ART DAYBOOK

Exploring a world without temporal or physical boundaries in an installation at CAMH.

BY MOLLY GLENTZER The piece: “Telepathic Improvisation” The artists: Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz Where: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, through Jan. 7 Why: The transitional week between Christmas and New Year’s can make it a challenge to find one’s bearings. It’s no longer quite this year, but not yet next year, either. What better moment to explore an art installation that imagines a world without temporal or physical boundaries? “Telepathic Improvisation” puts viewers into a weird space from the moment they enter the CAMH’s darkened downstairs gallery. The place looks almost empty save for a pair of huge wooden handcuffs suspended from the ceiling, a fringe-y wall made of black and blond wigs, a trio of white boxes and a gaggle of microphones on a rotating pedestal that make you wonder if you’ve missed a performance or should wait for one to begin.

These objects also appear as props in the film that plays on a wall in the middle of the room. So, hmmmm — are you a part of what’s going on there?

The installation’s name comes from the 1974 musical score by the late composer Pauline Oliveros that inspired the project. Oliveros directs musicians to stand on a stage and wait for mind-messages from the audience to determine what they will play. In the same vein, German artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz ask their viewers to close their eyes and project what they want to see happening onto the screen.

Rationally, you know you cannot change the 20-minute film. No matter what else you might will her to do, the blonde in the red jumpsuit will still roll onto the stage, as if being pushed by one of those white pedestals. She will still recite text from an article by Ulrike Meinhof, a militant who co-founded the terroristlike Red Army Faction in West Germany in the 1970s. (Boudry and Lorenz originally planned to name the show for a line of Meinhof’s text that suggested not caring about the weather; but the artists could not turn Hurricane Harvey around, either.)

However, if you watch the film again, your experience of it will change: You’re 20 minutes further into your life, and you know what is going to unfold on the screen.

“One of the things that moves me is this moment of imagining what kind of future you want to see,” CAMH curator Dean Daderko said during a recent talk with the artists.

Boudry and Lorenz hint at a continuum by using historical political and cultural material, even down to things referenced in the props. They adapted the hanging handcuffs from William Friedkin’s 1980 thriller “Cruising,” about an undercover NYPD cop hunting down a serial killer of gay men. The motorized units reference a 1966 solo by choreographer Deborah Hay, who was echoing Robert Breer’s automated “float” sculptures. There’s even some fun woo-woo in the casting: The blonde is the American performance artist MPA, who staged her own spacey show in these same galleries last year.

“Telepathic Improvisation” was filmed in New York last February, as the U.S. government was enacting its first Muslim travel ban. Well before that, Boudry and Lorenz were concerned by growing rightwing movements across Europe.

Halfway through the film, the camera becomes menacing, revealing the action from the perspective of a surveillance drone — but only briefly. As if a viewer, herself in the act of watching, could will the machine to go away.