In the days of the expressionist multinationals, it is unfashionable-it seems downright middlebrow-to discuss an artist's work in terms of national culture and identity, but just such home questions are suggested by Chuck Fahlen's sculptures of the past two years. The pieces are distillations of the American landscape. Specifically, they refer to the heroic landscape of the far west, a reference that makes them not just topographical structures, but constructions in national myth.

Fahlen's works are neither models of mesas nor sketches of pinon pines. Their suggestion of landscape is more ambiguous and is conveyed by far more abstract and elegant means. Radial symmetry connotes vegetative growth, or perhaps the starburst lattices of certain crystals. Irregular massing of small, sharply faceted volumes certainly implies natural rock formations. Color, romantically contrasted between bright and dark, is more evocative still. The artist weathers, patinates and burnishes industrial materials such as steel, copper and aluminum, exaggerating, darkening or distorting the grain of the metal. The shiny flecks look like mica, The matte surfaces are similar to the tarnish that atmospheric moisture produces in geological specimens such as pyrite, the fool's gold of the southwest. Altering the outer face like this suggests that the true color is lying in pools beneath, making Fahlen's use of changed color surfaces simultaneously illusionistic and three dimensional. It is a kind of treatment unusual in recent sculpture, which tends to be caught between the twin literalnesses of formalist and craft approaches. However, such dimming and reflectiveness may also be seen in work by Scott Burton, whose furniture, even when most geometric and ultramoderne, conveys a vagrant atmosphere of gardens and sacred groves, comparable to the associations of Fahlen's work.

Manipulation of size strongly conveys the nostalgia typical of the art and folklore of the west. The sculptures are much smaller than the rock formations that, in a fragmentary way, they suggest and also much larger than the geodes that their parts resemble. Such unmediated sizes, alternating between exquisite and too big, appear again and again in visions of the wilderness from Bierstadt's panorama of Yosemite to Ansel Adams's closeups of madrone bark to the twenty foot, handformed cement prairie dog that Fahlen photographed by the side of the road in North Dakota. Most of the artist's own pieces are in fact only about six and a half feet tall, which is near the Greek norm for statues of gods and goddesses. The actual size of his American landscape images is therefore classical, figurative and heroic. The result of all the divergent sizes and scales is a homeless kind of feeling, since the pieces never settle down to being any one kind of structure or likeness of a structure.

Our legends of the frontier are never so much about the place itself as about such restless movement, and about the machines that make the movement possible. Only Americans tell ghost stories about semis and locomotives. Even the most popular natural monuments-Old Faithful, the balancing rocks in the Garden of the Gods, the flowerlike hot springs at Yellowstone-are weird simulacra of machines-clocks, fulcrums, luxury plumbing or other such contraptions. Mechanical forms appear all through Fahlen's work, lending an ironic quality to the landscape subject.

The ambivalence is not just the result of industrial materials, his whole formal system the disparate scales, tilted or top-heavy placements, compressed and cantilevered balances, contrast of volumes and even a certain overdefinition of edges-it all conveys a world of industrial things. Two realms, machine and nature, reinforce each other in Fahlen's work, undergoing a very American kind of metamorphosis.

In the old country world of classical humanism, gods are transformed into nature and nature into humanity. The nymph Arethusa flows into the waters of her spring; dragon's teeth, once sown, sprout up as armed soldiers. Out hills and valleys are haunted, very differently, by Lincoln's funeral train, still rolling by at night with a brass band playing hymns on the flatbed car. In American art and storytelling, it seems that myth is revised and now nature and machine are transformed into each other. The new metamorphic world first appears, in sculpture at least, in pieces by David Smith. Indeed, Smith's private machine shop on top of a mountain in the Adirondacks could be seen as a kind of spiritual home for other American artists. Smith's welded landscapes, Bontecou's predatory forms in steel and velvet, Andre's horizontal sculptures, Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Holt's star traps, Denes's downtown Manhattan wheat field and of course what Fahlen calls his "floating landscape" of hybrid forms-all mix images of the creative force of the landscape with images of the power, grace and destructiveness of machines. On one level, such art may be seen as an industrial sublime, uniting works of God and man in the kind of reconciliation that is the purpose of myths and dreams. On another, the result is a post-industrial pastorale where the melancholy grace of "et in Arcadia ego" is given a darker translation. Instead of the gentle inevitability of natural death, we are reminded of the actual, if not inevitable, death of nature.

Patricia Stewart