Stuart Collection (Video)

A 199-foot tall metal flag-pole-like sculpture is mounted with a flashing light which playfully spells out “What Hath God Wrought” in Morse Code. The titular phrase is notably the first message Samuel Morse tested and transmitted across 41 miles in 1844. The sculpture reflects both the origins of the university as well as the origins of present-day communications: Morse Code is at the root of our contemporary era of information exchange, where communication travels instantaneously. Morse’s good-humored, secular message is interpreted thoughtfully by Mark Bradford and aligned with the artist’s expansive work depicting communities and reflecting on our shared cultural history. With this epic artwork, Bradford explores the physical means behind past and present-day communication that underlines his greater practice. Series: "Stuart Collection at UC San Diego" [Arts and Music] [Show ID: 37825]

Bruce Nauman's "Vices and Virtues" for the Stuart Collection at UC San Diego consists of seven pairs of words superimposed in blinking neon, which run like a frieze around the top of the Charles Lee Powell Structural Systems Laboratory. Seven vices alternate with seven virtues: FAITH/LUST, HOPE/ENVY, CHARITY/SLOTH, PRUDENCE/PRIDE, JUSTICE/AVARICE, TEMPERANCE/GLUTTONY, and FORTITUDE/ANGER.

The virtues flash sequentially clockwise around the building at one rate; and the vices circulate counterclockwise at a slightly faster rate. At brief intervals, all seven virtues and all seven vices flash together. The progression of the two repeating cycles playing off each other allows all possible combinations of the words to be displayed. This complicated performance, generated by the mechanical sequencing of a simple moral dichotomy, dramatizes the instability of any ethical judgment. Series: "Stuart Collection at UC San Diego" [Arts and Music] [Show ID: 37810]

Terry Allen's diverse talents and experiences are highlighted in his first outdoor project, "Trees," for the Stuart Collection. He remarks upon the continual loss of natural environment at UC San Diego by salvaging three eucalyptus trees from a grove razed to make way for new campus buildings. Two of these trees stand like ghosts within a eucalyptus grove between the Geisel Library and the Faculty Club. Although they ostensibly represent displacement or loss, these trees offer a kind of compensation: one emits a series of recorded songs and the other a lively sequence of poems and stories created specifically for this project. At the entrance to the Geisel library the third tree of Allen's installation remains silent - perhaps another form of the tree of knowledge, perhaps a reminder that trees must be cut down to print books, perhaps a dance form, or perhaps noting that one can acquire knowledge both through observation of nature and through research. Series: "Stuart Collection at UC San Diego" [Arts and Music] [Show ID: 37807]

Finlay created a one-word poem installed at one edge of the north playing field at UC San Diego. "UNDA" consists of five stone blocks into which are carved, in various sequences, the letters U, N, D, A, and an S-like mark which is the editor's notation for "transpose these letters." The letters on each block in the sequence carry out the transpositions indicated by this curved mark so that regardless of the order of the letters, each block ultimately spells out UNDA. In the course of the multi-part sculpture, the wave sign rolls through UNDA, the Latin word for wave, while the tops of the stones are aligned with the distant horizon of ocean. A literary cycle is identified with the cycle of the natural wave, an association that the artist relates to the velocity and flow of language. Series: "Stuart Collection at UC San Diego" [Arts and Music] [Show ID: 37809]

"Another" is in the vast atrium of the UC San Diego Price Center East. The large interior wall bears a massive double image of clocks which is punctuated by terrazzo-like areas that contain phrases. Two LED displays show live current news, adding another level of interest, as well as meaning, and suggesting how our lives are, to some degree, culturally inflected, constructed and contained.

This combination of graphic image and moving text creates a space which functions on both a pictorial and a time-based level. The visual motif of the wall is extended to the floor by the use of terrazzo rectangles placed throughout the area, containing quotes from prominent figures in both the arts and sciences. The expansiveness of the wall and floor anchor the area with powerful images and, with the texts, create a space of visual pleasure, and relevancy. Series: "Stuart Collection at UC San Diego" [Arts and Music] [Show ID: 37822]

Snake Path consists of a winding 560-foot-long, 10-foot-wide footpath in the form of a serpent, whose individual scales are hexagonal pieces of colored slate, and whose head is inlaid in the approach to UC San Diego's Geisel Library. The tail wraps around an existing concrete pathway as a snake would wrap itself around a tree limb. Along the way, the serpent's slightly crowned body circles around a small "garden of Eden" with several fruit trees including an apple, a fig and a pomegranate.

These pointed allusions to the biblical conflict between innocence and knowledge mark an apt symbolic path to the University's main repository of books. The concept of finding sanctuary within oneself - outside the idealistic and protected confines of the university - speaks directly to the student on the verge of entering the real world. Series: "Stuart Collection at UC San Diego" [Arts and Music] [Show ID: 37815]

For the Stuart Collection at UC San Diego, William Wegman created his first major outdoor permanent sculpture: he installed a scenic - or nonscenic - overlook at one edge of the campus, near the location of the university's theater and dance complex. The site commands a view not of the Pacific Ocean, but of La Jolla's suburban sprawl. Wegman's overlook makes a simple cartoon-like connection between Southern California's still-picturesque natural scenery and its booming economic growth/development which places an ever-increasing strain on the region's environment.

Wegman's La Jolla Vista View uses the language of fantasy and humor to convey a serious message. By defamiliarizing the ordinary world of suburban life - through its transformation into an exotic or scenic overlook - Wegman encourages the university community to view its surroundings with fresh and newly critical eyes. Series: "Stuart Collection at UC San Diego" [Arts and Music] [Show ID: 37811]

A bear constructed of boulders. Eight granite stones, together they make a bear 23.5 feet high with a total weight of 180 tons. Bear pushes the bounds of credibility. Questions arise. Where did they find these rocks? How did they get them here? Are they real? How are they held together? On one hand, the sculpture is massive, permanent, thoroughly engineered. At the same time, it has a form (a toy bear) that one knows to be soft and cozy - a form that one associates with childhood, play, and security. The bear can be seen framed through the trees lining the paths that lead to the courtyard. As you get closer, you see the mass, the monumentality and the stone surfaces. It becomes immense, especially in the context of the scale of a toy. The rounded, ancient, and weathered natural granite contrasts with the high-tech, anodized, and highly manufactured surfaces of the surrounding buildings. Series: "Stuart Collection at UC San Diego" [Arts and Music] [Show ID: 37821]

For the Stuart Collection, "Two Running Violet V Forms," Robert Irwin was drawn to the eucalyptus groves so characteristic of the UC San Diego campus. Irwin installed two fencelike structures in V-forms amidst the trees. The "fences" are blue-violet, plastic-coated, small gauge chain-link fencing supported by stainless steel poles that average twenty-five feet in height.

At no point is the fence an obstacle; rather it acts as a screen reflecting the changes in light throughout the day and the year, the moment and the season. Its gentle introduction of industrialized geometry recalls the unnatural grid that organized the grove, and suggests a sensual intrusion into the forest. For people who walk the grove's various paths, the sculpture provides an ever-changing perceptual experience. Series: "Stuart Collection at UC San Diego" [Arts and Music] [Show ID: 37805]

Same Old Paradise, a mural painted by Alexis Smith, was commissioned by Brooklyn Museum in 1987 as a temporary installation and then remained rolled-up for thirty years. Alexis worked with Lucia Vinograd to develop the five-point perspective of the orange grove and the colors in the scales of the snake that turned into a paved road. Alexis loved to drive, and when you drive and look out the window you are experiencing something akin to her work—an ongoing visual collage. You see one thing after another. Alexis Smith also had become fascinated with the idea that instead of having paradise be a place, paradise might be a state of mind. Series: "Stuart Collection at UC San Diego" [Arts and Music] [Show ID: 37863]