A Master of Arts

What kind of future could you envision for a guy from a small town in Iowa who founded a funky theater as a college undergraduate, became--in fairly rapid succession--an actor, director, dancer and choreographer in Great Britain, got a master’s degree in fiction writing and then chucked all this creative activity to burrow into the arcane world of literary theory?

Stephen Barker--still trim and youthfully energetic at 52--is, appropriately enough, a networker extraordinaire on behalf of UC Irvine’s arts and humanities programs.

Laden with such titles as “faculty assistant to the chancellor,” “professor, department of drama” and “director of the School of the Arts program in interdisciplinary studies,” he operates like a gleeful dilettante in the groves of academe.

“It’s all been a very strange ride, I must say,” Barker remarked from his fifth floor office overlooking the bright orange Mark di Suvero sculpture he brought to campus last year as a first step toward a UCI public art program.

“I’ve been here for almost a dozen years, and I’ve been lucky enough to teach and partake in all kinds of wonderful things that wouldn’t have been possible except for this strange, eclectic background.”

Pragmatism played a major role. Barker left the United States after graduating from Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1968 because he was, as he put it, a “card-carrying draft dodger.” Acting and teaching acting for a small company in London (Studio ’68 of Theatre Arts), he began taking dance classes to develop more control of his body onstage.

“Modern dance was just starting to catch on in Britain, and there were few male bodies to lift all those women,” he said.

Six months after starting to classes at the well-regarded London School of Contemporary Dance, he joined its professional company. He toured around the world, 50 weeks a year, until the British Arts Council began paying London arts groups to take their work into the provinces.

Working in a huge high school in Cardiff, Wales, he and seven other performers had a swell time doing multimedia work in the mid-1970s. A few years later, Barker was able to return legally, thanks to President Jimmy Carter’s amnesty for draft evaders.

“I was so tired of touring and performing at that point that I actually went back to school to see what I wanted to do,” Barker said.

His initial interest was creative writing, but even before he finished his master’s of fine arts degree at the University of Arizona, he got “seduced by scholarship again,” he said, and began work in the university’s PhD program in literary theory.

“I always had an interest in philosophy, and it was just a duck-to-water thing,” he said. “I was very lucky in getting a number of early pieces of scholarship published.”

Barker’s next move was a natural: to UC Irvine, where former Yale University literary theorist J. Hillis Miller had just been hired, along with the Parisian guru of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida.

And then other offers beckoned--administrative posts at UCI--that wound up taking Barker away from his writing. “It’s hard to say no,” Barker said, And, gesturing toward the Di Suvero--”I have a nice view from here.”

Serendipity Steps In Again

The sculpture, a one-year loan from Di Suvero’s Santa Monica gallery, was a bit of serendipity, as Barker tells it. Invited to watch the installation of the artist’s abstract steel sculptures at Town Center Park in Costa Mesa last summer, Barker found out that they’d be returned to storage at the end of September.

“One of the things I really wanted to do for the first time in the 35-year history of UCI is to upgrade campus awareness of the world of art,” Barker said. “[UC] San Diego has a wonderful [public art] policy. UCLA is dotted with stuff. Santa Cruz has stuff all over the campus. We have a beautiful campus which is potentially a first-rate sculpture park, and there’s nothing here.”

Ralph J. Cicerone, the new, arts-friendly chancellor of this traditionally science-dominated campus, and his vice chancellor, William J. Lillyman, a humanities professor, were both “ready to take action,” Barker said. In vivid contrast to the dozens of public art projects that languished and died in committees over the years, the deal was consummated in a record 48 hours.

But “Aesop” will remain on campus for just one year, unless Barker’s fledgling Campus Art Alliance can come up with the $500,000 purchase price negotiated with UCI alumni Mark Moore, Di Suvero’s West Coast art dealer.

The alliance, whose full, 12-member roster will be announced in the next few weeks, will have representatives from the arts and science faculties (including professor James Fallon, at the School of Medicine), artists and art dealers (professor emeritus Tony deLap and Moore), as well as local residents. The group will recommend potential purchases for campus sites and help raise money to create an art endowment. (So far, no dollar goal has been set.)

Barker realizes his timing could be better. The School of the Arts is holding out its hat for $16 million to upgrade performance and exhibition venues and to support scholarships, research and artist residencies. Some local arts philanthropists already have told Barker they’ll be putting all their eggs in another basket: the concert hall and museum to be built on a site adjacent to the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Still, Barker said, UCI’s arts departments are determined to make themselves more visible to the community at large. Two years ago, as acting dean of the School of the Arts, he appointed Brad Spence the art gallery director as part of this new push toward public accessibility.

Barker, who no longer oversees the gallery, says he was “a bit surprised” when Spence was recently replaced by Jean-Edith Weiffenbach, former director of the San Francisco Art Institute Gallery.

“I hope and expect she’ll be able to live up to what I consider to be a really interesting standard of thoughtful and quirky shows that Brad put together,” Barker said. “They haven’t been hermetically sealed in some right thematic or theoretical bubble.”

Barker was referring to the radical political emphasis of exhibitions organized during the directorship of art faculty member Catherine Lord--who happens to be his cousin. (“We live in separate worlds, even though we’re in the same department.”)

Broadening Students’ Exposure to Art

Among Barker’s bids to make the UCI arts program more visible even on its own campus is a new course called Art Core, meant to broaden science students’ exposure to subjects outside their primary interests. Recently, a student ran up to him with a reproduction of Mark Rothko’s “Four Darks on Red.”

“I saw this over the break! I saw it for real!” the young man breathlessly told Barker, who had lectured on the painting in the fall. “And it was so amazing, so different from the slide! The texture of it and how the colors work together and the magnitude of it!”

Barker was surprised and pleased. “I thought, ‘This guy was listening,’ ” he said.

Although he enjoys teaching college-age students, Barker said he found himself keen to “start talking to some people who aren’t 18, who actually have some rich, dense life experience.”

So last fall, he taught the first full 10-week credit course offered by UCI Extension in collaboration with the Orange County Museum of Art. (Lectures also are available on a drop-in basis, for a $35 fee.)

“Boy, it was wonderful,” he said. “There were dentists and psychiatrists and a retired CPA, people from every conceivable walk of life.”

Accustomed to lecturing to dutiful young note-takers, he found his new audience was liable to ask how the statement he just made reconciled with something he said 10 minutes ago.

The fall course (“Why Art?”) dealt with the relevance and function of art as an aesthetic and social phenomenon. As is Barker’s wont--his publications have such titles as “Autoaesthetics: Strategies of the Self After Nietzsche”--he worked in a few thoughts on postmodernism.

“Everybody in the class said, ‘Well, that’s not enough. We need to hear more about this thing that nobody understands,’ ” Barker said. “So I decided to play a joke on them. In the winter [term], the course is called, ‘Understanding Postmodern Art.’

“At the first class, I let them know it was a joke. There’s no such thing as understanding postmodern art. That’s not the point. The point is to be around it and understand you don’t understand it. It’s saying the unsayable.”

Among the artists, composers and performers to be discussed are Marcel Duchamp, John Cage and Laurie Anderson.

“What we try to do as academics is to be good surfers, to ride these cultural waves, which to a certain extent we can articulate and maybe have some impact on,” Barker said. “But in my view, it’s really the creative people, the artists, who are responsible for leading the way.

“All the things we’re talking about in literary theory were foreshadowed in the art of the previous generation. There’s nothing new going on in structuralism or deconstruction that wasn’t happening in Dada and Surrealism at the beginning of the century. It just wasn’t conceptualized [by the artists]. So the thinkers are catching up.”

The spring term course, “Art and Light,” will cover such subjects as photography, cinema and the use of photography by artists, including the Impressionists.

“We’ll actually spend the first two weeks talking about physics and optics and the way light works to produce the conditions in which art happens,” Barker said.

Then, relying on Leonard Shlain’s recent book, “The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image” (Viking), Barker will discuss a controversial notion of how the science of physics stems from “notions of power and gender.”

Barker obviously is thrilled to be the stimulus of controversial ideas.

“The ideal thing would be, 10 years after teaching a class, to have someone bang on my door and say, ‘You know when you said X? Well, you were completely wrong, and here’s the answer to that.’ ”

* “Understanding Postmodern Art,” a 10-week course offered in conjunction with UC Irvine Extension, at the Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Remaining lectures, all from 7-10 p.m.: tonight , Jan. 26, Feb. 2, 9, 16, 23; March 2 and 9. Ticket price per lecture: $35. (949) 824-5414.