ART : SITE Specific : With a wide-ranging exhibition of 30 contemporary international artists, some Santa Fe movers and shakers are hoping to put this Western art outpost on the international map.

Record-breaking crowds attended a couple of disparate but obliquely related events in New Mexico on July 16. About 4,600 people visited Trinity Site, where exactly 50 years before an atomic mushroom cloud over the desert ushered in the nuclear age.

About 150 miles to the north, in the Sangre de Christo mountains, nearly 3,700 locals, tourists and members of the art world spent the day attending the opening of SITE Santa Fe, a two-part, wide ranging exhibition of 30 contemporary international artists. There, two works, by Americans Meridel Rubenstein and Allison Rossiter, directly addressed the fact of the Trinity anniversary. But most of the multimedia art installations were more general in their focus and perhaps more typical of much of today’s art in expressing the anxieties--and whimsies--of life in a post-nuclear era.

SITE Santa Fe is planned as the first in a biennial series of multidisciplinary efforts. At its center is the exhibition, “Longing and Belonging: From the Faraway Nearby,” a show that some movers and shakers here hope will put this art outpost on the international map alongside organizers of biennial exhibitions such as Venice, Sao Paulo and New York.

While the fallout from this nonprofit undertaking remains to be seen, the response in the opening weeks has been heartening for the organizers. On opening day, the crowds nearly doubled any previous one-day tally for the Santa Fe Museum of Fine Arts, which, along with a renovated warehouse, is a primary venue for the exhibition.

With the inclusion of work by such well-known artists as Jenny Holzer, Rebecca Horn, Bruce Nauman, Lorna Simpson and Andres Serrano, the celebration encompasses not only the largest display of contemporary and conceptual art ever mounted in this city but also symposiums, concerts, films, children’s programs and performances. There is even a low-rider car show and Robert Ashley four-part opera, “Now Eleanor’s Idea,” complementing one of the installations: a gigantic mural on sheet metal depicting a surrealistic vision of Mexico City--a collaboration between Belgian-born artist Francis Alys and the Martinez brothers of Chimayo, New Mexico lowrider artists.

Getting to this crossroad in Santa Fe’s cultural odyssey, however, has been a bumpy and noisy ride at times.

“Whenever you’re trying to do something that’s never been done before, there are a lot of people who say it can’t be done,” said Laura Carpenter, a local gallery owner and one of the prime organizers of the event. “There were some false starts, some skepticism, some internal problems getting here, but I think we met our initial goal, and that was to rev up the art things in this town.”

Like many other members of the SITE board, including John Marion, its president who was until recently the chairman of Sotheby’s North America, Carpenter is a relative newcomer to Santa Fe, having moved here from Dallas in 1991. She started the ball rolling on the idea of SITE Santa Fe in 1992, soliciting donations that would eventually total more than $1 million--a third of which has gone into the renovation by New York architect Richard Gluckman of a warehouse near the train tracks into 19,000 feet of exhibition space.

But the ambitious project was nearly derailed early on. Some city officials, gallery owners and other businesses took umbrage at the secretiveness of developments, fearing that the event would become a spectacle for international art stars, wealthy collectors and dealers at the expense of local artists. The fact that most of those on the board were “second-homers” only served to fuel the suspicions.

“Everybody who moves here wants to be the last one,” said Meridel Rubenstein, one of only two local artists (along with Bruce Nauman) selected for the show. “There is a funny reclusiveness and closed-mindedness when people ‘rediscover’ Santa Fe. Whether I’d been selected or not, I’ve always felt a terrible need for a mixture of ideas, the sort of cross-fertilization you get from an international gathering of artists like this one.”

The initial idea of creating site-specific art pieces that would have dotted the city was shot down, and the first curator, Mary Jane Jacob, was eventually replaced by curator and director Bruce W. Ferguson. Also a visiting curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Ferguson opened the process up to the community and encouraged a concurrent show of local work organized by the Santa Fe Council for the Arts called “Insight/Onsite/Santa Fe.”

“I wanted the locals to realize and make good use of the international contacts the show would bring in,” said Ferguson, who’s been working on the project for the last two years. “There’s no question Santa Fe is in a moment of great transition with a potential for great expansion. And that always brings with it great resistance.”

For SITE Santa Fe, Ferguson, along with co-curator Vince Varga, selected 31 artists from 13 different countries to participate, half of them women, half from the United States. Keen on having a theme for the show, he asked the artists to explore issues of identity and place--both mental and physical--and invited them to visit Santa Fe and absorb its unique history as a multicultural nexus of art and nature.

The results range from the elliptical--sculptor Anish Kapoor’s massive stone squares with funnel-like voids, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ luminous waterfalls--to the directly referential: British photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper’s photographs of the headwaters of New Mexico. There is also the satirical: French artist Pierrick Sorin created a video triptych of a Western-style tourist shootout in the town’s main plaza.

“I wanted each artist to deal with their own questions of identity and place,” said Ferguson, as he guided an interviewer through a tour of the warehouse and museum galleries a week before the show opened. “But I also hoped each would, in his or her own way, deal with the resonance their own artistic inspiration drew from Santa Fe. Most of the artists were familiar with its sustained mythology, whether it be from Ronald Reagan movies or Navajo pottery or its magnetism for writers and painters.”

In fact, Ferguson borrowed the subtitle of the show, “From the Faraway Nearby,” from Georgia O’Keeffe, one of the state’s most famous transplants, who often used the phrase in her correspondence to friends and family back East.

“I think she meant by it that, even though she was physically far away from New York, she never felt that removed from the discourse taking place in the art world,” Ferguson said. “It’s meant to be ironic and contradictory and I thought it would be an appropriate starting place for the discourse among artists and with the public we hope to begin with this show.”

A remarkably calm Ferguson pointed to some of the work then in the process of being installed as elements of that discourse--all the while fending off volumes of phone calls, dodging moving equipment and picking his way through crates disgorging, among others things, mounds of synthetic fur, video monitors and a hundred small white plaster Asian masks. The latter were destined to float in a red lacquered sea beneath a beautiful wooden bridge devised by Barbara Bloom, a New York-based artist. Workmen were busy installing a vitrine at the top of the bridge fitted with magnifying glasses so the curious could view the erotica laser-etched on grains of rice resting below on silk pillows.

“It’s not meant to be a didactic work,” said Ferguson. “Barbara’s pieces are seductive and contemplative, inviting the viewer to make his or her own associations.”

Nearby, Lorna Simpson was in the process of installing archival newspaper etchings of disasters, including men drowning, ships sinking, slaves being chased by dogs and collapsing bridges. While in yet another part of the warehouse, Japanese artist Chie Matsui was busy draping huge mounds of black synthetic fur over two cubes, one made of mirrored glass, another of adobe for a piece placed so participants have to passthrough it to get into the next part of the exhibition.

“The feeling of community and alienation are important to my work,” Matsui said. “In Japan, we have lost many basic feelings of [community] through rapid technological and social change. It’s not all bad but it does bring with it a lot of problems. And when I came here for my research, to Santa Fe, I realized there are shifting and critical moments in this culture too. These are different but universal feelings and the reason that my work always needs people to participate is because I think it is better to confront these enigmas together.”

As SITE Santa Fe continues through Oct. 8, the biggest challenges for the project may still loom ahead. A follow-up show is planned for two years hence, and there are plans afoot to continue to mount some exhibitions year-round at the warehouse. SITE Santa Fe also plans to remain a presence through the administration of grants to local artists, as well ancillary programs in education and development.

“We’ll see how successful we can be in continuing to raise money from private donors in this political climate,” Carpenter said. “We’ve got to get busy and build a world-class event and institution that is not just of a regional nature but that can appeal to people in Germany, in Japan, in New York. We’ve found the place. Now it’s a question of an evolving identity for ourselves.”

* SITE Santa Fe continues through Oct. 8. For information, call (505) 989-1199.