Contemporary art gets touchy-feely at ICA

By Jim Sullivan, Globe Correspondent, 08/07/2003

The main summer exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art starts with a long, straight pathway of smooth stones set in resin. The stones start small; over nine sections, they grow gradually larger. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to shed socks and shoes and walk it. With gunpowder-on-Japanese-paper drawings on a wall nearby, New York artist Cai Guo-Qiang connects the sensation on your feet to reflexology.

The concept that the body positively responds to stimulation of different parts of the soles of the feet is an old one, and when we gave it a try, we got a pleasurable, energized feeling, one that lasted as we toured the 15-artist exhibit.

"Pulse: Art, Healing and Transformation," which runs through the end of the month, asks "How can art and the creative process contribute to and even promote healing?"

At the ICA, it certainly offers a contemplative refuge on a hot summer day. The open space and the ambient music seem to slow the metabolism and shut out the bustle of Boylston Street. The nature of the art, sometimes playful, sometimes jarring, draws the visitor to consider how the mind and body relate to each other.

Six of the exhibits are interactive, breaking down perceived barriers between artist and viewer. These include Ernesto Neto's "The Ovaloids Meeting," where four pellet-filled, Lycra-covered forms are there to be hugged and probed. (A sign says "Please do not sit on, punch or roughhouse with them.")

Lygia Clark produced a series of cloth masks fitted with different devices to alter hearing, vision, and smell. Felix Gonzalez-Torres created an "Untitled (Placebo)," a "candy spill" where thousands of shimmering, silver-wrapped pieces of candy are laid out along a wall on the second floor. Take one; we did. It was a pineapple drop. Gonzalez-Torres intended the exhibit to be consumed and replenished.

You can't help smiling as you watch Joseph Beuys's "I Like America and America Likes Me," a videotape made during three days he spent in New York in 1974 with a coyote in a caged room. The tape is looped so you come to it at a random point and, say, watch Beuys, covered in a blanket, bend over slowly and extend a copper cane toward the coyote, who bites at it.

It's easy to imagine a thought bubble over the coyote's head reading: "What the heck am I doing in here with this crazy man? Why does man have dominion over us animals anyway?" Beuys has said that he chose the coyote because of its venerated position in Native American culture and he assumed a series of postures and ritual gestures to channel the coyote's chaotic energy and harmonize its potential through him. Uh, OK.

The most disturbing piece is Hannah Wilke's exploration of her lymphoma. Clumps of her hair are in one clear box. There's a large nude photo of her, taken one year before her death in 1993, with medical gauze attached to her thighs and a pot of flowers on her head; there's another photo next to it taken a few months later, in which she wears more medical attachments.

As we studied David Medalla's "A Stitch in Time," three stretches of woven cotton fabric in which people attach whatever they want to with needle and thread, we saw a striking young woman reach into her purse to take out a business card with a series of telephone numbers written on the back.

This is Yudelka Checo from the Dominican Republic, who on a visit to Miami recently had met a fabulous man from Madrid. He said he would call Monday. He did not. Nor did he call Tuesday. Here was Wednesday, and, smiling as she told her story, she sewed his card into the cotton. She said she felt a wave of tranquility from what she saw in the exhibit.

Sewing can be therapeutic, and the mundane items threaded into the fabric included a parking ticket, a Red Sox ticket, a crushed water bottle, receipts, a lollipop, money, and a key.