MIRKO IS NOT a public person, Harvard's sculptor-in-residence keeps his Carpenter Center studio curtained off and locked, so that few people ever got to see his sculptures.

When confronted by the locked door of his fifth floor studio I originally felt that somehow Harvard's sculptor ought to belong to me; I ought to be able to watch as well as learn from him. But after tripping over and disarranging at least five of his works in process, and after being disturbed at the interview with Mirko by a stray artsy busybody, it's easy to see why Mirko doesn't hold open house. His jungle of massive wood beams from razed houses (works-to-be), metal shears, styrofoam, paints, glues, saws and over 100 sculptures and sculptures-to-be is neither suitable nor navigable for masses of visitors.

Mirko Basaldella (he prefers to use only the first name) wants to "give students the grammar to express themselves." The design programs he directs at the Carpenter Center differ radically from traditional figure study and painting practice.

Indeed, he and other teachers at the VAC shy so strongly from academism that they won't even exhibit their own works in the building, because that might encourage imitation instead of learning.

Mirko is a most wordlessly cloquent grammar teacher. He visits all the classes in the VAC occasionally. When he dropped in on one VES 20 section he moved a one inch black square into a big white area on a figure-ground exercise. Instantly the design improved 100 per cent -- you knew what "activating space" meant and what a square could do, although it would take ten pages to explain it in writing.

Mirko came to America in 1957 to organize the University's design courses, although he was already an established sculptor and had designed the famous bronze gates for the Ardeatine Caves in Rome. He teaches because he's interested in students and wants to give them "something different [in training] than what I had." Mirko studied traditional art school methods in Italy.

Sometimes the teachers at the Carpenter Center can drive students to incessant nail-biting and general anger. In all the design workshop, including Mirko's own, people gripe, "He's absolutely incomprehensible and he just wants us to do everything his way."

One student said, "The secret to success in Mirko's course is to get the project done while he's not looking. Otherwise he poses too many questions that you can't resolve." And Mirko supposedly teaches by the Socratic method--he asks questions until you come to his conclusions.

But once you decide that the Mirko (or Alcalay, or Reimann, or Neuman, etc.) language is the one you want to learn, the "grammar" seems correct. Teachers' corrections are improvements-- your eyes tell you that even while your ego rebels.

MIRKO stands closer to an interviewer than Americans do, and he speaks softly, never making press-release-type pronouncements of his beliefs and theories on Art. His works are what is public. When they are complete Mirko "shoos them off like grown children." And he does not cherish favorites because "to love your own work very much is like to love yourself--it is sick, morbid."

He protested to the secretary who arranged my interview, "But I am not a star."

Like most arists today Mirko rejects attempts, similar to those of Coney Island portraitists, at a frozen duplication of reality. The reality, he feels, is better than a copy because in the duplication you lose "the warmth of a cheek, or the movement of a tree." For art to equal nature it must "create its own magic reality."

Words tend toward a Coney Island Mirko. They can say that Mirko looks intently at you while he speaks, and that he smiles at just the right moment to put you at ease, and that he really has fun when he shows you how his mobile sculpture moves and makes sounds when he pushes it.

But even his own words, and still less those of his cataloguers who speak of "interplay of space and void" are inadequate when they come to his work. They cannot delineate a method of work, or describe the shape of a from.

Mirko's sculpture, from beginning to viewing, is simply nonverbal.