RECLAIMING AMERICAN DREAMS

ACROSS AMERICA, on car-swept main streets and in shady small-town squares, thousands of ordinary citizens are nosing around, notebooks in hand. They're looking for sculptures, any kind of sculptures - stolid Civil War memorials, avant-garde Latino installations, even inspired recyclings like the ones in the pictures here - as part of a national campaign called Save Outdoor Sculpture! (SOS!). The idea is for these volunteers to catalogue any outdoor art they find, note any deterioration due to acid rain, vandalism or lack of maintenance and, it is hoped, persuade people to restore and look after it better in the future.

The first part has been working splendidly since 1989. Fifteen thousand volunteers in all 50 states have compiled 20,000 reports diagnosing sculpture ailments, from cars scarring distinguished statues to devious worms chomping through wooden monuments, and sent them back to the SOS! headquarters in Washington DC. "We have potato chip salesmen and insurance salesmen documenting sculpture for us," says Susan Nichols, the campaign's director. A similar cheery enthusiasm marks her organisation's fundraising, money coming from local grocers and the Getty Foundation alike, and even from - despite Republican budget-slashing - the federal government.

The ideals behind SOS!, which is a private charity jointly owned by the Smithsonian and the National Institute for Conservation, go far beyond a little municipal tidying-up. Each step of its plan is discreetly political: first, seeing art that is public and sometimes old as worth caring about; second, recording the damage modern America has done to it; and third, hoping to induce a "preservation ethic" that could persuade the public to take back their streets in general. "If you're trying to reclaim a public space," says Nichols, "your rallying point can be a public sculpture." And, indeed, the actual workings of the campaign do seem to recall a forgotten liberal America, of busy local activists and public-spirited ladies in the capital working together, just as they did in the New Deal.

Anyone can be a volunteer; no training is required. Any piece of three- dimensional outdoor art is recorded, regardless of artistic merit or method. The bull in the main picture was made out of bits and pieces of old New Mexico cattle ranches by artist Holly Hughes. Its rustings and frayings and history have been recorded on a standard eight-page SOS! checklist and included in a thickening Inventory of American Sculpture at the Smithsonian in Washington, where students and the public can examine them in print or on the Internet. The figures in the picture above are there too; called Going for Water, they were welded together out of old machine parts (the male figure's stetson is an upside down tractor seat) by a 71-year-old retired appliance repairman called Gordon McMath, seen standing beside them. He's proud to have his work recorded - there's not much else to do in the old railroad town of Mountainair, New Mexico.

SOS! may have a job finding and saving the work of every McMath, though. The task is near-infinite, and the funding could be very finite if the Republican axe, currently hacking away at subsidies for the arts, swings towards the half of the organisation's budget that comes from the government. "We're trying to keep a low profile," says Nichols.

For all the success of SOS!, it is cutting against the grain of modern America, where the past disappears fast and public spaces are shrivelling before fear of crime and privatisation, with few people - except for the homeless - lingering long enough in the streets to look around them and see art. And Nichols admits she has "no treatment money" to fix the corroding sculptures yet. But there is hope: decay has slowed since the Clean Air Acts of the 1980s reduced pollution levels, says SOS! founder Arthur Beale. And those citizens with notebooks have already raised $1m to start fixing their statues. !