Quite a spattering of intellectuals and studio artists based in and around San Diego – especially those associated with UCSD – like to amuse themselves with commentary on the city’s decided superficiality, reveling in their declarations of barren cultural wasteland, political despicability and other such mainstream-America atrocities. Where are the dusty bookshops and overgrown, uneven cobblestone streets necessary to spark a poet’s wick, the hip San Francisco/New York cramp to draw move a painter’s brush to canvas? More than any other West Coast urban cluster, San Diego is accused of being one big blank.
What our unique regional situation does inspire is a heavy turnout of oft-stimulating social-commentary art centered on hot local topics like border relations and economic division; but there’s also a tendency toward art that only comments on the emptiness of it all. “”Copia,”” by Chicago-born photographer Brian Ulrich – the sole present exhibit at MCASD’s La Jolla gallery, besides a handful of permanent outdoor pieces – consists of 14 photographs meant to spotlight America’s bleak shopping habits. Florescently lit aisles, bratty kids and cell phone-attached mothers are isolated and framed around the rectangular gallery, as much a statement on our own environment as the middle states in which they were captured.
But if our contemporary creative minds explored for a minute, they’d soon realize that we’ve grown ourselves a substantial cultural base down here in California’s neglected bowels (in large part thanks to UCSD’s heavy influence). With the January expansion of MCASD’s downtown facility, now located at both 1001 and 1100 Kettner Blvd., the city’s heart takes on a new excitement and sense of pride, an air that things are happening here. The stouter building alone – it formerly housed the Santa Fe Depot baggage station (a unique little history in itself, complete with antiquely industrial, royal-blue letters looming overhead) and sponsored by such research-fueling bank accounts as our own Joan and Irwin Jacobs – boasts four current exhibits, one fresh from a May 20 opening, and a few more slated for summer.
What’s refreshing about the new work is that instead of letting itself get caught up on any absence of creative legacy, it takes natural steps toward bettering this supposed lack of cultural substance. The ethereal serenity of Brazilian 3-D multimedia artist Ernesto Neto’s “”Mother body emotional densities, for alive temple time baby son”” fills the left wing of the Jacobs building with a literally aromatic presence. A ceiling-wide spread of Lycra fabric branches down into hanging sacks of varied lengths, like a 21-legged spider’s set of giant nylons turned inside out with the socks still crumpled in the feet. The phallic end-sacks (equally resembling hung testicles and garlic cloves) are filled with kitchen spices like ginger and pepper, thinly brushing the cold museum air with earthy powders of anticipation – a one-room fungal universe. Directly through the glass door to the left, February’s postwar flashback “”Modern American Masters”” has been reinstalled until July 7, keeping lesser-known pieces from pop-culture classics like Andy Warhol (his 1963 stunner “”Liz Taylor Diptych,”” all red lipstick and silver geometry) and grungy paint splatters from the dark 1940s (Clyfford Still’s “”Untitled””) to the psychedelic 1970s (Sam Francis’ “”Untitled””). The hindsight exhibit provides a swelling sense of popular history to its modern counterparts, which also include a globe-trotting, narrated and sung video installment by Finnish media artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila and the permanent, site-specific gold-feathered window panes and aerodynamic triangle wall-sweep of Richard Wright.
The original trolley-wound gallery also shelters a brand new installment in MCASD’s Cerca Series, with construction-background Encinitas artist William Feeney’s structural pieces filling the bottom floor with interactive and slyly provoking familiar shapes of wood, plaster, crusted salt, gears, toys – even stretched faux ostrich skin, sewed meticulously up into “”Lust in Space”” underwear hanging from the ceiling.
Feeney milled about his exhibit a couple days after the opening, dressed in a fleece, boots and work pants, swarmed by nicely dressed middle-agers buzzing with empty compliments and starstruck inquiries. After they’d dispersed, he hopped into his dinged-up Ford F150 out front and took off into the downtown traffic, probably to his day job – a true San Diegan art-child, and of a city so long cursed with a stigma of artlessness.
