As a Cal freshman, Charlotte Sofranek is deep into her indoctrination on the mysteries of campus life, and one mystery is how that knot of steel in the reflecting pool got there.
Also, how one that looks just like it got into the breezeway down the hill at the psych department and another got onto the grassy knoll at the music building, and so on. This semester there are five looping sculptures strategically located around the hillside campus, making for something of a scavenger hunt.
"People say that they will just appear overnight," says Sofranek, an 18-year-old from Merced. "My sister is a senior, and she says the people who went to summer school said they would just be walking along and notice a sculpture that wasn't there the day before."
The five Slinkies, each about 15 feet tall and weighing 1,500 pounds, arrived by trailer, one by one, and were installed by crane in the early morning hours in the summer. The crew was always gone, without a trace, by 8 a.m.
"I love the idea that they fluttered down out of the sky like some mythical creature," says the deliveryman, Bruce Beasley, a sculpture major from UC Berkeley's class of 1962. Beasley, who is 74 and operates out of a studio in West Oakland, has worked in monumental outdoor art for 50 years and has had more than 200 exhibitions worldwide. But he's never before placed anything on the grounds of his alma mater.
The series is called "Rondo," and it is the first exhibition of multiple pieces by one artist in a UC Berkeley public art program that dates to 1900.
Gov. Jerry Brown will want to know who paid for this, and the answer is Beasley. He spent two years designing and forging five separate artworks, each unique to its location. Beasley paid for the materials and installation, and when the show ends in August, he will pay for their removal, then offer the pieces for sale.
Beasley took on the project as a dare to himself, to see whether he could come up with any type of sculpture that made the spectacular campus setting look better than it did without them.
"A vocabulary of precisely curved shapes seemed like a good beginning," he wrote in an essay for a catalog that has not yet been published. "Experimentation with materials led to the conclusion that stainless steel, burnished not polished, provided a surface that was always light-reflective whether it was in bright sunlight, overcast or even moonlight. So rings of burnished stainless steel became the basic vocabulary. But then I had to make them sing as a work of art."
So the question, posed to Sofranek and other campus habitues, is does "Rondo" sing as a work of art?
"You are asking a very, very, very nonartistic person," says Rebecca Whitney, a senior from Salt Lake City with a double major in psychology and political science. "The statues that I've seen around campus are ones that have been there 50 or 100 years. So I think that it is cool that we are still adding history, and I like it that they are not solid to impede any views."
The piece that Whitney is critiquing is the most accessible of the five because it can be seen from off campus, in a glade along Oxford Street, a block from Downtown Berkeley BART.
Directly west is the second one, in a meadow at the north fork of Strawberry Creek. The largest loop frames the spire of Sather Tower, commonly called the Campanile.
"The curve of it is really graceful," says Kathy Phan, a nonstudent from San Mateo who stopped here on the way to her birthday dinner at Chez Panisse.
Another sculpture is situated next to a sprawling live oak in front of Morrison Hall, the music building, behind Hearst Gymnasium.
"What do I think of the artwork? I'm an econ major," says Mimmi Lundquist, a freshman from Helsingborg, Sweden, who is coming down the footpath on the way to a section meeting.
"There is a cool contrast between the nature and this silver steel," she says. "It's tangled up like a rubber band. It's organized chaos."
Due north, past the "Pappy" Waldorf bronze, past Faculty Glade and on the far side of the Campanile sits the most complicated of the five installations, in a pool of water at Hearst Mining Circle.
This is the favorite of chemical engineering Professor Susan Muller, who has made it her business to see all five sculptures.
"They are all fantastic, but I especially like this one," she says. "It hovers above the water, so it looks like it is floating on top."
Muller walked past this pool for 20 years before it had art in it. Sofranek has never seen the Mining Circle without it.
After giving "Rondo" careful consideration, Sofranek says: "I think it is interesting, but I don't know the meaning of it - if there is any."
The fifth and final piece in the series is also the toughest to find. We'll leave it a mystery, but here is a hint: It is in the breezeway of a building that was put up the year Beasley graduated. Some call it the ugliest building on campus.
"I've heard that," Beasley says. "People say the sculpture has enlivened the space, and they spend time in the courtyard when they didn't before."
Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @samwhitingsf
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