Andy Starnes, Post-Gazette
	Reiko Goto taps colored sand through a chak-pur (a metal funnel) to create "3 Rivers 2nd Nature Sand Mandala" at Carnegie Mellon University's Regina Gouger Miller Gallery. Related Stories Art Review: CMU'S 'Groundworks' is a complex show with local and international reach Artists work to preserve nature of Nine Mile Run Greenway Project

"Groundworks: Environmental Collaboration in Contemporary Art," at Carnegie Mellon University's Regina Gouger Miller Gallery, is an earnest compilation of art projects that illustrates the range of issues attracting the concern of environmentalists and the variety of responses to them.

As such, it's representative of the kind of exhibition that often leaves visitors scratching their heads and asking whether what is displayed is art.

That's also a question being asked -- at times hotly debated -- by the artists themselves and by others in the art community.

It's evident to even the casual observer that art exhibitions changed radically during the past century. Composition and/or content of painted surface or sculpted form became unpredictable, expression embraced new media and developing technologies, subject matter was unfettered, and presentation expanded to such nonfixed formats as performance and the Web.

Early eco-art projects included the 1970s "Serpentine Lattice" by Californians Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, who were among artists commissioned to create a project for "Groundworks" (see review published last Thursday).

In the same period, such groundbreaking -- in more ways than one -- earthworks as the late Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty" were created. The tension between those who bulldoze and those who heal began then and continues.

In his scholarly catalog essay, exhibition curator Grant Kester of the University of California at San Diego suggests historic precedents for the cultural predisposition that challenges consideration of the output of eco-artists as art. Paralleling this are the development of attitudes toward land use and property.

A "correlation between the power of artistic expression and the physical mastery of the land" was in place in the 18th century as landscape designers obliterated whatever was in their way to achieve the natural or English garden look, Kester writes.

As example of the prevalence of such beliefs in the 20th century, Kester cites noted large-scale earth artist Michael Heizer as saying, in 1977, "I'm a sculptor. ... I'm not for hire to go patch up mining sites."

From the diminishing acceptance of rule by "divine right" begun in the 1600s through the rise of bourgeois society, Kester builds a case for the evolution -- at times in compliance with and at others in opposition to prevailing socio-cultural practices -- of attitudes that continue to inform art today, such as the audience's role as passive viewer to the product of the artist's "unyielding individualism."

In contrast, the work in "Groundworks" is collaborative -- even multidisciplinary -- including other professionals and members of site communities and relinquishing the notion of "authorship" by a master/genius. The audience's position is "no longer defined primarily through distanced visual contemplation, actualized by reading or decoding an image or object, but through haptic experience actualized by immersion and participation in a process," Kester writes.

His conclusion doesn't debate the validity of eco-art, but rather supports "an aesthetic dimension to the process of reciprocal exchange" -- it is the doing and the interaction inspired that is the art -- and he calls for new critical tools that will allow such art to be included in the art canon and evaluated.

"Groundworks" evolved out of the work of artists Tim Collins and Reiko Goto of the Nine Mile Run project and, more recently, "3 Rivers 2nd Nature."

In the catalog, they write that the exhibition is "intended to elicit a dialogue about artists working with the intent to create change." The role of the artist must shift with changing global conditions, they write, proposing that artists "develop creative alliances with other disciplines and work in the greater public interest."

They do, however, implicate the viewer in the decision as to whether "anything this applied can be art," while stating that all exhibition project designers were trained in the arts and have declared that their works are aligned with "critical contemporary art practice with clear transformative intent."

"And if it is not art, what is it?" they ask.

It's problematic to present all of the information compiled during and essential to such projects, or even to streamline their complexities, so that they are appealing to the visitor who's neither eco-artist nor conservationist. But such exhibitions are here to stay, and should be as long as artists are expressing themselves in this manner.

Some suggestions for making such shows more accessible: Uniform labels accompanying each piece that give information such as locale, names and/or identities of participants, creation duration; text abstracts of each piece; a five-minute video of each work that presents context and goal.

"Groundworks" continues through Dec. 11, when the "3 Rivers 2nd Nature" mandala will be dismantled during an 11 a.m. ceremony. Gallery hours are 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. Admission is free. Show catalog is $25.

For information: 412-268-3618 or visit 3r2n.cfa.cmu.edu/groundworks.