ART REVIEW : ‘Terra Moto’: Earthquake Meditations : Robert Morris’ installation at Pasadena’s Art Center is an unmistakable response to the January temblor.

While the Northridge quake rattled Angeltown half to death in January, New York sculptor Robert Morris was embroiled in a big retrospective of his art at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. L.A. was, however, in his thoughts. He’d agreed to do an installation at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design under the auspices of its gallery director, Stephen Nowlin, and his faculty colleague, Debbe Goldstein.

Morris, 63, is a highly eclectic sculptor of the ‘60s generation whose work has ranged from painting to performance art and back again. He has often associated with the Gregorian Minimalism of Judd, Serra and Andre. In practice, his work has always had a Dadaist conceptual edge and an interest in the ancient, the primitive and the anarchic. He once appeared in an exhibition poster clad only in chains and a World War II stormtrooper’s helmet.

What he wrought for the Art Center’s Williamson Gallery is now on view and in unmistakable response to the temblor. Titled “Terra Moto: The Fallen and the Saved,” it consists of eight giant urns of molded fiberglass, the halves secured by C-clamps and suspended from the ceiling on steel cable. Morris describes their color as “deadflesh.” Their angles suggest chaotic falling. This kinesthetic effect is dramatized by apocalyptic synthesized sound that appears to blend everything from pounding surf to jet engines and babbling voices.

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Lengths of raw lumber angle from the floor to pierce one wall of the main room. On the other side they emerge to prop up an equally large Sheetrock wall that looks as if it’s falling. In a similar alcove outside the other end of the main gallery are parts of the mold and other bits of apparatus used in the urn’s making. They read either as debris or rebuilding.

Morris ran two risks in selecting his subject. It could inspire those who lived through the quake to see him as a carpetbagger. What does this guy know? Virtually guaranteed to rekindle trauma, it could be seen as a tasteless trick.

Somehow, the artist skirted both pitfalls. “Terra Moto” means “the Earth moves.” The piece certainly brings back the terror of that dark moment when crockery went berserk, the Earth seemed to groan like the mad Lear and millions of Angelenos felt they would, momentarily, be corpses.

That was real drama difficult to distill artistically. Morris brings it off by introducing, of all things, serenity. His urns stand still as if some deific gesture had gently freeze-framed disaster into a matter of philosophical contemplation.

The ancient form of the urns and the subtitle of the work suggest the biblical and universal. It has things to say about the instability of all physical existence. Having addressed nature it brings back fundamental thoughts of this city whose many nicknames include “Babylon.” It makes one ponder a question recently posed about what mind-set the Los Angeles’ founding fathers must have had when they thought it a grand idea to build an entirely artificial metropolis in a semi-arid desert on top of a web of seismic faults.

* Art Center College of Design, 1700 Lida St., Pasadena, through Aug. 21, closed Mondays, (818) 396-2244.