ART : Slick Art Is His Business : In 1987, Briton Richard Wilson filled a gallery with oil, creating an optical illusion so disorienting--and popular--that he did it again, and again.

‘Say you’re sitting in a train at a platform that’s due to pull out, the train next to you moves, and you think you’re moving,” says British artist Richard Wilson, the subject of an exhibition opening today at the Museum of Contemporary Art in conjunction with the UK/LA Festival.

“Suddenly you see the platform and realize you haven’t moved. At that moment you’ve experienced a fault in the body mechanism between eye and brain, and you’ve been fooled. That’s the experience you have in the oil room.”

For those not plugged into the international avant-garde grapevine, “the oil room” is an installation Wilson first completed at Matt’s Gallery in London in 1987. The piece, actually titled “20:50,” is on view at MOCA through Jan. 8; it has been re-created four times at locations around the globe and never fails to cause a ruckus.

Here’s how it works: Imagine a walled ramp extending into a room. The enclosing walls of the ramp are about shoulder height, and beyond the walls is a room completely filled with black oil--about 700 gallons--that creates an unbroken reflective surface. You, the viewer, are up to your neck in oil, but because of the reflection that surrounds you, you can’t quite figure out where you are. The piece is so intensely disorienting that people often flail about and wind up smudging themselves with oil in an effort to get their bearings.

“This is my most popular piece, probably because it’s the most psychological--in fact, there will be two on the planet when this one is completed,” the 40-year-old artist explains during an early morning meeting in a cafe in downtown L.A. (The other oil room is on view in London in the collection of advertising magnate Charles Saatchi).

“When you enter the room you don’t see the work, because there’s nothing to see--you’re simply looking at a room, or so you think. In fact, you’re seeing a reflection, but it’s not the kind of reflection we’re used to seeing in mirrors.

“As you move into the room, the ramp rises and narrows in order to create the feeling of running out of space,” he continues. “The ramp is all you have to keep from mentally falling into the reflection, and you reach a point where it’s like Alice through the looking glass and you flop into another world. The slight raising of the ramp intensifies the feeling of disorientation because normally when you wade out into a liquid--say, at the beach--you go down and out into that expanse. This operates in reverse, and though you’re aware something unusual is happening, your faculties aren’t acute enough to know the floor sloped up. People sometimes suffer extreme vertigo in the piece.”

Hearing about the oil room, one gets the impression that it’s not unlike a spooky carnival attraction. Wilson, however, intends that his art do more than toy with people’s equilibrium.

“There are two kinds of work: There’s slap-shot work where you walk in and say, ‘Wow!’ You get one view of the thing and it’s an incredible experience. Then there’s work that unfolds slowly and experiencing it is a process of layers peeling back. I want both to happen in my work,” he explains.

There are, indeed, subtle resonances to Wilson’s work, but it’s nonetheless firmly grounded in a Wow! school of art more identified with America than England.

British artist David Mach, Wilson’s contemporary and friend, also makes insanely grandiose work that defies belief (say, a life-size artificial elephant hoisting a refrigerator with his trunk), but mostly Wilson’s work is in a tradition of mind-boggling American Conceptual sculpture that stretches from Gordon Matta-Clark, Walter De Maria and James Turrell in the 1970s to current work by Chris Burden and Nancy Rubins. All of these artists deal in one way or another with issues of scale, perceptual phenomena and the sublime. However, unlike an artist like Turrell who creates sculpture out of light that has a palpable metaphysical presence, Wilson intends that his art remain firmly tethered to the real world.

“Metaphysics? Religion? Never touch the stuff,” he says with a laugh. “I like the physicality of the work I make and don’t see myself as a Conceptual artist, because the pieces I make are so incredibly physical. However, I suppose they are Conceptual in that they disappear and, like most Conceptual art, must rely on the written word for any kind of longer life.”

An intense man who is cordial yet private in a way that is distinctly British, Wilson is amazingly animated considering that he’s being interviewed at 7:30 in the morning after having just gotten off a plane from London. He lives there with his wife, Sylvia Ziranek, who is a performance artist, and their two children (Wilson’s youngest child, a daughter, was born just five weeks ago).

“I’ve lived in the same place for 19 years in a building that’s a bit like a lighthouse,” he says, poking at a plate of eggs. “It was a condemned squat so I was able to buy it very cheaply, then I gutted it and rebuilt it. It’s about two minutes from the Thames, where I have a big old wreck of a boat.”

Wilson was born in London in 1953, the second of five children. He recalls that “an interest in art was always encouraged.”

“My father taught art and made art himself--he made three-dimensional studies of the sea that combined sea patterns with a mathematical equation called Root Three he became interested in during World War II when he worked as a radar fixer. I suppose you could call what he does Conceptual art but for the fact that his pieces are traditional--they’re made of wood and paint. My father’s father was a painter, and his father’s family were tinkers who traveled the countryside making pots and pans. On my mother’s side, I’m related to builders and watchmakers, so the family has a long history of skill in the fingertips.

“I was a creative kid and was always having fads where I’d decide to do something, do it for a day, then get bored. I considered graphic design but found it too flat--I wasn’t using my hands enough. When I tried sculpture I immediately knew it was the perfect medium for me, and by the time I was getting out of my teens I was committed to a career in art.”

A fter graduating from high school in 1970, Wilson attended the London College of Printmaking in 1970-71, then transferred to Hornsey College of Art, where he was to spend three years. He earned his master’s degree in 1976 at Reading University, where he now teaches in the art department one day a week. “I don’t know what I teach, but I certainly have good conversations--I find it very stimulating,” he says with a laugh.

“I started out making fairly traditional sculptural objects and quickly noticed they worked best in certain spaces,” Wilson says in explaining the evolution of his work. “I began building floors for pieces of work, and slowly the objects disappeared and the floors and walls became the central components of the work. Basically I was putting architecture in architecture, and I realized I needed to develop that idea as fully as I could.

“During the course of this evolution I was getting snippets of certain artists--there was an interesting artist in New York in the mid-1970s named Billy Apple, for instance, who’d do things like wash a part of the gallery floor then exhibit the dirty rag he’d used. I saw Walter De Maria’s ‘Broken Kilometer’ and heard about Gordon Matta-Clark. At that point, people were just starting to realize he was an important artist and he wasn’t well-documented yet, so I was only able to collect bits of information about him. (Matta-Clark, who died of cancer in 1978, made sculpture out of abandoned or condemned buildings--he would slice them in half, for example, or gouge chunks out of the roof.)

“I made my first installation in 1980, but prior to that I made impermanent pieces that had a quality of event--I did a lot of explosion pieces, and I did Formalist things like make a perfectly finished plank, then snap it in half. I don’t consciously design impermanence into the work, but it seems to be an unavoidable fact of life now. A milk bottle can become a Molotov cocktail in the wink of an eye, and everything we touch is constantly being adapted.

‘My work is essentially about adapting architecture--I object to the idea that buildings are these gods we’re forbidden to act upon,” says Wilson, who has had opportunities to collaborate with architects but turned them down.

“Architects, like artists, are very conditioned by what they’re allowed to do, and we’re ending up in a world that’s completely enveloped in cotton wool,” he says. “Why can’t we adapt and change buildings? My interventions are quite sensitive to whatever interior situation I go into, and it’s often the case that I enlist parts of the building to function as the fabric of the work.

“For instance, I did a piece in 1989 called ‘She Came in Through the Bathroom Window,’ where I cut a 26-by-7-foot window from the gallery and simply brought it into the room. I’m interested in the idea of taking information that’s always at the periphery of our vision in a gallery--say, the radiator--and making it the center of attention.”

Wilson’s work of the early ‘80s was well-received in England. However, it wasn’t until 1985 when writer Michael Newman wrote an article for Artforum about a work titled “Sheer Fluke” that Wilson began to receive wider recognition.

By 1986 he was able to support himself with his work, and during the past eight years he has twice been nominated for England’s prestigious Turner Prize.

“I’ve been well-looked after by the British Council,” he says. “I tend to be the other act--I’m sort of the token wild, wacky artist, which is fine.”

In light of the fact that Wilson’s work has been critically acclaimed in Europe for nearly a decade, it is surprising to hear him say that the reason he’s never shown in the United States before is because he’s never been asked.

“The invitation from MOCA was the first U.S. offer I’ve received, although there’s been a lot of interest,” he says. “What’s that guy’s name in New York? (Art dealer Larry) Gagosian? His people have been writing, but I’m not sure I’m what they’re looking for. Galleries need to make money now because we’re in a recession, and I’m a risk in that respect, although I do guarantee audiences and I do sell work.”

Although the MOCA show marks Wilson’s U.S. debut as an artist, he has worked here before with Bow Gamelan, an improvisational trio he formed in 1983 with performance artist Anne Bean and percussionist Paul Burwell.

“We’re like a road accident or a building site--we’re not entertainment but what we do draws a big crowd,” he says. “We’re interested in getting back to first principles of sound-making and we don’t do songs--we just hit it hard and keep going until everything breaks down.

“ ‘Stomp” works with similar ideas in that they make music using everyday objects,” he says, referring to the British percussion act, “but whereas they use things from around the house, we go to scrap yards--we’ve used everything from big grain silos to enormous car axles. The lovely thing about inventing instruments is that no one can tell you how to play them, because they have no history.”

Showing alongside “20:50” will be “Deep End,” a new work conceived specifically for MOCA that Wilson describes as “a big risk, because I’ve built the thing over the fax machine with (MOCA installation designer) John Bowsher and (MOCA curator) Paul Schimmel. The central component of the piece is an upside-down pool, and I haven’t even seen the pool they got yet--I have visions of the scene in ‘Spinal Tap’ where they wind up with a 17-inch replica of Stonehenge for a stage set,” he says with a laugh.

“I work in spaces intuitively, as opposed to mathematically, and can’t really predict what’s going to happen when I begin a piece. One doesn’t have a clear idea of a piece then go make it--it’s more a case of feeling one’s way through it. The museum told me they wanted an old work and a new work and that they wanted the oil, so I had to come up with a piece that deals with the same things without copying it. Illusion versus reality, a sense of vastness, the feeling of a moving out into an unstable space--these are the things I was thinking about.

“When I flew into L.A. last year, I was knocked out by all the swimming pools I saw out the plane window and was struck by how sculptural they were in terms of shape,” he continues in explaining the genesis of “Deep End.”

“My work is generated to a large degree by the space where it will exist, but I also feed off the location, and for me L.A. has a sense of artificiality. Then there’s this great hole in the ground which is MOCA--it’s as if someone’s dug it out and put in an interior. So I started thinking about swimming pools and pool shells and a shell within another shell--hopefully it will all add up to something.

“Obviously, the oil is much less of a risk because this is the fifth time I’ve done it and at this point I feel I know it. However, there are dramatic differences in it every time I do it, and technically it’s always a major job putting it in. The first oil room cost just over 1,000 (about $1,600 in today’s dollars) to build, but when Saatchi installed his in 1990 it cost more than 30,000 (about $48,000 today). He wanted it for a six-month run, but it’s been there for 3 1/2 years--he loves it. It had an expensive oil change last year, but basically it’s self-cleaning--if anything falls in, it’s just pulled in. I get the oil from local refineries and use sump oil (used oil) because it’s blacker and creates a more reflective surface than new oil would.

“I realize I’m in danger of becoming ‘the guy who does the oil room’ but I can’t stop doing the piece, because I don’t own it,” says Wilson, who is also completing a permanent commission that opens in November in Tokyo.

“It’s an interesting situation--Saatchi’s permission is required to do the piece, and if he gives it then I must install it. He’s never agreed to do it against my wishes, which is very kind of him, but he’s always terribly happy if it’s done. Prince Charles will be standing in it Nov. 2,” Wilson adds, clearly amused at the idea, “because MOCA has been selected to be the site of the formal opening of the UK/LA Festival.

“Everyone always wants to know how far down the oil goes,” he says in parting, “and I always tell them it’s as deep as you want it to be.”

* “Focus Series--Richard Wilson,” Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., downtown. Today through Jan. 8. Tuesday-Sunday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursdays until 8 p.m. Adults, $6; students and senior citizens, $4; free Thursdays after 5 p.m. (213) 626-6222.