Mediocrity Prevails in Sculptures

The fifth manifestation of the Ilan-Lael Foundation’s annual juried sculpture competition, currently on view at the Lyceum Theatre in Horton Plaza, presents a combination of highlights and low-lights typical of such exhibitions. The resulting impression created by the 44 works by 22 San Diegans, plus several more pieces by guest artist Guillermo Castano of Tijuana, rises only slightly above mediocrity.

This is especially disappointing considering the estimable ambitions of the foundation. Its mission statement, exhibited along with the works, declares that its purpose is “to integrate art into the life of the community.” This purpose is not realized here, however, because no public or community aspect is discernable in the works.

What’s on view is a wide range of detached objets d’art; works that are essentially “pedestal sitters,” even though in some cases there is no formal base on which they sit. That they’re exhibited in a theater, as opposed to a gallery or museum, hardly constitutes a significant move toward integrating art and community.

Be all this as it may, the exhibition is up and the jury--composed of world-renowned architect Michael Graves (whose “Aventine” is under construction in the Golden Triangle), San Diego Union arts writer Isabelle Wasserman and Cal State Northridge art professor and gallery director Phillip Morrison--has made its decisions.

No cohesive direction or stylistic preference appears in their choices for the modest three prizes awarded. It looks as though a compromise was reached in which each juror had the opportunity to place his or her preference among the winning three, with the only unsolved issue being who would win first place ($500), who second $250) and who third ($150). One suspects that Graves’ international stature predetermined that he would pick the first-place winner, with Wasserman and Morrison fighting it out over the designation of second and third.

Confirming this situation, which is not unusual in art jurying, is the choice of two works by Ellen Phillips (“Passage 11” and “Passage 15”), as the overall winners. Her powerful geometric forms look like models for skyscrapers, with an emphasis on the “scraping.” Constructed predominantly of steel mesh and barbed wire, and accented with strips of photographic transparencies that lend highlights and a hint of color, these sculptures exert a natural appeal to an architect, especially one as oriented toward Expressionism as is Graves. Second and third prizes went to Verda Friesen and Norman Ridenour, respectively. Friesen’s “Caravan” consists of squiggly flat and linear rusted steel elements assembled in a shape that remotely resembles a big sawhorse. Independent of this reference, the work invokes the enduring spirit of abstract Expressionist painting, which first emerged in the late 1940s. In painting, the style is notable for its ability to convey purpose and immediacy through unpremeditated, “gestural” drippings and slashings of paint.

However, gesture doesn’t work as efficiently in steel as in paint. Hence, a seemingly inescapable barrier confronts sculptors who try to achieve in their media what artists like Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman achieved in paint 40 years ago. Third place winner, Ridenour’s “Remembrance Past,” is appropriately titled because it, too, follows in the path of another. The Ridenour work consists of cut-out and brightly colored geometric shapes--mostly arcs and sections of circles--assembled at angles into a dense three-dimensional collage. The territory in which this art operates belongs wholly to Frank Stella, who began exploring the modus operandi in the early ‘70s.

Some of the works of the other 19 artists are strong and attractive, some are undistinctively expectable or simply strange. Christopher Slatoff’s “Three Columns,” a bronze of women’s heads attached to the top of classical architectural columns, exemplifies the strange. Single-named Doty’s white marble “Umbrella,” which looks very much like that object, and T. J. Dixon’s realistic ceramic figure, pleasantly exemplify the expectable. Jerry Dumalo, Bob Feeley, and Peter Mitten display abstract works that rise noticeably above the average here and invite further attention because of their varying use of materials and form.

The special stand-out among the non-winners is Judith Bethel. In each of her two works, a slender tree branch (one supporting a bird’s nest) replaces a leg and part of the back of a ragged chair from an old dining room set.

The eleven works by guest artist Castano don’t particularly help the exhibition. His figurative works, mostly of women and mostly in bronze, project no clear sense of direction or concept of what the artist is trying to achieve beyond producing reasonably skillful variations of conservative 19th- and early 20th-Century styles. Disturbing, too, is an apparent hostility toward women, who are occasionally presented in the classical mode as objects of beauty, but are as frequently ridiculed, made demonic or cut up like beef. Castano’s “Disposable Worker” is reasonably effective in conveying the non-person status of undocumented workers contending with the horrors of the border, but this single effort seems more like tokenism to social responsibility.

The exhibition continues at the Lyceum Theatre in Horton Plaza through June. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, and performance evenings. For more information, call 231-3586.