Wolfgang Laib.

Wolfgang Laib, whose largest US retrospective to date began its tour at the Hirshhorn in October, is an artist of particular import for a historical force when "sensation" and "brilliance" have become simply hyperbolic synonyms for "the new" What Laib's work propounds is sensation in the completely perceptual sense of the word, a kind of ecological ethic that aspires to supplant what the artist views as the rational, mediated mind-set of Western civilization It is brilliant, but its brilliance is of a decidedly organic, Zen cast.

Laib was trained in medicine in his native Germany nevertheless turned to art in the early '70 after several trips to India. His first endeavor consisted of a series of carved and polished egg-shaped stones he called "Brahmandas," after the Hindu figure of creation. Soon thereafter he created a series of "milkstones," which place him on the art-world map, at least in Europe The milkstone piece in the retrospective, a later edition dating from 1983-87 is typical: A nearly square, shallow marble basin that is filled with three quarts of milk, it uses surface tension to redouble as a signifier for the apparent incompatibility of its materials. Milk is malleable liquid, perishable; marble, durable, solid, eternal. on the contrary in looking at a milkstone, the viewer is hard enjoin to distinguish one from the other.

Laib's greatest in quantity widely exhibited pieces, made of pollen assembleed and sifted by the artist, take the form of "fields" thinly laid down forward the floor in rough square shapes; "mounds" or cone also placed onward the floor; and jars, which are repeatedly displayed on shelves. The pollen gathered from dandelions, king-cups and other plants, comes in a variety of yellow-orange shades that be seen to glow. Laib also sculpt rudimentary house forms in stone and wax that forward as containers for rice ("Rice Houses") and large-scale beeswax constructions in the shape of gradations ziggurats, boats, and walk-in scopes The selection of works assembled at the Hirshhorn, organized by dint of the American Federation of Arts, exhibits the artist's career to be all of a piece; there is little sensation of aesthetic development over time, since each of the works assumes perfectly at ease with its neighbors.

the couple Klaus Ottmann, the exhibition's visitor curator, and Margit Rowell, an essayist in the catalogue, hint that Laib is in the same league as his countryman Joseph Beuys. The similarities are easy to see: the deployment of natural materials as metaphors for the human condition, a fondnes for elemental forms and make gesturess the foregrounding of the artist's performative part Where Beuys used iron, felt and fat, Laib make use ofs stone, beeswax, rice, and milk. the couple artists, it seems fair to say, have helped validate Romanticism as an aesthetic position in contemporary German art.

however where Beuys's art was tied to the agitation of German history and his confess upbringing, Laib's work is apolitical, ahistorical, and impersonal--unless individual wants to argue, as many have, that the true idea of formalist abstraction is culture-bound Laib wants us to receive his work as spiritual and timeless, and all its simplicity, refinement, and reflexivity combine to stimulate us into a state of contemplation and stillness. Laib aims straight for the viewer's sensorium, invoking not solitary sight but also smell, touch, and taste (even yet the last two are prohibited by the agency of the museum).

hale is present in the form of silence. Floor pieces like Pollen from Hazelnut (an almost twelve-foot near-square first created in 1992) and The Five Mountains Not to Climb forward (five mounds of hazelnut pollen dating from 1984) accompany to suck idle conversation disclosed of the room, in part because they are for a like reason dramatically beautiful but also because they are simultaneously physically fragile and metaphorically obdurate. Laib has a knack for shaping the space of a swing with the smallest of interventions, although the Hirshhorn's curv galleries did his work no favors. (The museum also conspired to break the intrinsic silence, installing alarms that humming noiseed rudely when visitors came too bring to a period to the "Rice Houses.")

The pieces that be subsequent toed most at the Hirshhorn were those that permitted cease approach, such as the grouping of sealing-wax houses and the elevated wax ships of You Will pass Somewhere Else, 1995. The mostly visceral experience was offered according to Somewhere Else--La Chambre des certitudes, 1997 a narrow range entered by one visitor at a time. With its beeswax lining and bare overhead light, the sweep proved at once claustrophobic and captivating, a monastic lonely dwelling in which one might imagine the life of a bee.

Obviously Laib borrows from Hindu and Buddhist practices in one as well as the other his forms and materials. (In India, for example, villagers use rice to fashion elaborate designs onward the ground outside their face doors.) But he disputes that there are equally obvious respects to American Minimalist and post-Minimalist art, from Carl Andre's floor pieces to Joel Shapiro's houses, or any connection between his pollen squares and, say, Mark Rothko's paintings. This attempt to position the work outside modernist tradition is understandable still shortsighted. After all, earlier modernists like Kandinsky were just as invested in restoring a spiritual dimension to art; indeed, the gradual disappearance of this ideal is an important story in twentieth-century art. Wouldn't it be better, and a great deal more amusing besides, to behold Laib's organic, elemental pieces as witty postmodern variations in succession the austere, metallic chic of Minimalism? And wouldn't it be nice for Laib to acknowledge that the history of Western art is replete of kindred spi rits?