Outside at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, up the stairs from its poetic and permanent Richard Serra in steel (Joe, 1999), is currently a field of stacked airy balsa cubes painted light red. They were designed by another minimalist, Rasheed Araeen, in 1968. Each side of each cube has just four crisp edges and a diagonal crossbar. They’re all empty and identical and very lightweight, made to be moved around with ease. Like the contributions from the eight other artists in Assembly Required (the Pulitzer’s spring show), Zero to Infinity is explicitly “interactive.” Viewers-cum-participants are meant to rearrange its blocks to create their own unique “structures” (the artist’s word), preferably in collaboration with others. Especially later in his career, once he’d more fully hashed out some of the aesthetic implications of conceptual art and Third World politics, Araeen managed to make some pretty good artworks. Zero to Infinity is not one of them.

The year, the movement, the intentions of this piece are all worth considering, especially insofar as they converge on the point of art’s departure from self-reflection. This departure seems to be the pretext or métarécit for the various bids at “activation” and “participation” made by the artists in Assembly Required. Araeen, who emigrated from Karachi to London in 1964, was a critical proponent of minimalism during the early years of his career in the West: critical because he sensed in its “specific objects” an alienness and antihumanism, proponent because he saw in its forms a promising newness. What Michael Fried, however, famously lambasted as this type of work’s “literalness” — its insistence that art’s power lies not in creating experiences but in imposing on experience — Araeen combated through a misdirected doubling-down. Inspired no doubt by the would-be revolutionary conflagration in Europe the same year he designed it, Araeen conceived Zero to Infinity (which wasn’t actually realized until four decades later) as an egalitarian response to minimalism’s air of cerebral remove. He tried to make freedom apparent through his artwork by giving his audience the freedom to determine its form. But is this rendering of freedom that we get in Zero to Infinity sufficiently girded for the onslaught of harsh and corruptive reality which all good art needs to be able to withstand? Is its really the same freedom that art is supposed to help us access?

No, I don’t think so, for a reason that has something to do with the history of form. By “activating” minimalist forms while leaving the movement’s suppositions about style unaltered, Araeen simply dynamized literality — intensified it even — and embedded it deep inside the unconscious functioning of his art. He aggrandized the very thing that made art defenseless to contamination by the dumb, fleeting stuff we humans think and do, rouged it up and gave it suppleness and strength. His was a hair-of-the-dog sort of tactic against unimaginative creation; it naively assumed that the problem with plain cubes in a room was their physical rather than their spiritual inertness. Araeen’s little revolt against minimalism therefore took the form of a radical affirmation of minimalism’s core tenets, and this is the problem: physically reshuffling his building blocks reminds you how uninspiring this sort of stuff really is as art — how dull it can be in this immediate world of ours and how unfortunate it is when art refuses to create another one for us.

Though Araeen was mostly a minor figure, Assembly Required makes this work of his feel emblematic in a broad way. Zero to Infinity is a microcosm of the Pulitzer’s current show, in all its failures and dullnesses. What the show demonstrates more than anything is something we all pretty much know: that the opening of the floodgates separating art and life which minimalism undertook has meant a fifty-year churn of a lot of underwhelming, repetitive art. Minimalism’s recapitulation as a social-aesthetic project in the 1990s, as well as its current zombie-plod through any number of artists’ sparse installation practices, seems to be proof of this. Much of the revolving badness, though, has less to do with any categorically unbridgeable divide between art and life than with the smug assuredness with which artists like those in this show tend to merge them. What this attitude expresses is the involution of newness since postmodernism, the surface patterns of critique thinly draped over a stiff and static body. Prior to this state, art criticized the world by criticizing itself; since, it’s often only managed a deeply repressed self-critique that manifests, like a sleight, as shrill pronouncements against the world. “Interactivity,” the term of focus for Assembly Required, is a clear expression of this problem.

Don’t get me wrong: the intentions behind just about every work in the show seemed sweet, sometimes even a bit precious. All of the art attempted to see a better world which, it thought, it could somehow manifest. The capacity of much of the work to do anything other than perform its artiness, though, albeit in a number of semi-interesting ways, seemed mostly limited. There was a massive disconnect — which I really believe anyone in the world would have to be lying not to admit — between the social pronouncements and the general effect of almost all of the work. It “prompt[ed] us,” said the show’s catalog, “to consider what we can achieve by coming together and how art might help us imagine new ways of being in the world,” but I was left wondering how any of it did this prompting more or better than, say, a weekend team-building retreat with a church group, as well as what exactly the relationship was between the works as art and their social dimension. While interactivity was supposed to signify (even foment) political action and social connectedness, its status as an ideal — untroubled, unquestioned: an aspirational state — drew the art’s actual impotence into almost embarrassing relief. Almost all of the works were ultimately “solvable,” and at that very easily solved.

Michael Fried, in his famous essay, said that minimalist art tends to feel inexhaustible in the same way that driving forever along a circular road would feel inexhaustible. He might also have mentioned toys like Rubik’s Cubes or Legos, which are in some ways even less exhaustible experientially than most of the art at the Pulitzer. (Come to think of it, the tiny tracks that I used to run my Hot Wheels cars around were usually closed loops.) There was a room built within one gallery that was full of books by Alfred Whitehead, for instance: Siah Armajani’s Alfred Whitehead Reading Room (2013). I can’t imagine that anyone used this space to actually read and talk about Whitehead’s writings, and if this wasn’t the piece’s purpose I’m not really sure what was. There was some gravel and a metal cage designed by Hélio Oiticica inside another gallery, called Penetrável Macaléia (1978). The idea was to have you step inside the artwork and be forced to use your senses anew, but I pretty much just felt like I was stepping into a big metal cage with a gravel floor inside an art museum. You couldn’t actually interact with Francis Alÿs’ Cuando la fe mueve montañas (2003), in which 500 shovel-wielding saps spent a whole day in 2002 shifting an entire sand dune four inches; only a contemporary artist could think up such a depressingly pointless and unfulfilling metaphor for collective action.

The two Lygias of Brazilian conceptualism, Clark and Pape, had contiguous rooms in the basement. Clark’s foldable metal sculptures were fun to use for a couple minutes, but they looked better and felt more sincere, if a little sullen, resting as untouched originals in their glass vitrines. Pape’s Livro da Criação (Book of Creation, 1960) was bright and crisp and playful, but my rearranging of its pages felt perfunctory. I got the sense that, were it not presented quite so antiseptically as an Interactive Artwork, Pape’s book (an original of which was, like Clark’s sculptures, languishing behind glass, the hemophiliac twin of the “exhibition copy” we were allowed to touch) may have held more than just the fleeting charm of entertainment. But what I really wanted to do was rip it up or pray to it or have someone smack me around with it or something — you know, the stuff we should be able to do with art when it’s life and it’s truly ours — but all of that at the Pulitzer seemed decidedly out of the question.

The issue with Assembly Required, though, wasn’t that the art in it was interactive, but rather that it all exhibited an almost flippant disregard for considering what might be artistically productive about this interactivity. The show’s core polemic, in fact, is actually a very reasonable one, or at least it was when there was first a spate of its being asked more than fifty years ago. There’s no reason, it’s true, that artistic experience has to be exclusively ocular, even that it has to be — though this one’s a bit trickier — exclusively sensuous. But this argument, like all of postmodernism’s arguments, has long been overdetermined, and its manner of being asked is by now just that: a manner. This has left the real question of what a critical art of involvement and participation would look like and what it would do perennially asked but never sincerely answered. Only one piece at the Pulitzer offered a hypothesis.

Yoko Ono’s book Grapefruit was published in 1964, and it contained some couple hundred prompts (Ono, in Fluxus vein, called them “scores”) for whimsical and often unrealizable action. “Imagine the clouds dripping,” read one of the few dozen, printed on yellowed notecard-sized paper, that were hung in the Pulitzer’s vestibular gallery: “Dig a hole in your garden to put it in.” (Cloud Piece) “Stay in a room for a week,” read another: “Do not take anything except water. Have someone whisper to you in the end of the week.” (Room Piece I)

The beauty of these works lay in their extraliterary dimension, which carried them outside of poetry (though their language was indeed quite poetic): through language they didn’t figure the closed worlds that literature does, but instead interleaved bits of a new reality between the gills of our own. This wasn’t so much because they used the imperative voice as because their appeal through it was so unliterary; it was authoritative and expectant in the way lunatic ravings are. Even the most doable scores — Painting to Be Watered: “Water every day”; Painting to Be Slept On: “Hang it after sleeping on it for more than 100 nights” — seemed somehow unrealizable, as though the actions they prompted would at best move one asymptotically towards some ideal hidden behind their naivete. Greenberg’s dictum that aesthetic experience occurs through “eyesight alone” holds little sway here, as the frisson comes from a knowledge they stimulate of this ideal’s holographic nature. Ultimately, this is a recognition that art’s dalliance with life is just that: fleeting, silly, unsustainable, absurd. The way Ono grazes life in these works — the way she uses your mind as her subject and her medium to place the truth of them uncannily inside you in a place you can’t quite reach — is precisely how she defends them against life. Their silliness allows them to go around life’s comedy. This is why Ono’s piece did much more than simply entertain me. It’s also why the curators’ decision to carry out one of her pieces on the gallery floor (Painting to Be Stepped On: “Leave a piece of canvas or finished painting on the floor or in the street”) seemed just a little pat.

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