‘Vices and Virtues’: Word Association : Neighbors initially took a dim view of Nauman’s neon display, but now the reviews are glowing

Imagine looking out your living room window and seeing the words lust, sloth and gluttony spelled out in 5-foot-high neon letters on a building across the street. Some neighbors of UC San Diego considered that prospect in October of 1984 and didn’t like it one little bit.

It was bad enough that residents of La Jolla Shores Planned District had to put up with university traffic and construction problems and that the new Mandell Weiss Center for the Performing Arts intruded into their formerly sylvan view of the campus. To crown the massive rectangular building with a Bruce Nauman neon sculpture called “Vices and Virtues” was more than some neighbors could bear.

News of the proposal to add a spectacular example of Nauman’s work to the Stuart Collection--a privately financed group of artworks sprinkled around the campus--was greeted as a threat. “People were terrified of the fact that the art is words and that it is neon,” said Hugh Davies, director of the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art.

Acting out of “an irrational fear that had nothing to do with neon or art,” some people seemed to believe that “Vices and Virtues” would “incite infidelity in the community,” said Mary Beebe, director of the Stuart Collection. Detractors charged that the flashing artwork would cause automobile accidents. One man said he would have to change the route of his daily walk to avoid looking at the nasty neon words, Beebe recalled during an interview in her UC San Diego office.

At the height of the controversy, La Jolla City Councilman Bill Mitchell called a press conference at the site and urged that municipal zoning ordinances prohibiting flashing signs be applied to the art. Though the laws cover neither university property nor art, he asked, “Why should an exception be made--whether it’s for Picasso or this guy?”

Nauman’s proposal had vocal champions. Edith Kodmur, a neighbor who owns a piece of neon art, contended that the neon would improve the “ugly” building. Davies, who lives near the university but doesn’t have a view of the campus, offered to exchange houses with anyone who had a view but objected to the art.

But critics of the project were not impressed. Davies’ offer, issued during a community hearing, was answered with a hiss from the crowd. In the interest of community relations, university officials decided to seek another site for the art.

Now--almost six years after Nauman completed his first drawings for the project--a larger version of the originally proposed “Vices and Virtues” has been installed on the Charles Lee Powell Structural Systems Laboratory in the center of the campus, safely removed from neighbors’ sight. Stories of heated exchanges during the controversy have faded into local history and acquired the flavor of quaint anecdotes. Meanwhile, the neon art has found such easy acceptance on campus that some of its supporters have difficulty recalling details of the fuss.

A television crew that came on campus to film the finished piece had to “look far and wide to find anyone who didn’t like it,” said Lea Rudee, the university’s dean of engineering, who says he is delighted to have “a world-class artwork in the engineering complex.”

Rudee also has something of an aesthetic wonder on his hands. Containing a full mile of neon tubing, “Vice and Virtues” may be the biggest neon sign in the country. (Most of the glittering spectacles on Las Vegas casinos are now electronic.) Like all artists whose works are in the Stuart Collection, Nauman was paid $20,000 for his effort. Total cost of the piece was $240,000, of which the National Endowment for the Arts contributed $40,000.

An art aficionado who serves on the board of the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, Rudee said that “greed” was part of his motivation in snaring the artwork for his bailiwick when it became clear that the theater location was doomed. But he has two other reasons for enthusiastically adopting Nauman’s troublesome art.

One is conceptual: “It is simplistic to assume that only the theater department deals with vices and virtues. In a technological society we have to confront these issues on a daily basis,” Rudee said.

The other reason is physical: The laboratory, located at the future hub of the campus, is far more visible to students than the theater, on a hill at La Jolla Village Drive and Torrey Pines Road.

Every night from dusk until 11 p.m., “Vices and Virtues” performs for passers-by, patrons of the university library and anyone who happens to spot it from windows of the Scripps Memorial Hospital or the Marriott Hotel in University City--among the few off-campus places where the work can be seen.

Seven-foot-tall neon words run around a bank of windows at the top of the 60-foot tall laboratory. Seven virtues and vices-- faith/lust, hope/envy, charity/sloth, prudence/pride, justice/avarice, temperance/gluttony and fortitude/anger-- appear in superimposed pairs. The virtues are spelled out in upright block letters that flash in clockwise direction. The vices circle the building in slanted letters, with words running counterclockwise. The virtues flash sequentially for three seconds per word in a cycle that starts every seven seconds. The vices move a bit faster, flashing at two-and-a-half seconds per word on a 5.83-second cycle. At periodic intervals, all the virtues or all the vices flash simultaneously for 10 seconds.

The overlapping cycles of flashing light and the fact that each word is composed of two colors in a palette of 11 hues results in seemingly endless variations and a constantly changing rainbow of color. Sometimes two or three words stand out like beacons; at other moments, a ribbon of superimposed letters and fluctuating colors streaks around the building and disappears into the night.

Situated on 10-foot-tall glass panels, the words also shine through to other sides of the building, giving the whole parade a three-dimensional appearance. During twilight hours--when most observers think the piece is at its best--the words are subtle apparitions. As night falls, the building seems to slip away, leaving the bright words to float in dark space.

Some people liken the neon-adorned laboratory to a modern cathedral with stained-glass windows. Others find deep meaning in momentary visions, such as the fact that gluttony seems to devour avarice or the way that the superimposed lust and faith blend into a word that looks rather like Faust.

Nauman has issued “a moral reminder without being didactic or confrontational, and he uses the medium for getting that across in a truly subversive way,” said Marcia Tucker, director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.

For Tucker, who has shown Nauman’s work at the New Museum and at the Whitney Museum of American Art when she was curator there, “Vices and Virtues” provides a perfect illustration of the difference between propaganda and art. “Propaganda tells you what to think. Art tells you to think,” she said.

“You are inclined to make up a story from the flashing words, but you don’t have time,” Beebe said, watching the art from a nearby hill. One glimmer of insight tends to be superseded by another as the art runs through its computerized paces.

The speed and repetition of the flashing neon lends a sense of urgency to what is actually just a familiar list of words. Like many of Nauman’s other works, “Vices and Virtues” leaves viewers to unpack their own psychological baggage when they confront his art. He often selects a few spare elements that seem quite neutral or benign but set off reactions ranging from claustrophobic discomfort to poetic release. His 1969 “Live Taped Video Corridor,” re-created last year at the Long Beach Museum of Art, makes participants feel as though they are walking away from themselves and into a grim prison of surveillance. A neon piece at the Baltimore Museum of Art, on the other hand, plays with the appearances and meanings of the words violins, violence and silence.

Essentially a conceptualist, Nauman always appears to be more interested in meanings than in form, and the location of his public art often adds another layer to the conceptual context. Seen from the outside, the Charles Lee Powell Structural Systems Laboratory at UC San Diego is a plain, dark, rectangular building--little more than a sleek, upright box. But inside is an unusual, open structure used for an activity of enormous consequence: seismic tests.

“We can build a five-story building inside the laboratory,” Rudee said. The only larger facility for testing earthquake loads, repairing structural damage and testing the repairs is in Japan, he said.

Is there any significance in locating the neon here? “We like to say that the art is testing the pillars of Western civilization while the laboratory is performing earthquake tests,” said Beebe, who has made a career of explaining difficult art and likes nothing better than to watch people learn to love the art they thought they loathed.

She has previously smoothed the way to an unorthodox assortment of outdoor installations at the university: Niki de Saint Phalle’s colorful fiberglass “Sun God,” Robert Irwin’s fence-like structure that mingles elusively with a grove of trees, stone sculpture by Richard Fleischner and Ian Hamilton Finlay, Terry Allen’s “talking trees” (equipped with recorded music, poetry and duck calls), Nam June Paik’s TV sets in a pseudo-archeological site and William Wegman’s “photo opportunity” observation point, overlooking an ongoing parade of real estate development.

In process are proposals by Jackie Ferrara, George Tracas, Jenny Holzer, Michael Asher, Maria Nordman and Alexis Smith.

While few of the projects undertaken by the Stuart Collection are conventional artworks, Nauman’s neon is the most complex to date, Beebe said. But she has few regrets, especially now that the controversy has disappeared and critical acclaim has taken its place.

“It’s one of the most extraordinary pieces of public sculpture ever installed anywhere,” Tucker said.

“It’s a brilliant piece,” Davies agreed. He regrets that the neon is not a prominently located “beacon of the university” as it would have been on the theater. But he’s pleased that the present site allowed the piece to be bigger than planned and that its placement on windows added three-dimensional life to the work.

And what does the architect think? “It’s terrific,” said Leonard Veitzer, who designed the laboratory without a thought of neon. “Anything that makes a building more worthwhile” is desirable, he said. In this case “the scale and glass banding at the top” of his building made a “perfect background” for the neon. “I wouldn’t like graffiti written all over the building, but this is a splendid piece of work.”