ART REVIEW : Making Magic From the Mundane : Terry Fox’s work is spiritual with a secular slant, exploring the order and meaningin our seemingly random existence

As an artist, Terry Fox has always seemed to be a European who happened to be born American (in Seattle, to be precise, in 1943). His work addresses matters of great philosophical complexity, which are most often suggested by objects and drawings of spartan simplicity. A spiritual dimension is at his art’s core, but in a manner that chafes against material limitations without getting unctuous or affected.

Fox, whose touring 20-year survey of Conceptual art is currently at the Otis Art Gallery, has in fact spent a good deal of time in Europe. He went to Rome shortly after high school to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti. He was in Paris in 1968, where his participation in the dramatic student uprisings had a profound effect on his artistic direction. His first European gallery shows were in 1972, and he’s had more one-person exhibitions in galleries and museums in Italy, Germany, France, Belgium, Austria and Switzerland than in the United States. In 1980, he became a full-fledged expatriate--moving from San Francisco and New York first to Berlin, then to Naples, on to Florence and, since 1988, to Liege, Belgium, where he currently resides.

The survey exhibition’s useful catalogue, written by art dealer and former curator Constance Lewallen, pointedly notes that Fox chose to leave the United States for good “just after President Reagan had taken office.” It’s easy to see why: A spartan aesthetic concerned with issues of spiritual and philosophical moment is hardly compatible with a period whose profile is most vividly marked by consuming greed and debilitating political duplicity.

Tellingly, the Otis show was organized by Elsa Longhauser at the Moore College of Art andDesign in Philadelphia and will travel next to the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley. American art schools and universities, unlike most American museums, have always been more open to exhibiting artists whose concerns are not manifest in the fabrication of traditional objects. At Otis, Fox’s spare materials include some piano wire, a couple of ordinary drinking glasses, four beer bottles, a button suspended from a pencil by a piece of string, a few ladders, long strips of paper marked with ink and pencil, a pair of battered stools--the stuff of everyday usefulness.

Neither is there much to look at. The show features almost three dozen works dating from 1972 to 1992, following a five-year period devoted to site-specific performances that cannot be reconstructed; but none is what you might describe as “visually compelling.” As with other American and, especially, European Conceptual artists who emerged from the crucible of the 1960s, Fox employs the simplest materials necessary to his task.

If Fox’s spare objects aren’t visually compelling, many are nonetheless engagingly curious. You want to puzzle them out. Unassuming but oddly inviting--and sometimes eccentrically witty--the best of them sneak inside your consciousness and cause a gentle ripple in the cerebral cortex.

“Terry Fox: Articulations (Labyrinth/Text Works)” begins with the artist’s preoccupation with the metaphoric possibilities of a pre-existing structure--namely, the famous, medieval labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral in France. Descriptive of a facet of medieval cosmology, at Chartres the labyrinth is about 43 feet in diameter and composed of rough, flat, blue-and-white paving stones embedded in the cathedral floor. It is not an object but an articulated path.

An articulated path is also perhaps the most succinct way to describe Fox’s approach to the relationship between art and life. For the labyrinth, designed as a pattern of 11 concentric rings winding through 34 turns along 552 steps to its inevitable center, is plainly a metaphor for life’s circuitous journey.

At Chartres the journey is endowed with a particular religiosity: Believers would get on their knees and recite specific prayers at each step along the path. But Fox attempts to untangle it from rigid doctrine. The mundane ma terials he chooses suggest a secular spirituality.

The labyrinth turns up in the exhibition at least a dozen times. A small plaster model is placed on a pedestal, its material suggesting the origin from which future repetitions of the object could be cast. Nearby, a plan of the labyrinth is scratched into the black, painted surface of a sheet of glass, allowing flickers of light to pass through while creating a reflective surface in which you glimpse your face through the pattern.

Drawings project the flat pattern of the journey into three dimensions, creating a surprising sequence of cruciform shapes. One drawing, made on a tube of clear plastic, rests inside a large glass jar. Air holes punched in the lid trace the winding path, while allowing oxygen for an (unseen) butterfly that a kid might capture in such a jar. The principles of Fox’s cosmography apply to all things--great and small.

Another plan of the labyrinth, drawn in black ink on a circle of paper, is suspended on a string stretched taut between two wooden stools that stand atop one another, feet to feet. This rudimentary object is in fact an unlikely model of the great cathedral.

The top stool rises above the conceptual plane of the cathedral floor, coincident with the surface of the Earth. It is mirrored by the stool below, which descends to a level equal to an underground water-table that, according to Fox, became the actual cathedral architect’s measurement for the height of the building’s tallest spire. Suspended between the secret “river of life” below and the soaring heavens above, the labyrinth goes round.

If Fox’s use of the labyrinth as metaphor, which he explored for a half-dozen years, suggests a doctrinaire view in which all life’s seemingly random movements are in fact worked out in advance, step by step along a predetermined road, the artist quickly cautions about who is truly in control. He does it with a little game.

“Experiment in Autosuggestion” is an unassuming work that includes instructions for a parlor game in which you hold a button, suspended by a piece of string from a pencil, over a simple diagram. By moving your eyes in proscribed patterns, the button miraculously follows suit, shifting directions at your eyes’ command.

Miraculously, that is, until you realize that your eyes and mind have imperceptibly conspired to direct the subtle movements of your body’s central nervous system. This little demonstration of the unconscious power lurking within sight and mind is both amusing and sobering--and especially revealing for an artist who had given up painting, with its emphasis on the visual, in favor of an artistic focus on ideas, which is the basis of Conceptual art.

A kind of “Mr. Wizard” quality permeates works like these, which use laymen’s materials--a glass jar, a button, bits of string, kitchen stools--to demonstrate philosophical rather than scientific principles that give order and meaning to the otherwise seemingly random twists and turns of life. (“Is that a science experiment?” a child at the gallery suddenly asked out loud, when looking at a lead pendulum slowly revolving around a half-filled water glass.) A spirit of playfulness is one source of the engaging curiousness of Fox’s art, in spite of its minimal visual pull.

The simplicity of materials put at the service of a secular spirit links Fox’s work to such contemporaneous European movements as Arte Povera , in Italy, where he’d spent much of his artistically formative life, or the performance “actions” of Germany’s Joseph Beuys. However, its quirky and demonstrative tenor is also the specifically American half of this expatriate artist’s equation, with its down-home suggestion of the artist as committed hobbyist or exalted tinkerer.

There’s nothing traditionally “professional” about Fox’s approach--no academic expertness that would otherwise separate the artist from the audience into a simple hierarchy of the skilled and the unskilled. For instance, having stretched two piano wires the length of the gallery, with one end attached to a sounding board, the artist has made a walk-in musical instrument that anyone can play simply by sliding the rosin-covered wire through clenched fingers. You’re invited to pick up a chopstick and a sardine can, with which the instrument’s low, resonating sound can be dramatically altered, and to play your own improvisational concert for time and space.

As with many other notable artists of his generation, Fox gives up a prevailing, popular view of art as the objectified manifestation of an interior self that is alienated from the world. Instead of a masculine, painterly tradition--Rembrandt to Van Gogh to Pollock--his quietly eccentric work simply attempts to externalize the mystery of consciousness.

Nowhere is that effort more wittily in evidence than in a recorded and amplified soundtrack that echoes continuously through the exhibition’s rooms. With the twisting labyrinth at Chartres here extrapolated into the pattern of a musical score, the low rumble of 11 cats purring in pure contentment improbably conjures the music of the spheres.

* Otis Art Gallery, 2401 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 251-0555, through March 6. Closed Sunday and Monday.