Taking Great Panes : Or How to See the Postmodern Side of Chicken Wire

And now, from our “But Is It Advertising?” file comes avant-garde artist Viki Cole’s wacky window displays at the venerable San Diego Hardware Co.

Cole is the reason downtown strollers have stopped and gawked at the whimsical scenes that have occupied the store’s windows for the past three years. Scenes that feature frolicking dogs fashioned out of freezer paper and masking tape, spilling paint while a worker paints a wall. Or a chicken-wire lady relaxing in a bathtub.

An odd-couple relationship has grown up between Cole and her bizarre constructivist tableaux and this historic 5th Avenue landmark.

“It’s my own personal art show every three months,” Cole said recently. The nice part is that “nobody sends in rejection notices.”

And her life has been enriched by pedestrians, people from all walks and conditions, who stop by to talk with her, Cole said.

The store’s merchandise is advertised in its windows only inasmuch as Cole chooses it for her art. Chicken wire, or poultry netting as it is known in the business, has been a workhorse for Cole, becoming in her hands cactuses, people, a meticulously detailed saddle or a handsome horse.

The lack of hard-sell window dressing doesn’t faze the owners.

“We used to do it ourselves, but, believe me, we really did a lousy job,” said co-owner Bill Haynsworth. “We’d say, ‘Well, let’s get some hose and trash cans.’ It was always horrible.”

When Cole offered to do the work free in 1985, “our windows went from the pits to a metamorphosis overnight--to today, when everybody walks past, then has to stop and look. It forces them to look inside and see what kind of a store would have these windows,” Haynsworth said.

Cole, who has a master’s degree in art from San Diego State University, has won several awards for her art constructions. She offered her services to San Diego Hardware partly as personal therapy and partly as a means to return to art after the trauma of a divorce, she said.

“Since my life changed, it was a way to continue working in the art arena, without continuing to commit to competitions and shows,” she said. “It helped me to continue to work through a difficult time.”

Cole’s windows are mostly excursions into whimsy, but some are more popular than others, including a tin man made from the store’s stock of 3-inch aluminum ducting, with a head fashioned from an upside-down tractor funnel.

It’s not unusual for people to ask to buy the displays, Haynsworth said, but they’re not for sale.

Cole’s current “exhibit” is a gentle satire on the popularity of Southwestern design, featuring imitation adobe walls, Southwestern stereotypes and cactuses made from chicken wire and clothespins. “It’s sort of like the overstuffed ‘40s couches,” she said of the Southwestern trend. “It’s a pleasant, sweet, reminiscent idea.”

Cole also scatters the windows with examples of the store’s 50,000 items of merchandise, from copper and straw nails to sisal rope, gold-mining pans and snowshoes.

“I don’t want to offend anybody or do anything somebody won’t understand,” she said. “(The store owners) need to advertise what they sell. There’s a lot of levels going on. I’m walking a razor line between something absolutely corny and the sophisticated. I still have the fun of coming up with bizarre, wild ideas.”

Besides, Cole said, she can’t stop her compulsion to make art.

“People who are born with what I’m born with know it’s like an illness,” she said. “You can’t help yourself.”

Now the store pays her to design and fabricate the window displays that blanket about 50 feet of storefront along 5th Avenue and about 25 feet at the other end of the store on 4th Avenue.

The results attract comments from other artists as well as customers, according to the store. “It’s so unorthodox for a hardware store to have window decoration, but it’s not decoration--it’s almost like a show,” Haynsworth said.

Although Cole earns her living with a Solana Beach publisher, she says making the window displays has enriched her life.

“I’ve received letters,” including one she carries with her, she said. “Whenever I feel depressed, I pull it out and read it. You get a letter like this maybe once in a lifetime.”

Written in a neat hand, the letter praises her displays that “pleasure me to the point of temporary forgetfulness of the hassles of being a fixed-income SRO (single-room occupancy) resident too familiar with the negative street ambiance . . . and makes me feel hopeful & ‘possible’ in a personal way . . . you make my walking easier.”