ART / Cathy Curtis : Sculptors Believe the Time Is Ripe for Going Out Into the Real World

Wolfgang Leib spends the months from February through August collecting pollen from the fields near his house. Then he patiently pushes the powdery material through a sieve to create a hovering blanket of intense yellowness.

That’s a work of art.

Richard Long takes walks all over the world. On one of those walks he kept throwing a stone and then walking to the spot where it landed. He repeated this action until his walk brought him back to his starting place.

That’s a work of art, too.

In “The Artist as Alchemist”--the first of a trio of Thursday night talks on contemporary sculpture given at the Irvine Fine Arts Center--Nora Halpern Brougher, curator of the Frederick Weisman Collection in Los Angeles, introduced her audience to nine artists whose work deals in idiosyncratic ways with the notion of time.

Getting in tune with this nontraditional kind of work involves understanding a couple of key points. One is that these artists are primarily interested in an idea or a state of mind rather than the way an object looks. The other is that they are keen on creating art events that either happen out in the real world or involve bringing the real world into the gallery.

Some of these works don’t contain any tangible object at all. (Although Long incorporates simple descriptions of his walks in photographs and maps, these are offered simply as documentary evidence.)

Sometimes the “object” is in a remote location and has only a temporary existence, like the pattern of excavations in the desert that constitute Michael Heizer’s “Nine Nevada Depressions.”

Brougher likened the California artist’s use of time in that piece to a draftsman’s use of an eraser--although of course (unlike a draftsman erasing a line) Heizer has no control over the length of time it will take for those slits in the earth to be covered over by the movements of wind and sand.

Other artists are concerned with different aspects of the passage of time.

Long’s countryside walks, like anyone else’s, are temporary activities. But the English artist records his passage with simple patterns made by his footsteps or by rearranging the sticks and stones he encounters on his path.

The crosses, circles, squares and zigzags he makes are reminiscent of the Druid ruins that can still be seen in the British countryside. Long’s walks also connect him with such 19th-Century countrymen as John Constable and William Wordsworth, who celebrated the great joy they felt in the presence of nature in paintings and poetry.

Leib’s pollen pieces require enormous patience to create, both in the field and in the gallery. They also require the viewer to slow down and allow the extraordinary, almost gaseous air quality and rush of pure color to invade the senses. In addition, the German artist’s works reflect the long cycles of nature itself, replenishing itself via the airborne travel of male sex cells formed in the anther of the stamen of a flower.

Time is only one concern of Italian artist Mario Merz, but in making art out of such elemental ingredients as fruit, light, kindling and tar he seeks romantically to recapture a sense of the wholeness of life in an earlier time when nature and culture existed in harmony.

As Brougher pointed out, the work of these and other artists was heavily indebted to the social upheavals and rebellious spirit of the 1960s. The desire to make art independent of the art market was part of that spirit.

And yet, in one way or another, people and institutions have staked out claims on this work. Some have become financial sponsors of an artist’s project. Others have purchased a documentary photograph or a small-scale, indoor piece by the artist, like Long’s simple arrangements of stones, wood, slate and pine needles.

Still others boldly acquire the actual work. Heizer’s earthwork, “Double Negative,” has actually become part of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s collection, even though it is in a mesa in Overton, Nev.

It is even possible to purchase one of Leib’s pollen pieces, provided you have lots of time on your hands.

“You’ll be presented with four jars of pollen and sieve,” said Broughton, with a smile. “And then you’re on your way.”

The lecture series on contemporary sculpture continues Thursday when sculptor Michael Davis, whose work was recently at the Laguna Art Museum, will discuss his own work and that of other artists who make public sculpture.

The May 26 program features Elizabeth Smith and Jacqueline Crist, curators at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, who will offer a two-part talk on contemporary abstract sculpture and the parallels between performance art and the multipart, multimedia genre known as installation.

Both lectures are at 7 p.m. at the Irvine Fine Arts Center, 14321 Yale Ave. at Walnut Avenue. Tickets are $6 per program. For information, call (714) 552-1018.