Deliverance Pat Keck’s kinetic menagerie BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS

The first museum retrospective of a living artist’s life’s work is one of those make-or-break affairs, like the publication of a poet’s collected works or a songwriter’s boxed set. Not only do few get so far, but among those who do, fewer still merit either the hype or the time required to take in the entire oeuvre.

The current exhibit of Andover resident Pat Keck’s work at the DeCordova — it spans a quarter-century’s output from one of this country’s most iconoclastic and riveting artists — proves spectacular in both senses of the word, a three-ring circus of wry profundity.

I’ve been following Keck’s career with excitement and admiration for most of the last decade. I can recall with cinematic precision the first time I encountered one of her electronically driven kinetic pieces in 1995 at the Genovese Sullivan Gallery in the South End. The occasion marked the debut of Answer Man, a wooden figure reminiscent of a marionette, his (or its) pointed cap, striped jersey, and yellow smock with red epaulets suggesting a clown or a dunce. He sat at his podium (the sculpture is six feet tall), slumped over what is now a tarnished hotel desk bell. Answer Man comes to life, like Keck’s even more extraordinary Messengers from 2001, when you feed him money. Drop a quarter into the waist-high slot built into his circus-colored platform, and the spinning wheel behind his head rotates, he sits upright, his eyes open, and his miniature, white-painted hand slowly crosses in space, pauses, then comes down on the bell. Bing. The wheel stops on your answer, either "yes" or "no."

Although it may not qualify as her most amazing work — there’s lots of competition for that designation — Answer Man represents the fruition of two of Keck’s strongest themes, money and manipulation. Money brings Answer Man to life; it also sets in motion Messengers, which is made up of four seated figures who, for a quarter or 50 cents or a dollar, will type out a message in beeping Morse code and deliver it on a ticket-sized printout. (The one in my wallet reads, "A Bondsman Crown’d Will Down You/A Bondsman Down’d Will Crown You." Half dollar.)

Yet despite the centrality of hard currency to the animation of these works, cash is hardly revered. Answer Man gives up his reverie for a mere quarter; Messengers swings into action for the same or little more. It’s as if the artist were saying in the same gesture that money is both crucial and preposterous, pivotal and demeaning. What does it mean that a work of art comes to life for two bits? Whatever sense you might make, it means a lot. I remember years ago stumbling into a church in Italy and having to drop a coin into a box on a wall to set off a light on a timer to get a look at some Renaissance masterpiece. It was a sad, silly, confusing moment — grandeur delivered for pocket change. Keck stands unique among artists of her generation for addressing with disarming and discomfiting simplicity the place of art in a commercial culture.

If Pat Keck’s sculptures offer a sharp commentary on the intersection of art and commerce, they offer an even sharper perspective on the artist as consummate manipulator, and conversely, on the audience as willing participant in the manipulation. Much of Keck’s most provocative work from the last decade in some way requires the viewer to become physically involved. Crank the lever below the Four Sleepwalkers (1992) or to the side of Three Conga Drummers (1989) and they respectively march or bang. Tap the keyboard in front of the Accompanist (1996) and he plays back a complementary tune. Press the pedal at the base of Man with an Inner Demon (1994) and watch his mouth open to expose what’s inside.

When direct, active contact between viewer and object isn’t required, another kind is. You have to bend down and affix your eye to the pupil of Big Head (1998) to behold its startling content. You’re required to circle and peer and angle your perspective on Hideout (1997), with its multiple mirrors and vertical apertures, to discern just how many figures it hides.

Further along the same continuum of involvement are those sculptures that don’t demand hands-on interaction or investigative viewing — when Keck leads you to believe you know what you’re looking at only to jolt you into a double take. The arch, stately, huge Watchman (1987), square-shouldered, vaguely threatening, on his black, seemingly medieval throne, appears the essence of immobility. Only gradually do you become aware that the sound you’re hearing belongs to the slight drumming of the fingers of his left hand. Similarly, Man with Time Running Out (1994) looks like a perfectly static figure staring at sand dripping in an hourglass — unless you happen to catch him in the act of turning the timer upside down. Subtler still is Man Discovering Something (1997), a diminutive black figure who appears to be looking down at his shadow until you realize that his shadow has eyes.

Keck’s argument isn’t with manipulation per se — much of her greatest work depends on it — so much as an argument with passivity. Art isn’t about what you watch, it’s what you wind up. An aesthetic experience isn’t delivered to the mere onlooker or the passer-by; it’s earned with the expenditure of money or effort. There’s something deeply old-fashioned about Pat Keck’s high-tech inventiveness — which may explain the 19th-century carnival costumes and the puppet-like visages of her figures — since its goal is the restoration of her audience to a place of engagement and centrality in the very meaning of art. Which comes down to her work’s ultimately being about spiritual deliverance.

One of the outstanding new pieces in this unfortunately named and impeccably presented show is Man with Something to Hide (2002). A white-faced figure, something of a tuxedoed dandy, stares out from behind a glass case. One arm’s tucked behind his back in such a way that there’s no seeing what he’s got in his hand. Only if you happen to pass behind the case in which he’s housed — which you’re not especially invited to do, since it’s near a wall — do you see an identical figure surrounded by mirrors. Only in the mirrors’ reflections, and then still with difficulty (I was bending and squinting at this point), can the object he’s grasping be discerned — a coin, a hundred Greek drachmas.

Man with Something to Hide is hiding money; his shame takes the form of aggression — his expression is both startled and menacing — and our ability to understand him is predicated on serendipity and work: the chance of passing behind the sculpture and the effort then required to see. It is an example of Pat Keck at her most arresting and diabolical — even more subtle and powerful than the flashy-eyed Man with His Head on Fire (1992), the ominous Manticore (1986), or Red Muses (1987). For a split second, having finally figured out what he’s holding, you think, "Is that all he’s got to hide?" And with that thought you realize Pat Keck has just hit you.