Art of the fugue: Louise Neri on Juan Munoz. (Passages).

IN HIS PREFACE to Naked Masks: Five Plays by Luigi Pirandello, Eric Bentley wrote of the Sicilian playwright's belief that the essentially human thing was not merely to live but also to see oneself living, to think. For Pirandello, dramatic form was a challenge to show more of the inner life of humans, to show people seeing themselves, to let characters become roles and speak for themselves. Thus, maintained Bentley, Pirandello's people "think" a lot, but their thinking is part of their living, not their maker's speculations or preaching. Like Pirandello, the artist Juan Munoz believed in thinking. Through his tenacious investigations of art and life, which ranged from the classical to the eccentric, from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to the philosophical nonsense of Edward Lear, from the anatomies of grief to the strategies of games, this cosmopolitan Spaniard came to excel at the complex art of being human.

By willing previously discrete, even antagonistic, territories of aesthetic, cultural, and social reference into highly charged dialectical relations, Munoz evinced an artistic language that, to use the artist's own words, could "express without being expressionistic," actively engaging with the past in order to recollect traces of memorable things within the historical amnesia of modernity. Like its maker, this language, with its intricate webs of surprise, seduction, disorientation, deception, and doubt, endeared itself over time; once insinuated, its impression was indelible. Yet equally, it seems, it continues to elude those unequipped or unable to travel the pleasurable yet vertiginous contours of its tierra incognita.

Past and recent mappings of Munoz's dialectical relationship with the histories of modernity reveal a recurring critical blind spot. As in all good crime novels, this blind spot speaks volumes about the true nature of his work, beginning with the first sculpture he considered to be his own, a 1984 miniature staircase in welded metal affixed to a wall. To locate this piece in existing passages in modern sculpture is to miss its point, because its key-and this is true of the oeuvre in general-lies in its difference from, or supplement to, its precedents. Munoz's staircase is spiral. In one syntactical maneuver, he offered a passionate challenge to the available options of progress or aporia. Twisting the flat planes of modernism into the suggestive curves of a helix, he tapped the pulse of the Baroque dynamic that, as Henri Focillon describes in his liberating treatise The Life of Forms in Art, at once sums up, turns on, contorts, and narrates the formulas of all other dynamics.

I like to imagine that while making this poignant little sculpture, a scale model of sorts, the young artist in a suburb of Madrid in the early '80s may have been thinking not of modern masters but of another young artist, Robert Smithson, and his spiral, the ultimate spiral, the gigantic and mysterious gesture of Spiral Jetty, excavated in the landscape of the American heartland. Over the course of the next two decades, Munoz's challenge would evolve with increasing persuasion into myriad forms-which, as with Smithson, included writing of a most imaginative order, as well as sculpture, drawing, and sound- in a restless and compelling investigation of the possible relations among space, object, and viewer.

True to the strategies of Baroque detournement and the excessively expressive vernacular that attends it, Munoz succeeded in slyly injecting a vivid otherness into the master discourse of contemporary art. In constantly questioning the oppositions between consciousness and history, he created an oeuvre that was inclusive rather than exclusive, in which the semiotic structures were open rather than closed: "I came to realize that I could have been walking in a park or drinking in a bar instead of looking at thousands and thousands of little boxes. There is not that much to gain from it. . . I think what a lot of people need today is an involvement with the real world. Someone like Judd defined a unity, a common element in art. But Borromini created a 'conceptual unity' to which I am more aligned."

Fugue, the Baroque's signifying form, suffused Munoz's working patterns. In essays such as "Segment" and "The Face of Pirandello," he spun labyrinths of etymological possibility from unselfevident propositions. Fascinated by the persistent human obsession with idols and surrogates and its evolution in a predominantly secular age, he elaborated entire archaeologies of humanoid form to do with physical strangeness or incongruity, from solitary puppets and dwarfs to crowds of enigmatic, laughing Chinese men. Fugal theme and variation also predicated sound pieces such as A Man in a Room, Gambling, a 1992/1997 radio broadcast in which Munoz presented a series of favorite card tricks set to music by the composer Gavin Bryars. The piece was later performed by the artists before a live audience at the BBC studios in London and recorded on CD for general release.

Confronted with the platonic spaces that constitute the unifying territory of the white cube, he interrupted and "traumatized" them-either literally cutting through them in section then populating the sections with intriguing sculptural episodes to draw the viewer in, as in the massive installations A Place Called Abroad, 1996, at the Dia Center for the Arts, and Double Bind, 2001, at the Tate Modern; or recasting them in a higher register by rendering floors or walls with trompe l'eoil schemes to effect the vertiginous "tiled" ground or the blank, shuttered facade of a Mediterranean elsewhere; or more subtly by rearticulating them through elaborate figured geometries he called "conversation pieces" in reference to the eighteenth-century genre.

But there was yet another element to the intricate fugue of Juan Munoz. He was compulsively engaged with the world and reveled in its emotional, intellectual, and material textures-yet he constantly fantasized about disappearing from it. He made endless jokes about it. He even made works about it. So, months after my friend's sudden and tragic death, I still struggle to accept that the dramatic and painful absence he has created by this latest act of disappearance is anything more than his most daring and complex trick to date.

Louise Neri is an editor and curator based in New York.