ART REVIEW : 4 New Works at Institute Herald Sculpture Park

“Pigeons on the grass alas,” the puckish poet Gertrude Stein wrote in her play, “Four Saints in Three Acts.”

“Sculpture on the lawn yawn” might serve as a weary ‘80s rejoinder. We’ve become accustomed to the ubiquitous little dab of color or lick of abstract doodling sitting on the well-manicured lawns of corporations, collectors and upwardly mobile organizations.

Now, the Art Institute of Southern California has gotten into the act with a yearlong outdoor installation of four pieces by four Southern California artists, intended to herald the creation of a “sculpture park” on the Laguna Canyon campus. Through Oct. 1, three of the sculptors also have work in the school’s Ettinger and Reynolds galleries.

The outdoor stuff looks fairly peppy and youthful, as befits a school anxious to trumpet its new vigor and forward-looking stance. There’s nothing embarrassingly square here or boringly blue chip but also nothing startling or remarkable. True to sculpture-on-the-lawn form, the pieces have come to rest hither and thither on the school’s Laguna Canyon Road-facing property, scattered as if by one giant, albeit distracted, hand.

The best-situated piece (near the entryway), is Michael Todd’s “Diamaru XIV,” one of the large ring-shaped steel sculptures he has been turning out for several years. The ring snags small geometric shapes, a molten blot and a free-form scribble--the latter, a vestige of the willful little pieces Todd was doing a decade ago.

Todd’s rings carry a metaphysical freight; as in Japanese Zen painting, the shape is a symbol of the cosmos. Granted the artist’s seriousness and calmly grounded Far Eastern outlook, these pieces have nevertheless become predictable and a wee bit boring. Like lesser works by Erick Hawkins--the modern dance choreographer whose style is deliberately tension-less--Todd’s approach has a way of bogging down in passivity.

Positioned on the far edge of the school’s property, as if anxious to sneak off downtown, stands Cy Vojak’s “Just for Openers.” An architectural 16-foot-tall mixed-media construction in black and gray, it has several platforms, a large, central opening and a fussily jigsawed upper portion.

In common with Vojak’s indoor pieces, the structure seems designed to be viewed from the side, a vantage point from which it looks rather like a giant hand-operated can opener. Seen straight-on--at least in daylight, when the fluorescent light tubes in front don’t register--the piece rapidly loses its quirky identity.

Ed Quoss’ “Re-Cyclone” perches uncertainly on a patch of grass near the road. It is a stack of tires--different sizes, with a variety of tread patterns--in the shape of a tornado. A comfortably zany little object, it works here (despite competition from neighboring trees) precisely because of the modest offhandedness of its concept.

Steve Metzger’s “Canyon” is the most pedestrian of the group. It sits on the wooden building wall near the north parking lot like a tasteful brooch on a dark dress. A medley of slices of lacquered fiberglass and other materials, it might as well have been made to fill in some imaginary checklist of the Polite Ideal in abstract sculpture.

Does it contain various shapes? Yes! Does it display different colors? Yes! Is there textural interest? Yes! Is there just enough symmetry? Yes! Well, then, it gets an “A” for effort.

Inside, where three of the artists also hold court, the story is much the same. The Indoor Metzgers are smaller kissing cousins of the Outdoor Metzgers. The Quosses are clever without being bratty. And Vojak balances tantalizingly on a line between a smart, well-engineered update on Constructivism and an unfortunate slickness.

Quoss, whose work is also in “Something Funny,” a concurrent show at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, has a knack for working up deadpan visual puns with formal appeal and--on occasion--rather baffling musings on the intersection of nature and culture.

“Logarhythm” is simple and sweet: a curving pile of vinyl records sitting on the floor echoes the natural curve of a hunk of tree limb parked alongside it. A stack of yardsticks and a log intersect in “Branch Mark”; a pencil turns into a twig and back into a pencil in “Pencil Stick.”

In an untitled piece using an old, skinny wooden table, Quoss seems to reach for a more complex equivalency. He replaced the three drawers with equivalent-sized blocks of granite and wood and a sealed glass container filled with water. Attached to a pull-out ledge on the table are diagrams of what appears to be the “Golden Section,” a geometric proportion believed by Renaissance artists to be aesthetically superior to all others.

The viewer seems to be asked to view the three elements of the table--granite, wood and water--as the three elements of this proportion. But the meaning of it all remains unclear.

Vojak’s wall sculptures are machine-like structures built from witty combinations of shapes. In “Skull Fracture,” big lobe-like wooden shapes are punctuated by balls, levers, springs and a row of gleaming metal cubes. A dome-shaped cracked light in a metal case is an unseeing eye. Formally adept and precisely crafted, this neo-constructivist image of the workings of the brain is a sharp piece of work.

“Transformer,” with its long, “plugged-in” metal rods and layers of wax and wood and “Butt Wrench,” which resembles a crouching animal, are other well-made pieces in this mode. Problems arise in “Ahead,” where Vojak becomes enamored of a coyly moderne look and wastes his time fussing with speckled paint and decorative screws that take the muscle out of his method.

Next time, perhaps the gallery show will have a sharper curatorial focus, rather than roping together unrelated bodies of work. But the main event is clearly the establishment of the sculpture garden. Dependent at present on long-term loans from artists, the program’s overall direction is still not cast in concrete. May it dare to be different than all those other boring and forgettable lawn projects--and possibly inspire a student or two to go out and enliven a spot of greensward somewhere else.

The indoor portion of “Indoor/Outdoor Sculpture” remains at the Art Institute of Southern California (2222 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach) through Oct 1; the outdoor pieces will be on view until September, 1989. The gallery is open Monday through Thursday, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Friday, 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; Saturday, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Admission is free. Information: (714) 497-3309.