Reality Based

In 1971, shortly after graduating from UC Irvine, Chris Burden had himself shot in the arm for a piece of performance art that drew international attention to Orange County.

The shot heard around the world grooved UCI a niche in art history lore, and Burden, one of today’s art novas, never lost his shine. A new exhibit showcasing such notable UCI alumni and faculty aims to illuminate Burden’s celebrated time at the school and the art department’s ensuing years, not all of which brought such notoriety.

Paul Schimmel, chief curator of Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, held the same post at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in Newport Beach during the ‘80s. He and others describe that decade as UCI’s fallow period.

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The 31-piece exhibit, opening Wednesday, is “dominated by some of the most important artists to have emerged in Los Angeles in two different milieus,” Schimmel said recently, “once in the ‘70s and again in the ‘90s.”

Explanations for the gap range from funding cuts to competition from other emerging Southland schools, which had been fairly quiet when UCI’s art department entered the scene in 1965.

The university had opened that year in the form of “four buildings and a giant sea of mud,” recalled 1970 graduate Alexis Smith. One of the exhibit’s top contemporary artists, Smith and her classmates recall having little studio space or tools. But the young, unstructured department fostered individualistic, freewheeling experimentation. Its international cadre of instructors qualified as cutting-edge art world stars, then and now.

Clayton Garrison, the School of the Arts founding dean now retired, wanted to set up a conservatory for aspiring professionals (in contrast to the largely theoretical slant of other UC campuses of the time), and he believed working artists would make the best teachers.

A former chorus dancer with a Stanford doctorate in dramatic theory, Garrison hired British artist and critic John Coplans, a founding editor of Artforum magazine, to run the school’s gallery. Together, they brought on board such local artists as John Mason, Tony DeLap, Vija Clemens and Robert Irwin. Visiting instructors from New York and Europe included artists Roy Lichtenstein and David Hockney, critic Barbara Rose and Walter Hopps, then curator at the Pasadena Museum of Art.

This avant-garde, global perspective produced a little-known 1972 Marcel Duchamp festival. Its films, monthlong exhibit and two-day symposium marked the first collective recognition of the pooh-bah of Dada on an American campus, said UCI art history chair Dickran Tashjian, who curated “A Hotbed of Advanced Art: Four Decades of the Visual Arts at UCI.”

Burden, who lived in a campus locker for five days for his MFA project, is the early era’s most famous student, but Jay McCafferty, Gifford Myers and James Turrell also passed through during the early to mid-’70s.

But from then through the ‘80s, the department’s flame dimmed, even while it sporadically exhibited nationally known artists, hired prominent faculty and bestowed degrees on such noted artists as Sandra Rowe.

DeLap, a faculty member from 1965 to 1991, said competition from such area institutions as Cal Arts, in Santa Clarita, contributed to the lull.

“There was a great surge of contemporary thinking popping out all over the place,” DeLap said, “so eventually UCI became just another player in a much larger scheme.”

Others pointed to funding cuts and poor leadership. Current art professor Catherine Lord, art department chair from 1990-95, said her predecessor, Jerry Anderson, allowed faculty to expend too much energy on their careers. She found students and faculty embittered and cynical.

Anderson, who served during most of the ‘80s before retiring from academia, said he intentionally gave faculty their freedom. “And I worked very hard to get the university to pay attention to the kind of funding attrition they were allowing, with some success and some failures.”

At any rate, observers said Lord oversaw a much-needed rejuvenation, even if, as MOCA curator Schimmel said, the school “entered back into the picture in a very specific way.”

A social activist and former dean of Cal Arts’ School of the Arts, Lord aggressively championed greater inclusion of ethnic minorities, women, gay and lesbian artists. Exhibits she curated included photography by Catherine Opie, currently a visiting instructor, who openly addresses her lesbianism in her work, now on view at MOCA.

Lord also generated more funds for the department, but not everyone has embraced her redirection. Artist Ed Bereal, a faculty member from 1970 to 1991, said she abused power.

“She had an agenda, and if you didn’t stick to it, you didn’t have a voice,” said Bereal, now an assistant professor at Western Washington University.

Keenly aware of this perception, Lord writes in the show’s catalog that “Everybody says [she] saw Irvine as an opportunity to impose a leftist, feminist, socialist, radical, Marxist, progressive, controversial, terminally trendy lesbian agenda.”

Lord doesn’t deny her political agenda. She wants to open the creation and consumption of art to a wider audience, she continues in the essay, which means “working against the usual bigotries . . . racism, sexism and . . . homophobia.”

Whether the emphasis endures under David Trend, chosen art department chair in July, is an open question. But school officials say the future may bring something that all agree remains a pressing need: more space. Over the past year, undergraduate studio art majors rose nearly 50% to 255, making studio art the largest and fastest-growing department in the school of the arts, Trend said.

* “A Hotbed of Advanced Art: Four Decades of the Visual Arts at UCI” runs Wednesday through Dec. 6 at the UC Irvine Art Gallery, Fine Arts Complex, off West Peltason Drive, Irvine. Monday-Saturday, noon-5 p.m. Free. (714) 824-6610. On Nov. 18 at UCI’s Nixon Theatre, UCI art faculty member Daniel J. Martinez will moderate a 7 p.m. symposium about the show.