The Siegfried Line: It Failed First in War and Now as a Work of Art

In 1938, Adolf Hitler ordered the construction of a 400-mile long, 2 1/2-mile wide fortified rampart. Running from the Lowland countries to Germany’s southern border with France, this Siegfried Line or Westwall, was intended to guard against invasion from the west. With plans already in mind to leapfrog over the older but equivalent structure in France, the Maginot Line, Hitler knew the uselessness of such defenses.

Nevertheless, 8 million tons of concrete, a million tons of iron and steel, and a million tons of wood were poured into the project, as was a lot of “volunteer” labor.

Barbara Westermann, a German-born New York based artist with interests in architecture and urban planning, responds to the phenomenon in her “Westwall/Crossing the Siegfried Line,” an installation at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art’s token downtown space, located at 835 G Street.

In the modest sized gallery, Westermann has arranged 104 concrete forms cast in a shape similar to one prong of the jacks that kids play with. These are aligned in rows that take up most of the floor except for an aisle through the middle rows and an area that transects the aisle at one end. These voids produce a cross; presumably the “cross” referred to in the show’s title and, perhaps, a specifically Christian reference.

At the far end of the gallery, atop a pedestal, is plaster mold that looks like you might get the form of a tree stump out of it, or maybe a foot and ankle. In fact, you get the concrete forms, but no added meaning.

Less uncertain is a historic photograph mounted on the wall opposite the plaster element. It shows a couple of workers constructing the original wall. They carry a large, wooden form used to cast pyramid-shaped defenses against tanks. In the background are row upon row of pyramids, stretching to the horizon. The bland documentary character of the image, with only these two people in it, does little more than hint at what must have been a very awesome earthwork, a Great Wall of Germany, as it were. In fact, it takes considerable effort to make the photo yield any sense of the impressiveness inherent in its subject.

Westermann’s installation only hints at impressiveness, too. The concrete forms soon look like large, gray Hershey kisses rather than reflections of stern military deterrents. Even hunkering down on the floor next to the outer row of forms, to try to enhance the perspective through a kind of dramatic close-up, leaves a sense that something is missing.

The problem is that the scale is wrong; too large to achieve the kind of explosive compression that a small model produces; too small to generate a feeling of resistance and mass.

The presence of the crucifix in the arrangement of the concrete elements also seems weak. The behaviors that the artist is commenting upon--whether manifested in the Siegfried Line, the Maginot Line, the Berlin Wall, or the Great Wall of China; even in the walls that we build around ourselves as psychological defenses--reflect a sad but universal human reality that transcends particular religions. By injecting a purely Christian symbol into the work, Westermann draws attention away from this universal aspect and the work’s ability to communicate suffers for it.

This exhibition remains on view through July 9. For more information, call 454-3541.

Meanwhile, across the street, and offered by a very different kind of institution, is an exhibition of new photographs by Walter Cotton. The place is Java, a coffeehouse which has become the hub of downtown San Diego’s modest but tenacious avant-garde art scene. Thus, it’s an institution of a sort, and a valuable one. The nine Ektacolor photographs on view in a quiet back room reveal Cotton’s new and on-going exploration of interfaces between photography and painting. The results are attractive and provocative.

Cotton draws his imagery not from the “real world” that constitutes photography’s habitual domain; instead he creates sparse compositions of forms in his studio and photographs these. He paints the floor and the walls, producing apparent spatial divisions by abutting contrasting light and dark shades. In this, he is a painter. He then places within this environment few items that might also be painted. These include tools, chunks of metal, wood blocks, shelves, folding screens, strips of white and black tape, and parts of dolls. Here, he acts as an installation artist, or sculptor.

The photography that is the final outcome of Cotton’s activity strikes the eye as marvelously rich and subtle. His manipulations in the studio produce images of a flattened space more suggestive of painting than of photography; while the spareness of details and their distribution across the scene framed by the camera produce compositional effects most readily associated with two dimensional design.

The works’ expressive qualities engage the focused serenity of minimalism, with an added twist of mystery that is a delightful consequence of Cotton’s confounding of expectations concerning what one sees in what media.

This is smart work that’s very alert to the operations and ideas of photography, of art, and of the two in combination. His response to these achieves formal and expressive results very much worth looking at.

The exhibition continues at Java, 837 G Street, through May 26. For more information, call 235-4012.