Art Without Context Becomes an ‘Exercise’ in History Lessons

As an art exhibition, “The Experimental Exercise of Freedom” at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary is a bore. As a history lesson, however, it is informative.

This careful sampling of objects, models and refabricated installations by Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathias Goeritz, Helio Oiticica and Mira Schendel raises troubling questions about the relationship between contemporary art and history. In the middle of the muddle is the role museums play in the transformation of art into history.

None of these artists is alive today. They came from a variety of backgrounds, but all of them developed their careers in Latin America, and they are united by a vigorous insistence that the objects they made throughout the 1950s, ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s are not nearly as interesting as the contexts in which viewers physically interact with them.

Take, for example, “Eden, Whitechapel Experience,” a giant sandbox Oiticica (1937-80) constructed in 1969 for his retrospective at London’s Whitechapel Gallery. Combination hippie crash-pad, sandy beach and theatrical stage, this multi-ton expanse of fine sand includes rudimentary tents, enclosures made from plastic sheets and wooden stalls filled with piles of straw, crushed stone, paperbacks and magazines.

Whatever the magical mystery that might have permeated the work’s casual atmosphere 30 years ago, it is nowhere to be found in its current manifestation. In downtown Los Angeles, the well-traveled Brazilian’s once-playful encampment too explicitly recalls the temporary shelters built by the homeless.

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But that is not all that prevents Oiticica’s piece from functioning as intended. Rather than inviting viewers to kick back, relax and get in touch with their inner thoughts and sentiments, MOCA’s version of his installation invites you to look back in time.

When you take off your shoes and walk barefoot in the sand, the experience is so unremarkable that your thoughts soon turn away from immediate bodily sensations to vague speculations about what it must have been like to see this piece in London in the swinging ‘60s. The artist’s original appeal to direct experience is swamped not by the inclusion of his piece in a museum but by its status as a historical artifact. In contrast, when art actually works, it gets you to (momentarily) forget about historical references.

A more elaborate yet no more effective re-creation of an installation by Clark (1920-88) similarly evokes the atmosphere of a party’s aftermath. Made for the 1968 Venice Biennale, the Brazilian artist’s snug labyrinth consists of four adjoined enclosures through which viewers walk, crawl and squirm. Bumping into cloth walls, bouncing off padded floors and wading through piles of balloons, you feel your way through yarn party streamers before emerging from this chamber of warm-and-fuzzy sensations.

Wall labels say the journey is a metaphorical trip through a woman’s reproductive system. But it is far less farfetched to imagine that you have just visited an early prototype of a McDonald’s playground.

Dozens of less ambitious pieces by Clark require you to try on odd masks, hats, gloves, goggles and coveralls--all of which impede some of your senses while emphasizing others. Slapstick humor fuels the artist’s attempts to stimulate bodily awareness. But the results are so obvious and remedial that these works seem to have more in common with petting zoos than with museums.

It is important to remember that Clark would probably not have been offended by this comparison. Uninterested in what she perceived to be the stodgy snobbery of established museums, the Paris-educated artist preferred the emotional vividness of first-hand experience to the pretense of out-of-touch institutions.

For their parts, Goeritz (1915-90), Gego (Gertrude Goldschmidt, 1912-94) and Schendel (1919-88) experimented with less loopy, more formally rigorous works. Born in Germany, Goeritz moved to Mexico City, where he built gigantic Minimalist sculptures that resembled dwarf skyscrapers. He is represented here by photographs of his works, an architecture model, a life-size copy of seven free-standing columns and a large pedestal covered with maquettes of proposed pieces.

Gego, who emigrated from Germany to Venezuela, is represented by a remarkably consistent series of quaintly futuristic wire sculptures she made from the late ‘60s to the mid-’80s. Also fleeing the Nazis, Schendel left her native Switzerland for Brazil, were she wove a series of ephemeral rice-paper ropes and nets along with a group of black-and-white collages made of cut-out letters pressed between sections of Plexiglas.

As a whole, “The Experimental Exercise of Freedom,” organized for MOCA by assistant curator Alma Ruiz and New York-based guest curator Rina Carvajal, does a terrific job of re-creating important works of art. It cannot, however, re-create the contexts in which these works were made. As such, it is more a time capsule than anything of current relevance.

* “The Experimental Exercise of Freedom,” the Geffen Contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., (213) 621-2766, through Jan. 23. Closed Mondays. Admission $6.