ART : Big Art on Campus : UC San Diego is a sculpture garden like no other, thanks to the Stuart Collection’s integration of art into campus life

Famous for its Nobel laureates, supercomputer and science programs, the campus of UC San Diego is also a 2,000-acre canvas upon which a dozen artists already have made their mark.

Shady eucalyptus groves punctuate the sprawling university, with its eclectic architecture and richly varied terrain. Modular concrete dorms cascade down the side of one shallow canyon, while a woodsy, rambling complex of student facilities sits in another. The futuristic central library, known to students as the UFO, looms at the center of it all.

Old converted water towers serve as artists’ studios, and some classes are held in barracks abandoned in 1964 when the site was deeded to the university from the military, which had used it to train marksmen. Every so often, echoes of that past resound throughout the campus when military jets drone overhead, slicing through pristine views of the Pacific and clouding the calm of the intellectual oasis.

Over the past 13 years, Mary Livingstone Beebe, director of the Stuart Collection of outdoor sculpture, and the Stuart Foundation advisory committee have invited about 40 artists of international esteem, from Vito Acconci to Alexis Smith, to wander through the university, soak up the stimuli and come up with sites and proposals for permanent outdoor works of art. So far, 12 of those proposals have been realized, and the result is a collection lauded worldwide for its brilliant integration of art into the intellectual and physical fabric of the campus.

“Sculpture gardens are sculpture gardens. This is something completely different,” says Robert Irwin, whose untitled stainless-steel-and-mesh installation of 1983 was one of the first artworks commissioned for the campus.

Next to the Stuart Collection, conventional sculpture gardens look as contrived as most zoos, their contents confined to pedestals and enclosures, arrows pointing the way from exhibit to exhibit, didactic labels explaining exactly what’s on view.

Works in the Stuart Collection by Nam June Paik, Richard Fleischner, Terry Allen, Jenny Holzer and others behave more like animals in the wild, settling in where they can thrive, whether near or far from the beaten path. The first Stuart Collection commission, Niki de Saint Phalle’s “Sun God” (1983), an exuberant, bird-like creature perched on a large archway, announces itself with unusual fanfare. Most of the others fuse more subtly with their surroundings, injecting them with subversive energy or, as is the case with Irwin’s piece, enhancing their natural, ephemeral beauty.

Known for his work engaging the ineffable qualities of light and space, Irwin ended his roam of the campus in a lush stand of eucalyptus trees. Within the grove, he erected an overhead fence of sorts, a blue mesh band that zigzags through the trees at a height of around 20 feet. The fence’s supporting stainless steel poles rise like the trunks of the surrounding eucalyptus, straight and tall, but at the level where the trees begin to thin and branch off, the poles sprout a horizontal web of blue that shimmers or dissolves according to the day’s light. It’s a transfixing sight, especially for the university crowd, “a diverse group of people,” as Irwin describes them, “interested in expanding their interests and consciousness.”

Nearby, within the same grove, stand Terry Allen’s “Trees,” a pair of lead-covered eucalyptus containing concealed speakers that emit, at intervals, a program of songs, stories and poems. Allen, a storyteller and musician himself, asked friends “what they would like people to hear coming from a tree.” From their submissions and his own contributions, he created three different programs. The trees had been cut down in another grove to make way for new construction, sheathed entirely in hammered-on lead patches and “replanted.” Visually, they are relatively inconspicuous, yet they send haunting, sometimes poignant, always completely unexpected sounds floating through the grove. (A third silent tree is currently in storage, awaiting a new site.)

“What I found most interesting about the campus was those groves of eucalyptus that people would walk through on the way to classes. There were a lot more of them then than now,” Allen said of the campus, which has expanded substantially since he completed his “Trees” in 1986.

“I keep saying that some day these (the lead-covered trees) might be the only trees left.”

Works in the Stuart Collection are not just site-specific, made to accommodate a given space. They are site-generated, inspired by the nuances of the natural environment and also by the university’s function as a realm of discovery, a place for learning, evolving and testing. They act as catalysts for the kind of revelations universities are intended to spark--and more.

“My feeling about working at a university is that you should be able to take more chances than if you’re working at a shopping center. You ought to be able to challenge people,” says Bruce Nauman, whose “Vices and Virtues” triggered unusual controversy for a Stuart Collection piece when it was still in the planning stages 10 years ago.

The neon work spells out the seven vices and seven virtues in flashing seven-foot-high illuminated letters. It was originally intended to wrap around the Mandell Weiss Center for the Performing Arts, located on the southern edge of campus.

When first proposed in 1983, neighbors in La Jolla objected, saying the words avarice , lust , pride and gluttony flashing in the night in bright, buzzing, luminous neon would intrude upon both their privacy and peace of mind. One called the proposal garish, another equated the work with graffiti, and a San Diego City Council member deemed the proposed work inappropriate for a public place.

The university chancellor put the work on hold, but in 1986 another site offered itself. “Vices and Virtues,” completed in 1988, is mounted atop the six-story Powell Structural Systems Laboratory, where it is larger than the original design and more visible from within the campus, but less visible to the outlying community. The words now punch the night sky in a continuous cycle that is mischievous, confrontational, a challenging menu of moral options.

A particularly good view of Nauman’s work can be had from another piece in the Stuart Collection, Alexis Smith’s “Snake Path,” completed last fall. A 500-foot slate tile snake, its back mounded ever so slightly, eases up a steep incline toward the library. Along the way, it passes a gargantuan granite edition of Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” and curls around an intimate, Edenic garden.

With its allusions to the university as a haven for innocents before they get contaminated by the outside world, “Snake Path” provides not only a good vantage point but also a great counterpoint to Nauman’s work.

Stuart Collection director Beebe says the relationship between the two is purely serendipitous.

“I would like to have thought of it, the way you walk out of the library at night and see the Nauman. You see what’s out there when you get kicked out of paradise.”

The university has proved a paradise of sorts for the Stuart Collection’s brand of public art, coming at a time when the surrounding city (as well as the nation) has been slower to embrace such experimental environmental strategies. Despite a general trend toward involving artists in the process of designing buildings and public areas, most public art is still applied like Band-Aids to pre-determined sites--as late attempts to remedy poor planning or extraneous baubles, monuments to good intentions.

In the Stuart Collection, the sculptures are so well-integrated with their sites that it’s not always evident where the campus ends and the art begins.

“We’ve not said, here’s a building, put something in front of it. We’ve gotten a lot of good things because of that flexibility,” says university provost P. J. Ledden, who was assistant chancellor in 1980, when the University of California regents struck a deal with James Stuart DeSilva to set the Stuart Collection in motion.

DeSilva, a soft-spoken, kindly man who lives in nearby Rancho Santa Fe, says that as a child, he was always “the backward one in the family,” the one who had to be dragged along to museums by his mother. But by the 1970s he was living comfortably in New York off a Puerto Rico-based tuna cannery--and was going quite willingly to look at art.

“There was a curator who gave Wednesday night walk-throughs at the Museum of Modern Art. He would get us in front of things and ask: ‘What do you feel?’ I was straining to get in touch with my feelings at the time. It had enough impact on me that I changed my life.”

DeSilva sold his business and enrolled, at the age of 50, in Columbia University’s graduate program in art history. After a year of studies, DeSilva and his wife, Marne, moved to San Diego, bringing with them an unsettling but inspiring memory of New York during the boom years.

“A new skyscraper was going up on every corner, and architects would pick a sculpture and plunk it into a corner. That influenced me to do something for the underprivileged sculptors.”

Just as the artists needed room to exercise their vision, so did DeSilva. He approached local museum directors first, but none showed interest in his plan to give artists an opportunity to interact with a site, an environment. One day, riding his bicycle by the university, he suddenly thought, “Oh, what a spot this is. It has incredible variety--from ocean bluff to canyon to urban.” After “a flurry of meetings and luncheons,” DeSilva’s goal took the shape of a sanctioned plan.

He set up a committee of advisers including such art world luminaries as critic Pierre Restany of Paris, collector Count Giuseppe Panza di Buomo of Milan and Anne d’Harnoncourt, director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Though DeSilva put up a base of $1.5 million to establish the Stuart Foundation (he has since given another $1 million), and he remains president of the advisory committee, he defies the image of the patron who wears his acquisitions like so many medals on his chest. On the committee, he says he is just “one other voice to reckon with.”

Driven less by vanity than by a commitment to the possibilities of art, DeSilva appeared to university officials to be a solid, well-intentioned partner.

“The key notion was that this wouldn’t represent his own idiosyncratic taste,” Ledden says. “That’s a very generous notion.”

If DeSilva seems a picture-perfect patron, so does the staff of the Stuart Collection enjoy an unblemished reputation among peers. Beebe, an ebullient woman whose gray hair neatly frames her cherubic face, came to the director’s post with no academic art history training, but with a knack for developing good rapport with artists.

Beebe had worked for short spells at the Portland Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum. But she made her reputation by founding and directing the Portland Center for Visual Arts in 1972. There she organized installations, performances, films--”you name it, indoor things, outdoor things. That’s what I wanted to do, work with artists, not buy objects.”

Beebe has since invited many of the artists she worked with in Portland to make proposals for the Stuart Collection. In drawing up a list of artists for consideration, which has also included George Trakas, Peter Shelton, Martin Puryear, Roy Lichtenstein and Edward Kienholz, she says she tries for “a mix of predictable people and unpredictable people.” William Wegman, a pioneering artist in the fields of photography and video, was definitely of the latter category. Beebe approached him as a stranger at an art opening in L.A.

“There was some spark in Mary that made me want to play, to goof around,” he remembers. “She came up to me and said, ‘Have you ever done sculpture before?’ I said yes, and I’ve been thinking about it. It was a totally flippant comment, but it sparked the process.”

Best known for his staged photographs of Weimaraners, Wegman’s “La Jolla Vista View” (1988) is one of the quieter, wittier works on campus, a satirical twist on the tourist rest stop and scenic overlook. A “hideous but fascinating sprawl of overdevelopment,” as Wegman describes it, fans out from the bluff on the southern edge of campus where the work is situated. Along with benches, water fountain and telescope, Wegman mounted a bronze plaque to map the view. His scribbly drawing yields a wealth of puns, scathing asides and latent political critiques, such as labeling one triangular traffic island as an “Indian reservation.” Within one area overgrown with brush, he wrote “lost dog.” Another he identified as a site for “lost dreams.”

“That place at the very edge of the campus was so wonderful,” Wegman recalls. “Mary and I thought that to claim it would also somehow save it as a place. It’s still one of the harder pieces to find in the collection.”

Beebe has played midwife to the works in the collection with aplomb, smoothly blending her roles as cheerleader, ego appeaser and stubborn defender of visions. The grace with which she’s carried out these roles has not gone unnoticed.

“You can’t even do public art for more than 10 years without feeling angry and bitter,” says Smith. “One thing you usually don’t get in public art is a supportive atmosphere and respect for how artists work. Mathieu (Gregoire, project coordinator) is an artist and Mary is sympathetic and fun. It’s a pleasure to work with them.”

Beebe (whose staff also includes program representative Julia Fuller) has reason to be proud of the collection’s gleaming reputation, but she generously shares the credit with the university.

“The university’s been very supportive through this whole thing. The chancellor can say yes or no, but nothing’s been rejected, even though I know he doesn’t personally like every piece. The administration has been behind this rather than set up barriers.”

The newest work in the Stuart Collection, Jenny Holzer’s “Green Table,” presented a sure test for the administration’s tolerance, for it pushes a number of psychological, sociological and political buttons. Inaugurated in March, the 20-foot-long granite table and accompanying benches have the oversized, overconfident air of the corporate boardroom. Truisms, laments and prescriptions from different series of text by the artist are inscribed on the top and sides of both table and benches.

In the dense, cacophonous dialogue that plays itself out on these slick surfaces, Holzer addresses everything from the poor financial prospects of affluent, college-bound students to the delicate interconnection of all living things. In writing that ranges from benign, fortune-cookie ambiguity to brutally honest condemnation, she dissects the use and abuse of power, gender differences, sex, vulnerability and human nature.

Cynical statements neighbor idealistic hopes. The voice of cruel authority collides with the painfully earnest voice of the vanquished. Much of what Holzer has set in stone is tough and unsettling, but university officials hardly flinched at the new installation, even at the repeated use of a popular expletive.

“Who would be offended--students?” asks Ledden, provost of UCSD’s John Muir College, where the table is located. “They use that word more than they use golly gee whiz . In its context, it is the right word. We have to depend on the artist for that.”

The table’s power stems partly from its seemingly casual, remote setting in a paved and landscaped courtyard among concrete buildings.

“I thought about tucking the table into a corner so it would be a getaway place where people could eat or study and have some shelter,” Holzer said. “The site is much like modern life--a little foliage on one side and a concrete wall on the other, somewhere between pretty and frightening.”

Holzer, whose work is “a little about putting power back into the language,” according to Beebe, has in the past made works with electronic message boards and a variety of other media, but the Stuart Collection piece was her first permanent outdoor commission. So was Terry Allen’s “Trees.” Ian Hamilton Finlay’s “UNDA” (1987), a sequence of large stones incised with the Latin word for wave, was the Scottish artist’s first American piece. For Wegman, the foray into sculpture was a deviation from his regular work, but it opened up an entirely new direction for him. After making “La Jolla Vista View,” he started painting panoramas.

All of the artists invited to make proposals receive $5,000 to develop their ideas to a workable state. Those selected to create works are given another $20,000 as a fee. The foundation, with the help of grants and gifts from individuals, covers all expenses of fabrication and installation.

Most of the works officially belong to the foundation, though several, because of funding arrangements, belong to the university. Eight of the 12 realized projects, whose budgets have ranged from less than $100,000 (Paik and Finlay) to more than $400,000 (Smith), have been partly financed by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, an unprecedented record among public art enterprises, says Bert Kubli, program specialist for the agency.

“Mary knows the real guts of the (NEA’s) visual arts program is helping visual artists. She will take a well-known name, which in itself is not enough to get a grant, and give that artist an opportunity to grow into a new level of satisfaction.”

With its generous hands-off patron, supportive staff, contented artists and engaging sculptures, the Stuart Collection seems a model for public art efforts. Indeed, Beebe’s colleagues around the country, even those with programs larger and older than hers, call the collection an outstanding example of its kind.

“There really isn’t a parallel in the United States for the collection,” says Diane Shamash, director of the Seattle Arts Commission’s 20-year-old art in public places program. “It helps inform people as they move through the campus. It’s an educational collection and an interesting way to experience contemporary work. Frankly, I have a lot of criticisms about contemporary public work around the U.S., but there isn’t a work in that collection that I think is weak.”

For all of its intelligence and adventurousness, however, the Stuart Collection does have its flaws. Michael Asher’s granite-clad drinking fountain is innocuous at best. Intended as a conceptual comment on a nearby historical stone marker, the fountain (installed in 1992) instead stands mute, an ineffectual aside. Jackie Ferrara’s “Terrace” (1991) functions smoothly as a resting spot and walkway for users of the adjacent molecular medicine building, but it succumbs to an aesthetic of bland decoration that the other works in the collection so scrupulously and successfully avoid.

Also, only one of the collection’s first eight commissions was to a woman. The tally now stands at four out of 12. “We’re catching up on the gender issue,” Beebe says, but admits that “we’ve not done well on racial diversity.”

With the exception of Korean-born Nam June Paik, who now lives in New York, all of the artists commissioned by the foundation are white and from Europe or the United States. Beebe says she is trying to remedy the situation, but makes no apologies for the foundation’s choices thus far. “The committee’s first concern is artistic merit,” she says.

The foundation’s advisory committee will meet again soon to discuss the next round of proposals, while details are being finalized on plans for a canyon footbridge by George Trakas and an amphitheater-like seating area by Maria Nordman. After last year’s “Snake Path,” the largest and most expensive work in the collection, the focus for the future may be on smaller, “poignant moments on campus,” Beebe says. In the meantime, she expects to start researching and fund-raising soon for a catalogue of the collection.

Even with only a dozen works to its name, the Stuart Collection has reached a critical mass that has earned it international acclaim and the status of a serious destination. A crew recently visited the campus to film the collection for a feature on “CBS Sunday Morning,” scheduled to appear in July. But more than just bringing attention to the campus, the Stuart Collection has given it a soul, something most public art attempts to imbue in its site but fails.

“It changes one’s whole perspective,” says UCSD’s Ledden. “It plays for us a role analogous to the library. It’s a current archive of what’s going on in monumental sculpture, and that archival quality is very important for a university. In the year 2000, this is where people will come to see sculpture from the end of the 20th Century.”