ART : Simple Sculpture Exhibit Fills Austere Surroundings With Bold Presence

So you finally decided to brave the freeways to visit an art exhibit that sounded worthwhile. But when you get to the gallery you find . . . not a heck of a lot. The walls aren’t lined with paintings; the floor isn’t forested with sculptures. There are just a few large, simple objects, and it takes only a minute or two to check them out.

A visit to the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery exhibit of sculpture and an installation by Los Angeles artist Peter Shelton (which contains only three works) made me think about the phenomenon of exhibits that offer a spare grouping of austere pieces, surrounded by lots of empty space.

It seems to me that such exhibits baffle viewers accustomed to browsing among numerous objects and focusing on details. The work doesn’t invite you to gaze at it endlessly. And it doesn’t offer opportunities to mutter knowledgeably about the “patina,” or admire how lifelike the thing is, or appreciate its emotional content.

But it does put viewers in a provocative physical and mental environment.

In the 1960s, so-called minimalist sculptors created abstract, radically stripped-down sculptures--cubes and beams and spheres and such--that were intended to be perceived at a glance. Frequently made by a factory according to the artist’s specifications, these works were intended to carry no metaphorical, emotional or style-conscious baggage. The impact hinged on the viewer’s unmediated experience of the simple, geometric object in space.

Since then, artists have evolved other approaches that give the eye more to play with but still rely on conceptual and viewer-interactive themes. A number of younger artists slide all manner of references to physical states and everyday objects into their work, “humanizing” it, albeit in a very different fashion than straight, old-fashioned representational sculpture.

Shelton, 39, juxtaposes inventive shapes that look almost, but not quite, like recognizable objects. Part of the pleasure in contemplating his work is in coming to terms with the odd ways he fuses one sort-of-object with another and plays with notions of relative scale. The heights at which the sculptures are hung also frequently correspond in intriguing ways to the location of specific human body parts.

“Bagbox,” in the UCI exhibit, consists of a pair of items companionably linked (with small metal loops) that hang from the ceiling on long cables. The “bag” is a long, lumpy cast iron object, somewhat like a Christmas stocking. The “box” is a small cube with a square trough running through its center.

It probably isn’t coincidental that bag and box are joined--at the upper portion of the bag--more or less level with the area where the viewer’s arm and shoulder meet. There is something curiously anthropomorphic about the piece. True, it doesn’t look like a person, or even part of a person. But it focuses attention on human scale.

It’s somewhat like what happens at a cocktail party, when you continuously adjust the angle of your head and the amount of space between you and the next person, depending on their height and your personal connection to them. It’s also somewhat akin to encountering an exceptionally large front door, or steps that are too high or too low. Suddenly, attention is focused on your personal unit of measure--the length of your stride or the reach of your arm. You find yourself defining the space you occupy in the world vis-a-vis someone--or something--else.

Obviously, the piece also is a juxtaposition of rigid right-angles (the box) with undulating curves (the bag). On some level, Shelton is contrasting the quality of being precise and self-contained with wayward flexibility--two states that also have human parallels.

In his installation, “TUB, tubes and pipes,” Shelton creates a weirdly humanoid set of images. A massive, 7,000-pound concrete object shaped like a T-shirt sits at some distance from a pile of rusted, hollow cast-metal objects on the floor that look variously like chopped-off tree limbs or human limbs.

The concrete “tub” is just tall enough to make it hard for a short person to peer into its hollow center. Bulky and assertive, it resembles a human figure in silhouette, yet it has the perfectly symmetrical, unyielding physicality of formal architecture. The pile of objects, on the other hand, exude a certain pathos. They are damaged (by rust), fragmentary and flung together helter-skelter. Some of the long, curving “limbs” extend into the air like imploring arms.

I thought of photographs of concentration camp victims heaped together in mass burials, or victims of mass slaughter or natural disaster. I saw the juxtaposition of tub and tubes-and-pipes as an emblem of monolithic power lording it over a defenseless heap of individuals. The phrase “the dustbin of history” ran through my mind as I looked at the heap of metal.

In a statement accompanying the exhibit, however, Shelton says the metal parts are “a kind of fluid architecture--the arteries, veins or innards of a building” and the tub “becomes a figure transformed into architecture.”

Then again, the thing that keeps Shelton’s best work from being too pat or too obvious is that he rarely offers direct parallels between one thing and another. As he once somewhat mysteriously told an interviewer, “I’ve always been interested in things that are not glaringly conscious or profoundly unconscious . . . what ends up being really attractive to me are things that are nearly common, nearly mundane, or slightly shifted, (or) noticed or just found. “

The bag, shirt and tree shapes are familiar elements of Shelton’s sculpture, as well as the unusual portmanteau words and capitalizations in his titles. He is as acutely aware of the resonance of words joined together as he is of the resonance of shapes combined in a particular scale. As he once said, “Naming . . . is like treating language as a series of verbal objects, or complexes of objects.”

Shelton’s work manages to fill whatever space it’s in with a presence at once elusive, metaphorical and intensely physical. And once this presence makes itself felt, you find you don’t need any more art in the room to keep you company.

Works by Peter Shelton remain through Dec. 10 at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery, in Fine Arts Village on campus, off Bridge Road. Hours are noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission: free. Information: (714) 856-6610.