Photo by Craig Carlson

Allan Kaprow: "UCSD is known for being and still is the most experimental art department in the country.”

In a bathroom near the UCSD visual arts department’s main office is a scrawl of the type that has become a familiar sight on the walls of public restrooms from California to New York. Executed in a style common to much contemporary graffiti — flat yet somehow wispy letters drawn in narrow-point, felt-pen black — it reads:

David Antin: Paintings of any type are simply “wall obstructions.”

Photo by Craig Carlson

In search of:

A. personal icons

B. universal icons

C. any icons — Icontacts!

D. something of at least passing interest

E. con artists (UCSD)

F. conundrums

G. a different drummer (see A)

In a way, the graffiti describes the scope of the UCSD visual arts department.

Heidi Hardin gravitated to the more traditional side of the schism, particularly to painters and critics Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson.

Photo by Craig Carlson

The rise of an art department at UCSD has been no mean feat in itself. At a school known for molecular science and practically nothing else, where late-night conversations in dormitory corridors are likely to be about computer programs or recombinant DNA, the existence of an art department might almost be called extraordinary. (Three percent of the undergraduates, about 250 students, are currently seeking their bachelor degrees from the visual arts department. Thirty-eight students are enrolled as graduate students.) And it is not just an art department but one with an exalted national reputation, considered by many to be one of the top two or three places in the country for aspiring artists to cut their teeth.

Harold Cohen: “We weren’t interested in talented animals who could make pretty pictures."

Photo by Craig Carlson

Two graduates of UCSD’s visual arts program. Bob Kushner and Kim McConnell, have gone on to become two of the most talked-about artists in New York, and perhaps in Europe, too. A third graduate won the grand prize at the prestigious American Film Institute's student video competition in 1980, and a fourth is now a film critic for New York City’s Village Voice. There are numerous other art professors, critics, and aspiring artists who have come out of UCSD in the last decade, but the message is clear: in the small but intense world of art, where single individuals and schools have traditionally had far-reaching impacts, UCSD’s visual arts department is one of the current major influences.

Patricia Patterson: "Almost every art school and college in the country has better facilities than we do."

Photo by Craig Carlson

It has all been done with an unflagging devotion to the new, the experimental, the avant-garde. To say that the members of UCSD’s art faculty aren’t interested in teaching traditional academic painting is like saying the planet Jupiter is pretty big. (One professor, David Antin, has gone so far as to say that paintings of any type are simply “wall obstructions.”)

"Dick Atkinson (UCSD’s new chancellor] has told us that we’ve [already] got all the space we’re going to get."

Photo by Craig Carlson

“The whole intention here was to deal with the art of the present,” says Antin, one of the first members of the department and one who, having been chairman the longest (four years), has probably influenced the direction of the department more than anyone else. “That is, we might deal with the art of the past, because it’s necessary to obtain an education of what people had done before, but it wasn’t going to be an art department primarily concerned with historical scholarship; it was going to be an artists’ department dealing with art, the current world, and the current world of art. ”

Harold Cohen, another long-time faculty member and the department’s second chairman, sums it up a little differently. "The thrust of the thing was to consider art as a serious intellectual exercise,” he told me recently in his studio on the university campus.

“We weren’t interested in talented animals who could make pretty pictures; we were interested in hardheaded professionals who could move the field forward.

“There are a lot of people out there who think we are extremely stuck up, extremely full of ourselves. And they might be right, for all I know. But the department is characterized by an extremely high level of professional activity. I doubt whether in this country you’d find half a dozen other departments put together that would collectively show the kind of exhibition record this faculty has. . . . Our people are bouncing all over the world.”

Cohen is probably right when he says that UCSD’s art faculty (twenty permanent members) includes some of the most active and highly regarded artists in the world, but to the uninformed observer they seem like a peculiar bunch: there are a couple of painters and sculptors, and then there are people who do food performances and cine-murals and talk pieces and installations with tanks full of live shrimp. Some of them would probably argue that the graffiti quoted earlier in this article is art, although maybe not Art. In the last decade the art world has been preoccupied with conceptual art: art which has some new idea or theory, but which depends on no specific technique, and in some cases on no technique at all. Nowhere is this trend more evident than at UCSD, where courses in art theory and criticism abound alongside new and eclectic art forms such as performance.'installation sculpture, and video. There are painting classes, too, but in general at UCSD it’s ideas that count, not canvases; theory and not technique. “Techniques are a dime a dozen,” Antin has said. “You can be terrific at doing some wonderfully unnecessary thing."

To a large extent criticizing UCSD’s visual arts department means criticizing the direction that a great deal of contemporary art has taken. But now that art is moving away from its preoccupation with the conceptual, criticism is surfacing. There is tot) much emphasis on theory at UCSD, some say; students are learning a lot about how to talk about art and define its boundaries but not much about the technical aspects of actually producing artwork. “UCSD does well what it does, but it is not a good technical school,” one observer of the local art scene commented recently. “They're very anti-craft; most community colleges have better facilities. If you’re a graduate student and you’re interested in conceptual art, it’s a good place to go — but it’s very narrow. If you ’re an undergraduate you should probably go somewhere else.”

The scene: a large, theater-like room on the Muir Campus of UCSD. The seats are slowly filling with students who have come for the final class meeting of Visual Arts 2, Introduction to Art Making, taught this quarter by professor Allan Kaprow. The scene is reminiscent of most classrooms just prior to a class, with students milling around and talking to each other in the aisles. But there are two important differences: nearly all the students have brought candles with them, many of which are already lit, and nearly everyone has brought bread and a drink of some kind, too. (Kaprow had asked them to do this as part of a “food performance” he was going to orchestrate.)

After what seems like a long time Kaprow appears on the dais in front of the classroom. He is a short, middle-aged man with dark hair and a full dark beard, and he is wearing jeans and a denim jacket. He seems very relaxed. In a few minutes the lights go out, and after a few minutes more Kaprow sits down cross-legged on the dais and, flanked by two graduate students on either side, begins the food performance. One of the graduate students begins to hit a small gong rhythmically, counting each beat silently with a little wave of his stick — Bong! 2, 3, 4, Bong! 2, 3, 4 — while Kaprow gazes up at the rows of students in front of him calmly, unsmiling. Candles are lit on nearly every desk now and the class has taken on the air of a religious ceremony. Some of the students have fallen silent, but many are chatting with the people sitting next to them or, in some cases, the people a few aisles away. Beer bottles have been opened and bread is starting to disappear.

Finally Kaprow picks up a microphone and speaks: "This sharing of our bread and drink will be conducted silently and with joy.”

A pause. “I urge you to do just that — enjoy — and to share that with those around you.”

The gong beater continues his monotonous rhythm as the room fills with the sounds of cans being popped open and bread being unwrapped. The noise level swells as students begin to converse with each other over their food (apparently ignoring Kaprow’s instructions to remain silent), and soon people are walking up and down the aisles offering each other goodies. A girl in front of me turns around and asks me if I want a brownie, and I accept it gratefully. Later 1 hear her tell a friend, ‘ ‘These are the worst brownies I ’ve ever made.”

Through it all Kaprow sits expressionlessly in the front of the room, accepting food when it is offered to him and chewing it silently as he regards his students. In one of the aisles a girl is taking flash pictures with an Instamatic camera; in fact, nearly everyone seems to be using the performance as an excuse for a big social occasion, except for the guy hitting the gong, who can't pause to talk or eat or he’ll miss the beat. Forty-five minutes after the performance began, Kaprow leans over and says something to the gong beater, who stops.

Taking the microphone again, Kaprow says, “This will be the last meeting of our class.”

A pause. “I want to thank you for all you’ve done, and most of all for who you are.”

There is whistling, cheering, and wild applause from the students. The food performance is over.

Allan Kaprow is an art philosopher, art teacher, and artist who has been teaching at UCSD since 1974. He has been described as “a curious mixture of the visionary and the academic intellectual” by The New Yorker's art writer, Calvin Tomkins, and he is one of the originators of what is now called performance art, an extremely loose new art form that might be defined as something which involves people performing. Kaprow made his name initially by inventing “Happenings” in New York in the late 1950s — group events in which people often performed slow, ritualistic movements. Happenings were soon criticized, however, in some cases by other artists, as being too easy and of limited appeal.

In his Introduction to Art Making class, Kaprow says, he tries to teach undergraduate art students that consciousness alone can reframe ordinary life experiences and turn them into works of art. “Even making bread can be an artwork,’’ he told me when I met him in his office a few days after the food performance, “and that artwork can be part of your life. In the class the week before, we had been talking about how huge parts of our cityscapes, and our symbologies, are concerned with food in some way . . . and it turned out that only half of the class had ever eaten homemade bread. So I said, ‘Well, here’s going to be your chance.’ I told them to bring some to class, and that it had to have two characteristics: no mixes, don’t fake it; knead it, watch it rise. And love it so much you’ll be willing and happy to share it with someone else. I told them to bring candles and a drink, too, and to think carefully about it. It sure made the atmosphere of that room better than it usually is.”

I asked Kaprow in what way he considered the food performance art, and he replied, “Any deliberate performing ceremony is part of the history of art and therefore artwork by its history. Its form automatically made it art — the way I put it together. I could have made it much more ‘artistic ’ by beefing up the drama, giving it more form, increasing the pacing or the props, all the things dramatists do, but I didn’t want to. I wanted it to be art with a lower-case ‘a,’ because that’s the point of that class. I’m not against high-class art but I wanted the students to see that the origins of it are in everyday life.”

Thinking of all the noise that was going on during the class, I wondered aloud if the students had made the connection. But Kaprow seemed to think that most of them had, and added that he wasn’t much concerned with relating to an audience anyway. Other performances could take place in a car on the freeway or in a small room, he insisted, and when I asked what the point of such a piece would be without the audience that, say, a more traditional play would have, he seemed impatient. “What about them [plays]?” he asked. “They’re more attended, and they proliferate. I hardly feel they’re in danger. But there are very few artists playing at the outer edge. I’m not advancing [my] stuff as a necessity to anybody. But the most exciting thing to me is what to do with our lives, and if the new arts can help us figure that out, that’s as good a reason as any for them being.

“How many explorers and pioneers are there at any one point in history?” he continued a moment later. "The bulk of us at UCSD are not only active and well known, but very experimental. UCSD is known for being and still is the most experimental art department in the country.”

It wasn’t always that way. When the department first formed in the late 1960s, it had no real direction of any kind, according to David Antin. Antin, a poet, art critic, and former curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, is a key figure in the department and one of its most vocal supporters. Artistically he is probably known best for his “talk pieces” — performances that are part poem, part conversation, part lecture — and he has a rapid-fire, rambling way of answering questions that is sometimes entertaining, sometimes tiresome, but always highly rhythmic and logical.

Recently Antin sat in a sparsely furnished office in UCSD’s Mandeville Center and talked about the growth of the art department . The late Sixties, he said with a smile, "were the good old days, when we didn’t have so many faculty meetings and we didn’t have the bureaucracy we have now. Basically a few of us taught courses, undergraduates came, I was the director of the gallery. . . . But we had to figure that a certain amount of growth was going to occur. And it was figured we’d need more people to teach, and the question was, what could we sensibly teach? Because you can’t teach all art, unless you ’re going to be an immense diploma mill. I mean like the University of Wisconsin, some of those places, they teach engraving, they teach ceramics, they teach print making — I mean you name it and they teach it — woodcutting, weaving. And all those things are interesting, but the question is, what’re you going to teach if you run with a smaller group? And there were ideas that whatever else the department would do, it would primarily be a department that would deal with art making, that is, it would be an artists’ department, not the tail of a dog where the dog was the art historians, as at, say, Berkeley, or the notorious Ivy League schools. And Paul Brock’s (the original chairman’s] tendency was to teach in the areas where you could take up what is called the serious-commitment art. ... In effect, he saw it as the high tradition of painting and sculpture.

“But even then there was no idea of a discipline. You just selected artists who would be interesting, and you figured the numbers you needed, and you thought you were basically going to teach painting and sculpture, and some art criticism, and that was it in the beginning. Nothing else.

“Then a big change took place, when Paul was leaving and we selected as a new chairman a guy he had brought in, a brilliant English color painter who is now known for working with computers, Harold Cohen. Cohen felt that in order to be a serious department with a serious teaching mission we should have a graduate school. ... It made sense to me. So we began to imagine, well, what would we teach? Because that’s when you begin to set up the image of the discipline. So we began to debate what it would be. Harold and Newton [Harrison] had most of the original input, and I went along with them, but what they created with the best intention in the world was a kind of Technische Hochsschule [advanced technical school ]. It was going to be high tech, we were going to try to teach some of the things in common between art and science.... It was an illusion we all suffered from, that since this was a science school we could somehow make a rapprochement with science. It seemed like it made sense at the time.

“It didn’t take us long to find out we weren’t going to do this. We were very good at teaching computer stuff, but it was mostly the computer students who came to study, not the art students. [Antin laughs.] They didn’t really want to do it. So we took another look at the situation, the kind of people who were available, the most interesting art that was going on, and we tried to get people who looked like they were breaking new ground, or trying to break new ground. . . . And I kind of committed us heavily into mechanical electronic media [film, photography, and video] and it didn’t take a lot of persuading to get everyone to agree with me. . . . We thought certain areas of sculpture were important, and we realized it was important to do performance, and we did it, and we wound up as the only place in the country that has a serious kind of a subgenre where we teach performance.

“But basically we moved into all these areas not because we were diversifying but because we thought art was moving toward a conceptual thrust, and that while it wouldn't mean the end of any of the traditional genres, it meant that you wouldn't be able to sustain a really reasonable art school unless you had these things. In the older work, people were often committed to a particular technique, [while conceptual art] deemphasized particular genres, not to dematerialize art, but to emphasize its meaning and its idea."

Antin’s point that art is no longer restricted to painting or sculpture — that it consists, in fact, only of new ideas, and that any material or medium will suffice as long as it gets these ideas across — is the essence of the department’s approach to art. It includes an extremely casual approach to the craft of art making ("If you have inclinations toward making it in a certain domain, you can Figure out what to do or you can always learn what to do," Antin once told me), and it is the main reason critics of the department think it is a better place for graduates than undergraduates. Students at California Institute of the Arts — a progressive private art school north of Los Angeles that is often compared to UCSD’s visual arts department — receive extensive training in subjects such as music or film in what amounts to an apprentice-like program. On the other hand, students at UCSD are encouraged to study several fields at once. They are also encouraged to become fully competent in one, but the problem is, if you don’t know how to do all the basics in your chosen field when you come to UCSD — if you ’re a painter who can’t draw animals very well, for instance — chances are you won’t learn how in the visual arts department. For one thing, they say they don’t have enough money to provide that kind of training to students. For another, they just plain don’t have facilities.

"Almost every art school and college in the country has better facilities than we do," says Patricia Patterson, an assistant professor of visual arts at UCSD. "In terms of painting and sculpture space we’re way below Grossmont or MiraCosta College. It’s shocking. It’s a scandal. We don’t have a single, decent, large studio with sinks and a storage area so students don’t have to take their work home after each class. I've been to high schools that have that. Out here, if students have to go home on the bus, what a drag. It immediately limits the size of what they can work on.”

As one of the few painters on the UCSD art faculty, and one of the few teachers there who emphasize tools and techniques in their teaching, Patterson is probably hurt more by the lack of adequate studio space than most of her more theoretically minded colleagues. Antin insists that the lack of undergraduate art facilities at UCSD is not due to the orientation of the department (he says it’s due to the University of California’s financial crisis of the past few years); but he doesn’t exactly make it sound like a pressing problem. ‘‘The university owes us a building that they’ve never come through on,” he said. “Mandeville Center was not set up to house both a graduate and undergraduate operation. We tend to use it for our graduate operation . . . which means that we’re missing a whole undergraduate building that would house slightly larger studio space. So if you’re talking about ordinary studio space, we’re probably worse off than many of the traditional places in terms of standard painting, standard sculpture, drawing. . . . But Dick Atkinson (UCSD’s new chancellor] has told us that we’ve [already] got all the space we’re going to get. The only way we’re likely to get such a building is presumably to go out and recruit private money to support it. If we can’t do that, I doubt seriously that any state money will be put up for an art department building in the next ten years.”

Antin said that students probably are better off getting technical instruction from a private tutor, and that he prefers the university tackle the more “intellectual problem” of encouraging students to understand and utilize various mediums to produce a new kind of art. It must be said that this has been the general drift of American art in recent decades, a drift that has led to a proliferation of bizarre styles and “art forms,” many of which have left the public in a state of shock, if not downright bewildered or angry. But like most artists, Antin claims to be unconcerned by this comprehension gap. “One of the peculiar assumptions in this culture is that everybody has to have an opinion about art,” he told me. “Most people who never deal with any kind of art at all feel that it is necessary to produce an evaluation of it. It’s very curious, and they feel that there’s something wrong if they can’t say it’s good or bad. . . .

"I guess there’s some sort of historical association of art with universal values, and there’s a belief that art should be immediately intelligible, incredibly beautiful, and of great value to the human spirit. And these are among the greatest banalities, and they’re probably all untrue. It’s nonsense. I mean, art can certainly be approached by anyone, but you can’t just walk in on it and have an opinion about it any more than you can walk in on anything that’s been going on for a while and have an opinion on it, until you know what the hell’s going on. You can’t have an opinion on a conversation until you’ve been following it.”

Some students and former students of art at UCSD have said that the visual arts department is in fact divided into two opposing camps: those who advocate conceptual art, and those who advocate a new kind of art utilizing more traditional methods of painting and sculpture. There is said to be friction between the members of the two camps, that certain teachers are having difficulty getting raises because others don’t like their work, etc. Antin admits there are tensions, but he dismisses them to some extent as “personality differences.” “Sparks would crop up in any department that hasn’t gone to sleep,” he says.

While the department might be divided into two groups, one professor likely to wind up somewhere in the middle is Harold Cohen. Cohen is a painter who has been working with computers in the field of artificial intelligence since 1971, formulating computer programs that mirror the complex logic an artist uses as he or she tries to produce a work of art. He is something of an enigma in the art world; although his $120,000 worth of computer equipment can produce drawings of its own (and here Cohen’s work differs from the vast majority of “computer artists,” who program computers to draw specific patterns or objects), many people question whether these drawings can truly be called art. Cohen himself neatly sidesteps the question by saying, in effect, that it hardly matters; one watches the computer producing drawings, one is almost compelled to attach meanings to them, and one is fascinated. Currently Cohen is working on a set of even more sophisticated programs that will “produce drawings which will persuade people that the computer knows what the world looks like,” he says with a little smile. Of course the computer won’t really know that, and will only be exercising a complex series of choices.

Cohen still teaches undergraduate drawing and painting classes at UCSD, and one afternoon he greets me in one of them, an introductory drawing class held in a large, disorganized room full of movable chalkboards and stacks of unused chairs in the basement of UCSD’s humanities library. Students are filing in, and Cohen, a short, stocky man with a neatly trimmed gray beard, is asking them if they have brought their homework with them. Most of them have, and Cohen tells them to take it — sculptures made from bending a single coat hanger — to the front of the room and hang it up. “Why don’t you put them all together, so we don’t have to walk a lot,” he says.

The students gather in a semicircle around the sculptures, and Cohen discusses their work. He points out that some of the hangers have been bent into the outline of a face; they “stand” for an object in the real world. Others are more inventive. Pointing to one wildly bent hanger, he says, “No one’s asking you to believe there’s an event somewhere out in the real world that corresponds to this.”

After a few more minutes of discussion Cohen asks the class to produce a drawing using a continuous two-and-a-half-foot-long pencil line. “We’re looking for the difference between two and a half feet of pencil line and two and a half feet of coat hanger,” he announces.

As the students go to work, Cohen sits in the back of the classroom and discusses his approach to teaching art. Bom and raised in England, he speaks with a light accent. “You might notice this class is somewhat different from most traditional art classes,” he says. “There’s no model, no kids sitting around sketching, and no instructor going around saying, ‘You’ve got the leg wrong.’ It’s not what I do. I was subjected to that in art school, but I eventually started teaching this way in part because it’s more efficient. You wouldn’t run a chemistry class by going around and seeing what people had mixed up. I think the knowledge of art that we have can be schematized into a system, and if you say something to one student, inevitably you end up saying things that other people in the room should be listening to.

“But I also don’t teach anatomy partly because it’s all indoctrination, getting you not to use your own ears and eyes. There’s no evidence that someone needs to learn anatomy first in order to experiment meaningfully with art. In fact. I’m quite happy when someone comes in to one of my classes who hash’t had an art class before. I try to get them to use their own minds to formulate art making, rather than just accept a formulated idea of what art is.”

Soon the students have completed their drawings. Cohen looks them over, and among other things he points out that shading is one thing that can be done with pencil that can’t be done with coat hangers. Then he asks the class to shade their drawings, but not in any conventional way; in other words, the shading is not to be used to denote shadows, etc. Before sending them to work, though, Cohen also announces that if anyone is wondering who I am (I have been sitting unobtrusively in the back taking notes), that I am just a CIA agent collecting information on UCSD students. A few of the students laugh nervously and glance at me over their shoulders. Then they go to work.

During the interlude, Cohen complains to me that too many art students seem to think art has to do with “the state of their soul.” “There’s been a lot of easygoing, self-expression-type art lately,” he says, “and it’s disturbing. It’s as if people are saying that artists don’t have to know anything, just express themselves; that art follows the essentially California paradigm, if it tastes good, eat it.’ Within that context it’s exceedingly difficult to adopt any kind of evaluative, critical position. If the person is only interested in feeling good, what do you say? You feel good now. but you’re not going to feel good next week?

"The very lowest form of that type of art you can find on Del Mar fairground any Sunday morning. It’s always the same, of course.” I ask Cohen if he is talking about the type of painting that often depicts waves crashing against the rocks, and he nods. “You’ve seen it. Every now and then Jesus will appear at the top, to bless the surf. That’s a local variation.”

It isn’t long before Cohen asks the students to hang their drawings up in the front of the room. Many of the pieces are unusual and even startling: faces split into patterns of black and white, curiously distorted designs, and others. “These are marvelous drawings, I must tell you,” Cohen says, obviously pleased.

“When you said don’t rely on the way you would normally use shading, it really put a big obstacle in the way,” says one young woman. “I don’t know if I feel satisfied with what I did, but it definitely brought up a lot more issues.”

“We’ve been talking about making something new as opposed to matching something ‘out there,’ ” says Cohen. By guiding them through a two-step process, he has gotten them to do this. Now, as a final project for the day, he asks them to try to do it on their own while drawing or assembling anything they choose. “Drawing is inventing,” he adds as the students fall to work. “You have to make the whole thing up.”

Cohen slips into a chair beside me and comments, “It’s rather easy to improve students’ work temporarily. The test is whether they can do it themselves.” I tell him I think the class so far has been a very instructive lesson in different techniques, but he corrects me. “I wasn’t emphasizing technique, I was emphasizing technology. Technique is what Americans charmingly call know-how; technology is really know-why. The things the students were asked to do were chosen to elucidate the kind of constraining effect of the material upon what they can conceive of doing. Not merely what they can do, but what they can conceive of doing.

“You have to recognize the dynamism of the redefinition of art as the normal state of affairs,” Cohen continued. “The things that I do now and the things I see as reasonable to do now would have been unthinkable when I started thirty years ago, but that’s not abnormal. We have not lived through an extraordinary event. The fact is, anything that is original and provocative and powerful today not only can but inevitably will be degraded to some kind of dull, tedious, repetitive self-expression game tomorrow. And the reason for stressing the technological aspects of art making instead of the technique aspects is in the hope of protecting people from falling into that kind of a trap. . . .

“It sounds preposterous, but as a teacher you actually have to say, ‘Art ought to be this,’ or, ‘Art should do this.’ Not so much to force it in the direction you want it to go — although what else would you do if that’s what you passionately believe? — but simply to make students aware of the fact that the way the world is now is not the way it’s going to be twenty or thirty years down the line. And the things that you’re teaching now are either outmoded when you teach them, they become outmoded the moment you have taught them, or they are of a much broader significance. . . . In a very down-to-earth sense you're trying to teach survival skills, intellectual survival skills. And what I mean by that is not even trying to guess what the face of the culture will be in thirty years, but to teach in such a way that artists will be able to respond whatever it is.”

By now most of the students have finished the assignment. Cohen stands up and asks them to display their drawings on the front wall, and the students hang their work up and then step back, waiting hopefully. Cohen looks at the rather standard assortment of portraits and other drawings for a few long moments without a word, but you can read the disappointment in his eyes. “There now,” he says finally. “It’s not so easy, it it?”

In an aging building on Eighth Avenue in downtown San Diego is a large second-story room that faces the street. The walls in the room are painted brilliant white, and there are assorted tables, desks, stools, and bookshelves arranged in a haphazard way in the middle. One table supports a large piece of glass with varying colors of oil paint on it in thick blobs. The room is an artist’s studio, and the artist who works there is Heidi Hardin, a former art student at UCSD.

Hardin came to UCSD from Oklahoma in 1971 to study biology. Submerged for four years in the strict, heavily science-oriented curriculum of Revelle College (during summers she sometimes worked in marine biology laboratories, too), she finally began to realize she had no desire to become a doctor, or a researcher, or, for that matter, anything else in the field of science. She had managed to squeeze in a few art courses here and there, she said, ‘‘but I didn’t know I was getting seriously involved in art until my senior year. I had never dreamed of art as a career; it had always seemed like a hobby.”

Hardin eventually graduated from UCSD with a double major — biology and art — and was soon accepted in the graduate program in visual arts there. In 1979 she went to New York on an independent study program, and for a year did almost nothing but paint and go to art galleries. The work she did in New York later formed the backbone of her M.F.A. show (an exhibition of work required of all graduate art students at UCSD), and she received her master’s degree in art in 1979.

Since then Hardin has enjoyed considerable success for a young artist. Currently she is having her first solo show at the New Space Gallery in Hollywood, and some of her paintings will soon be in an exhibit at the Long Beach Museum. She is attracting attention for a deft and somewhat whimsical style that combines drawings and outlines with bright splashes of oil paint; often her subjects are people. Some of Hardin's paintings are designed to stand by themselves on a gallery floor, like books that have tumbled off a shelf and are now propped open, and others are long, thin panels that hang on walls. The show at the New Space Gallery includes paintings of swans in six panels, she told me as we sat in her studio one evening not long ago. Each panel is one foot high and ten feet long, and taken together they ‘‘read like a sentence or a piece of film,” she said. ‘‘They form a little narrative.”

Hardin's work is far from being standard painting, but it still involves putting paint on a surface and, in many instances, drawing pictures of people. I told her it seems kind of traditional compared with what much of the UCSD art faculty works on or says should be worked on, and she nodded. ‘‘My interest in art never was what the mainstream at UCSD was,” she said. One of the graduates who believe there is a “schism” in the UCSD art department, Hardin explained that she gravitated to the more traditional (as she put it) side of that schism, particularly to painters and critics Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson. “I knew very few of the other faculty members,” she said. When she heard David Antin say things like “paintings are wall obstructions,” she just “dismissed it.”

“He’s just talking,” Hardin added with a laugh.

Hardin told me she had received some formal training in painting from Farber and Patterson, but she emphasized that those two teachers don't simply teach traditional painting techniques; their approach to painting is as radical in its own way as performances and other new art forms. “For technical how-to — the normal art training — you just don’t get it at UCSD. You just don’t,” she said. “But it’s much better this way. You work out your ideas about art as you learn. Most of the technical training you’d think an art student would need you can get in high school. ”

When I asked Hardin if she thought it was ironic that she had studied art at UCSD but was “only” a painter, she shook her head emphatically. “My whole work starts from ideas that were given to me in a conceptual framework,” she said. “I use film and photography and literature as a foundation for what I paint. And Jesus, I hope I never get into a trap where I have to produce the same kind of art time after time. I can easily see myself stop painting and do some other kind of art, like performance. ... So I don’t think it’s odd at all that a painter came out of UCSD. The conceptual concerns of the department are what make my work strong.”

It had grown dark in the street outside, and Hardin was waiting for a friend to pick her up for a concert. I started to get up to leave, but before I did Hardin added something to what she had already said, almost as an afterthought. She said, “What UCSD is really all about is waking people up to what art is all about. One of the most valuable things about being there is that the teachers are constantly challenging themselves. They’re constantly developing, growing, expanding, seeking. ... It’s almost unbelievable, the amount of energy that’s there for a student to pick up on. The issues that are talked about in the art magazines are being created at UCSD. It’s an artery for what’s happening.”