All But 1 Installation Falter in IN/SITE ’92

Installation art draws much of its strength from dissolving boundaries between other media. It makes collaborators of painting, sculpture, photography and even performance art, eliminating the hierarchical distinctions between them (the notion that painting, for instance, is a superior art form) and channeling their individual attributes into one common effort. Boundaries break down, too, between viewers and the thing viewed. Observers may become participants when art and audience share the same space.

When that space is the space of everyday life, rather than the rarefied realm of the museum or gallery, installations often take on an even more intriguing dimension. The organizers of IN/SITE ‘92, the current citywide program of temporary installations by local artists, recognized the fertile possibilities of staging installations in such unexpected contexts as bookstores and office buildings, and these venues complement the more conventional list of galleries and museums on the IN/SITE schedule.

Cora Boyd’s moving installation, “Operettas on the Head of a Pen,” is one IN/SITE offering that fully exploits the potential of its site, ABC Books/Art + Architecture downtown. Unfortunately, several others take their sites for granted and fail to use their unusual settings as impetus for unusual experiences.

Steve Ilott’s “Travels,” a series of vague ink sketches on yellow legal paper, hangs inauspiciously, in fact nearly invisibly, above a bookcase in the already richly cluttered atmosphere of D. G. Wills Bookstore in La Jolla. Among wagon wheels, skulls, sleds, scales and profuse memorabilia permanently strewn about the store, the artist’s abstracted impressions of people and places feel undistinguished. The drawings have energy, but they are overshadowed by the abundance of equally energetic ideas and images that fill the store.

At Java Coffeehouse/Gallery downtown, Luis Stand has drawn excerpts from maps of the Mediterranean and Latin America directly on two of the walls. Upon these, he has mounted painted shelves holding flowers planted in coffee and tomato cans. On one wall, a less readily identifiable map is punctuated by three vases of red carnations mounted on it. While the flowers in the vases have a vaguely elegiac quality in combination with the unidentified country outlined behind them, the planted flowers have little resonance at all with the regions with which they are paired. Stand, a graduate student at UC San Diego, calls his work “Historical Ceremonies,” but fails to truly engage history in this all-too-passive installation.

Also at Java, Michael Soriano fills two exterior windows (on the 9th Avenue side) with a curious array of books and objects in a work titled “The Flight of Waxed Dreams.” A paean to learning and fully experiencing the process of life as opposed to just its products, the installation has its mildly evocative moments, but most of its appeal lies in the antique aura it conveys through the combination of such materials as old picture frames, well-worn books, a bed of dried pomegranates and fronds of eucalyptus. Though texturally rich, the installation feels conceptually bland.

By contrast, Boyd’s installation at ABC Books works because it uses its space as an active arena for interchange. Physically, the installation announces itself at once, but insinuates itself more slowly into the viewer’s consciousness. Boyd has hung 10 plastic mirrors, handles up, at eye level throughout the store. The back of each mirror has been painted gold, and across the front is a narrow strip of plastic with such phrases as Who Are You , They Will Tell You Lies Too , and You Are Changed .

Leaning against one shelf, among texts that focus on issues of appearance and beauty, is another gold mirror, with the message, “Someday You Will Grow Into a Beautiful Swan.” A small swan figurine sits on a framed old movie still next to the mirror. In another small assemblage planted unobtrusively in the store, this time on the cashier’s table, Boyd uses a broken china saucer, a typed text and other objects to make a point about the tragic linking of beauty and wholeness.

Boyd also provides a soundtrack of sorts for the installation, audible through earphones attached to a gold chair. On the tape, women’s voices sternly proclaim: “Lies . . . Look into the mirror . . . Who is that person? Who are you? Where did you go? I don’t recognize you.” With a cloying girlishness, other women’s voices chant nursery rhymes, “London Bridge is falling down” and “Ring around the rosy.”

The sounds, the mirrors and the small assemblages all weave together to issue a simple but powerful warning not to succumb to the fickle flattery of the mirror. Amid books about the nature of beauty, truth and the ideal, Boyd incisively brings the dialogue down to a personal, intimate level. The promise of becoming a beautiful swan leads to disillusionment, Boyd cautions, for even if one does attain a state of external beauty, it will fade. One will be changed by time and become unrecognizable even to oneself. This bitter truth becomes all-encompassing in Boyd’s work, for she has made her installation something to be experienced, in a real context, and not just viewed in a vacuum.

* Steve Ilott’s “Travels” continues at D.G. Wills Bookstore, 7461 Girard Ave., La Jolla, through Oct. 10. Hours are 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Sunday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday-Saturday.

Luis Stand’s and Michael Soriano’s work remains on view at Java, 837 G St., through Nov . 6. Hours are 8 a.m.-2 a.m. daily.

Cora Boyd’s installation continues at ABC Books, 835 G St., through Nov . 6. Hours are daily 11 a.m.-6 p.m. daily.

CRITIC’S CHOICE

Fix Up That Painting

“How to Fix That Old Rembrandt” is the title of a two-part seminar on the preservation and conservation of artwork, offered this month by the Athenaeum Music and Arts Library. Three members of the Balboa Art Conservation Center, which services major museums in the Southwest, will lead the seminars Oct. 22 and 29 and provide consultations about individual works brought in by participants. For reservations, call 454-5872. . . .

The San Diego Museum of Art’s Meet the Masters lecture series for 1992-93 begins next week with a presentation by John Edmund Cooper, head of education at London’s National Portrait Gallery. Cooper will speak on “The British Monarch 1500-1992: Portraiture, Power and the Private Image” at 10:45 a.m. Oct. 13. For ticket information, call 232-7931.