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4 Part IV—Mon., Oct. 29, 1973 Los Angeles Times

ART REVIEW

Ruth Asawa's Wire Whatsits

BY WILLIAM WILSON
Times Staff Writer

Japanese American craftsman-sculptor Ruth Asawa was born in agricultural Norwalk in 1926.  Today she is an active force in San Francisco's community art scene.  She serves on the city's art commission, lectures in the city's schools, raises her six children.

She mainly makes a public sort of sculpture, most of woven wire, recently of cast baker's clay.  Many of us have seen her mermaid-and-turtle fountain in Ghirardelli Square, tied wire sculpture in Joseph Magnin's and her delightful fountain before the Union Square Hyatt House.

It is a drum-shaped affair that runs upstairs.  It is decorated with cartoony figures.  Its satirical comment about the city as a chaotic purgatory of activity is unusually biting for a civic sculpture.

Is It Art?

Two sections of the fountain's design are included in a retrospective exhibition on view at Cal-tech.  It was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Art.  An accompanying catalog has text by former SFMA director Gerald Nordland.

The informative and sympathetic essay gets funny in quotes from critics busting their brains to try to figure out if Ms. Asawa's work is or is not "art," as if conferring or withholding that label had some sacred significance.

Ms. Asawa's work certainly is art.  It certainly is not art as we are accustomed to think of it when we visit museums and galleries looking for aesthetic innovation and intellectual rigor.  Ms. Asawa's art is too decorative, conventional and adaptable to warrant Nordland's suggestion that we judge it in an inapplicable category by hinting it is "constructivist."

Ruth Asawa makes a species of architectural decor predominantly in wire; woven, welded or cast.  Forms are primarily geomorphic.  The depth of her dialectical commitment to pure abstraction can be measured by how easily she decides to do something else, like the figurative fountains, watercolors of flowers or a contour drawing of a chair.  She comes across less like a passionate innovator than an honestly capable person trying to get a job done.  She never gets weird and she never gets slick, causing her to make superior architectural decor.

Among her most typical wire sculptures are hanging tubes that bulge into various basket shapes.  I didn't like them.  They cause inescapable associations to an esophagus full of half-swallowed melons.

The rest is more gratifying.  Some cactus-like forms become airy and delicate.  A gallery devoted to 16 symmetrical reliefs finds Ms. Asawa at her decorative best.  They are wire starburst designs whose points branch into branchlike brushes.  They combine design with organic sensations and overtones of symbolism.