Stingel's eclectic playlist: a traveling survey, which changed substantially at the second of its two stops, reveals that Rudolf Stingel's sociable works actively shape each other's meaning. Viewers are welcome to enter the process

Piety. Dissipation. Formal invention. Community engagement. Gleeful bad-boy provocation. One by one. the positions Rudolf Stingel has taken plot the coordinates of the field of visual culture, ca. 2007. Conceptually tidy on its oxen, each complicates the others, as is evident in a survey of 20 years of work by the Italian-born, New York-based artist, organized at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. where it opened, and now at the Whitney Museum in New York.

At the MCA. the entryway's grand skylit central hall--for a sleekly modernist 10-year-old building, this hall is a surprisingly old-fashioned architectural feature that Stingel helped you see as such--was lined to a double-story height with Celotex. a kind of foil-covered insulation board. As in previous similar installations, visitors were invited to leave their mark on the silvery foil. and they weren't shy. Three months in. the walls were thick to a surprising height (do giants roam the Midwest?) with gouged names, felt-tip-penned tags, business cards, school IDs. plastic utensils, notes on paper stuck to the foil with bobby pins. pushpins, pencils. emery boards, gum. and more. The graffiti was variously plaintive, witty, silly, purposeful and. taken together, irrepressibly festive. Hanging in the atrium was an absurdly big, lavish gilt and crystal chandelier made by a local manufacturer, adding a touch of Versailles to an installation equal parts Warhol's Factory and the bathroom at any well-used local pub.

As art historian Miwon Kwon and others have observed, the reigning paradigm for public art, which insists on audience involvement, is not altogether benign. Often, it descends through populism to abject compromise, with results that are banal at best. Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid have parodied the community-outreach process in an ongoing project called "World's Best Painting"; town-hall style meetings in some eases, and Internet polls in others, have been conducted to determine the features (subject matter, style, color, size, etc.) that a particular voting pool most. wants

to see and the artists rather hilariously make their wishes come true, on canvas or digitally, Striking a more serious note, in 1986 Jochen and Esther Gerz built a Monument Against Fascism for Hamburg-Harburg, Germany, in the form of a 36-foot-high steel column covered in soft lead; after viewers covered each reachable section in turn with their thoughts, for which styluses were provided, the monument was incrementally and permanently sunk underground by the artists. Stingel, who has preserved selected portions of previous, audience-altered Celotex installations as freestanding artworks--two, both 2002, were shown in Chicago--takes the idea to a place both less grave and more sinister, where the spirit of civic celebration meets the always incipient violence of graffiti and other more malicious forms of vandalism.

Mixed impulses also register in a lurid orange wall-to-wall-carpet that constituted another signature installation at the MCA. (Previous such projects include Stingel's New York debut in 1991 at Daniel Newburg, which also featured orange carpeting, as did a subsequent exhibition at Paula Cooper; Plan B, a colossal, garishly flowered rug, was installed in 2004 in the waiting room at Grand Central Station in New York under the sponsorship of Creative Time.) The carpet installation in Chicago succeeded on purely perceptual, James Turellian terms, its color so strong you could almost smell it. The way it muffled footsteps and in general enforced a local hush seemed to enhance, by corollary, a roaring visual experience, with volumes of bounced orange, plus some overtones of pink, warming up the cold white walls and even spilling onto the floor of adjacent rooms. At the same time, a few months of foot traffic gave the carpet a morning-after look of hard use.

The theme of trampled floors and messy revelers was picked up again in two large, white Styrofoam wall works (both 2000) mucked up with big, galumphing footprints made by the artist wearing shoes wrapped in rags soaked with lacquer thinner. These have credibly been linked, by Whitney curator Chrissie Iles in a catalogue essay, to a line of formal experiment that runs from Rauschenberg, with his work's implicitly horizontal, "flatbed" registry of imprinted information (or so posited Leo Steinberg) to Warhors dance-step paintings. A less historically informed association evoked by Stingel's footprinted Styrofoam is to a heavy person stumbling, dreaming or drunk, though a field of what could be snow, but is soiled just enough to look like a placeless landscape of pure decadence.

This motif can be seen as extended, in turn, by the most recent work shown: black and white, photorealist oil-on-canvas portraits of the artist (all 2005-06), based on photographs taken by Sam Samore and very capably executed by Stingel (who began his career, he has said, as a portrait painter), working with assistants. In all these images (which include the one featured prominently in the last Whitney Biennial), Stingel sports an international uniform of casual sophistication--white shirt open at the neck, sports jacket and well-worn jeans--though his 10-mile stare suggests he's not much enjoying its privileges. In one small dark painting, he is holding a martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other and looking balefully at the numberless candies on a too-small birthday cake. Four other self-portraits show him sitting or lying in bed. Throughout, he seems tired, grim and a little dissolute; Dirk Bogarde in Visconti's Death in Venice comes to mind. Most of these portraits are big, some the size of movie screens, and in two of the 11-by-15foot canvases the radical foreshortening of Stingel's sprawled form makes us feel that we're in a theater's perspective-warping, neck-wrenching first row. Or that we also sit slumped, in some low-slung chair, sharing the stale aftermath of a party that has lasted too long.