A charming paradox of Conceptual art: while we can understand much of it solely from its documentation or recounting, we still thrill at seeing the works themselves in the flesh. The scraps of paper, documentary photographs, and other unremarkable materials employed in Conceptual art practices take on an archival allure because of their proximity to the ephemeral moments of their genesis. That compelling, almost mystical fragility turns viewers of MoCA’s Index: Conceptualism in California into relic-seeking pilgrims, but instead of descending to Chartres’ basement to view the Virgin Mary’s tunic, they descend down the concrete stairs of Chris Burden’s Exposing the Foundations of the Museum (a re-installation of his 1986 work). There, they find nothing but the mangled stone foundation of the MoCA’s Geffen Contemporary building. Suddenly the relic is freed from being part of an authoritative structure and re-cast as liberating, hilarious and contingent.

The show’s 209 works, many of them cult classics, spread this gospel well. Douglas Huebler’s Location Piece #17 (1968), for instance, documents an occasion in which the artist finds a "man who bears a strong resemblance to the artist,” and records that act of finding through basic reportage techniques: snapshot and typewritten text. Location Piece #17 highlights the limits of such documentary measures, and positions the artist as an oft-faulty conduit of data (hence the joke that the artist, in finding a man who resembles himself, participates in a larger tendency of reflecting his own subjectivity rather than shedding light on anyone else’s). We meet with the artist’s skepticism of his own position in the world, problematizing (but not fully nullifying) the position of the artwork as an object of reverence.

Curators Philipp Kaiser and Corrina Peipon create very loose chronological groupings that allow the viewer to sense the vast matrix of belief systems that formed different genealogies of southern California “concept art” (a contested term even during its heyday). The Huebler piece is near a suite of William Wegman drawings that depict anamorphic forms: Gulls/Waves (1973) shows the instability of markmaking by framing some of Wegman’s ink flourishes as gulls, and others as waves. Though it’s common to view Wegman as a New York video artist, this suite was produced during his years teaching in Long Beach and together with Huebler’s Location Piece creates a balanced look at ways in which both artists rejected the artist’s touch as a concrete arbiter of information in the same five-year period.

The lineages of these 1960s and 70s artists become more blurry during the 80s and 90s. As the years progress, it becomes more and more difficult to draw 1 to 1 correspondences between particular formal strategies and critical discourses. MoCA does a good job of emphasizing the “pre-critical” quality of the featured pieces by refraining from excessive wall text (a la the Tate Modern) or convoluted exhibition layouts (a la this year’s SITE Santa Fe biennial). Jeff Vallance’s Relics from 2 Vatican Performances (1992) rests solely on its own in this way, consisting of a note to Vallance from the Vatican acknowledging their receipt of his painting of Veronica’s veil. Next to the note is a handkerchief bearing an imprint of the artist’s face in ground espresso – a vicious double entendre that digs at the Italian reverence for the drink – and the two objects sit side-by-side in a case.

Though a twenty-first-century observer could probably corral several dominant discourses of postmodernism with which to analyze Relics, the display doesn’t much belabor this point. In a clever twist, the curators place this work near Chris Burden’s Exposing the Foundations of the Museum. Not a coincidence, I suspect, as Vallance stated in 2007 that seeing a photo of Chris Burden’s 1971 performance Shoot “changed his whole outlook on life.” Viewers may amass these lateral and literary ties as they wish but no matter what, the artist’s act of displaying his rejection letters and imprinting his face in food is funny with no contextual prompting. Success.

Kaiser and Peipon also solve the problem of how to frame disparate discourses, feminism among them, within the exhibition’s historical bracket by making proximity, rather than chronology or ideology, an organizing principle. All artists populate the space in the same laconically analytical way without narrative interruptions. Andrea Fraser’s Little Frank and His Carp, placed near the check-in desk, provides an avenue into institutional critique practices with its reel of Fraser humping the Guggeheim Museum walls and is also hilarious in its own right. Ed Ruscha’s 1969 Stains portfolio is around the corner from Trisha Donelly’s Untitled 2004, a splotch of red enamel on paper that forms a chaotic, faux-action-painterly motif; while these works may not have been in direct conversation with one another, through their proximity one senses a shift in praxis from the cataloguing of everydayness to the use of “the stain” as a sarcastic painterly gesture.

The viewer’s belief system will be what brings these works into a warm communion with spectators and with each other, but it would be equally valuable to walk through this space imagining that you’re not viewing anything of import. And this is ultimately what Index makes salient about California conceptualism: that even if you can’t bring yourself to be a pilgrim, historian or devotee, you’ll be able to pick through the jokes. Most are funny.

Katie Anania is a curatorial researcher at Fluent~Collaborative and an editorial contributor to ...might be good.