More Lukewarm Than ‘Hotbed’ : Impact of UCI Community Is Diluted to Varying Degrees in a 40-Year Survey of Students and Faculty

Does an exhibition about an institution necessarily have to be institutional--in the bland, lifeless sense of microwaved food or a corporation’s annual report?

The question nags after looking at “A Hotbed of Advanced Art: Four Decades of Visual Arts at UCI,” a disconcertingly sterile assembly of individual works of art by 30 graduates and faculty members, curated by Dickran Tashjian, chairman of the university’s art history department and the author of well-received books on aspects of earlier 20th century art history.

Though a fair amount of first-rate work is on view--most of it familiar to anyone who follows contemporary art--the guiding principles behind the choices of artists and work seem murky. Leaders of their generation rub shoulders with individuals of more modest abilities, and pieces by James Turrell, Maria Nordman, Bruce Nauman and Catherine Opie don’t convey their makers’ stunningly personal breakthroughs.

In some cases, that’s because the artists work on an environmental scale that could not be replicated in the tiny gallery. But even video receives a cursory treatment, with a handful of wildly uneven examples.

The fact that some of the most important UCI-connected artists don’t make lasting or portable objects in a traditional sense makes the best case for the department as “a hotbed of advanced art.” But Tashjian’s apparent effort at evenhandedness obscures this key point.

Most regrettably, the layout and presentation of the show offer little sense of the artistic communities that existed at UCI in different eras. The one thing all the artists have in common becomes a weak excuse for an exhibition rather than a means of illuminating what made the campus art scene so special at particular moments of its history and how instructors and students interacted.

But to do that is to acknowledge that other periods were not so great, not a cheering theme for a show that opened during a campuswide “ArtsWeek” and ultimately must be viewed as a promotional tool for the department rather than a critical survey.

Tashjian’s catalog essay, which dutifully discusses each of the selected artists, offers few fresh insights. It works best on an anecdotal level, explaining, for example, how 1974 MFA graduate Mieke Gelley found in painter and teacher John Paul Jones a kindred spirit attuned to the nuances of subtle imagery.

Possibly no one could have assembled an ideal exhibition given the constraints under which Tashjian labored. Working in unfamiliar territory (while engaged in his professorial duties), he had six months to assemble a show that easily could have been a multiyear project.

From its inception in 1965, UCI has employed some unusually gifted artists, whose presence in turn attracted other artists and promising students.

John Coplans, then editing Artforum magazine in Los Angeles, was the gallery’s first director. His own art, begun years later, is a remarkably intense photographic scrutiny of portions of his lined and hairy naked body.

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One of the finest works in the show is Coplans’ “Self Portrait (Hand, Three Panels Vertical)” from 1990. Hugely magnified in a vertical position, four of his thick fingers scored with hatch marks have the weathered gravity of ancient stanchions.

Other outstanding faculty members from the early years include Vija Celmins--represented by “Moon Surface (Luna 9) No. 2,” a graphite drawing from 1969 that uncannily conveys the look of slightly blurry early space mission photography--and Robert Irwin, whose shadow-casting translucent disk from 1969, “Untitled (No. 2220),” was one of his early attempts to explore the experience of visual perception.

The ‘70s ushered in the first crop of student artists represented in the show.

Chris Burden, a 1971 MFA graduate, was notorious in the early ‘70s for high-risk performance pieces such as “Shoot” (in which a friend shot him) and “TV Hijack.” The show includes an elliptic video of the former event and photographs and a “relic” (the small knife with which he threatened his cable TV interviewer, Phyllis Lutjeans) from the latter.

Other former students are represented by work made years after they graduated. That makes sense from a qualitative point of view but begs the question of formative influences at UCI, which are sometimes unclear from the catalog, in which artist interviews tend to be about specific pieces of work rather than the experience of teaching or learning.

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Alexis Smith is one of a select few students who returned to campus to teach. In “The Scarlet Letter,” a 1975 collage, Smith’s subtly inflected visual allusions to the interior life of Hawthorne’s harshly judged heroine run underneath portions of the novel’s text, typed on pink paper.

Former department chairwoman Catherine Lord remarks in a wonderfully rangy, quirky essay that the main difficulty with the department in the ‘80s was “the gradual erosion of resources,” such as studio space and equipment.

Still, a 1986 conceptual drawing of a train journey by Kim Abeles, who was on the faculty for two years in the mid- and late ‘80s, rescues the decade from oblivion.

Bringing things up to date with work by all the full-time faculty (though not by such hotshot recent visiting instructors as Judie Bamber or Jacci Den Hartog) tends to skew the show’s focus. There probably was no politically judicious way to pick and choose, but some of this work is quite thin.

Perhaps someday a curator at a gallery that has no personal stake in the matter will successfully convey the way the lack of structure and the meeting of congenial minds sometimes resulted in serendipitous moments of art-making at UCI.

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* “A Hotbed of Advanced Art: Four Decades of Visual Arts at UCI,” through Dec. 6 at UC Irvine Art Gallery, Fine Arts Complex (off Bridge Road). Free. Noon-5 p.m., Monday-Saturday. (714) 824-6610.