LOOSENING UP - At play with contemporary art.

There doesn't seem to be a lot of graffiti in Lisbon, or I didn't notice it because my Portuguese is minimal. But one graffito in English showed up at various locations. It read, "He who is without faith is the looser."

I'm used to the impressionistic use of English-try a provincial Hungarian menu-but this could as easily have been a philosophical proposition. I've lived for more than thirty years in the American Bible Belt, where the congressional delegation is ultraconservative in religion and politics, even by the standards of the Republican party and the Baptist church. The same attitudes are tiresomely evident in the editorial and letters columns of Oklahoma's largest newspaper. So it seems self-evident that faith, at least of a certain kind, constricts and narrows. That's as true of my doctrinaire leftist acquaintances as it is of my so-called representatives in Washington.

The great thing about travel is that many of the usual boundaries and limits either disappear or don't seem to apply. And, as I discovered when I took the train west from Lisbon to Sintra, that's as true of aesthetics as it is of morals and politics. In Lisbon's museums, I had examined thousands of square yards of framed, cased, and sculpted objects ranging from the prehistoric to the postmodern. Some were by artists whose work I'd seen and been impressed by elsewhere, some were derivative in depressingly obvious ways. Some, especially that of Portuguese artists new to me, had a fresh perspective on old themes. In a Pentecost scene an apostle at the rear of the group was raising his arm to fend off the tongue of flame, like a man attacked by a bee. In Birth of John the Baptist, maids were performing the necessary but usually undepicted task of cleaning the floor after the delivery. A portrait of the apostles pictured a very funky-looking and sometimes overweight downscale group of real human beings without haloes or Tuscan gloss.

But even this kind of faith-based realism, though welcome, could not be described as "loose." Nor were the classically modernist works on the first floor of the Sintra museum. But upstairs there was something different. On the landing of the museum's last flight of stairs to the second floor lay stones, strewn loosely in a rough rectangle about ten feet long and four or five wide. Just lying there. No frame or rope or anything else to separate the rubble from the rabble.

My first and very strong impulse was to kick one of the stones-in fact, to mess with, maybe mess up, this unprotected and at least potentially random scattering that dared to call itself art. But I didn't kick anything, and after reading the legend identifying the rocks as Richard Long's Sandstone Line, I moved on like a good patron through the rooms containing the other exhibits. All were more colorful than what I still had trouble calling Long's "piece." Many were more obviously "transgressive," to use last year's popular term. All had a necessary relationship between part and whole and a definite shape imposed by framing or welding or clamps. And all looked like something.

But none stuck in my mind like Long's scattered stones. Can a work of art exist in a form that is neither accidental nor fixed-in other words, can art be loose? If I had dislodged one of the rocks, would I have been a vandal? Was it even possible to vandalize a work that was, in legal terms, an attractive nuisance? Did the piece invite, indeed demand, such a response?

By the time I had finished walking through the second-floor galleries, a group of teen-age schoolchildren had gathered around Long's stones. They stood looking at each other until one boy stuck out his arms for balance and hopscotched in gaps between the stones from one side to another like a broken-field runner. That emboldened the rest. A girl used it as an obstacle course; then a slender black kid in glasses walked from end to end on the stones themselves. Then one boy reached down, picked up a small wedge-shaped stone, and made as if to put it in his pocket. A second boy grinned, gestured as if to say "Piker," picked up a stone larger than a bread-loaf, and pretended to conceal it in the fold of his T-shirt.

In any other museum I know of, there would have been guards, alarms, Dobermans, admonitions, expulsions. But either the Portuguese are very tolerant or they didn't care. And I noticed that the kids didn't molest or play with any of the other pieces. Their horseplay reminded me of an incident from the late 1960s that I hadn't thought of in years. The Catholic grade school in Norman, Oklahoma, had closed for lack of teachers, and some of the parishioners had volunteered to help convert it into a day-care center for low-income families. We cleaned and sawed and collected equipment from garages and attics. Then the Christian education director, an earnest young man named Gabe Huck (even Flannery O'Connor would have been embarrassed to make up a name like that) found some very rough-cast concrete circles lying in a field at the former Navy air base north of town, got help loading them into a pickup, and installed them on the playground for the children to use as stepping stones.

When I unrolled the newspaper the next morning, I read "Major Art Theft in Norman." A restaurant in Oklahoma City had commissioned work from an environmental artist; after the concrete cured, the circles were to be displayed on edge in some kind of pattern. The police chief speculated that the thieves had to be from New York or someplace like that because locals couldn't be sophisticated enough to realize the value of the art.

Paper still in hand, I dialed Gabe. "Uh, Gabe. You might be interested in this story..."

After various gulps and "Oh, my Gods!" he called the police and fessed up. Fortunately, the artist had a sense of humor, donated his work to the day-care center, and was photographed watching the children hop across his stones.

The Portuguese teen-agers had the same impulse. They didn't want to mess up or mess with the stones; they just wanted to mess around with them.

A few days later, at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, I came across another Long installation. The legend explaining this one noted that Long photographs "his interventions as a means of preserving what nature will eventually undo." This information solved two problems: what term to use for what Long does and what to think about the teen-agers. They were forces of nature.

I was given another perspective on this experience at an exhibit of resolutely modern art in Budapest. In a darkened space curtained off from the main hall was a cd-projection of Ange Leccia's The Sea, shifting, fluid shades of black and gray undulated across the wall at the far end. Every adult who passed in front of the light used in projecting Leccia's images flinched at seeing his or her shadow and ducked out of the way. But a boy, about eight, started in delight, waved his hand in front of the projector, and ran toward the shadow of his head, becoming, at least temporarily, in and of the work.

Of course, this kind of interaction wouldn't work in most museums. All you can do with a Rembrandt or Vermeer, for example, is look at it. And that is, as the line in the old Latin Mass went, "fitting indeed and just." To be sure, the works of Long and Leccia are designed primarily to be contemplated. But unlike the Rembrandt or even the wrappings of Christo, they are looser. They admit, even anticipate, the possibility that boundaries don't have to be constricting or confining. And that possibility allows for a different kind of pleasure, even joy.

Robert Murray Davis teaches at the University of Oklahoma in Norman.