Being part of the exhibit

Midway through the survey exhibition of the late Spanish figurative sculptor Juan Munoz (1953-2001), which opened Sunday at the Geffen Contemporary in Little Tokyo, something startling happens. One of the sculptures appears to be dissing its audience.

You approach this sculpture from behind. Seven bald male figures -- six seated, one standing -- are casually posed on a pair of wooden bleachers, which is carefully positioned to face into an empty corner of the gallery. The men, cast from gray resin, seem to be attentively looking at the vacant space formed by the museum’s abutted white walls.

As a curious visitor moves around the side and begins to glimpse their faces, more information comes into view. All seven men are Chinese. They are dressed identically. Their facial typology is relatively uniform.

Plus, the men are laughing uproariously at the empty corner. Mocking the void, perhaps, in a fit of Postmodern mirth? Or maybe chortling over the impossible idealism embodied by “the white cube,” contemporary culture’s uniform situation for isolating art from the hurly-burly world?

Well, not exactly. By the time you get all the way around to the other side and look the sculpture in the face, it dawns that what the figures are laughing at is you, the willingly manipulated viewer. A sculpture depicting an audience faces its actual audience -- and you have been cornered. You are the butt of the artist’s carefully crafted joke. Victimized and made the fool.

Is art supposed to do that?

There’s a great tradition in Spanish culture of artists’ representations of dwarfs, jesters and clowns. In the aristocratic courts of Europe, their ritualized function was to speak difficult, even embarrassing truths in the face of ultimate authority -- which only a fool would do. A court jester had license. And a court painter could certainly identify with that role, given art’s observant eye. Trenchant artists like Diego Velazquez painted any number of empathetic portraits of these characters, in which he saw his conflicted position.

Contemporary artists have likewise broached the subject. John Baldessari identified a modern continuation of the tradition in Hollywood movies, and made a wonderful image combining film stills to show a pair of anonymous tap dancers, large and small. Jonathan Borofsky’s “Ballerina Clown,” the once-controversial sculpture attached to the side of a Venice condo on Main Street at Rose Avenue, puts the frowning rubber mask of a sad jester over the head of a tutu-clad dancer, who’s trying to bring a little aesthetic grace to the world. In both works, a joyful yet clearly pained identification between the subject matter and an artist’s difficult position in the life of contemporary society is hard to miss.

Munoz’s piece feels sharply different, though, for here it’s hard to find much sympathetic emotional identification within his sculptural manipulation. To be generous, perhaps the sculpture represents an attempt to push the tradition one step further -- by taking the artist off a pedestal and inviting the audience to fill his cultural shoes. You get to experience the queasy role culture assigns to artists.

None of this ambiguity is found in the show’s most compelling work -- and Munoz’s first mature sculpture -- “The Wasteland” (1986). Like “Towards the Corner” (1998), this work mixes sculpture and the architectural space of the room to create a deft manipulation. Unlike the forerunner, a strange poignancy results.

“The Wasteland” is a large, mostly empty room, its floor covered with linoleum cut in a Baroque or ancient Roman pattern of three L-shaped wedges. One side is black, one is pale blue-gray, one is beige. The color pattern creates an optical illusion that the floor is composed from cubes that tightly interlock into visual infinity, like the ground in an M.C. Escher print. Munoz has arranged the pattern on a diagonal, which points your eye directly into the room’s corner.

There on a simple steel shelf sits an odd bronze figure, its grinning head too large for its demurely dressed body. What the heck is it?

The only way to know is to approach the sculpture -- but Munoz doesn’t make the trip so easy. He has cleverly arranged the linoleum pattern so that the black side, which represents shadow, is closest to you. The bronze figure sits off-center on his shelf, where visually he seems to be radiating the light that illuminates the cubes. It’s as if you, the visitor, are at the bottom of a wall of cubes, faced with a daunting uphill climb to the other end, where the sculptural prize awaits. Rarely is such a simple visual trick employed so effectively.

The bronze figure turns out to be ventriloquist’s dummy. Like a court jester or dwarf, this diminutive figure operates as a kind of surrogate, into whose willing mouth other peoples’ voices are projected. Is it the artist’s voice that’s being thrown in our direction? Or is it our own?

With its reference to T.S. Eliot’s 1922 poem of precariously balanced chaos and stability, “The Wasteland” positions art in a modern social landscape at once bleak and playful, disorienting and driven by entertainment. It’s the most resonant work in the show, which includes 35 sculptures and 25 drawings made between 1984 and 2000 and was organized by Washington’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in association with the Art Institute of Chicago.

Munoz was 31 when he made the show’s earliest works -- Post-minimalist drawings and tentative small sculptures of wrought iron balconies common to apartment buildings in Madrid. He’d spent a long time deciding whether to become an artist, during lengthy stays in London, Stockholm and New York, where he studied intermittently. Franco-era Spain had experienced a 40-year Dark Age, culturally speaking, and Munoz had a lot of catching up to do. Initially he drew notice not as a sculptor but as a freelance exhibition curator in post-Franco Spain. As that country was reconnecting with the international art scene, he organized thematic shows that incorporated the work of sculptors and architects such as Richard Serra, Joel Shapiro, Frank Gehry and Peter Eisenman.

The balcony pieces seem conventional, even old-fashioned, recalling the late-1970s vogue for architectural sculpture. But they do begin to map out a potentially productive territory, somewhere between the space of sculpture and architecture, with all the physical, psychological and emotional resonance each genre contains.

The most productive bridge between them is a series of wall sculptures that derive from staircase banisters. Grasped by your eye, rather than your hand, the twisty wooden railings do the reverse of what a stairwell banister does: In an in-between space, they making your perception momentarily unsteady.

The sculptures recall the similarly hybrid work of Richard Artschwager, which employs perceptual conundrums to thwart physical expectations. Munoz mixes the optical trickery and physical manipulation of Baroque architecture with spare Minimalist sculpture, which often erases traditional boundaries between mass and space and makes the viewer an active participant in a theatrical mise-en-scene.

The weakest aspect of Munoz’s work comes in its most well-known guise -- slightly smaller-than-life-size figures placed in everyday settings, such as “Towards the Corner”; another piece composed of five men seated in variously tilted cubic chairs placed before a tilted mirror, “Five Seated Figures”; and, finally, the show’s largest work, “Many Times” (2000), in which 100 cast-resin figures of grinning Chinese men mill about singly and in groups on the gallery’s mezzanine. (They have no feet, as if planted in the gray concrete floor.) Oddly, the tableau sculptures of American artist George Segal (1924-2000) don’t rate much notice in the otherwise very informative exhibition catalog, but their obvious precedent is inescapable in the galleries.

The emotional solitude and alienation of Segal’s work has a different tone from Munoz’s, which rarely feels sentimental or melodramatic. But his gray, uniform effigies, which attempt to reflect the viewer while also maintaining an aesthetic distance, are unthinkable without Segal’s work from the 1960s.

Starting late in life -- the mature work spans just over a dozen years -- Munoz was also not especially prolific. His unexpected death (from an aneurysm) at 48 abruptly ended his still-youthful development as a sculptor. The show suggests an artist more of significant promise than major achievement, which adds a valedictory note of melancholy to the prominent barbed laughter.

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Juan Munoz

Where: MOCA at the Geffen Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave., Little Tokyo

When: Closed Mondays

Ends: July 27

Price: $8 adults; $5 students and seniors; children younger than 12 free

Contact: (213) 626-6222