Now, Op Is for Options

BRRRR! Reaching out to touch the frost-encrusted Ice Stick by Hans Haacke at the Milwaukee Art Center last week, visitors were expected to chill their fingers. All of the "Do Not Touch" signs in the gallery had been removed. OUCH! Gallerygoers could warm their fingers on three electrified aluminum columns that Sculptor John Goodyear calls Heat Sequence. And they could sit upon and be jiggled about by Royce Dendler's mechanized box titled Vibrate. By pressing buttons, they could activate David Jacobs' siren and two aluminum-and-rubber resonators, entitled collectively Mother's Mechanical Wonderful Wha, Wha!

Not only could they but did they. Called "Options," the exhibit is a fun-house display of 90 amusing works of art, and it is attracting delighted crowds. The show was conceived by Director Tracy Atkinson to demonstrate the variety of ways in which today's artists expect gallerygoers to be something more than merely onlookers. Originally he thought of calling the show "participatory art," but then it occurred to him that even the Mona Lisa requires a degree of participation. He finally settled on "Options" because he considers it a "more accurate and basic term, pointing to the common quality held by all such works--that they offer choices and alternatives."

Shadow Play. In many cases, the options in Milwaukee are simply yes or no decisions. Gallerygoers, for instance, have a choice of contemplating Andy Warhol's peeled version of a silk-screened banana, or admiring the unpeeled one. Or they can stoke Robert Watts's Stamp Machine with either nickels or dimes. (Having been removed from daily use to the higher realms of art in 1963, Watts has replaced its now outdated U.S. Government stamps with stamps of his own design.) They can strum the weird musical instruments of Francois and Bernard Baschet, but the atonal sounds evoked are far less controllable than those of the lowliest guitar. They can walk on Piero Gilardi's soft polyurethane carpet and be amazed when they do, for it is sculpted to look exactly like a bed of stones. Or they can tie themselves up in knots with Robert Israel's 35-foot-long Dacron and vinyl python titled Progress 35.

Strictly speaking, the option in most of these cases is to enter into the fun--or leave it alone. But several of the objects have been so intricately put together that they offer the viewers some real variants to work with. Oyvind Fahlstrom sets up panels dotted with comic-strip and newsclip images mounted on magnetized blocks; these can be moved around at will. The result, Fahlstrom suggests, is to produce the "elusive-mysterious quality of a never-fixed work of art." Gerald Oster's Instant Self-Skiagraphy permits the viewer-participant to make shadow pictures with his hand against a panel covered with phosphorescent paint. The panel retains the image for a while, before it slowly fades.

As Director Atkinson and the assembled artists in the show well know, optional art is deadly serious in intent. It is meant to give even the most inexperienced viewer a way to express compositions of his own, to allow him to share with the artist in the pleasure--and catharsis--of creation. But if catharsis implies tragedy, to most gallery-goers optional art ranks as high comedy. Milwaukee digs op primarily because it is fun.

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