PHOTOGRAPHY THAT EVOKES SCULPTURE

By Helen A. Harrison

EAST ISLIP SCULPTURE is by nature a three-dimensional art form. Photography, in contrast, is implicitly two-dimensional, and its primary relation to sculpture is as a recording device. True, there are sculptors who incorporate photographic elements in their carvings or constructions. But for most, the camera is a tool chiefly employed for documentationand publicity purposes.

However, in ''Photo/Sculpture,'' a provocative and highly recommended show at the Islip Art Museum, we see that photographic processes can have a more direct relationship to sculpture, can dictate its form and prescribe its meaning - can, in fact, be its raison d'etre. The nine artists represented here all use photography to elucidate sculptural imagery rather than simply to record and preserve it.

With the rise of environmental and conceptual art in the 1970's, photography came to play a major role in disseminating the work of artists whose main interest was less in the creation of objects than in communicating attitudes and shaping consciousness. Art as information, and the reverse, became more and more a preoccupation of the avant-garde.

The photographs in this show are all essentially informational, and yet not strictly documentary in the ordinary meaning of that term. A few of them have a sculptural, or three-dimensional, aspect, but for the most part, they capture a moment, a setting or a piece of action that exists in another realm of tangibility. Still, none are photographs of discrete art objects, such as statues or structures. In each case, we feel that the scene was made especially to be captured in this way, and that the photographing is as much a part of the finished work as were the selection of subject matter and composition of the tableaux.

Vicki Ragan's theatrical, sometimes bizarre arrangements include toylike fragments grouped on patterned cloth to give the impression of a private domain of fetishes. Many of the props she favors seem to have an intimate personal significance, hinting at subconscious obsession or the reminiscence of dreams. Painted animals, fake fruit, dolls and other symbolic devices interact with each other on miniature stages, where the familiar and the unexpected coexist. Gloved hands and even whole people sometimes intrude, asserting the artist's presence and heightening the sense of autobiography that pervades these sculptural events.

Bernard Faucon creates a similar, if more sinister, atmosphere with mannequins of children as the actors in surreal dramas. His color is lush and seductive, but the vitality of the natural settings, such as a field of blossoming lavender or a beach at dawn, is jarringly offset by the stilted poses and vacant expressions of the lifeless figures. Every element is carefully orchestrated for maximum psychological impact. Occasionally, as in ''Lacs Sieste,'' a live child is included among the dummies, so that reality and fantasy are further confused.

Laurie Simmons also creates miniature worlds peopled with toy figures, but they lack the visionary intensity of Miss Ragan's tableaux and the surreality of Mr. Faucon's scenes. In her most effective image, a tiny cowgirl and her horse are made to assume the false scale of full-sized figures by the way they are photographed against the landscape.

In contrast to the subjective, hermetic imagery of these artists, Luis Camnitzer takes a more intellectual, more deliberately witty approach. His pieces deal with perception as an act of will, particularly in ''The Book of Holes,'' where the incomplete outline of an open volume is held before various surfaces. Thus we can read in the same book a variety of content, depending on our point of view as manipulated by the artist. Mentally, consciously, we must supply the missing pieces that complete his statement.

The show is liberally laced with humor, notably in Mr. Camnitzer's ''Landscape as an Attitude,'' where the artist's face becomes the hills and valleys of a pastora le, complete with grazing sheep. The double meanin g of the word ''attitude'' - a state of mind and a selfconscious posture - ironically implies that inner reality and outward appea rance are often at variance.

Photographic postcards are the basis of Howardena Pindell's relief assemblages, several of which seem to be free associations based on the artist's travels. These are the show's most colorful and decorative works, but they also contain a strong narrative line that emerges on closer scrutiny. Miss Pindell is noted for her abstractions of great textural richness, but here, on a small scale, she allows the outside world to engage in a dialogue with creative technique.

The remaining four photo-sculptors take more formalistic approaches to both subject matter and treatment. David Haxton uses the standard props of the phraw material, cutting and tearing backdrop paper and arranging the lighting to articulate and define its patterns. Glass, scrap paper and assorted fragments enliven the neutral surface of the floor. The play of light, shadow and color is beguiling and often deliberately misleading, as the ephemeral paper is made to appear unnaturally substantial.

Boyd Webb combines highly refined and elegant formats with strangely ambiguous arrangements, such as bunched linoleum that might be read as fabric, or a shower room where up and down have lost their meaning. Like so many of the other works on view, these images came into being only to be captured on film, and the photographs exist to tantalize our imagination. In different ways, Gerry Marx and Pierre Bo ogaerts use photographs as sculptural objects in their own right. Mr. Marx's cutout enlargements of rocks and boulders are crease d and mounted to suggestthe volumes of the original objects, but they are only slightly raised off the plane of the wall, so that the y carve out their own territory somewhere between rock and photograph.

Mr. Boogaerts's wide-angle view of an intersection extends in segmented panels that both draw the viewer in toward the center and stand up well at a distance, where they are experienced as a completely different phenomenon. What was felt close up as negative states seen from below becomes a jagged cross of blue with black edges when viewed from across the room. In the works of these two artists, sculpture and photography have become a single medium.

''Photo/Sculpture'' will be on view through March 7. The gallery is in Brookwood Hall at 50 Irish Lane, and is open Wednesdays through Saturdays from 10 A.M. to 4 P.M., Sundays from 2 to 5 P.M. and Wednesday evenings from 8 to 10. Admission is free.