In a show called Genus and Species, on view at the Nasher Sculpture Center through May 2, the sculptural work of Spanish artist Jaume Plensa walks a fine line between the lyrical and the sentimental. Plensa’s work, not only on view here, but as a whole, is driven by concepts of multicultural harmony in which language, the body and nature serve as metaphors for peaceful global ideals.  More often than not, his work is reliant on some kind of physical encounter — a passage, touch, or sheltering — that helps propel the artist’s convictions about diversity’s great poetic potential.

Jaume Plensa, Twenty-nine Palms, 2007 (Photo: Juan García Rosell, IVAM)

For Genus and Species the main entrance and hall of the Nasher has been bisected by a hanging metal curtain called 29 Palms made up of hundreds of strands of text from various poems of the artist’s choosing. Each strand hangs individually, letter stacked upon letter, like giant

alphabetical bead chains. It’s hard to know at first if one is allowed to pass through the curtain — to touch the art and venture to the other, otherwise inaccessible part of the building by way of the installation – but soon enough it becomes clear that there is no other way to get to or fro without passing through, so you sort yourself between some strands to the other side.

There were two occasions on which I’ve seen this piece: once at a very polite and hushed press preview where adults parted the strands like fragile shafts of wheat in a field so as not to make a sound or knock one letter into another, and then again on the Target First Saturday free day when dozens of children purposefully careened head-first, sideways and backwards through the chains just to see how tangled they could make the curtain and see how much noise  (a jingly bell sound) it would make in the process.

Another piece, Twins I and II, had the same double-faced reaction. The piece is comprised of two twelve foot tall sculptures of figures sitting with their knees drawn up to their chests. Their bodies are made up of hundreds of random steel letters from various alphabets, each letter welded to the next, making the figures’ body a kind of linguistic net. At the base of each sculpture, where the hands gather the legs, there is a door sized opening that allows entrance into the figure. On my first viewing, we adults were hesitant to enter the bodies, and when we did it was with a no-touch policy, being extra careful not to even brush a shoulder against the low lintel of the “door.” But when the kids were in the building this past weekend, they came and went into the figures with the aim of climbing once inside, or at the very least looking out through the letter-net at close range. But this was discouraged, perhaps regrettably, by guards and parents alike.

Jaume Plensa, Twins I and II, 2009 (Photo: Gasull Fotografia)

Of my two encounters, the latter was the more appropriate for viewing Plensa’s work, but my experience in both settings revealed a conceptual challenge that cripples Genus and Species more than a little, and that is its forum here in the gallery. Without touch, or play more specifically, Plensa’s ideas about the possibility of harmony and unity through diversity fall flat, and even worse, drum up feelings that are ultimately pretty basic multicultural fare: we are all one body, all of our parts make a whole, language can’t divide what hearts can unite sort of stuff.  Without the spectacle of interaction with much of his work, the ideas propelling Plensa’s work don’t have the resonate gravity required to push his actual sculptures out of the realm of the trite and into the provocative. And the artist’s use of words written on the body, or the body made of words, does less to triumph diversity through language than create a kind of babble as some viewers attempt to decode what riddles they assume are hidden in the text.

Plensa is perhaps best known here in the States for his public art piece, Crown Fountain, in Chicago’s Millennium Park in which two huge video screens that are embedded in glass brick towers project the myriad ethnic faces of the residents of Chicago. Every few minutes one of the faces puckers their lips into an “O” as the screen spews a real stream of water from a hole aligned with the mouth of the face, watering the plaza between the two screens and all the bystanders beneath. The fountain and the plaza serve as a playground for young and old alike, and the ever-changing round-up of faces on the screens mirrors back to the crowd Chicago’s rich ethnic diversity.

Without risk of over-reading the concepts at the heart of Crown Fountain, it’s safe to say that Plensa sees the fountains as offering a kind of communal baptism, cleansing away the contentions between different classes, ethnicities, genders and creeds and unifying the masses in a common ritual of play. In concept and actuality, the project works: Crown Fountain, and indeed Millennium Park as a whole, is perhaps one of the most successful urban revival projects on record, having set a new standard for how art, common space, and human interaction between the two can reclaim a city’s geography and unite a disparate population; and Plensa’s ideas about culture, identity and common human experience find the most appropriate forum here where real life plays out around his work and uninhibited  interaction with the work happens on a grand scale.

Of Plensa’s work on view at the Nasher, the most satisfying is, like the wordless faces of Crown Fountain, also the most quiet. Certainly of a higher caliber than the rest of the work in the show, and perhaps out of place because of it, his series of eleven carved alabaster heads of young girls are simple, beautifully wrought, puzzling things that don’t require a viewer’s touch to complete the work. In these luminescent sculptures, Plensa has let the material and subject dialogue about notions of scale and proportion, fragility and resilience, dependence and isolation in a way that ultimately, without a word, say the most about the ideals of human harmony and the deep profundity of the challenge.