The Threads That Tie a Show Together

Rudolf Stingel’s Carpeting Makeover in Venice

Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times

In Venice, the exhibition “Rudolf Stingel” unfolds over the atrium and both upper floors of the Palazzo Grassi; in the larger salons, the carpeting reinforces the architecture of the building.

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: August 20, 2013

VENICE — François Pinault, the French megacollector and mogul, was smart to give the painter Rudolf Stingel the run of his regal Venetian exhibition space, the Palazzo Grassi, along with an elastic budget. Still, it was a risk. Quantities of money and space can bring out the worst in artists, including Mr. Stingel. But this time, the resources were well used.

The visually explosive, historically charged transformation of the palazzo’s interior is one of the signal achievements of Mr. Stingel’s fascinating career and just about the best contemporary art in Venice outside of “The Encyclopedic Palace,” the exceptional centerpiece of this year’s Biennale.

At a moment when art is swamped with big-ticket, high-tech spectacles that overwhelm, Mr. Stingel’s effort is the exception that proves the rule. It engulfs but also backs off, giving the viewer plenty to look at and think about, and plenty of room for doing so, often with a weird, unexpected one-to-one intimacy.

Mr. Stingel has achieved this rarity by lining most of the palazzo’s public spaces — the vast atrium and the two floors of enfiladed galleries overlooking it — with synthetic carpet printed with an enlarged, repeating digital facsimile of a predominantly red Ottoman carpet. He then countered the blazing color with noncolor: grisaille oil paintings hung sparingly throughout the palazzo, usually one, and occasionally two, canvases in each gallery. Abstract paintings dot the second floor; the third has loosely Photo Realist paintings of carved-wood medieval saints and madonnas, some quite small, copied from old art history books.

The result of this makeover is a three-dimensional interplay of two-dimensional mediums (painting, textiles and photography) that carefully layers abstraction and representation; original and reproduction; East and West; art and craft; and personal, local and world history, all into an encompassing environment of exhilarating complexity.

Mr. Stingel is among the great anti-painting painters of our age, a descendant of Warhol but much more involved with painting’s conventions and processes, which he alternately spurns, embraces, parodies or exaggerates. His art asks what are paintings, who makes them, and how?

Among much else, he has made paintings by walking on thick slabs of white plastic foam in shoes dipped in corrosive acid, creating the one-liner effect of footsteps in snow. He has made painting kits (canvas, paint, spray paint, instructions and a bit of ballet tulle to use as a stencil), whose purchasers can attempt their own Stingel abstractions, simpler versions of those on view here.

He has also installed silver foil-covered insulation foam that the public is allowed to mar and write on; he subsequently divides these “ready-made” surfaces into paintings. And in the past decade, Mr. Stingel has revisited his early training in representation with Photo Realist works: morose self-portraits, and portraits of people important to him, like his longtime dealer, Paula Cooper. These works signal the autobiographical subtext to his seemingly distanced approach.

Throughout his career, Mr. Stingel’s installation pieces have expanded painting’s physical borders in starkly efficient ways, including the unfurling of great expanses of carpet on either wall or floor and the claiming of them, often convincingly, as paintings.

The Grassi carpet painting is his biggest ever, the first to cover both walls and floors at once, and unusually freighted with history. It is from the early 18th century (the palazzo is mid-18th-century) and just the kind of exotic luxury item that regularly passed through Venice when it was a major gateway to the Middle East.

Such carpets sometimes ended up depicted in Renaissance paintings, with the result that certain patterns are forever linked to the artists who used them and are, for example, referred to as Lotto, Memling, Holbein or Crivelli.

(The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a Lotto carpet from 16th-century Turkey on view in Gallery 459 that is thought to be the carpet depicted in Lotto’s 1542 “Alms of Saint Anthony,” an oil-on-wood painting hanging in the Basilica of Santia Giovanni e Paolo, not far from the Palazzo Grassi.)

At first sight, Mr. Stingel’s pictorial wonderland is mesmerizing; you seem to float like a fish in an aquarium or fall, like Alice, into some unusually lavish rabbit hole. The white cube is obliterated, absorbed completely into an encompassing, unending visual fact. Appropriately, the Persian word for “carpet” means to spread.

The mind is pulled in, too, figuring it all out: the carpet has a large central medallion on a tight field surrounded by an ornate border; its pattern is greatly enlarged (roughly eight times the original); it is the same throughout the building. Above all, it just keeps going: up the walls and the stairs, into the elevator. Always it softens sound (and comforts the feet). This built-in sense of “hushed awe” enhances the privacy of the experience.

Upstairs, space folds and unfolds, as patterned walls and floors seem to meld into continuous planes. You become aware of the care taken with piecing the carpet to fit the rooms. In the smallest, it seems magnified. In the larger salons, the giant motifs seem closer to human scale, chiefly because the carpet borders sometimes reiterate the architecture, implying wide molding around doors or wainscoting along walls. This makes sense: such carpets often had architectural inspiration in Islamic buildings, monuments and gardens.

As for the “normal” paintings: On the second floor, their loose, abstract gestures contrast with the considered craft of the rug. Some paintings with hints of brocade and signs of the stenciled tulle echo carpet’s foliate motifs and evoke the tiny grid of carpet weaving.

In a stately second-floor salon, overlooking the Grand Canal, a large portrait of the Austrian artist Franz West — a close friend of Mr. Stingel’s, who died a year ago — startles. West’s youthful image is flecked with paint and coffee cup stains, as if it had sat around his (or Mr. Stingel’s) studio for years. (One of Mr. Stingel’s darker self-portraits, based on a similarly damaged photograph, hangs in a corner of the ground floor, as if intended as a signature.)

The paintings of carved saints on the third floor set up an especially lively dialogue, contrasting Christian imagery with Islamic semiabstraction, European with Middle Eastern, opulence and love of nature with colorless deprivation and martyrdom. Moving in to examine the small paintings of St. Elizabeth, St. Barbara or John the Baptist brings you up against the Op-Art blurriness of the printed carpet, and also contrasts modern pixilation with one of its ancient precursors: hand-tied carpets.

In a sense, Mr. Stingel has merged two forms of local architecture, turning a formerly residential palazzo into a setting for religious art after purifying it with the high, sometimes religious, art of another culture. It is by far the best exhibition seen at the Palazzo Grassi since Mr. Pinault bought it from the city of Venice in 2004 as a showplace for his often tone-deaf, inordinately blue-chip collection. Maybe its run should be extended.

In a city full of centuries-old churches, whose in situ artworks never move, why not leave an aggressively contemporary site-specific one in place? Maybe the Dia Foundation could take it over; it has just as much startling displacement as Walter De Maria’s famed “New York Earth Room,” yet it is also profoundly at home.

Theft Charges Reverberate in Connecticut Art World

Librado Romero/The New York Times

Jasper Johns in his studio in northwestern Connecticut in 1999. Unlike some artists, who employ many assistants, Mr. Johns is said to work with a small staff.

By PETER APPLEBOME and GRAHAM BOWLEY

Published: August 18, 2013

For 16 years, William Morrison has watched the passing parade at his airy, contemporary Morrison Gallery in Kent, in northwestern Connecticut, where luminaries like Meryl Streep, Sam Waterston, Kevin Bacon and Kate Winslet, and far-flung artists great and small live the understated good life of the Litchfield Hills.

Last week he was pondering something less genteel — federal charges that James Meyer, a familiar local artist and longtime assistant to the modern master Jasper Johns, had stolen 22 works from Mr. Johns and had sold them through an unidentified New York gallery for $6.5 million.

“I never would have imagined this,” Mr. Morrison said. “He was always very nice to me, and I thought he was loyal to Jasper. If it’s true, I’m shocked about it and disgusted. It’s crazy. Isn’t being Jasper Johns’s assistant enough?”

Mr. Meyer’s arrest last week rocked the New England reserve of the area, where Mr. Johns is a revered but largely invisible presence and Mr. Meyer a midlevel figure in the local art scene whose stature was elevated by his relationship with a celebrated master. And it highlighted a dynamic as old as fame itself, the often-fraught relationship between an established star and a younger hopeful working on his behalf.

While an artist like Jeff Koons is famous for hiring dozens of assistants to help produce his paintings and sculptures, Mr. Johns, who did not respond to requests for an interview, works with only a small number of assistants at his compound; they are said to be loyal and tight-lipped, even after leaving his employ, which made the news even more surprising.

Chris Mao, founder and director of Chambers Fine Art, a Chelsea gallery, who said he had known Mr. Johns well for several years, had the impression that his assistants were few in number. “It is mostly him,” Mr. Mao said. “He is working hard even at this stage.”

One person who worked for years as an assistant to an internationally known artist — who spoke anonymously because he did not want this instance to reflect on his experience and who had no knowledge of the Johns-Meyer relationship — noted that most artists’ assistants are artists on their own who can risk losing their own artistic identities and identifying to a dangerous degree with someone else’s success.

He said: “I’m sure that many, many years ago, there were a few guys running around the Sistine Chapel trying to pick up girls or impress a potential patron by saying things like: This thing would be a mess if it weren’t for me. You see the way those hands are almost touching? Mike wanted them further apart.”

The relationship between Mr. Johns and Mr. Meyer was long-lived and extraordinarily important for Mr. Meyer, whose Web site says he was “born of Mexican heritage and adopted in Lynwood, California, in 1962,” grew up on Long Island, attended the School of Visual Arts in New York and became the studio assistant for Mr. Johns in 1985.

The indictment charges that Mr. Meyer, 51, carried out the thefts from September 2006 to February 2012. He was arrested on Wednesday and appeared in court in Hartford, where he was released on an unsecured $250,000 bond. The indictment accuses Mr. Meyer of having falsely told an unidentified New York gallery that Mr. Johns, who is 83, had given him the pieces as gifts. According to a federal official, Mr. Johns’s lawyer was the one who contacted the authorities. Mr. Meyer has pleaded not guilty. Neither Mr. Meyer nor his lawyer, Donna Recant, responded to requests for comment.

Around the end of the period cited in the indictment, some friends of Mr. Meyer were surprised to learn he was no longer employed by Mr. Johns. Soon stories began to circulate in Connecticut and New York that the split involved allegations of theft. There were other signs that not all was normal. On March 5, 2012, less than a month after the split, Mr. Meyer transferred ownership of the house he and his wife, Amy Jenkins, had owned together to her name alone.

In an interview from the 1990s with Matthew Rose, an artist and writer, Mr. Meyer described himself as a total naïf who barely knew Mr. Johns’s work or how art studios functioned when he was looking for a job and was given a list of some of the most important artists in New York. He stumbled into a position with Mr. Johns that lasted 27 years. During that time, he also tried to make his own name as an artist with works whose influences included suburbia and Dostoyevsky filtered through the techniques and sensibilities of Mr. Johns.

“While 1960s suburban American remains my primary source of inspiration,” Mr. Meyer wrote on his Web site, “rethinking the linkage of image, shadow and subsequent images, sets off a conceptual clock of instantly recognizable pieces to a more complex puzzle. It’s my way of generating psychological power.”

During the last three decades Mr. Johns rose to almost unimaginable heights in the art world and marketplace. His painting “Flag” from the collection of the best-selling author Michael Crichton, who died in 2008, sold for $28.6 million at a New York City auction in 2010. Koji Inoue, a Christie’s specialist and contemporary art expert, said Mr. Johns’s works can change hands in private sales for significantly higher prices — sometimes above $100 million.

Mr. Meyer has regularly exhibited his art, including at galleries in New York like the Gering & López on Fifth Avenue, where he had a show this spring. According to Mr. Meyer’s Web site, his work has been acquired by some prestigious collectors and institutions including the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

But he appears to have had only modest success at public auction. Artnet, which tracks auction sales, lists only five instances when his works were put up for auction. Four times his works were “bought in,” or failed to sell, including a 1995 watercolor with an estimate of $2,500 to $3,000. In 2011, however, a mixed media collage sold at auction in Stockholm for $788.

The indictment alleges that Mr. Meyer deposited $3.4 million of the $6.5 million in illegal sales in a Connecticut bank. Records show that Mr. Meyer owns four cars: a 2005 Subaru, 1971 Volkswagen bus, 2008 Mini Cooper and 2006 Toyota pickup; two motorcycles, including a 2007 BMW; and three trailers. In recent years, he has owned several boats including a 42-foot fiberglass sailboat that is now registered in his wife’s name.

But the house, now in his wife’s name, is a modest one in Lakeville, Conn., and was purchased in 1996 for $185,000, records show. Over the years, he took out six mortgages on the property, which is now assessed at $361,428. Mr. Meyer lists as his residence a slightly frayed house in Salisbury about 15 minutes on two-lane country roads from Mr. Johns’s 102-acre gated estate in Sharon.

A few people in Mr. Meyer’s circle were familiar with the allegations, but more common was concern for Mr. Meyer and Ms. Jenkins, an admired art teacher and artist, and their two children, who attended local schools.

Mr. Meyer is lauded by friends as a public spirited part of the community who helped found the popular artgarage in Falls Village, Conn., an after-school art studio at a local high school. Others describe him as overbearing and too quick to traffic on his association with Mr. Johns.

“Everyone is shocked, because they know him to be someone of integrity,” said one friend, who did not want to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the situation. He added: “It’s got to be a complicated psychological thing, working with an artist for so long. Who knows, maybe Jim felt entitled.”

Ruth Asawa, an artist who learned to draw in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II and later earned renown weaving wire into intricate, flowing, fanciful abstract sculptures, died on Aug. 6 at her home in San Francisco, where many of her works now dot the cityscape. She was 87.

Her daughter Aiko Cuneo confirmed the death.

Ms. Asawa had been shunted from one detention camp to another as a child before blossoming under the tutelage of the artists Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Franz Kline and Josef Albers. Gaining notice in the art world while still a student, she soon began building a wider following with abstract wire sculptures that expressed both the craftsmanship she had learned from Mexican basket makers as well as her ambition to extend line drawings into a third dimension. Many of these were hanging mobiles.

In 1968 she startled her admirers by creating her first representational work, a fountain in Ghirardelli Square on San Francisco’s waterfront. It had two mermaids — one nursing a “merbaby” — frogs, turtles, splashing water and a recording of frogs croaking.

Lawrence Halprin, the distinguished landscape architect who designed the waterfront space, had planned to install an abstract fountain. But after a long, unexplained delay, the developer chose Ms. Asawa for the job. Her creation set off a freewheeling debate about aesthetics, feminism and public art. Mr. Halprin, who had been a fan of Ms. Asawa’s abstractions, complained that the mermaids looked like a suburban lawn ornament.

Ms. Asawa countered with old-fashioned sentiment. “For the old, it would bring back the fantasy of their childhood,” she said, “and for the young, it would give them something to remember when they grow old.”

By and large, San Franciscans loved it. Ms. Asawa went on to design other public fountains and became known in San Francisco as the “fountain lady.” For a work in a plaza near Union Square, she mobilized 200 schoolchildren to mold hundreds of images of the city in dough, which were then cast in iron.

The work became the locus of a dispute this summer with Apple Inc., which wanted to remove the sculpture to make way for a plaza adjacent to a store it is building. After a public outcry, the company and the city promised to protect the sculpture, but the final disposition of the piece remains unresolved.

Ms. Asawa’s wire sculptures are in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In May, one of her pieces sold at auction at Christie’s for $1.4 million, four times its appraised value.

After the M. H. de Young Museum in San Francisco opened a new building in 2005, it installed 15 of Ms. Asawa’s most significant hanging wire sculptures at the base of its tower. As they drift with air currents, her large organic forms have been said to resemble a giant, eerie kelp forest.

Her work is inextricably linked to her life. “Glimpses of my childhood” inspired her, she once said. One memory, of sunlight pouring through a dragonfly’s translucent wing, was transmuted into the crocheted wire sculptures for which she first became known. In 1958, The New York Times wrote of their “gossamer lightness” and the way “the circular and oval shapes seem like magic lanterns, one within the other.”

Ms. Asawa said another influence came from riding on the back of horse-drawn farm equipment on the fruit and vegetable farms where her Japanese-American parents worked in California. She made patterns with her feet as they dragged on the ground.

“We made endless hourglass figures that I now see as the forms within forms in my crocheted wire sculptures,” she said in an interview with The Contra Costa Times in 2006.

A third influence — one she insisted was positive — was being held in internment camps with her family during the war, a fate that befell 120,000 Japanese-Americans, rounded up by the federal government for fear that they might aid the enemy. Her family spent the first five months of detention in stables at the Santa Anita Park racetrack. It was there that three animators from the Walt Disney Studios taught her to draw.

“I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one,” she said in 1994. “Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the internment, and I like who I am.”

Ruth Aiko Asawa was born on Jan. 24, 1926, in Norwalk, a Southern California farming town. Her third-grade teacher encouraged her artwork, and in 1939, her drawing of the Statue of Liberty took first prize in a school competition to represent what it means to be an American.

In 1942 F.B.I. agents seized her father and sent him to an internment camp in New Mexico. Ms. Asawa did not see him for six years. Two months later, she, her mother and her five siblings were taken to the racetrack. After five months, they were taken to a camp in Arkansas, where Ms. Asawa graduated from high school.

In 1943, a Quaker organization arranged for her to attend Milwaukee State Teachers College, now the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, to prepare to be an art teacher. She completed three years but was unable to earn her degree after being barred from a required student-teacher program because of her ethnicity.

Ms. Asawa then spent three years at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, a magnet for budding artists and renowned teachers. There she befriended the choreographer Merce Cunningham and studied painting with Albers, whose theories on color were immensely influential. While still a student of his, in 1948, she caught the attention of a reviewer for The Times, who observed that her work “transformed Albers’ color-shape experiments into personal fantasy.”

Ms. Asawa had started exploring wire as an artistic medium after a trip to Mexico in 1947, when she noticed looped wire baskets being used in the markets to sell eggs and produce.

“I was interested in it because of the economy of a line, making something in space, enclosing it without blocking it out,” she explained. “It’s still transparent. I realized that if I was going to make these forms, which interlock and interweave, it can only be done with a line because a line can go anywhere.”

Ms. Asawa wore bandages to protect her hands when working with wire, but still suffered constant cuts. When young, her children were usually at her side while she worked.

Her husband of 59 years, Albert Lanier, an architect she met at Black Mountain, died in 2008. Their son Adam died in 2003. In addition to her daughter, Ms. Cuneo, she is survived by her sons, Xavier, Hudson and Paul Lanier; her daughter Addie Lanier; 10 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

Ms. Asawa supported arts education in San Francisco public schools, and in 2011, the one to which she was most devoted was renamed for her. For years Ms. Asawa maintained the grounds herself.

Her own educational experience came full circle in 1998, when the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which had prevented her from graduating a half-century earlier when it was a teachers college, sought to present her with an honorary doctorate. Ms. Asawa asked that she be awarded the bachelor’s degree instead.

In today's contemporary art world, most people would consider the status of California Light & Space artist James Turrell (b. 1943) to be nothing short of paradisiacal. He has three concurrent, major museum exhibitions going: a retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and solo shows at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. At Lacma, time-sensitive tickets limit the number of people admitted at any one time, with posted suggestions as to how much time should be spent with each work so the visitor's eyes can adjust for optimum viewing. Houston is exhibiting seven of Mr. Turrell's "immersive light environments" that date from the late 1960s to the present, along with what the museum calls its "beloved light tunnel," "The Light Inside" (1999). "Aten Reign"(2013)—a hyperpretty, computer-controlled, colored-light installation—occupies the Guggenheim Museum's famous rotunda.

Each exhibition affords viewers the kind of pure, unencumbered-by-things perception commonly associated with religious ecstasy and revelatory near-death experiences. Add to this heady mix Mr. Turrell's continuing, ultragrand project to turn Roden Crater—an extinct volcano in the northern Arizona desert—into a celestial observatory that's one giant work of art, and you've got an artist whose oeuvre comes as close as any out there to being timeless and universal. Or so it may seem.

Mr. Turrell—a handsome man with an oracular presence, a long beard and a full head of silver hair that he often tops with a black cowboy hat—is the son of an aeronautical-engineer father and a mother, trained in medicine, who worked in the Peace Corps. Mr. Turrell earned a pilot's license at 16, studied perceptual psychology at Pomona College and art as a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine. Perhaps influenced by his Quaker parents, he registered as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam war.

LACMA/James Turrell/Florian Holzherr

'Afrum (White)' (1966)

"Afrum (White)" (1966), in the Lacma exhibition, was Mr. Turrell's ingeniously simple breakthrough work: a rectangle of brilliant white light projected into the corner of a room to give the illusion that it was a luminous, hovering box. A year later, at age 24, he had a solo show of several such projections at the Pasadena Art Museum, and was credited in many quarters as being the first artist to put light itself on display as art.

But Mr. Turrell didn't just slide down a beam of light and land, sui generis, in the Southern California art world. Los Angeles—with its shiny custom-car culture and surfer-Zen regard for the Pacific horizon—already had a "finish fetish" art style that emphasized light reflections on shiny surfaces. As early as 1963, Larry Bell was experimenting with mirrored boxes and Craig Kauffman with vacuum-formed plastic, and by the mid-1960s, Robert Irwin and Doug Wheeler were busily dematerializing the art object by including a gauzy electric-light surround as part and parcel of their minimalist wall works. (Mr. Irwin, who's about to turn 85, has one of his miraculous scrim pieces, "Scrim Veil—Black Rectangle—Natural Light," from 1977, reinstalled at the Whitney Museum through Sept. 1.) But where light is concerned, Mr. Turrell—whose daunting output falls into such categories as "Space Division Constructions," "Veils," "Perceptual Cells," the "Magnatron Series," the "Tall Glass / Wide Glass Series," the "Window Series" and "Skyspaces"—is clearly the head honcho.

A Skypace is essentially a beautifully placed and tailored hole in a ceiling (or the open top of a specially built enclosure) that reveals a crisply cropped sliver of sky that seems to exist as a flat shape on the ceiling's own plane and at the same time accentuates one's perception of changing natural light. In 1974, Mr. Turrell's first Skyspace was installed in the residence of the Milanese collector Giuseppe Panza. Since then, Mr. Turrell has executed more than 80 such works around the world.

They're not cheap. Much of the proceeds of their sales, however, have been pumped—along with funds from the DIA Foundation and other helping hands—into the Roden Crater project. Completion dates for this remote complex of architecturally and sculpturally fastidious tunnels, ramps, stairs, platforms and a Skyspace iteration, have been set, variously, at 1990, 2000 and 2011. As of now, it looks as if the Roden Crater might take its place—although much more serviceable and beautiful in its incompletion—alongside the Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota, which was begun in 1948 and is still being worked on.

Mr. Turrell isn't bogged down in a probably neverending Roden Crater enterprise, however. In the Lacma retrospective, there's a spherical Perceptual Cell entitled "Light Reignfall" (2011), into which a viewer (after paying about double the cost of an ordinary ticket to the show) is slid, face up in a big drawer, in order to experience a personal 10-minute lightshow. More democratically, spectators at the Guggenheim can stand, sit or lie supine and look up at the smooth, 60-minute color cycle of "Aten Reign," a cone of concentric ovals ascending toward the museum's famous skylight.

The purposes of Mr. Turrell's art are profoundly simple: To make the viewer realize that his art takes place within one's perceptual apparatus—indeed, consciousness—rather than outside of it, embedded in a configuration of inert material, and to make the viewer aware of the act of perception itself. "Seeing oneself see," Turrellians call it. By doing this, viewers shake themselves free from a more earthbound kind of aesthetic perception that is rooted in objects, making judgments of good-better-best among them, and improving one's taste. (Mr. Turrell has said that "Taste is repression.")

Do Mr. Turrell's work, and its wonderful, breathtaking arc from "Afrum (White)" to "Aten Reign," truly escape taste? Which is to ask, do they fly free from history, style and the vicissitudes of culture? Although the attempt is both noble and exhilarating, the answer is no.

photograph by David Heald - Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Installation view of 'Aten Reign' (2013) at the Guggenheim Museum

After a while, looking up at "Aten Reign," one notices in the first layer of scrim, stretched overhead, a couple of individual threads, a bit of dust, an incipient wrinkle. Inexorably, one begins to pay attention, as it were, to the man behind the curtain. And the nested ovals are necessarily tints of one color or two closely neighboring colors at a time, a convention in high-end room décor redolent of Los Angeles in the 1950s. As shapes, they evoke the post-Surrealism and abstract classicism of such earlier Southern California artists as Helen Lundeberg and Frederick Hammersley. And on a track parallel to the pop-culture influences of custom cars and surfer's bliss, those two painting styles fed directly into the work of the "finish fetish" artists who were Mr. Turrell's artistic contemporaries in mid-1960s Los Angeles.

That doesn't mean Mr. Turrell's art falls short in its ambitions. Its inescapable Southern California flavor merely reiterates the truth that particular times, places and, yes, tastes, cling to works of art even as cosmically intended as "Light Reignfall" and the Roden Crater project. Such human traces are, in fact, what give visceral life to art that wishes to be abstractly universal.

Mr. Plagens is an artist and writer in New York.

A version of this article appeared August 15, 2013, on page D7 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Can the Light Set You Free?.

“Untitled” by Jackson Pollock was one of the forged works. How imitations of the most heralded Abstract Expressionists by a complete unknown could have fooled connoisseurs and clients remains a mystery.

By PATRICIA COHEN and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

Published: August 15, 2013

For 15 years, some of the art world’s most established dealers and experts rhapsodized about dozens of newly discovered masterworks by titans of Modernism. Elite buyers paid up to $17 million to own just one of these canvases, said to have been created by the hands of artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell.

But federal prosecutors say that most, if not all, of the 63 ballyhooed works — which fetched more than $80 million in sales — were painted in a home and garage in Queens by one unusually talented but unknown artist who was paid only a few thousand dollars apiece for his handiworks.

Authorities did not name or charge the painter and provided few identifying details except to say he had trained at a Manhattan art school in a variety of disciplines including painting, drawing and lithography. He was selling his work on the streets of New York in the early 1990s, they said, when he was spotted by a Chelsea art dealer who helped convert his work into one of the most audacious art frauds in recent memory.

The new details about the man said to have created the fakes were contained in a superseding indictment, handed up Wednesday against one of the co-conspirators, Glafira Rosales, an obscure dealer from Long Island who was arrested after a lengthy Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry. She has been charged with wire fraud and money laundering in connection to what authorities have called a scam, but her boyfriend, alleged to be the other co-conspirator who discovered the painter, has not been charged.

Investigators say Ms. Rosales sold 40 of the counterfeit works through Knoedler & Company, a venerable Upper East Side gallery that took in about $63 million from their sale. The gallery, which abruptly closed in November 2011, kept $43 million of that sum, and paid Ms. Rosales $20 million. Fakes sold through a second Manhattan dealer, Julian Weissman, brought in another $17 million, according to the indictment.

Meanwhile, the painter earned $5,400 for a painting in December 2005 and $7,000 for another in February 2008, the indictment said.

Ms. Rosales has pleaded not guilty and was released on bail earlier this week. Knoedler, its former president Ann Freedman, and Mr. Weissman have repeatedly said they believed the works they sold had been authentic.

How imitations of the most heralded Abstract Expressionists by a complete unknown could have fooled connoisseurs and clients remains a mystery.

“It’s impressive,” said Jack Flam, president of the Dedalus Foundation, the nonprofit organization that authenticates Motherwell’s work. “Whoever did these paintings was very well-informed of the practices of the artists.”

One of the first experts to publicly identify some of these paintings as forgeries, Mr. Flam noted that not only the works themselves, but also the backs of the paintings and the way the canvases were treated and the frames constructed aped the styles of the artists.

But he said “the way we look at reality is highly influenced by the context it’s presented to us.” The fact that they were sold by Knoedler, a respected gallery, influenced people’s opinions, he said.

Ms. Rosales’s boyfriend and business partner, who was not named in the indictment but has previously been identified in court papers as Jose Carlos Bergantiños-Diaz, processed the freshly painted fakes, “heating them, cooling them, and exposing them to the elements outdoors, in an attempt to make the fake works seem older than, in fact, they were,” the indictment said.

Ms. Rosales concocted various stories about the sudden appearance of so many never-seen-before works, telling Knoedler and Mr. Weissman that a majority came from a family friend who had inherited them from his father and insisted on remaining anonymous. The works, she said, were acquired in the 1950s and kept stashed in a sealed container.

Eight lawsuits have been brought by customers who say they were duped into buying forgeries. Many of the works were subjected to forensic testing that concluded they were forgeries.

Two of those suits were settled, including one involving a Pollock bought by a London hedge fund director for $17 million.

Ms. Freedman’s lawyer, Nicholas Gravante Jr., said: “Rosales’s confession confirms that Ann Freedman was the central victim of this criminal scheme.” Knoedler’s lawyer, Charles D. Schmerler, said in a statement: “If proven true, the new allegations against Rosales are a sad development for the entire art world.” But he said claims that Knoedler knowingly sold inauthentic paintings were baseless.

A lawyer for Ms. Rosales, Steven R. Kartagener, declined to comment on the new charges.

John Howard, a Wall Street executive who has sued Knoedler, Ms. Freedman and Ms. Rosales after paying $4 million for a painting attributed to Willem de Kooning, said that after he purchased the work in 2007, he asked Ms. Freedman to be on the lookout for a rare item — a small Motherwell from the artist’s acclaimed “Spanish Elegy” series.

“I doubt you’ll ever see one,” he remembered her saying.

Then six months later, he said, he got a call from the gallery saying one had surprisingly turned up. He decided not to buy it, he said. He noted that the work remained in an inventory of works unsold when the gallery shut its doors.                       

Owner Who Plans to Sell a Banksy Mural Steps Forward

Johnny Ohalloran spends a moment over the grave of 18-year-old graffiti artist Israel Hernandez Llach, who died after being shocked by a police officer's Taser, during the youth's funeral in Florida, August 14, 2013. (Al Diaz/Miami Herald/MCT)

A tearful funeral service Wednesday ended a week of mourning for the family of an 18-year-old artist who died after Miami Beach police shot him with a Taser.

But relatives and community leaders say they're still waiting for answers about Israel Hernandez-Llach's death.

More than a hundred people, including many teenagers, attended the service at Vista Memorial Gardens & Funeral Home in Miami Lakes. Some carried red roses and wore pins designed by the young man's friend, a fellow artist. His mother and sister linked arms and wailed along with others as they followed the casket to the grave site under the mid-day sun.

Only sobs broke the silence as the casket was lowered into the grave. Relatives of the Colombian-born young man took turns dropping earth onto the casket. Unusually, many in the crowd chose to stay as heavy equipment did the rest. The teen's mother stepped away, leaning on others for support.

"This is a very sad day, not only for the family but the whole Hispanic community," said Fabio Andrade, a family friend and president of the Americas Community Center. He broke down in tears when speaking of the young man and said community members are rallying to reform guidelines for the use of Tasers.

The family is still waiting for authorities to explain why their son died Aug. 6 after police caught him spray-painting graffiti on a building near 71st Street and Collins Avenue. They've received no official answers from police or the medical examiner, according to Andrade.

"There is no question after seeing Lito after seven days that there were really bad bruises on the body that shows that there was more than just a Taser," he said, using a term of endearment. "You could see it very clearly when we received the body." Police have said he was Tasered just once and no other force was used in making the arrest.

According to the police report, Hernandez-Llach "came crashing down hard" onto the hood of a car after launching himself over a fence to get away from police.

Miami Beach officer Jorge Mercado, who fired the Taser that struck the young man in the chest, was placed on administrative leave after the incident.

The service coincided with the release of the police radio recording that captured 14 minutes of conversations between officers, dispatchers and paramedics on the morning that Hernandez-Llach was Tasered.

The tape begins at 5:13 a.m. as a police officer, presumably Mercado, breathlessly reports to dispatchers that he is pursuing a suspect.

"Going into a building,'' the officer says, panting. He continues announcing his location, as he pursues the subject for several minutes, describing him as a 6-foot-1 male with a yellow or cream-colored, long-sleeved shirt and dreadlocks. Three minutes into the chase, another officer interrupts, asking why they were chasing the suspect. The dispatcher responds: graffiti. The dispatcher begins to re-deploy other units to the area.

One officer questions the wisdom of reassigning patrols to the call.

"This is a graffiti subject. We'll look in the area...but like I said, this is a misdemeanor. We're not going to bring the dogs out for this. We're gonna' be looking out till we find him, but he's probably hiding out somewhere.''

Seven minutes after the chase begins, an officer spies Hernandez-Llach hopping the fence, then announces that he is in custody. About 30 seconds later, an officer reports that the suspect appears to be having a "seizure,'' though the officer says he is breathing. There is no mention of a Taser being used.

Tasers result in death in only the rarest of cases. When deaths have occurred in the past, they are often the result of a pre-existing medical condition or a reaction to drugs in the system. The medical examiner hasn't ruled on the cause of death pending the result of toxicology tests.

The funeral service followed an all-night wake during which many stopped by to view the open casket. The funeral home donated the plot and services after hearing that the family was trying to raise money for the burial.

"This is the time for the authorities to change something," said Manuel Santander, a family friend. "Anything we do, it's going to be the same for Israel and the family, but at least the police department, the city and Miami-Dade County have to think about how this thing doesn't happen again."
 

By Katia Savchuk and Julie Brown

ROSENBAUM

The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/ARS

Jackson Pollock's 'Number 7, 1952.'

Water Mill, N.Y.
And Southampton, N.Y.

In accounts of the Abstract Expressionist era, painter and assemblage-maker Alfonso Ossorio (1916-1990) is better known for throwing great parties and purchasing important works by major artists than for producing significant work of his own.

Attempting to rewrite that history is "Angels, Demons, and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet," the provocative show at the Parrish Art Museum near the Long Island communities where Ossorio, as well as Jackson Pollock, lived and worked. It positions the underrated oeuvre of the wealthy bon vivant on equal footing with works by Pollock and Jean Dubuffet, his two renowned friends, who held him in high regard as a professional colleague. What they all had in common was a penchant for experimenting with unconventional materials and techniques, and a predilection for rawness over refinement.

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The Ossorio Foundation, Sally Vanasse and Nicole Vanasse/Lee Rosenbaum

Alfonso Ossorio's 'Head' (1951).

"Ossorio's patronage overshadowed what we know of him as an artist," observed Klaus Ottmann, curator-at-large of Washington's Phillips Collection, where a larger version of the show opened in February. Conventional wisdom pegged Ossorio as a dilettante and Sunday painter, and an early collector of masterpieces by Pollock, Dubuffet and Clyfford Still. Five works formerly in his collection are now on display at the Parrish. They had once been ensconced at the Creeks, Ossorio's grand East Hampton estate on Georgica Pond, which he bought on Pollock's recommendation. (It is now owned by the billionaire Ronald Perelman.)

Grappling with the question of why "his artistic career [was] so thoroughly marginalized," Phillips Collection director Dorothy Kosinski wrote in her catalog preface for the show (which she co-curated with Mr. Ottmann) that Ossorio "was perhaps too difficult to categorize" both personally (Philippines-born, naturalized American of mixed ethnic heritage, observant Catholic, gay) and professionally (diverse techniques, styles and media).

Pollock and Ossorio first met in 1949 through dealer Betty Parsons, who exhibited both. Pollock suggested that his new friend visit Dubuffet in France, which Ossorio did later that year and again in 1951. Although interested in each other's work, Pollock and Dubuffet never managed to meet.

The best evidence that Ossorio was no Sunday painter is his feverish burst of productivity in 1950, during a sojourn in the Philippines—his first time back since being sent away as a child to receive a British and U.S. education.

He had returned to design the interior of the chapel of St. John the Worker, being constructed for employees of his family's sugar factory, the source of his substantial wealth. While creating the chapel's monumental, fiery-hued mural depicting the Last Judgment, Ossorio also produced hundreds of his most riveting, idiosyncratic works—the so-called Victorias Drawings (actually, watercolors), named after a mill town on the island of Negros where the chapel was located. What is thought to be the first Victorias image is tellingly titled "The Child Returns."

These small, vibrant works on paper, swirling with lush reds, oranges and greens, are anomalous among the pieces in the show, including the other Ossorios. With their tropical palette and haunting treatment of religion and family, they convey the disturbing emotions unleashed by the artist's bittersweet homecoming. In the first page of his Philippines diary, he described his "lonely" childhood and sense of being "never at home in any conventional category."

Even the technique used to create these distinctive works was a departure for Ossorio. Inspired by the Surrealist Victor Brauner, he employed the wax-resist painting method in his Victorias works: With a candle or hot wax, he drew on a paper sheet that he first coated with watercolor. He then applied another layer of paint, which would not adhere to the waxed areas. Next, he drew with black ink over the waxed and painted surface, adding virtuosic, delicately rendered details to the layered image. On some of these works, he also cut or tore the paper support, creating shaped borders or lacy interiors.

The wall devoted to eight examples of this rarely seen "fracas of forms" (as Dubuffet described them in an admiring 1951 catalog essay, reproduced in the Parrish exhibition's catalog) is itself worth the visit to the museum. If, like me, you find yourself yearning for more, there's a plentiful stash in storage drawers at the nearby Southampton warehouse occupied by the Ossorio Foundation, which is still seeking homes for some 550 works remaining in his estate. It is open year-round to the public by emailed appointment.

Did Ossorio have any effect on his colleagues' work, beyond his financial patronage? Pollock's transition from his celebrated, mural-size poured paintings to more overtly figurative drawings in black industrial paint may have been inspired by Ossorio's works in his Manhattan studio, where Pollock resided while his friend was abroad.

One of those semifigurative Pollocks, "Number 7, 1952," lent by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a highlight of the Parrish show. With an elegance reminiscent of old-master drawings, this abstracted but recognizable head, delineated in black and enlivened by yellow splotches, hangs next to Ossorio's Abstract Expressionist-influenced "Head" (1951). Overworked and overwrought, the Ossorio suffers by comparison to Pollock's confident expressiveness.

The catalog suggests that Dubuffet's experimental collages (not in the show) that incorporated butterfly wings may be indebted to a butterfly-shaped Victorias drawing sent to him by Ossorio, who frequently depicted children with angellike wings. The juxtaposition of Ossorio's impenetrably scrawled and slathered "Martyrs and Spectators" (1951) with Dubuffet's mud-hued, grotesquely broad-bodied, tiny-headed woman—a 1950 work from his well-known "Corps de Dame" series—exemplifies the predilection of all three artists for dense compositions in which the deployment of materials is as much the subject as what they depict.

Notwithstanding his sophistication and erudition, Ossorio was at his best when creating works that come across as outsider art. Like the intimate Victorias Drawings, some of the monumental Congregations, from the 1960s, are irregularly shaped and refreshingly oddball. Although not in the Parrish show, which chiefly focuses on works from 1948-52, the Congregations can be seen by appointment at the Ossorio Foundation. Encrusted with jewellike baubles and punctuated by glaring glass eyes and phallic protrusions mounted on panel, they are both fanciful and menacing.

Finally given a bit of overdue attention in the Parrish's uneven but tantalizing sampling, Ossorio now deserves a comprehensive retrospective, to be appreciated on his own terms, not upstaged by marquee names. Perhaps this "huge talent," as Ms. Kosinski describes him, may at last win due art-historical recognition.

Ms. Rosenbaum writes on art and museums for the Journal and blogs as CultureGrrl.

In the process, conservators at the Los Angeles-based center are pioneering the use of digital X-ray radiography, near-infrared imaging, electron scanning microscopy and mass spectrometers to probe the painter's flamboyant work. Their forensic tools turned the $140 million canvas into a crime scene in which the culprit is the chemistry of decay.

"From the chemical composition and buildup of paints, we are unlocking evidence of Pollock's creative process, his choice of materials, and any alterations through time," said Getty conservation analyst Alan Phenix.

Mural is one of a half dozen Pollock paintings undergoing restoration recently at collections around the world. The University of Iowa, which owns it, commissioned its repair. Art collector Peggy Guggenheim, who commissioned Pollock to paint "Mural" for her New York townhouse, donated it to the university, located in Iowa City.

Photos: Probing Pollock's 'Mural'

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Michal Czerwonka for The Wall Street Journal

Experts examined 'Mural,' by Jackson Pollock, at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles.

Graphic: The Restoration Work

Get an up-close look at some of the restoration work on the painting, see the results of analysis of the paint used, and take a look around the Getty Conservation Institute.

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The massive 8-by-20-foot canvas was a turning point in modern art when it was painted in 1943, energizing the abstract expressionism movement. "Scholars have always looked at this painting as a seminal work; a moment in which Pollock is changing," said Yvonne Szafran, senior conservator of paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum, which is collaborating on the project with the conservation institute at the Getty Center complex.

The 70-year-old painting embodies the conundrum posed by all famous works of art—whether conservators should restore and refurbish, or simply preserve what they find as best they can. But time is especially cruel to modern art. Commercial paints fade and flake. Canvas sags. Frames warp. Exotic creative materials, from synthetic dyes, neon tubes and plastics, to body fluids, animal parts and table scraps, readily disintegrate or rot.

That limits a conservator's choices in the effort to save modern works. "If they are made of lettuce, there is only so much you can do," said conservation expert Gillian McMillan at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

And the artist's palette keeps expanding. "If a material has been invented—and there are millions of materials out there—I swear there is an artist who has tried to use it," said James Coddington, chief conservator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who has been restoring three Pollock paintings. "It is very hard to know what the longer-term performance of these materials might be."

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Michal Czerwonka for The Wall Street Journal

Alan Phenix at the Getty Conservation Institute points to a digital image of the Jackson Pollock painting under repair.

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Michal Czerwonka for The Wall Street Journal

The artist's signature.

At the Getty, researchers are trying to make necessary repairs without changing the character of Pollock's work—to preserve rather than restore. But the materials in his painting posed their own technical challenges. The painting is so large that it took three days to X-ray the canvas in its entirety.

"Big paintings like 'Mural' lead a hard life," said Getty conservator Laura Rivers. "They are stretched, un-stretched, rolled, unrolled over and over."

As a result, its paint in places has chipped. Some colors have faded—driven by the internal chemistry of the pigments they contain. The canvas itself has sagged under the weight of all the paint it holds. And like other famous works of art, Pollock's painting also suffered the ill effects of earlier preservation work.

Using a noxious solvent called xylene, Ms. Rivers spent weeks removing the acrylic varnish applied across the painting during a restoration in 1973, which had masked the painting's texture and sheen. To protect herself from the fumes, she wore a face mask as well as three layers of gloves.

To safely analyze the chemistry of Pollock's paints, the conservators used a series of noninvasive imaging techniques, including infrared imaging and X-ray fluoroscopy, which let them probe the canvas with different electromagnetic wavelengths without having to touch it. A single application of teal blue contained 12 different pigments, the spectroscopic analysis showed.

Microscopic examination of paint samples—each no more than a half-millimeter across—revealed as many as 25 layers of color splashed, spattered and brushed on the linen canvas.

Their tests revealed that Pollock had been surprisingly cautious for an artist once renowned as "Jack the Dripper" for his exuberant splatters of color. He painted "Mural" methodically, working from right to left, with the canvas upright and not horizontal on the floor, as with many of his later paintings.

Moreover, Pollock relied almost exclusively on traditional oil paints, the researchers determined. "In a funny way, despite its radical creative dimension, it is really quite conservative from a materials point of view," said Dr. Phenix.

But the tests also showed that Pollock had used a white, water-based house paint to lighten the background spaces between the swirls of oil paint. That paint had grown transparent as it aged. "Oil and water don't mix, so you get some odd interactions that pose a conservation challenge," said Dr. Phenix.

Even so, the Getty conservators don't plan to repaint those patches. "We accept changes like that," said Ms. Szafran. "It is part of the aging of the painting, its inherent vice."

In the weeks ahead, the Getty researchers expect to rebuild the wooden framework that supports the large canvas and keeps it taut. They have spent months consulting with art scholars on the proper way to proceed. "You are balancing historical accuracy and authenticity with what you know of the artist's intent," said Getty conservation scientist Tom Learner. "We want this painting to look like a well-preserved 70-year-old."

Write to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com

"Soundings’ Features Art With Audio Elements

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Soundings: A Contemporary Score, a survey of sound art, opens at the Museum of Modern Art on Saturday. Tristan Perich’s “Microtonal Wall” is a 25-foot panel with 1,500 tiny speakers, each at different pitch. More Photos »

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: August 8, 2013

Three summers ago, the Museum of Modern Art installed a 1961 sound art work by Yoko Ono in its atrium. It was called “Voice Piece for Soprano — Scream 1. against the wind 2. against the wall 3. against the sky.” It consisted of a live standing microphone and some extremely loud amplifiers. Anyone passing through the atrium was invited to stand in front of the mike and follow the instructions in the title: that is, scream.

Countless visitors, including many kids and antic-minded adults, gleefully complied. But where Ms. Ono could turn a scream into a coloratura aria, the average amateur participant just gave an explosive shriek and scampered away. The piece stayed in place for months. It turned the museum into a sonic hell. MoMA habitués, including guards, couldn’t wait for it to go away.

Still, it had its merits. It was, for one thing, a very un-MoMA phenomenon: unpredictable, uncontrolled, anarchic, all that that institution is not. It also did what sound art was historically meant to do: to give sound — variously referred to as noise, or music or silence — the assertive presence of any other art medium, make it fill space, claim attention and time.

In recent years, attention has been slight. The much-maligned 2002 Whitney Biennial included a substantial amount of sound art, by the likes of Maryanne Amacher and Stephen Vitiello. But like many of that show’s innovations, this one sailed straight over the heads of critics and didn’t get much follow-up.

Now, more than a decade later, MoMA is picking up the slack with a survey show of new art called “Soundings: A Contemporary Score,” which opens Saturday. As if in reaction to Ms. Ono’s eruptive brashness, it is low key to the point of timidity. And formally speaking, much of it isn’t sound art in any pure sense. It’s sculpture, film, installation and work on paper with audio components.

Throughout the 20th century, sound was frontier terrain, staked out by crazies and visionaries: pro-violence Futurists, war-addled Dadaists and out-there beings like Antonin Artaud. The composer John Cage and his Fluxus successors were part of sound art’s gentler, though no less radical side. And that’s the side, now neatly landscaped, that “Soundings” is on.

The simple fact that the show looks like a normal, neat, stuff-on-the-walls-and-floors MoMA fare says a lot. Two artists are represented only by drawings. Marco Fusinato’s are based on the printed pages of a score by the composer Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001). On each page, Mr. Fusinato has drawn hundreds of ink lines tying all the notes to a single central point. Were the piece played the way the score looks, it would sound like a detonation.

The large-format drawings on paper by Christine Sun Kim are also scores, but look expressive and personal, even diaristic. Ms. Kim has been deaf since birth, and her approach to sound is highly conceptual. Basically, she’s creating the idea of it, visually, in terms most useful to her: American Sign Language, written English, physical gesture.

Both artists present sound in abstract form, as notion. The work of a third artist, Carsten Nicolai, incorporates sound that’s actual but inaudible. Using a tanklike container, he directs low-frequency sound waves onto the surface of a pool of water and, with mirrors, projects the patterns the waves create onto a display screen. The screen is the first thing you see when you enter the galleries. You could easily take it for an abstract painting with the shakes. Only when you circle around, do you see that it’s really an elaborate, overly ingenious kinetic sculpture.

The show has more busy sculpture. One by the American composer Richard Garet is an ensemble of old stereo speakers, a spinning turntable, a microphone and a glass marble, joined to produce a sound like a skipping record. A concoction of buzzes and flashes by the British artist Haroon Mirza is notable mostly for serving as a frame for one of MoMA’s Mondrian paintings, which looks like a fancy acoustic panel in this context.

And the Rube Goldberg bug carries over into an installation by the Scottish artist and filmmaker Luke Fowler and the Japanese composer Toshiya Tsunoda that includes electric fans, landscape images projected on a loose cloth, stretched piano wires and a dollop of Cagean chance. If the cloth, blown by the fans, touches the wires, we get a sound, a dull drone. The piece is very pretty to see, but to hear, not much.

Both of the show’s videos are good. For the 2011 “Music While We Work,” the Taiwanese artist Hong-Kai Wang recruited retired sugar factory workers to return to their former plant, record its ambient sounds and create a score from them. As we watch them attentively holding microphones at assembly lines and loading platforms, we’re hearing what they are conscientiously rehearing: the soundtrack of their lives.

The Danish artist Jacob Kirkegaard also recorded and filmed specific environments, four public buildings in Chernobyl, abandoned after the 1986 nuclear disaster. Unlike Ms. Wang, he manipulates his data by recording and rerecording it multiple times, until sounds and images become dense, grainy and heavy. Interiors seem to be slowly leaking out of darkness into visibility; sounds swell from near-silence to a carillon clamor.

Bells — church bells, stock exchange bells, bicycle bells, all taped in Manhattan — are the substance of a charming timed sound installation by Mr. Vitiello in MoMA’s sculpture garden. (One bell goes off every minute; they all go off on the hour.) It’s one of several works that extended the exhibition — organized by Barbara London, an associate curator in the department of media and performance art, and Leora Morinis, a curatorial assistant — into other parts of the museum.

Most of the outlying things are physically plain and audio-intensive. In a sweet, slight piece by Florian Hecker, three discretely placed speakers carry on an electronic conversation between two floors of the museum. Tristan Perich’s “Microtonal Wall,” a 25-foot-long panel pieced together from 1,500 tiny speakers, each tuned to a different pitch, is a kind of monumental musical instrument. To walk past it is to feel the sensation of a xylophone playing in your head.

Susan Philipsz’s “Study for Strings,” inside the galleries, is the closest thing to conventional music, and one of the show’s strong entries. It’s a recording of only the viola and cello parts, and their pauses, from a string orchestra composition written in 1943 by Pavel Haas in a German concentration camp. A performance by prisoners of the full, 24-part piece was filmed for Nazi propaganda purposes, after which the musicians, including Haas, were killed.

Clearly, sound, all but dematerialized, can be extremely powerful. Here’s proof. And there’s more in Jana Winderen’s “Ultrafield,” a classic “field recording” piece for which the artist taped sounds made by bats, deepwater fish and insects pitched beyond human hearing. Converted to the minimal audibility, the whirs, ticks and crackles of invisible beings turn a dark gallery into a kind of cosmic acoustic device.

Finally, one piece, Camille Norment’s “Triplight,” radiates that wondrous thing, the music of silence. The hardware involved is bare-bones: a 1955 standing microphone, of a kind once regularly used by jazz, blues and pop singers. In this one, though, the amplification unit has been replaced by a small light that flickers and brightens as if responding to a singer’s breath and voice.

It’s tempting to see Ms. Norment’s mute mike as a counterweight to Ms. Ono’s loud one. And a few more comparisons, probing the parameters of an understudied discipline, might have given some punch to a show that, like too many others at MoMA these days, tames unruly impulses in art, past and present, when it should be egging them on. There’s still a major sound art exhibition waiting to be done, and it will be, but not here.