Art creates an uproar in a world where science rules
Biologist Marianne Bronner-Fraser likes what she sees when she looks out her Caltech office window. It is grass, green and simple. It is often adorned with students tossing Frisbees and scientific theorems around. Bronner-Fraser says she can envision a sculpture on the lawn -- a work of soaring excellence that would equal in creativity the innovation for which Caltech is so well-known.
But she can’t imagine the sculpture that has actually been designed and proposed for the spot, and has caused months of growing agitation in the Caltech community. It is an 80-ton, zig-zagging wall of steel by artist Richard Serra that would bisect the lawn like a parade barrier. The hot new rumor on campus this week is that the sculpture will not, after all, be built.
This bit of possibly inaccurate news caused joy among those who oppose the monumental artwork but who’ve had few signs thus far that their prolonged protests matter.
The protests themselves are unusual on this campus of brainiacs, traditionally not an activist bunch. Most are so totally immersed in scientific investigations and computations that they can be counted on to ignore issues unrelated to their esoteric areas of expertise. That non-activist tradition changed suddenly a few months back, when Caltech President David Baltimore somewhat casually informed the school community that Serra had been chosen to design a sculpture for the grass in front of the two biological sciences buildings.
After students and faculty got a look at the proposed work, they drew battle lines, signed petitions, even constructed a comical effigy of the proposed piece, which mysteriously appeared on the lawn last month where the real thing is slated to sit. Meetings were held, at which Baltimore tried to engage dissenters in open discussion -- to no avail.
A decision on whether to sign a binding contract for the sculpture was originally scheduled for July. It has been repeatedly postponed by administrators, for whom it has apparently become a diplomatic and artistic hot potato. Caltech officials said again this week that they’ve made no decision, and had no comment on new rumors that the sculpture would be too heavy for the site, would damage underground equipment installations, and so will be rejected.
Students and faculty have called the proposed art piece unattractive, inappropriate, spatially divisive and visually disruptive. “It is aesthetically unpleasing and artistically insignificant,” said Susannnah Barbee, a doctoral candidate in biology. “I would love a Serra piece on the site, maybe one of his beautiful buoyant rounded ones -- but not that particular piece. The symbolism of a wall is ill-suited to the nature of this beautiful campus. It speaks of isolation and separation, and what’s wanted is exactly the opposite.”
Bronner-Fraser, chair of faculty at Caltech, likes the idea of bringing great art to this campus. “I applaud David Baltimore for what he is trying to do. That said, I don’t like this piece for this space. To my mind, it’s divisive.”
By opposing the massive art work, dissenters are squaring off against Eli Broad, L.A.’s most ubiquitous philanthropist-about-town. Broad has offered to provide principal funding for the $2-million art piece, which would sit in front of the Beckman Institute and the new $50-million Broad biological sciences building, an architectural gem for which the benefactor also provided principal funding.
It would be the first major public sculpture by a celebrated artist to be placed on campus. It would also bisect the lawn students use for Frisbee games and as a shortcut to housing across the street. The work consists of four steel plates, each 3 inches thick and 60 feet long, with the tallest one rising to 9 feet.
On a small, highly focused campus like Caltech, where many of the great scientific breakthroughs of modern civilization have taken place, school officials admit surprise at the amount of passion generated by the proposed art gift, which has spurred discussion that ranges far beyond the sculpture itself. What kind of art belongs on campus, should students and faculty have a voice in the process (they have none at present), and why should so much money be spent on art at a time when essentials like health benefits may have to be cut back?
Broad wants the sculpture to be approved, he said by phone from his office. “I think Serra is the world’s most important living sculptor. I know that David Baltimore likewise has a very high regard for him. As the Broad Center was being built, David and I always talked about having a great piece of sculpture on the lawn in front if it. I offered to be the major contributor if Serra would allow himself to be commissioned.”
Serra was selected from a short list of five artists developed by the 12-member Caltech arts committee, which advises the school president, who apparently made the final decision.
Of course, neither Broad nor Baltimore could have known that Serra would come up with one of his “Vectors” -- a series of sculptures he began in the 1970s, based on walls rising out of the landscape.
“You don’t tell an artist what you want,” Broad said. “You show him the site, and he comes up with what he wants to create for it.”
Baltimore isn’t talking about the matter these days. Through an aide he said he’d rather discuss it after a decision has been made -- and no date has been set for that. In response to calls about the persistent rumor that the sculpture has been rejected, the school’s public relations director, Jill Perry, said there may be a decision soon.
Broad said he believes the work will ultimately win the required approval from both the school and Pasadena, which requires a portion of private development cost to be allocated for public art. He just doesn’t know when. Serra’s wife, Clara, reached by phone at their Manhattan home, said her husband is waiting for word on the design he submitted many months ago and will not talk about the matter until he has an answer. “We have no hostility,” she told a caller. “It’s just that we’ve been through all his before, and we’ve learned.”
There have been many instances in Serra’s embattled but brilliant career when either his creations or his feisty temperament have resulted in rejection of prestigious commissions for which he was tapped. A 40-foot tower of overlapping steel plates he designed for Wesleyan University was rejected as too tall for the site. (The piece later went to a museum in Amsterdam.) A proposed sculpture for the Centre Pompidou in Paris was turned down because architects considered it too intrusive. He was fired from a prestigious commission in Washington, D.C., after clashing with the noted architect on the project, Robert Venturi.
The major battle of Serra’s career occurred in the mid-1980s when a government agency placed a Serra sculpture in a large plaza in front of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in Lower Manhattan. The tilted wall of steel was reviled by many who worked in the building, including a judge who led a campaign to have the offending piece removed. Serra refused a government offer to relocate the sculpture. He sued for $30 million, for breach of contract, and lost the case four years later. The sculpture was moved to a government parking lot in Brooklyn.
The highly publicized case temporarily stunted his popularity in America, but not his talent. He reached even greater artistic heights with his torqued ellipses, some of which are walk-in sculptures. The rapturous, soaring, curved and tilted steel walls seem to transport viewers through time and space, reviewers have said. An exhibit, which included these works, was held in New York last year, one month after Sept. 11. It was so well-received that one critic said it helped the city start to heal. Calvin Tompkins, writing in the New Yorker, said the ellipses offered viewers “a jolt of euphoria.” A young couple who repeatedly visited the ellipses asked permission to be married inside one of them. It is one of these newer works that students and faculty say they wish Serra would have selected for their campus. Instead, he has designed one for UCLA across town, a work for which Eli Broad will also provide principal funding. UCLA Executive Vice Chancellor Daniel Neuman says the torqued ellipse will be installed by 2005, in front of what will be the new Broad Art Center complex.
Some distinguished voices in the fracas believe the Caltech sculpture would be a good thing. Melvin I. Simon, professor of biology and former member of the school’s art committee, thinks it’s “wonderful that we would have a piece of world-class art by one of the great sculptors of our time.” All art, and especially Serra’s, is controversial in nature, Simon said, and some people will be unhappy no matter what is chosen. “When you work with a great artist, you must relinquish control.”
Steven Schkolne, a computer sciences graduate student, thinks “it’s cool that they’re putting a sculpture in that space -- otherwise a new building might go up there in a few years.” He thinks most students are upset “for reasons other than the art, for reasons which are valid.” Still, Schkolne wishes that “something more interesting had been selected. This is not his best work. If Caltech puts art on campus to stimulate artistic thinking, it needs to select pieces that are over the edge.”
The sculptor has explained in writing why he preferred a “Vector” for the Caltech lawn. “In trying to conceive this work, the choice was one of sculptural object versus sculpturally structured field.” He opted for the latter, he wrote, so that “as one drives along or walks the site, the sculptural configuration foreshortens and extends, compresses and expands the entire field and its urban surroundings, continuously redrawing the viewer’s relationship to the landscape and the architecture.”
Many in the Caltech community, it seems, don’t want to have their views of the landscape “redrawn.” The intimate campus is a paradise of winding flower and tree-lined pathways with small, ornamental surprises -- reflecting pools, fountains, friezes, statuary -- at almost every twist and turn. It is the perfect, pastoral environment for some of the world’s most talented scientists and their proteges to think deep, theoretical thoughts.
It does, however, lack world-class public art -- an image problem Baltimore is trying hard to correct. Whether Serra’s steel wall helps solve that problem remains to be seen.
