Wide Range of Emotions at Wilstermann Show

SAN DIEGO — Jim Wilstermann won first prize in this year’s “New Sculpture: San Diego/Tijuana” show at the Lyceum Theatre and was one of a handful of artists commissioned to participate in Carlsbad’s annual outdoor art exhibition last summer. His work in both shows whetted the appetite with its enticing fusion of precise, subtle form and strong social content.

Now through Oct. 26, at Grossmont College’s Hyde Gallery, one can make a full meal of Wilstermann’s work and it proves a hearty, highly satisfying repast.

Wilstermann puts into immaculate, imaginative form the friction that exists between nature’s absolute integrity and the seemingly boundless human will to power. As small environments, his sculptures present microcosmic metaphors for various societal and environmental ills.

The simplest works, in the “California Landscape Series,” juxtapose a stretch of flat, innocent earth with the unsightly residue of human presence. In “Dumpsite,” the rusty sap oozing from a few small, corroded cans stains a shelf of light gray granite mounted just off the wall. In another work from the series, an oil derrick twisted and split by the wind is similarly abandoned and left as litter.

The vain, destructive and short-sighted nature of much human endeavor is better expressed in Wilstermann’s more complex environments. In “New World Order,” for instance, the artist uses a visual vocabulary of power to create an ominous, futuristic scenario, a monument to physical might.

Here, a tiny stairway leads up into a granite-and-steel cylinder that enshrines a highly polished bronze bullet or missile form. From the tiny lights inside that seem to double as surveillance cameras to the bold Latin inscription on the outside of the granite wall, Wilstermann has captured the power-worshipping, self-satisfied air of our militaristic society.

Wilstermann, who teaches at Grossmont, has extraordinary facility with his materials. Despite their small size, his granite, steel, bronze and clay structures exude a sense of massive scale and ambitious intention. Polished granite walls with articulated windows appear in several works, suggesting both the anonymity and sterility of the high-rise office building and the columbarium’s numbered niches for the dead. This same wall appears in several of Wilstermann’s necropolis sculptures as well as in the work, “Maquiladora.”

In the latter, it serves as pristine corporate facade, complete with the obligatory plant and abstract sculpture. The real work in the maquiladora seems to be done, however, in a small aluminum shack tucked into the back of the building, within its skeleton of steel girders.

At times, Wilstermann’s work feels cautionary, at other times mournful, and still others, wryly satirical. Concern over the antagonism that has evolved in the relationship between humans and their environment dominates the work of the past few years gathered here. These sculptural environments speak symbolically and literally of the human need--perhaps not universal but certainly current in this country--to expand our realm of control and to seek reassurance of the validity of our power through the building of grand, permanent monuments. What Wilstermann so poignantly shows us is how petty and yet how dangerous these motivations can be.

A small show of work by Faith Ringgold at UC San Diego’s Grove Gallery serves as a teaser for what’s to come in 1991. Next fall, the African American Museum of Fine Arts will stage a retrospective of Ringgold’s work, from her early ventures into “soft sculpture” to her more recent fabric dolls and quilts.

The Grove Gallery show contains only one of Ringgold’s quilts, “Tar Beach 2” from the “Woman on a Bridge Series.” Here, the artist, who teaches at UCSD part of the year and lives in New York the remainder, assumes the voice of Cassie Louise Lightfoot. Lightfoot, born in 1931, speaks in the quilt’s narrative as an 8-year-old New Yorker. With a tender nostalgia as well as an undercurrent of social protest, Lightfoot relates the joy of sleeping on her rooftop--the “Tar Beach”--and being transported in her imagination to the sky above the George Washington Bridge. The sweetness of the story turns slightly bitter when the narrator defends her father, whom others chastise as being “Colored or a half-breed Indian.”

Ringgold’s work melds autobiography, history, poetry and fiction, as it braids together strands of feminist thought, social criticism and folk art traditions. The surface of her quilts is often as richly textured and emotive as the tales written upon them. This unity of form and content led the writer Alice Walker to comment in 1986, “The marriage of the stories with the quilts is true, is inevitable, is justice.” Unfortunately, such is not the case with the present example. The central image here is silk-screened and far flatter than Ringgold’s sewn and painted versions.

More than a dozen of Ringgold’s foot-high fabric dolls are also included in this show. Five couples from the “International Collection” pose earnestly, seriously, in stereotypical native dress. The Japanese “Pearl and Sam” wear miniature silk kimonos, while the Latinos “Anita and Ramon” are dressed for a night on the town, in red satin dress and suit. These small, domesticated studies of racial distinction feel respectful but also slightly caricatural and comic.

Ringgold, a prolific artist, has dealt powerfully in her art with individual transcendence as well as violence--from overt acts of racial violence to the more subtle forms of violence enacted on the human spirit through centuries of social inequity. Little of her fine, fiery spirit is evident in this abbreviated show, but the African American Museum promises much more for next year.