ART : Missing: One Edge : The 52nd Carnegie International is an anti-spectacle so restrained it may suggest that it’s not a guidepost to the future of art.

The 1995 Carnegie International exhibition is something of a puzzlement. This 52nd outing of the periodic survey of recent art looks at the work of 36 artists; it includes 15 sculptors, 13 painters and eight camera artists--photography, film, video--a good number of them first-rate. Why, then, does it feel so flat and uninspired?

Here are a few notes, jotted down during and after perambulations through the show:

* Painting and sculpture, as well as hybrids of the two, are the focus of the 1995 installment, which would seem to want to signal the exhaustion of installation art, community-based art and site interventions that were prominently featured in the 1991 International. Then, it was necessary to drive all over Pittsburgh, map in hand, on a kind of treasure hunt; now, an emphasis on conventional mediums of painting and sculpture reasserts traditional museum functions.

* Of the 14 American artists, 12 are New Yorkers. (The category includes artists like Agnes Martin and Richard Tuttle, who established their reputations there before moving elsewhere.) One artist, sculptor Robert Therrien, is from Los Angeles. Video artist Gary Hill is based in Seattle.

* For the first time in a decade, the International makes an effort to encompass more than European and American artists, although it is again (and unsurprisingly) dominated by them. In 1985 and 1987, there were no artists other than Americans and Europeans; in 1991 there was one. This time there are seven: Filmmaker Stan Douglas and photographer Angela Grauerholz work in Canada; painters Guillermo Kuitca and Beatriz Milhazes and sculptor Doris Salcedo work in South America; painter Tomoharu Murakami and photographer Nobuyoshi Araki work in Japan. Most are represented by galleries in New York.

* The Carnegie Prize, given to acknowledge “best in show,” was awarded to American sculptor Richard Artschwager, 72, and German painter Sigmar Polke, 54, for run-of-the-mill examples. Carnegie International curator Richard Armstrong organized Artschwager’s first retrospective exhibition in 1979 and his second in 1988. Polke is one of only two artists to have exhibited in three Internationals since the Carnegie revived the periodic survey exhibition in 1982.

* The other three-timer is Bruce Nauman, whose work isn’t here but whose immense influence certainly is. The show’s youngest artist is celebrated British sculptor Rachel Whiteread, 32. Her “Untitled (One Hundred Spaces)” extrapolates from a well-known late-1960s Nauman sculpture, in which he cast in cement the empty space beneath a chair. Whiteread, using translucent gumdrop colored resin, made 100 casts of the spaces beneath nine different chairs, which she then laid out on the floor in a grid pattern. Despite the new material and the Minimalist format, the multiplication proves that more really can be less.

Do these notebook items begin to shed some light on why the 1995 Carnegie International feels so colorless and inert? The show includes a lot of artists whose work I admire. But it has no edge, no sense of dynamism or risk. No artist whose work you thought you knew is cast in a surprising light. No artist you didn’t know takes hold of your imagination and gives it a shake.

There is certainly familiar work to savor. Among the most compelling is a five-part sculpture of silvery aluminum cubes by Donald Judd, which is as exquisite as anything the late Minimalist avatar ever made. It looks spectacular in the Carnegie’s classical setting too.

At 82, Agnes Martin has contributed a breathtaking group of icy hot abstractions in pale blue, white and graphite horizontal lines. Chuck Close’s monumental portraits of artist friends are winning society portraits of a self-selected aristocracy of artists. Stephan Balkenhol’s small painted, totemic figures of ordinary middle-class folks, carved from blocks of wood and flatly painted, are like fairy-tale sprites remade by a suburban Brother Grimm.

A few unusual contributions are also found. Denmark’s Per Kirkeby is far more widely known as a Neo-Expressionist painter than as a sculptor. In the museum’s outdoor courtyard his brick construction--midway between an architectural environment, a garden maze and a free-standing sculpture--creates an evocative cluster of surprising interior and exterior spaces that are by turns dignified and ominous. The ordered presence of art brilliantly merges with the organic randomness of a natural cave to create a sculpture both comforting and startling. It’s the sleeper of the show.

Franz West’s “Clamp” is the quirkiest work, a makeshift artist’s studio slyly built inside a decorative arts gallery at the museum. Wallpapered with pages from the Pittsburgh telephone directory, it’s furnished with two sofas, two tables, two telephones and several of West’s “Telephonesculptures”--big, lumpy, eccentric blobs of painted papier-ma^che and stucco. The conceit here is that whenever the outside world of a telephone call intervened on the private realm of the studio, West stopped working on a sculpture--a nice involution of how people doodle while schmoozing on the phone. For West, sculpture is three-dimensional doodling--plus self-consciousness, sociability and chance.

As a group, the film and video works are exceptionally strong, led by the bleak poetry of Chantal Akerman’s moving filmic portrait of Moscow citizens adrift in a world that is slipping away. By contrast Gary Hill’s physically frightening “Dervish” employs rapidly spinning mirrors--which emit a loud whoosh !--to send inscrutable images skittering across the wall.

Tony Oursler uses tiny video projectors to cast talking heads onto otherwise mute dolls, most successfully in a sculpture where the head of a woe-is-me rag doll is helplessly jammed beneath a mattress. And Stan Douglas’ great film “The Sandman” pairs two slowly panning images, projected side by side, to create an extraordinary effect of shifting perception and memory.

Tellingly, most of the film and video works were standouts in major exhibitions within the year--Akerman at the opening of the new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Oursler at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Douglas at the Whitney Biennial. Hill won a prize at the Venice Biennale this summer. Their very recent prominence no doubt diminishes the freshness of seeing their work here.

But then, nothing much feels fresh in the exhibition. Oddly austere, the show seems more like a retrenchment, a guarded retreat during an art world period of fatigue, if not enervation.

It’s worth remembering that this is the first International to virtually span the 1990s, and thus to survey the difficult landscape of art after the collapse of an inflated market and a wildly expansive and rambunctious 1980s. Yet the big international survey shows--Documenta, the Venice Biennale, the Sa~o Paulo Bienal or the Carnegie--don’t succeed by reflecting the Zeitgeist . Instead, by focusing an otherwise amorphous trend of curatorial thought and feeling, the memorable ones help bring the Zeitgeist into being.

In his catalogue accompanying the show, Carnegie curator Richard Armstrong, who had been at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art for 11 years before moving to Pittsburgh, cheerfully acknowledges a Manhattan bias. Equating international significance with a discourse on contemporary painting and sculpture centered in New York was once persuasive. After the 1980s, though, who can believe it?

Most of New York’s big-name 1980s art stars are fittingly absent from this show; the period witnessed the dissolution of New York as sole center of significant contemporary art. The much-discussed “return” of Europe and the new arrival of multiple artistic centers, including Los Angeles, constituted a watershed development. The 1995 International is grudging in its acknowledgment of so decisive a shift.

The show’s feeling of retrenchment also inadvertently paints a bleak future for American art. A third of the artists are under 40, but only three are American: Oursler, the engaging video puppeteer; Leonardo Drew, a pleasant if undistinguished sculptor who makes rusty walls of fabric-stuffed boxes, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, whose makeshift kitchen serves up homemade curried rice to museum visitors. If this is all that young New York art in the 1990s has to offer, Manhattan is in worse shape than we already thought.

Cheerfully acknowledging my own geographical bias, I find it foolish for a major international survey to include the work of just a single artist based in Los Angeles. Robert Therrien’s colossal sculpture “Under the Table,” composed of an enormous, psychologically disruptive kitchen table and chairs wedged into a small room, was a standout in last year’s “In Site” exhibition in San Diego. It even deserves to have won the Carnegie Prize. But it hardly speaks for the full significance of art made in Los Angeles these days.

The best feature of the Carnegie’s emphatic sense of restraint is its seeming determination to be an anti-spectacle, working against the grain in an age of gaudy pop sideshows. Slow down, the exhibition seems to insist, because the pleasures of art take time to know.

That’s a lesson worth repeating, especially in fractious times like ours. Lessons, however, are no substitute for a show that helps us know where the culture is headed. There is certain solace in being relatively sure that the culture isn’t headed in the direction the 1995 Carnegie International says it is. Happily and alas, the show is not convincing.

* Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, 4400 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh. Through Feb. 18. (412) 622-3131.