ART : <i> Aaaalllll Abooooooarrrrddddd . . . ! </i> : Luciano Perna, with the help of friends, creates a model world. Get ready for a ride on the wonderfully absurd ‘Occupato.’

It was 1983 when Valencia-based artist Luciano Perna fell under the spell of model trains and began collecting vintage pieces manufactured by Lionel and American Flyer. “It’s obvious artists designed these objects because they’re really beautiful,” the 37-year-old artist says.

Until now, Perna’s had to experience his collection in fragments because he’s never had adequate space to set up a proper layout. A gallery, of course, is nothing but space, which is why he decided to play with his trains in public the next time he had a gallery show. And, when he saw Bennett Roberts’ gallery, he knew he was on the right track. Located in a garage behind a small house in a suburban neighborhood in West Los Angeles where Roberts and his wife live, this modest little room looks exactly like the lair of a model train fanatic.

Perna wouldn’t allow himself to simply display his collection, however. Working out of a sensibility that synthesizes aspects of Pop, Arte Povera and Conceptualism, he felt there had to be more going on than that; his solution was to send a letter to 115 friends and acquaintances from the creative community, inviting them to contribute small works that would be combined to create a massive model train.

The letter of solicitation Perna sent out left the possibilities for contributions wide open to interpretation. “It can be anything you like (except bombs),” Perna says in his letter.

The results are “Occupato,” a wonderfully absurd fantasy world that combines the efforts of 71 artists. Including contributions from local notables such as Greg Colson, Liz Larner, Mitchell Syrop, Judy Fiskin and Thaddeus Strode, the piece also features a tiny water tower that dispenses Prozac by Dan Connaly; Jim Shaw’s sculptural re-creation of a dream involving spools of thread and cute bears who tower over tiny houses; Godzilla, who appears courtesy of Jason Rhoades; David Muller’s forest made from the cardboard deodorizing trees one usually sees dangling from rearview mirrors; and John Baldessari’s “The Nose of God,” a cardboard cutout of a nose over a cloud over a lightning bolt that hangs from the ceiling.

As to precisely what Perna contributed to the piece, he says, “I brought lots of my train cars here to put in the piece--I have around 65--but wound up taking most of them out because I didn’t want the piece to be too much about trains. So, the sewing machine is mine, as is the sewing supply box transformed into a museum,” he says during an interview at the gallery.

“My criteria in picking the 115 people I contacted came down to whether or not I knew the person,” Perna says. “I couldn’t ask just anyone because none of us knew what this piece would look like until it was finished, so there had to be trust between myself and the participants.

“Several contributions deal with architecture and landscape, so I left it as open as possible as far as where each artist’s piece was positioned--anyone who wanted to have a say in the layout was welcome to come and talk about it,” adds Perna, who was born in Naples, Italy, and grew up in a provincial neighborhood on the outskirts of town.

“Forty artists I contacted declined the invitation because they didn’t have time to make anything, and a few people sent things I didn’t end up using. One friend of mine, Teddy Shapiro, was in the midst of a body of work about children’s clothing decorated with popular imagery, and he sent me baby bibs. I told him I didn’t know what to do with them and we wound up in an argument,” Perna said with a laugh.

Prior to “Occupato,” Perna has made sculpture out of everything from barbecue grills and feathers to spaghetti and broken records. Of his penchant for unorthodox materials, he explains “my parents were of the generation that went through a war that forced them to become resourceful. People would pull baseball gloves apart and make shoes out of them, or take a baseball apart and knit the string inside into sweaters. I was born in 1958, but an awareness of scarcity was still present in Italy, and that may be what gave me the belief that anything can be transformed into art.

“That belief enables me to create work that’s relatively cheap to make, but I’m still not able to make a living with my work--but when you decide to devote your life to making avant-garde art, the last thing you expect is to get rich. Traditionally, artists we call avant-garde are artists who make work nobody likes,” he says with a laugh.

Perna’s creative sensibility was further honed after he emigrated to the United States in 1977 to attend CalArts. “When I arrived at CalArts I was involved with street photography,” recalls Perna, who enrolled as a photography major hoping it would prepare him for some kind of job.

“I didn’t know how to drive then though, so I stopped doing street photography and began taking pictures of airplanes in the sky and of the moon that I shot from on campus. That was transitional work that took me away from street photography toward constructed photographs that were more fictional, which in turn led me to begin creating objects.

“I’m still always doing things with photography though,” adds the artist, whose first solo show in L.A. was at the Fahey-Klein Gallery in 1988. “I’ve recently been taking black-and-white pictures of dog heads that are sticking out of moving cars--I’m thinking of making a calendar of these images.”

Of the genesis of “Occupato,” Perna says: “The piece wasn’t conceived as being in any particular tradition, but as it came together I began to sense the spirit of Dada. I’m not doing anything terribly new here, and this piece fits very well into the tradition of 20th-Century art,” adds the artist, who mentions Chris Burden’s 1989-91 “Medusa’s Head,” a massive sphere laced with toy trains, and an untitled work incorporating a model train made by Italian artist Jannis Kounellis in 1977, as sculptural works that foreshadow “Occupato.”

“And I certainly haven’t come up with anything that goes further than Duchamp, who was a major influence on me in terms of method of working. Prior to Duchamp, artists had to work in a systematic way because they weren’t only artists--they were also inventors, and when they worked with mediums like paint or printmaking they also had to develop the technique. So, they’d dedicate their life to developing a single skill. Artists continued to work that way simply out of tradition, but in the computer age it’s no longer a necessity.

“I try to put out as many ideas as possible, but I have no interest in spending years refining an idea because you can predict where that leads,” he adds. “I recently heard the phrase ‘If ideas are not transformed into reality they evaporate’ and I think that’s true, so I just try to concretize my ideas as best I can before I forget them.

“I still fiddle around with the layout, but this piece feels finished to me and I’d be happy to leave it as it is,” he says of “Occupato.” “Exactly what it is, however, hasn’t quite sunk in yet. The piece seems to be governed by the laws of chance but it actually is not, and this is something I didn’t realize until I began experiencing it as a whole. When you read it that way, it begins to seem like a metaphor for how things really happen in the world.”

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“OCCUPATO,”at Bennett Roberts Fine Art, 1718 S. Carmelina Ave., Santa Monica. Dates: Through Aug. 5. Closed Sunday through Tuesday. Phone: (310) 207-5544.