Cleaning Up the Mess, Creatively : Art: In a work in Laguna Beach, a husband and wife team offers ideas for saving a polluted river in former Yugoslavia.

A basic concept of visual art is that most of it, no matter the medium, represents an idea, a feeling, a person, place or thing that isn’t actually displayed inside a gallery but is represented there by the artwork.

Artists Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison, a husband and wife team from San Diego, deal with Planet Earth and the sooty, sludgy, smoggy, toxic, insensitive, meddling destruction of it by humans.

Can’t bring all that into a gallery.

So they go out into the world, explore despoiled sites, formulate ways to restore ecological balance, implement such solutions if funding is found, and document their work with photographs, maps, drawings, poetic narratives and performance, for presentation in galleries around the world.

“Fragile Ecologies: Artists’ Interpretations and Solutions,” opening Sunday at the Laguna Art Museum, is a traveling group show organized by the Queens Museum in New York that includes documentation of an ambitious project the Harrisons undertook in what used to be Yugoslavia.

The project focuses on the ecosystem of the Sava River, one of Europe’s largest and last remaining flood plains, which the Harrisons say is threatened by industrial pollution and by man-made irrigation drainage and flood control systems. They call the work “Breathing Space for the Sava River (1988-90).”

“The river was under much pressure,” Newton said recently, “and the work simply says, ‘Let us give the river a breathing space.’ ”

All 12 artists involved in “Fragile Ecologies” are “not merely depicting the fragile beauty of nature but actively seeking to revitalize damaged habitats,” as curator Barbara C. Matilsky notes in the exhibit catalogue.

The various projects--some realized, others, such as “Breathing Space,” still in proposal form--often are created in conjunction with architects, scientists, engineers, local governments and community members. Among them: a hummingbird sanctuary planted with honeysuckle, an ocean fish habitat sculpted from recycled coal ash, and a batch of hand-carved limestone discs placed in rivers across the country to neutralize acid rain water.

The Harrisons (who in 1987 created “Disappearing Path,” a landscaped walkway set within Inspiration Point, a coastal bluff in Corona del Mar) have filled a large gallery at the Laguna museum with their Sava River project.

Maps, drawings and panoramic color photos of the Sava and its indigenous wildlife are on view. In some photos, the river appears pristine; in others, it is murky brown or toxic white, polluted by various chemicals.

Between these images are panels bearing the Harrisons’ trademark narration (“waters come from the factory whitened by chalk, burdened by nitrates”) which, Helen feels, makes the installation into something of “a long conversation, a rumination.”

In 1988, when the Harrisons first visited the Sava wetland, a once-sparsely populated area between the Austro-Hungarian and Turkish empires, Newton recalls that it still sustained “ancient biota that had disappeared in the rest of Europe” such as oak forests, rare black storks, spoonbills and sea eagles.

Some farmers were still employing traditional, “ecologically provident methods,” Newton said, “using only natural fertilizers like manure, and allowing their animals to range free.” But the river had been polluted with toxic waste from a nuclear power plant and factories along its route. Beyond that, it had been confined by earthen dams and canals for irrigation and flood control.

If left as nature made them, “rivers flood everywhere,” said Helen. “It’s how the earth is fertilized, how swamp life survives, where fish make nurseries.”

To redress the destruction they found, the Harrisons proposed natural purification systems involving plants that could eliminate pollutants, organic farming, and the creation of a “nature corridor” that, Helen said, would give the river “the space to be itself, to twist and turn as it wants to, to do things rivers normally do.”

Both felt optimistic about rehabilitating the Sava, which funnels into one of the world’s best-known rivers, the Danube. “We saw it as eminently savable,” Helen said, “and we began to tell stories. We proposed a new history for the Sava.”

The Harrisons’ work hasn’t escaped criticism. Some feel that the documentation, with its diagrams, maps and written materials, can be overly didactic, can require a daunting amount of reading and can be less impressive visually than conceptually. Wouldn’t the artists want to make their work as accessible as possible to best get their environmental message across?

Newton acknowledges that all the reading may cause viewers “to sweat it a little.” But he said he sees several indications that the message is getting across: Many of the Harrisons’ proposals--such as one for a city promenade in Baltimore--not only have been understood but brought to fruition.

After the artists exhibited their Sava River project in Germany and Slovenia, Newton said, the Croatian Department of the Environment approved their plans and the World Bank “said it would be willing to fund the purification of the river. . . . in part because of seeing our presentations and images.”

Before the bank could follow through, ethnic violence erupted in the region and brought the project to an screeching halt.

Now, “we have no idea” what will happen to the Sava and its ecological restoration, Newton said. But “we have been invited back, when the fighting stops.”

* “Fragile Ecologies: Artists Interpretations and Solutions,” works by Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison, Patricia Johanson, Betty Beaumont, Alan Sonfist , Nancy Holt, Mel Chin, Buster Simpson, Heather McGill, John Roloff , Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Cheri Gaulke in collaboration with a teacher and students from Wilson High School in Los Angeles, opens Sunday and continues through Oct. 9 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Tuesdays through Sundays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. $3-$4. (714) 494-8971.