NEWPORT HARBOR : EXHIBITING 2 DECADES OF REVOLUTION

Bill Woodrow stalks the streets of his London neighborhood in search of “urban clutter,” discarded dishwashers and junked car parts to cut up and reshape.

Tony Cragg lives near Dusseldorf, West Germany, but speaks with the accent of his native Liverpool about “British pragmatism” in the way he reuses old household utensils and broken plastic toys.

David Nash clings to the rural home of his Welsh forebears, living in a former church built of stone and chiseling wood boulders from oak trees to convey “the material reality of this place where I live.”

The three are among six mid-career artists whose work appears in “A Quiet Revolution: British Sculpture Since 1965,” an exhibit opening Friday at the Newport Harbor Art Museum and running through Oct. 4. The other three featured sculptors are Richard Long, Richard Deacon and Barry Flanagan.

The 51 works, which some people might quickly label abstract, stem from intentions--as four of the sculptors expressed in recent telephone interviews--that are as concrete as a London sidewalk or earthy as the wooded hillsides of Wales.

The artists said the show, organized by curators at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, reflects a number of shared traits representative of British sculpture over the past two decades: a delight in recycling the stuff of everyday life into art; a critical social consciousness; a wide-open definition of sculpture, and an emphasis on letting art retain unvarnished traces of the creative process.

“Whether it is David Nash or Bill Woodrow or me, there is a handmade quality to our work instead of a great interest in the finish, the polish,” said London sculptor Deacon, 37.

“England itself seems like a very handmade country. The cities are unplanned and kind of ragtag, the landscape has been subjected to agriculture and industry for a very long time,” he said. “It is a landscape that is a kind of residue, that has been worked on. Our work has that feeling. It does not have the high finish, the perfect surfaces, of some American sculpture from the same time, like (Donald) Judd and (Claes) Oldenburg.”

Instead of sticking to such classic sculptural materials as bronze and marble, these artists usually prefer corrugated steel, linoleum, plastic, fallen trees or slabs of slate.

The one who does use bronze most often is Barry Flanagan, 46, with his “quizzical”--the word is Deacon’s--sculptures of hares, one of them dancing on an elephant.

In Woodrow’s 1983 piece called “The Empty Spoon,” the artist said a shopping cart filled with electrical appliances represents the wasteful materialism of Western society. The empty spoon attached to the cart by a long strip of metal, Woodrow said, signifies the unfulfilled needs of the Third World.

Woodrow, 39, said “Winter Jacket,” which consists of a map of Europe that has been fed into a sewing machine, is a statement against nuclear war.

“I don’t think I can change the way people think or anything like that,” Woodrow said. “But I think I can say things I feel and can have people partly listening to me . . . . I think of Picasso’s ‘Guernica,’ which became a symbol for a certain attitude.”

Cragg said there is an “indirectly social” orientation to his S-shaped arrangement of wooden objects-- drawers, waste-paper baskets, crates, boards and other examples of what he calls “man-made nature.”

Cragg, 38, said the title of the work given in the exhibition catalogue--”Middle Way”--is a misleading translation of the actual German title, “Mittelschicht.” A Mittel can be a means to an end or a medicine, and a Mittelschicht can be a layer of material between other layers, or a social layer--the middle class, or a day shift in a factory.

“There is a social aspect to what I’m doing in some cases but it is more indirect than it is with Woodrow,” he said. “I am very British in my sensibility. In terms of culture, I think there is a very simple English aesthetic,” added Cragg, who lives in Germany because his wife is German. “Our aesthetic is often portrayed as aristocratic or snobbish, but it’s not. . . . I think it’s rough and ready and rather straightforward.”

Several artists said they look to Long, 42, as a major influence for his bold refusal to recognize old guidelines that defined sculpture as an object whose beauty was an end in itself. Long, whose work often focuses on the natural environment of a specific place, is represented here by a strip of pale stones from a lake in Italy, circles of slate from Spain and a photograph of stones he lined up on a mountainside in the Himalayas.

Nash, 42, who is also represented in Venice by a show that opened this past weekend at the L.A. Louver Gallery, said he is largely concerned with man’s relationship to nature.

Deacon said much of his work was inspired by the often-challenging poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke--especially the “Sonnets to Orpheus” and Rilke’s writings on the sculptor Rodin. One Rilke-inspired work is Deacon’s “Tall Tree in the Ear.” The piece, finished in 1984, consists of laminated strips of wood bent into the shape of a giant ear and sheathed in blue canvas; at the ear’s bottom is a pear-shaped base of silvery, galvanized steel.

Deacon said the work refers to a passage from Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus.” Rilke evokes the sensual experience of certain things--of a tree or a pear--as a gateway to spiritual transcendence. Deacon said he sheathed his ear in blue because it is the color of the sky, of ascent. “I don’t want to explain it anymore than that,” he said.

“Rilke uses fairly simple objects to convey meaning without having them be symbolic,” Deacon added. “They remain ordinary and at the same time profound.”

Do the artists surveyed in an exhibit called “A Quiet Revolution” see themselves as rebels?

“I like the show and all, but that title is wrong as far as I’m concerned,” said Cragg. “I don’t think of my work in terms of a revolution.”

The show’s collaborating curators in Chicago and San Francisco--cities where the exhibit already appeared on a national tour that will go on to include Washington Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden--chose its title according to the premise that these six artists revolted against the previous generation of British sculptors. The exhibit’s catalogue essays stress that many young artists studying with British sculptor Anthony Caro at London’s St. Martin’s School of Art in the early 1960s rebelled against his art and its highly formulistic aesthetic--one that largely emphasized geometry, shape and design.

Yet only one of the six here--Flanagan--studied with Caro and neither Nash nor Cragg attended St. Martin’s. Deacon, who called the show’s title “ridiculous,” said other St. Martin’s teachers shunned the “dogmatic articulateness” of Caro, instead encouraging students’ confidence in their own ideas.

Graham Beal, chief curator with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and a co-organizer of the show, defended the show’s theoretical premise. “I think there was a clear change from what was considered modern sculpture,” said Beal, who assembled the exhibit together with Mary Jane Jacob, who was then chief curator of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and now is with the new Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

While all the artists had academic training, they emphasized a highly personal process of trial and discovery--rather than external influences--when describing their journeys toward recognition as some of Britain’s leading sculptors, inheritors of a lineage that reaches back to include the internationally honored careers of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.

Cragg, a scientist’s son, turned to art after university studies in chemistry.

“I was working with things I couldn’t see,” he said. “I wanted to be involved with things I could see. I just started on my own, putting plastic and rubber objects from the laboratory together in ways that interested me. A friend of mine suggested that if I liked this sort of thing, I should go and study art,” Cragg continued.

“I signed up for a painting course, but before I started I had three months on my hands. . . . I got a job in a metal foundry. There were these great tides of molten metal, black sand flying all over. You have these really visual moments in a foundry. After this strong activity, to be confronted with standing in front of an easel was hard. I wanted a stronger activity. I wanted to do sculpture.”