Sculpture on the Cycle of Life

The German artist Wolfgang Laib makes sculptures that are less concerned with being independent objects than with their usefulness as offerings. The gentle power of ritual, ceremony and spiritual simplicity courses through his most impressive work. Art becomes a radiantly charged intersection between life and death--between the material world and an ineffable soul.

A traveling survey of Laib’s work since 1972, organized by the American Federation of Arts, opened Sunday at San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Laib (pronounced “libe”) showed several times in Los Angeles about a decade ago, including a powerful installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The San Diego exhibition concludes a national tour, and it has been slightly trimmed along the way; but for viewers unfamiliar with Laib’s sculpture, the show is a concise introduction. It also lets us in on what he’s been up to since he was last seen in any depth in Southern California.

Fifteen sculptures and 18 drawings are supplemented by 14 black-and-white photographs, mostly of the 51-year-old artist’s travels in India, Myanmar, Tibet and other parts of Asia. Eastern philosophies have been important to Laib, and the documentary-style photographs provide useful information that amplifies several of his sculptural sources. Laib originally intended to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a doctor--he finished medical school just as his interest in art fully blossomed--but attending the condition of the human spirit, not the mechanics of the human body, seems to have arisen as his principal concern.

The earliest works in the show are a group of eight stones, each the size of a large potato, carved into a balanced lozenge and polished to a high sheen. Titled “Brahmandas” (1972-75) and laid out on a floor-level pedestal, they’re not much to look at. But that seems to be part of the point: Even a meager piece of stone, when carefully considered, contains an essential wonder that can be extrapolated into the entire universe. Coaxing it out is the artist’s aim.

That poetic dichotomy marks the show’s earliest major sculpture, “Milkstone” (1983-87). A thin slab of white marble, just over 3 feet square and about an inch thick, rests on the floor. (It’s gorgeously installed alone in a gallery whose big glass windows overlook the Pacific.) Starting at the edges of the marble square, Laib ground a slight concave depression into the stone surface. Milk is then poured on, until the surface of the stone is completely covered.

Looking at the glistening white work, it’s nearly impossible to tell where the liquid ends and the solid begins. Marble, a classic sculptural material, is here transformed into the supporting role of a pedestal, which seamlessly sustains a shimmering plane of life-nourishing milk. Given the low-slung configuration at your feet, the gallery floor likewise becomes the sculpture’s horizontal pedestal. Art--and audience--are subtly exalted.

This embodied reverence for art as a humanly generative, sustaining activity is among the most appealing features of Laib’s work. It radiates throughout the exhibition and its museum site. After all, the milk in “Milkstone” cannot be left to sour and curdle when the piece is being publicly exhibited; the milk needs to be wiped off at the end of each day and refreshed in the morning. Picture it in your mind’s eye: This simple activity, ritually attended to by museum staff, restores a humbling sense of guardianship to curatorial routine.

Also exceptional are two pieces made with flower pollen, one from dandelions and the other from hazelnut. Pure pollen is sifted into a square configuration on the floor and flooded with light from above. The intense, gorgeous color of the square--vivid yellow or burnished gold--is like a bottomless pool. You can’t take your eyes off it.

Precisely where the sculpture begins and ends cannot be determined, though, as the sifted pollen filters out onto the floor and into the surrounding atmosphere. The ordinary white-walled gallery is quietly transformed, becoming a secular chapel where art and nature merge.

Typically for Laib’s aesthetic, the feminine associations of milk are here balanced with the masculine associations of pollen, just as nature and culture harmonize--not to mention life and death. “Rice House” (1995-96), for example, is a 5-foot-long slab of marble, roughly carved into a shape that recalls an elongated Monopoly house, around which small mounds of white rice huddle. The rice-laden marble suggests sustenance and shelter, but it also recalls a cemetery marker.

Serenely systemic cycles of life and death spread out in your mind, like the row of 27 brass plates lined up on the floor in “The Rice Meals” (1983); most plates hold a small mound of rice, one a smaller mound of golden pollen. As an offering, “The Rice Meals” hovers between a steadfast faith in the nourishment provided by art and socially poignant allusions to hunger and the distribution of food.

These are the works on which Laib’s reputation as an artist developed in the 1980s. Less familiar--and less satisfying--are his large-scale sculptures assembled from sheets of richly colored, aromatic beeswax. The three on view here date from the 1990s. Their forms are architectural (stairways, walls, temples). The largest is composed of six boat-shaped blocks of beeswax, lifted high overhead near the ceiling on a wooden trestle.

Titled “You Will Go Somewhere Else,” the allusions to death and transformation in its “heavenly boats” are not hard to grasp. (The form’s specific relationship to harvest practices in parts of Asia is revealed by one of the documentary photographs, which shows sheaves of grain piled atop wooden trestles.) But the narrative implications diminish its power, making the sculpture oddly anthropological and descriptive.

By contrast, the “milkstone” and pollen sculptures are persuasive because of the sleek, pared-down emphasis on their status as offerings. Sculpture gets regarded in a remarkably original way--as a contemplative condition in real time and space, created for the presentation of richly metaphorical substances.

Philosophically, the term “presentation” refers to things known in human consciousness through the senses, moment by moment. (Interestingly, given Laib’s medical background, it also refers to the position of a fetus in utero at the moment of birth.) In his most compelling work Laib avoids the descriptive limitations of much ordinary sculpture in favor of a remarkably generous gift of perceptual imminence.

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“Wolfgang Laib: A Retrospective,” San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, 700 Prospect St., La Jolla, (858) 454-3541, through May 19. Closed Wednesdays.