"Rice Meals" by Wolfgang Laib View more images

The current exhibit at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art, "Pulse: Art, Healing, and Transformation," is an example of the right exhibit coming at just the right social, economic, and geographic juncture. At the moment, art is at the mercy of elitist perspectives and, thanks to rising museum fees, expensive tastes. "Pulse" brilliantly succeeds in reasserting art's transformative power.

With its broad range of sculptures, installations, photographs, videos, and paintings, the exhibit reconnects art with its traditional role of providing an experience that's incorruptible, enlightening, and redemptive. At the same time, the show readily acknowledges the truism that science can not solve all our ills. It also reminds us that complex social theory and scientific inquiry have not resulted in a saner world devoid of terrorist attacks, nor has it led to vaccines to cure such aliments as cancer, AIDS and, now, SARS.

In earlier points in history and in cultures other than our own, understanding these large issues would be the responsibility of art, as well as medicine, philosophy, and the social sciences. On one hand, the medical world is beginning to accept that the Western scientific model may have something to gain from such practices as acupuncture and Chinese herbal remedies. Yet, the role of art in healing has yet to be seriously considered, even though it was a nurse, Florence Nightingale, who noticed "variety of form and brilliancy of color in the objects presented to patients are actual means of recovery.

"Pulse" suggests a variety of ways in which art might help the unhealthy body heal. Many of these methods are not traditional; the exhibit avoids the kinds of scientific description that Leonardo da Vinci or Thomas Eakins presented in their detailed depictions of dissections. It also steers clear of Surrealism's subconscious images and the more sensational kind of tactics practiced by artists like Hermann Nitsch, whose "Orgies and Mysteries Theatre" are meant to lead their audiences into unconscious states of catharses.

Unlike the latter path to mysticism, "Pulse" takes a more reasoned approach to artistic healing. The closest the show gets to taking flights of esoteric states is with the inclusion of some of the work of the late German artist Joseph Beuys. Beuys was a sculptor, a leader of happenings, and a guru. He was a figure of immense charisma, with at least as firm a grasp on the nature of celebrity appeal as his contemporary Andy Warhol: his trademark fedora was as consciously exploited as Warhol's silver hair.

"Pedra e Ar" by Lygia Clark View more images

Beuys turned to art rather late in life, in his 40s, after severe depressions. He publicized what may have been an invented story of himself as a Luftwaffe pilot, who crashed but was saved from death by a Tartar tribesman. The guy wrapped him in felt and fat, items that later became symbols for healing and transformation in the artist's work. "I think art is a basic metaphor for all social freedoms," he declared, "but it should not be only a metaphor; it should be a real means, in daily life, to go in and transform the power fields of society."

One of Beuys' means of transformation were his shamanistic-like performances, including "Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me" presented in New York in 1974 and shown here in its video documentation. In this regenerative mock-ritual, Beuys meant to recreate a pre-civilized, primitive state -- a return to Romantic, regenerative myths, which previously had been off-limits in post-Nazi era Germany. In retrospect, the presentation deflates the myth that Beuys spent three days with a wild coyote: the beast in the video looks tamer than an unruly dog.

Beuys' emphasis on particular materials and their inherent transformative properties is also central to "The Rice Meals," Wolfgang Laib's more contemporary, ritualistic display of gold plates, each filled with a staple of life, rice, except one. In that bowl the artist puts in a handpicked sample of pollen.

To the extent that the late Brazilian Lygia Clark saw art as a way to heal psychic wounds, her work resembles Beuys'. But for Clark, art reconnected individuals to their senses, not to some mythic past. Believing that contemporary society, with its cold and inhuman surfaces and interactions, had divorced us from our sensual selves, Clark made malleable objects out of everyday materials. Viewers are meant to wear, touch, manipulate, prod, rub and pull these objects to reconnect to their physical and psychic selves.

The interactive aspect of Clark's remarkably complex work finds its descendents in Ernesto Neto's delightfully, large, malleably soft and huggable pods, "The Ovaloids Meeting," and Cai Guo-Quiang, Irene and Christine Hochenbuchler and David Mandela's installations.

The Hochenbuchler sisters are facilitators of communal projects for institutionalized groups of people, such as those with learning difficulties and psychiatric afflictions. A tumble of umbrella-like fabric forms stretching down from the ceiling and spiraling into an enclosed place, their piece strikes me as a transformation of the Minimalist Richard Serra's aggressive steel corridors into soft, protective and embracing feminine enclaves.

Mandella, likewise, uses fabric in his piece "A Stitch in Time," in which viewers are invited to a kind of sewing bee, where they can stitch whatever they wish into the long swatch of fabric Mandella provides. Cai also encourages viewers to interact with his work by inviting them to walk on a rocky path, stimulating foot reflexology points, and ending at a vending machine filled with bottled herbal cures.

In the '70s, the call for change through action took forms other than the inner-directed works of Beuys and Clark. Reflecting the rest of society, the art world was becoming increasing politicized; marginalized voices began to make themselves heard. Among them were the views of women, including Hannah Wilke's, whose chronicle (in photos, drawings, and sculptures) of her own death from cancer helped pave the way for artists like Bill T. Jones and Gretchen Bender with their film "Still/Here," and Leonilson and Felix Gonzalez-Torres with their sculptures, who use art to explore the devastation of AIDS.

"Pulse" by Richard Yarde View more images

Trained as a painter, Leonilson took up embroidery to create moving self-portraits of his decline from AIDS-related illnesses. Another of the show's artists, Richard Yarde, used his struggle with kidney failure as an inspiration for stunning watercolors, filled with abstract representations of suffering and hope.

Among these activist artists, the late Gonzalez-Torres' works are the least overtly self-referential and the most artistically groundbreaking. Visitors are invited to take a piece of candy from his stack on the gallery's floor. Thus, in the course of the exhibit, his sweet treats are consumed, transforming art from its role as a precious commodity into a brief and fleeting transition, like life itself.

The art works here don't offer any concrete prescriptions for specific illnesses. Instead of miracle cures, they remind us that art and its practitioners can offer new perspectives on illness, possibilities that society's worship of empirical science misses.

The "Pulse: Art, Healing, and Transformation" exhibit will be on display at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, MA through August 31, 2003. In conjunction with this exhibit, the ICA is presenting the world premiere of "Remedy." It is part of the ICA's Vitas Brevis program, in which artists are commissioned to create temporary public art works that respond to a specific site. Choreographer Ann Carlson and video artist Mary Ellen Strom have created an engagingly edited video of health care workers' daily movements, resulting in a montage of beautifully paced everyday interactions.

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