VISUAL ARTS : City Should Let the Clock Keep Ticking in Balboa Park

One of the first sights that visitors entering Balboa Park from the Cabrillo Bridge see, after the landmark California Tower, is the San Diego Museum of Art’s sculpture garden, a grassy expanse holding more than a dozen large-scale works. Elegantly enclosed within a border of slender posts, but still fully visible from the outside, the sculptures announce the museum’s presence in the park and offer an invitation inside for further exploration.

The works, by such internationally acclaimed sculptors as Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Louise Nevelson and George Rickey, are in danger of suffocation.

The Committee of 100, an organization dedicated to preserving Balboa Park’s Spanish Colonial architecture, has mounted a drive to reconstruct a series of arcades along the park’s central artery, El Prado. (Many of the park’s original arcades still stand, but others were removed in the 1950s and ‘60s.)

One section of the proposed covered walkway would stand between El Prado and the sculpture garden, blocking an outside view of the work and substantially altering the garden’s pleasant, open atmosphere.

In aspiring to return sections of the park to their original condition, the Committee of 100 seems to assert that the only valid experience of the park is the original one presented to visitors at the park’s debut, the 1915 Panama-California Exposition. What the committee has neglected to consider is that the park, like the city at large, is an organic entity that grows, changes and matures in response to the needs and conditions of the community. Positive changes have occurred in the park since it was first built, and the presence of fine, outdoor art is one of many nourishing additions.

To replace the park’s original arcades would be to turn back the clock and deny the positive impact of these changes. It would inject a touch more authenticity to the park’s architecture, but at the expense of at least one of its institutions and the visitors it hopes to attract.

Afew weeks ago, Sushi Gallery was host to a show by 50 local artists, the same 50 who are celebrated in the recent book, “San Diego Artists.” Now, through Jan. 29, the San Diego Museum of Art makes its annual nod to local artists with the “Artists Guild Open Juried Exhibition.” Of the 25 artists in the museum’s show, only one (Ethel Greene) also appeared in the book and Sushi show, leaving the impression that a different city was scoured to make each show.

In truth, all 74 artists are based in San Diego County, but each show skimmed from a different tier in the artistic community. Although most of those included in the Sushi show have attained a level of professional accomplishment marked by frequent exhibitions and publications, very few in the Artists Guild show have reached that level of maturity or exposure.

Although for the most part their work makes up a secondary tier in the broad scheme of artistic importance, the artists in the Museum of Art show serve an integral and necessary role in the local community’s artistic dialogue. They form an active audience for local endeavors and their own art, this show demonstrates, possesses almost as much vitality as it does sincerity.

Earnestness is in such excess here, in fact, that much of the work can be faulted for simply trying too hard. Norman Ridenour’s slick clock on a wheeled Formica base, Raggio!’s boisterous but empty painted wood construction, “Bim, Bam, Blam, Boom! . . . Have a Seat” and Jo Going’s flamboyant mixed media works with flickering and flashing lights all suffer from the belief, all too prevalent in the art world at large, that the outlandish and extreme automatically merit distinction.

Of the 36 works on display, whittled down from 856 entries from Artists Guild members and others in the county by guest juror, artist Lita Albuquerque, several of the most affecting are the quietest and most austere.

Miriam Sievers’s construction, “Echo I,” in raw and painted wood, steel and industrial-weight felt, exudes a spare and elegant simplicity. Its open box form mounted on the wall houses a fluid wooden form, suggesting a sound wave, suspended in time and space. The concise geometry of the piece evokes a musical sense of structure and rhythm, of passage through time encapsulated in static physical form.

Two acrylic paintings on paper by Martha Matthews emerge as the most powerful and boldly realized in the show. Both “Story” and “A Saga” employ a stark vocabulary to contrast the sturdy, powerful forms of industry with the more fragile, organic forces of nature. In each, a pair of silhouetted figures can be seen on a boat floating on inky water. Dark skeletal remains of trees stand nearby, while in the distance, erect smokestacks issue dark and heavy clouds.

The red steel railing of a bridge cuts across the foreground of each image, and other industrial forms frame the views toward the small figures, who seem nearly swallowed up by the forces of progress. Matthews paints the scenes with dramatic intensity, edging each billowing cloud with a delicate strand of gold, an echo of the setting sun. The mood she conveys harks from earlier eras, especially that of the American regionalists of the 1930s and ‘40s.

Other notable selections in the show include Christine Oatman’s photographic sequences documenting site-specific performances, Genie Shenk’s sensitive diary, “Daybook, Nightbook,” and Nancy Kittredge’s pensive painting, “Signals.” Pete Evaristo’s painting, “Land’Scape” and Angela Kosta’s painted assemblage, “Life Script,” received the show awards.