[media-credit name=’JAKE NAUGHTON/Herald photo’ align=’alignnone’ width=’648′][/media-credit]

If the massive multi-colored streamers on the outside of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art look like the invitation to a party, you’d be right.

If, on the other hand, you felt they were meant as a sort of reality-bending filter of some sort, you’d also be right.

Basically, if you have any thought about the four-story wall of color other than “I can’t see in the building” you’d be right. That’s because artists Roberto Behar and Rosario Marquardt say their installation, The Absent City is meant to challenge conventional conceptions of scale, community and language.

The installation, which was created exclusively for the city of Madison, features three major pieces. The first and most obvious is “The Mask,” which coats the walls of MMOCA’s projecting glass wall with a shower of warm, bright colors.

“Masks are used to disguise one’s identity and become one’s self and in so doing, experiment with the experience of freedom,” Behar said. “What we have done is dress up the building with a mask to create a temporary identity for the building itself.”

And so begin the interpretations: the mask frees the building from it’s scale constraints, the mask allows people to enter a different world. It allows the world inside the museum to expand outward and is an expression of popular culture. But it’s also an expression of contemporary art. The mask is everything and nothing at the same time.

There is no pretentious obfuscation of the artists’ intent, either by guile or through their Argentinean accents. It’s because the artists themselves are not completely sure what they have created. In a way, they admit, it’s not up to them what the art becomes, but rather, those participating in the art. Behar and Marquardt may try and describe parts of their exhibit as “a 3-D painting” or a “projection of the city,” but the end result is altered by the viewers perception.

“We don’t have the truth,” said Behar. “We think of The Absent City as a model of possibilities.”

This becomes patently obvious in the second installation, “Our Home is Your Home,” where the artists own home d?cor is installed in the opening foyer to the museum as if it is a real living space.

And for all intents and purposes, it is. The modular power-blue, red and black ottoman are ready for patrons to lounge, the miniature fifties-era robots and spaceship toys are available to play and, most importantly, the record player in the goldenrod cabinet encourages viewers and listeners to “make yourself at home” and put on a record. If the choices of Deep Purple, Harry Belafonte or Brain Salad Surgery don’t pique your interest, the artists invite you to bring your own records to donate to the collection. After all, it’s your art piece.

And it’s the city’s piece, most of all. The third installation, “The Absent City,” takes the surrounding topography of the Isthmus and scales it down using the same kaleidoscopic streamers seen on the front of the building. The city square of the model city has miniature human figures and a raised flag using plastic flowers as its fabric. The illusion is reinforced and broken at the same time when one walks through the vinyl streamer walls of the model buildings. While the illusion of solid mass has been broken, the switch from warm pastels rainbows to four walls of blue, red or orange establishes a structured fulcrum balancing playfulness and absurdity.

The ultimate goal of the piece is one of exploration, of course. A “freedom of the mind,” as the artists call it. Yet, the frustrating aspect of the installation is how one possibility becomes abundantly dominant considering the city the exhibit was designed for. With the warm celebratory visual spectrum, evocative of the 60s-era counterculture this city embraced long ago, The Absent City‘s aim to change perception seems ironically unnecessary.

One only has to identify the heavy-handed political statement of the “World Poetical Map” — which features the standard world political map with land masses inverted and country’s names stripped — to know that many Madisonians would not treat the depiction as a philosophical challenge, but a reinforcement of reality as they see it.

So while the exhibit is, at its core, a personal reflection, it is one that constantly flickers: whether it be through the duality of the chrome “toy bomb” on the cabinet or through the vinyl cylinder of choice on the record player.

“The Absent City” exhibit runs through Nov. 16 at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.