EVEN Mirko's telling of how he makes a sculpture could fit any of at least 1000 great and minor artisst today. There is material--styrofoam, bronze, wood, automobile parts, plexiglass, wood. Material tells you what is permissible--bronze cannot be translucent, while plexiglass makes Mirko play with its strange transparency. Uncolored plexiglass does not exist visually, until you cut it. So it is the elimination of material that makes the form, while the bulk makes a void.

Then there is nature, from which most of his coherent forms come. Bird wings, insect claws around flowers, snakes--anthropomorphic forms are a major source for Mirko.

Man stands out in nature and in Mirko's sculpture. Noses, arms and faces turn up frequently. Many of his objects are totem-pole-like--the piece by the Holyoke Center express elevator is one example, although this work is less interesting and more rigidly rectilinear than most in his studio.

Mirko believes in the vertical and the horizontal because "the vertical is from nature; it is man, tree. It is the active and the horizontal is the passive, like death."

Individual memory and memory of mankind figure in the images. Mirko's titles are mythical, Biblical, and concerned with ritual. He looks for "another dimension," a way to evoke a total, rather than merely an intellectual response in the viewer." Abstract form is the common denominator," Mirko said.

And ultimately in the Mirko sculptures there is the creator. Every man has his own set of permanent beliefs or temporary feelings which go into the associations and expressions in his art.

But Mirko does not preconceive an object. "I try to be free and to catch what is the essence." From the nucleus of an idea he enters into a dialogue-- a dialogue of eyes and hands and shape and what might be called soul. "I first try to understand, then to make contact [with the work], like you first meet and later make contact with a person."

Confronting a Mirko work is as aliterate a process as building once. "There is enough complex to life," he says. Therefore he tries to "come directly to emotion" with his combinations of forms.

IN HIS PAINTING of a crucifixion Mirko uses a frigid yellow -- a moon yellow. With many black, downward curves to suggest mourners, and sharp linear arrows for Roman spears, pain and sickness hit a viewer immediately. Only then does he read the cross, the helmets or the realistic skull which Mirko makes the clue, the "bridge to reality." (Although sculpture is his main passion, Mirko does paint, draw and work in monotypes because each media has its own expressive quality. To investigate the "contemporary fourth dimension," like Picasso, Braque, and others before him, he painted musical instruments from many sides at one time).

There's a visually witty wood snake in one piece. Mirko made it because "sometimes you play." After a while one might analyze the wit of the snake's proportions, but at first the whimsy is simply experienced.

Mirko s right when he denies stardom. To play Helen Hayes in the mid-twentieth century are scene which revolves around the blatantly rich New York market one must dream up a revolutionary original concept of art. There's Jackson Pollock, of course, who gave the physical making process so much more prominence than Mirko ever does. And there's Morris Louis, whose name and stripes of color are better known at Harvard than is Mirko. The action painter, the flat painter, the minimalist, the happening-creator, the sculptor of simple geometric forms at superhuman scale (Tony Smith, for one)--these are the fantastically novel stars.

Most of Mirko's works could fit into a Radcliffe cubicle, and his thoughts and interests and forms by now seem traditional. The uniqueness of his sculpture is one of expressed personality and artistic choices, not fundamental conception of art.

But within tradition Mirko is very alive and open to new ways and ideas. When he came here from Italy he discovered styrofoam. He sketches in it--styrofoam is well-suited to sketching because it is easy to cut, join, and texture with just a fingernail or scrap of wood. And he modified the lost-wax casting technique to cast directly from styrofoam, and even egg cartons, to bronze. (In lost-wax casting, one puts a refracting material like plaster around a wax shape one wants to reproduce, melts out the wax once the plaster hardens and then pours in molten metal.)

One advantage of the styrofoam-bronze technique is that it is very easy to texture the surface of the model and transfer this to the bronze.

And relevant surface patterning is a Mirko specialty. Sometimes the pattern relates to the material, but it is most interesting when it connects with the subject. In one soldier-type piece, Mirko gives the surface a reptilian pattern which suggests armor without duplicating it. Signs also appear on his surfaces--"from the blood, from ancestral things."

Critics have said that some patterns show Pre-Columbian influence, but Mirko denies this. And Mirko's patterns are less mazy and diffuse than those of often hallucination-inspired Pre-Columbian art.

Mirko's emphasis on direct emotion seems special in the context of the VAC's neo-Bauhaus superrationality. The way he develops his forms from his feelings is encouraging and refreshing for those tired of ubiquitous Form From Function