ART : Works Mirror Wit, Charm of Metal Sculptor Nancy Graves : New York artist now has a major piece, titled ‘Laciniform,’ on display at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, a gift of Charles and Nora Hester.

“I’ve done my Cinderella act tonight,” sculptor Nancy Graves told an audience of trustees and others at Newport Harbor Art Museum a few nights ago.

With a cloud of blond hair falling over one shoulder and a smart red jacket buttoned over a brief ruffle of black chiffon, she had just transformed herself from working artist to feted artist. The only telltale sign was a swipe of blue paint on the wrist she gaily held up for inspection.

Earlier that day, Graves, 50, had flown in from New York to restore the paint on “Trace,” her outdoor work at the Los Angeles County Museum. Now she was the center of attention at a reception honoring Charles and Nora Hester’s donation of her 1988 metal sculpture, “Laciniform,” to Newport Harbor.

The jaunty-looking piece is now in the museum’s lobby pending a decision on whether it can be weatherproofed and placed outdoors. Among the brightly painted cast metal pieces that do a tricky balancing act are a giant leaf, a sunflower, a length of rope standing on end, a fragment of architectural ornament and the top of an ornamental outdoor lamp post.

Other elements include a shiny metal hose, a tractor seat (which looks, in this context, like the vertebrae of some improbable giant insect) and a pair of polished aluminum arcs, joined like a big, lopsided smile on top of the sculpture.

Graves, whose work has been exhibited by most of the major American museums of modern art, said the tractor seat and the sunflower motifs date from a (1986) commission for a bank in Kansas City, for which she was asked to incorporate typical objects from the region. Her requirements in the sunflower department were rather unusual, however: “I had people on a five-state alert looking for something with an 18-inch diameter.”

Finally, she found the perfect sunflower growing on the lawn of an old house in Connecticut. But by the time she brought it back to her studio in New York, all the seeds had come out. So she bought sunflower seeds at a health food store and attached them with a glue gun to achieve a lifelike look and texture before casting the sunflower in bronze.

Does the sculpture refer to the evolution of civilization? At least one viewer can pick out references to nature (the sunflower and leaf), tool-making and the cultivation of nature (the tractor seat, the hose), the “useful” art of architecture (the ornament) and the “pure,” “useless” work of art (the stainless steel element).

Graves said she wouldn’t quarrel with this interpretation. But in her view, “this sculpture is about process, about how the piece is made.”

She sees the stainless steel arcs, for example, as “a graphic gesture,” different from the rest of the piece because of the way its smooth, unadorned surface contrasts with the vivid colors and busy textures below.

Talking about the content of her work is “not very meaningful for me,” she said. “What I can talk about with greater meaning, it seems, is formal concerns. But obviously I select each of these forms not only for their building potential but also for their cultural significance.”

She mentioned works from 1989 that incorporate 14 different casts of famous ancient Greek sculptures--for example, the face and belly of the Venus de Milo and a bust from the Parthenon frieze known as the Elgin Marbles. In more recent sculpture, she frequently includes references to ancient Egyptian and Byzantine art.

Why?

“The larger meaning is that information of tremendous range and depth and cross-cultural ramifications is available instantly to all of us (today),” Graves said.

But she concedes that she selects the elements of her sculptures primarily for their formal values. She is more concerned with such matters as size, shape, texture, weight, placement and color than with the types of information conveyed by her cultural references.

“It’s what I do with the material which I assemble and collect which is important,” Graves said, “not what the original meaning necessarily was.”

In that regard, Graves seems to have more in common with such modernist sculptor forebears as Jean Miro and David Smith than with the young sculptors of our time. They tend to be interested mostly in the cultural references that objects make and rather skeptical of the value of purely formal qualities.

Still, critics have found culturally relevant themes in Graves’ work. Michael Brenson of the New York Times has seen her work as “re-creating evolution” and hailed her “ideal of democratization, whereby everything, from every corner of culture, has a place.” Despite the protean “creative force” she represents--a throwback to Picasso--she nonetheless, as Brenson writes, “works against the idea of fixed, heroic, eternal art.”

Graves grew up in Pittsfield, Mass., where her father worked at the local museum. “The Berkshire Museum, as is typical of museums in smaller urban areas, contained both art and natural history,” she said, “and it was that dialogue (between the two disciplines) that interested me.”

The first works to put her in the limelight were a group of life-size camel sculptures she made in 1969 from sheep and goat skins, fiberglass and liquid latex on armatures of steel and wood. Exhibited at the Whitney Museum in New York, these animals seemed to be resting and grazing as if in a field.

For an audience that had come to think of contemporary sculpture as a set of deliberately stark and featureless geometric forms fabricated with industrial materials--known as Primary Structures--Graves’ camels were startlingly realistic.

Graves said these early works had nothing particular to do with camels, or even with taxidermy, the art of stuffing and mounting the skins of dead animals. But in order to put her own stamp on the idea of stuffed animals, she felt she had to visit natural history museums to study how they are professionally prepared.

What interested her was “this illusion of something which is taken out of its context . . . and then subjected to formal concerns.”

Her next body of work consisted of very large pieces made of “bones” fashioned from various synthetic materials, which struck many observers as allusions to ritual practices and shamanistic behaviors. Yet another piece, “Variability and Repetition of Variable Forms,” from 1971, consisted of 35 totem-like standing objects made of welded steel and glazed ceramics.

Then came films and drawings and paintings, all of which incorporated Graves’ new interest in pattern-making, sometimes allied to the imagery of maps and satellite photographs. Finally, in the late ‘70s, she came back to sculpture.

In 1977 she began making bronze pieces, traveling from her New York studio to the Tallix Foundry in Peekskill, N.Y., where the staff seemed to enjoy experimenting.

In the late ‘70s, working in bronze was downright heretical for a contemporary-minded artist. The connotations of bronze--its permanence and grandeur and fine patina--seemed hopelessly old-fashioned. Instead, sculptors were far more interested in mirroring the uncertainties and impermanence of a decidedly unheroic society.

But Graves brought back bronze in a new guise. By casting such objects as leaves, sardines and bread sticks, she deflated the pompous side of the medium. Its tensile strength allows skimpy, light-weight objects to appear to support entire frameworks of other, seemingly heavier objects.

In the beginning, Graves used to cast objects for use in specific pieces. But she now keeps an inventory of 1,000 different cast bronze, aluminum and stainless steel pieces, ready to combine at will.

“Ultimately,” Graves said, “(my) individual forms, used over and over again, become as familiar to me as the color red. Then I have the freedom to use them in many different contexts.”

She views color as “an increasingly meaningful” part of her sculpture, a form of subversion or camouflage: “It contradicts what is there initially. Which again, of course, means asking questions.” Paint picks out some details and obscures others, with the result that light elements sometimes look heavier and heavier elements look lighter.

Graves works intuitively, juxtaposing objects taken from different worlds in ways that seem appropriate in a visual and kinetic way. One approach she favors “is to change in midstream--to start at one point and then shift (direction).

“For example, very often, the center part of a large sculpture will have originated as the “base” element . . . And then it becomes hoisted into mid-air, and something else begins to support what logically should have been the base.

“All of which is questioning, What is the nature of sculpture? And what is the relation between painting and sculpture?”

The fun part is that the question is clothed in an aura of wit and charm and the lush inclusiveness of nature itself.