find more conducive to productivity and a greater likelihood of having ones work critically reviewed.

There are trade-offs, to be sure, to living in San Diego.

“If I wanted more exposure, I’m sure there are better places to be,” said Deborah Small, who constructs politically charged works in wood and paint in a rented La Jolla garage. “But I probably get more reviews here, since there are fewer shows.”

Fine art photographer Philipp Scholz Rittermann brings a cosmopolitan background to San Diego. He has found a collegial atmosphere in San Diego that he prefers over that of his native Peru, or of Germany, where he lived for 12 years before moving here in 1982.

San Diego has little of Germany’s overwhelming tenaciousness, envy and back-stabbing, he said. Trips to New York, a necessity in placing his art, serve to set off San Diego’s allure.

“We all know New York is exciting, but it’s just not as fresh as it is out here,” Rittermann said. “I feel more at home here than I ever did in Peru or Germany.”

Despite the paucity of art collectors and contemporary art galleries in San Diego, painter Raul Guerrero has found financial independence.

The life style, he says, is simpler and less expensive to maintain than in Los Angeles, where Guerrero previously lived. He supports himself on art sales, mostly through a Los Angeles art gallery, and through grants and commissions, such as a fountain installation he is making for the revitalization of L.A.’s Grand-Hope Park.

“The main reason for being here is that it allows me the time to contemplate,” said Guerrero at his home studio near Balboa Park. “It’s almost a ‘50s sensibility--slow, quiet, something of a throwback, real sane.”

San Diego has directly influenced the work of some artists through its climate, geography and politics. The area has made a significant impact on the career of photographer whose watery “Aqueous Myths” series of prints grew out of her hobby of ocean swimming.

House left Los Angeles in 1980 to take a job teaching photography at Grossmont College, where she found the financial security that fosters her creativity. She calls San Diego “probably the biggest influence on my work. The ocean--that ability to stop and reflect and take some assessment . . . .

“What San Diego allowed me was the chance to . . . slow down, lower the stress level and explore who I was about,” House said, “to do some kind of soul searching--and I found an athletic event that I liked, something to do that wasn’t all photography, and then that fed into my work.”

Much more so than New York, this conservative corner of Southern California offers a microcosm of America, say David and Eleanor Antin, who have mined it for their work.

Eleanor created the King of Solana Beach, an outlandish looking performance art character who once tromped through that beach community discussing with residents the effects of the rapid population growth that is altering the human and ecological fabric of the region.

“A lot of San Diego has informed my work enormously, simply the nature of the struggle over land, over development, over honesty in government,” David Antin said. “It becomes more obvious to us in a smaller city like this . . . .”

San Diego’s status as a border city with Mexico underpins the work of several “border” artists, including much of the socially oriented and often controversial art of David Avalos.

“Really, my work is a product of seeing myself as part of a community . . . in which the only place we have is the place we create for ourselves,” said Avalos, an artist-in-residence and curator of the Centro Cultural de la Raza. An activist artist, he has most recently designed art that calls attention to the way society takes advantage of illegal Mexican workers.

“There’s this understanding that if we’re going to be a part of society, we have to get out there and contribute to the making of that society--contribute to the changing of that society,” Avalos said.

For all the advantages San Diego offers in terms of quietness and isolation, it can be severely limiting, especially for an emerging artist.

Allan Kaprow, a UCSD professor, cautions his art students about falling into “a provincial kind of sleepwalk here.” Kaprow conceived and developed the Happening, a form of public participation art event prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s.

While San Diego has “the protective atmosphere of a low-pressure city, for somebody who is a local, relatively unperipatetic artist, it may be sleeping death,” Kaprow warned.

The way to avoid that, he said, is for the artist to travel and be “exposed to things everywhere.”

Ultimately, any working artist who is nourished by San Diego’s beauty and peace must seek validation and sales elsewhere simply because so few people collect art here. For the local emerging artist, this is a peculiar form of growing pain.

“It’s difficult to get feedback here,” said Mario Lara. “That’s what I crave the most--dialogue and feedback.”

Lara, who has begun to receive commissions for his large-scale architectural constructions, is torn between San Diego’s attractions and its status as a hopelessly dead-end art market.

“It’s difficult for me to leave this area when I can get this much work done,” he said. “But now I have to work out of town. Now I’m at that next level, where I’m trying to hustle outside of San Diego. I’m at the bottom of that level. It’s a slow and painstaking process.”

San Diego poses a different kind of problem for the established artist who shows primarily in New York but wants to be a part of and encourage the developing local art scene.

“National artists aren’t going to do the really important work for a San Diego gallery,” said Kim MacConnel. MacConnel, who has exhibited his decorative art in a New York gallery since the middle 1970s, likes to show in San Diego as well. But showing here can be sticky.

“If I do that work and show it in New York, it’s at least seen,” he said. “I can then show the work here or show whatever.”

But when MacConnel debuts a new body of work in San Diego that departs from what has gone before, he gets in trouble.

“If I do new work, and I show the work in San Diego, and I . . . do another body of work a year later, and I show that in New York, this work that I showed here doesn’t exist. I made a huge jump, and I’m both criticized (in New York) for making a huge jump and put down for it because people can’t follow that, and it’s not reported.”

While selling art is a social and business process, making it still remains a personal act. Successful San Diego artists manage to balance both skills.

Suda House summed up the advantages and disadvantages of working in San Diego: “There’s a lot to be said for isolation (in San Diego) versus stimulation” in a major art center. “In some . . . cities people can be stimulated to the point that it is hard to do the work.

“But if you keep yourself educated with the newspaper, art journals and publications . . . you can enjoy San Diego and make your pictures and still tap some opportunities.”