CRAGG: British Sculptor Recasts Materialism’s Castoffs : At Newport Harbor, sculptor explores the borders between the natural and the man-made.

An aura of homey chaos mantled the Newport Harbor Art Museum on a recent afternoon as British sculptor Tony Cragg loped about in baggy shorts, preparing a 15-year survey exhibition of his offbeat sculpture that continues through Dec. 30.

The Orange County showplace has been in the news recently on account of controversy over the change in architects for its new building, but you would never have known it on this idyllic day. Scarlet bougainvillea bloomed on the museum patio while Cragg’s 3-year-old son, John, gamboled curiously from sculpture to museum cafe. Dressed in a red plastic hard hat and a patterned playsuit, he looked remarkably like certain of Dad’s works.

“It wasn’t done intentionally,” said the slightly embarrassed artist, “it just happened.”

Cragg also claims that his work “just happens.” That appears true. It moves from conceptual abstraction to Pop-like imagery with Da Vinciesque curiosity about the basics. Early on, he made art by tracing his shadow on the beach. Later he stacked things--bricks, books, wood. Then, with a singular lack of developmental logic, came mosaics of castoff plastic--rudimentary pictures of the English flag, a man standing on a chair. Just when one decides the artist is at least consistent in the use of discarded materials, he switches to cast bronze. One recent work looks like a bunch of grapes turning into the Venus of Willendorf.

Observe that his interest in ecology suggests he is “recycling” and his aquiline nose wrinkles. Suggest that large new works have an air of Oldenburgesque enlargement and he says the idea gives him an “allergic reaction.” That’s pretty typical. Artists hate being tacked down and love making fine distinctions.

Back in school, Cragg bristled when fellow students called their working matter “stuff.”

“I prefer ‘material,’ ” he says, “because it comes from the Greek word for mother -- suggesting we should treat the things we work with with respect and maternal care.”

He says he likes to work on the border between the natural and the man-made world. “When a bird builds a nest we regard that as entirely natural, but when a man makes a house, we don’t, although it is the same thing.”

He dislikes the idea of setting out to make art based on a preconceived idea, preferring to work with his materials until “I just have no option other than to make a particular work. It gets you out of the Post-Modern trap with all its options. Artists don’t really have options. They can only do what they do. I guess I’m a ‘dumb’ artist. I just work in the studio until the material leaves me no choice.”

Cragg first came to note making arrangements of common castoff objects he collected riding his bicycle--assemblages that weren’t quite assembled. It all had a distinct Arte Povera look, humble and indifferent to fame. In fact, there was a time that Cragg was so resistant to exhibiting he took a factory job painting signs rather than go with a gallery. Now he is considered among Britain’s leading Post-Minimalist sculptors. In 1988 he was given the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennial. The present show, organized by former Newport Harbor curator Paul Schimmel, will travel to Washington, Toronto and Houston after it closes here.

That, plus a staggering 120 solo exhibitions from Genoa to Hamburg, from London to New York, mark him as both energetic and prolific. But Cragg, 41, does not conform to the profile of the ambitious international artist on all points. He doesn’t exactly look like either the excessively macho or refined stereotype of an artist. Toothy, birdlike in profile and blue-eyed, he has fine thinning red hair. He could be a character from “Chariots of Fire” or a research scientist.

He was born in Liverpool to a father who was a pilot, engineer and designer of parts for the Trident missile and Concorde jet. He belonged, says his son, “to the generation that thought technology would save the world.”

Tony--with a kind of Oedipal inevitability--came out the other way, feeling that science, technology and utility are wrecking the planet. He studied biochemistry and worked as a lab technician in the late ‘60s. On the night shift, laboring over dull and detailed tasks, he could hear the sounds of the era’s demonstrations and parties outside. Sketching and puttering to relieve the tedium, he toyed with studying philosophy but decided on art. He didn’t quite fit in at art school either. He dwelt on such elemental matters that conventional classroom exercises held little attraction.

“In those days I thought a knot in a string was sculpture.”

At the dawn of the ‘70s, learning of Arte Povera and Minimalism, he felt kindred spirits in an older generation of artists such as Joseph Beuys, Carl Andre, Richard Long and Bruce Nauman.

“They sliced through art history and started with a contrived clean slate. They looked at simple materials like metal plates, ropes and lard and found important information in them. They asked the basic question ‘Is it art?’ and expanded the definition. After them, any material was valid and any activity could be sculptural. Art could be political or erotic. They opened up the vocabulary. There was even something moral about it.”

But eventually Cragg saw morality curdling into piety and his beloved simple materials “excessively ennobled” in luxurious signature-style objects. That was when he got on his bike to search out “loathed” materials such as plastics.

Young John wanders over, having demolished a turkey sandwich in the cafe. He gives Dad an affectionate hug, which turns into a stranglehold. Cragg is red-faced and laughing by the time he breaks the boy’s grip and points to a tree.

“Kuck mal. Sehst du der Schmetterling?”

“Schon, Papi.”

Cragg is pointing out a beautiful butterfly, but it’s surprising to hear Englishmen speaking pretty good German, especially a 3-year-old Englishman. He comes by it naturally. In 1978, Cragg moved to Wuppertal for romantic reasons. He’s been married twice and has two children by each wife. The younger set are along on this trip with their mother.

Cragg, who had virtually never traveled before he started moving about making art installations, has become internationalized. He was recently appointed co-director, along with painter Markus Lupertz, of Dusseldorf’s art academy, which boasts such faculty members as painter A.R. Penck and the architect Hans Hollein.

The European mood today he describes as “a sense of relief,” after an overheated art epoch that started in the ‘60s with a global network of galleries and museums that “forgot their responsibilities in a frantic search for the new and the young.”

On the upside, Europe recovered from a bad inferiority complex about American art. On the downside, a hysterical scene generated too many mediocre artists and a market too anxious to turn their work into a commodity.

“Art became a swimming pool with everyone jumping in making inferior stuff, but things are simmering down. Superior artists are always few in number and they just go on working. We’re getting back to Brecht’s dictum that ‘Art is for connoisseurs.’ Being really involved in art is hard work. It’s quite useless looked at as entertainment.”

For all his international aura Cragg feels his British blood. He shares bits of traditional English artistic concerns with literary, narrative and comic values. He doesn’t like his work described as “witty,” as he finds that contrived, but he will settle for the more empathic “humorous.” He identifies with thinkers like Hobbes and Berkeley who questioned what we know. He admires Newton and other scientists.

“The great scientists all got it wrong, but they provided us with thinking models. That’s what’s important.”

He worries about the evolution of the Industrial Revolution into a utilitarian culture “that is becoming a monoculture of thought. You know, Germans love to go walking in the woods of a Sunday afternoon. They still think they are in nature, but what they see today is man-made nature. We’ve changed the sky and the sea, punctured the ozone layer and chased away the animals. We’ve started to interfere with nature as the basic scale of everything we know.

“My wife took the children to Disneyland yesterday and they were horrified. That place isn’t for kids. It’s for grown-up ideas of what it’s like to be a kid. It’s obscene.”

He sees society’s need to make everything useful and profitable to man as a source of our troubles and praises the artists’ apparent uselessness.

“I don’t have to be useful. I’m still astounded to just be here. I’m too small in the situation of the world to feel a need to be useful. Artistic activity is a celebration of life. It marks wonderment without power forces. One must look to artists and poets for other thinking models.”