Go on, you’re welcome to pick up sections of the faux rock sculpture with the faded color scheme—reminiscent of sculpture by Rachel Harrison—and work off those holiday pounds right there in the gallery. There are even handles built into the sections of the piece for ease of use. If you need them, a number of inspirational image-themed yoga mats are provided, along with a video to consult for proper form and technique while you WORK… IT… OUT.

Though Mads Lynnerup’s current show is really just a couple of macaroons over the Gold Opulence Sundae served at the end of a decadent meal that that turns an exhibition space into a playscape, an aching sense of indulgence pervades. We are encouraged to shake up frames that contain DayGlo paper shapes and place them back in either portrait or landscape orientation (no matter how you shake it, the compositional variations all look similar enough that the notion of democratized authorship is all but undermined). It’s suggested that we work up a sweat in the gallery space while using Lynnerup’s sculptures, and that we are in on the joke, but does anyone really think that it’s very funny?

At base level, art exhibition tends to function like a Choose Your Own Adventure story—in which the work on display doubles as a portal to self-enlightenment. However, in this new iteration of the series, protagonists are encouraged to turn away from reflexivity to something more viscerally immersive, where goggles, flashing lights, sensory deprivation and big ol’ playground slides serve as the tools of engagement. But what if someone wants to break from the canned premise and outcomes setup by the author? For instance, what if they want to hurl a section of Lynnerup’s sculpture across the room? What if someone else wanted to have the gallery attendant serve as his or her squatting partner? What if a group of people wanted to organize a daily exercise session in the space? It’s when you begin asking yourself these questions that you realize that you are not to participate in any way that you wish. The context and environment of Lora Reynolds Gallery, while welcoming and encouraging, would not be able to accommodate the fullness of true participation were it to decide to pay a visit. The expectation is that we partake according to the spoken and unspoken rules established by the exhibition and exhibition space, checking at the door the impulse to deviate from these rules in any significant way.

Most generously, one could assign a sort of meta-intent to Lynnerup’s show to help explain its participatory character. Through this lens, you would see the work of an artist masterfully critiquing just how pat and dry the expectations associated with participatory exhibition trends really are. Using the trend’s logic against itself, the inelegant hand behind these sorts of exhibits is revealed and shown to be a controlling one that pushes participants into a very limited set of experiences, while holding up the banner of aesthetic progressivism as a distraction.

Thinking of Lynnerup’s two utterly transfixing video works, Demonstration and Untitled (Shadow), I choose to side with a generous assessment of the show. It is good to be reminded that the socialized body is incredibly pliant, flexible and variable, while standing firm in the view that it is also rigid, inflexible and achingly predictable. Every authored experience leads us down particular paths of discovery, but if we are given little to no opportunity to internalize and decide how our experiences of an artwork align with or deviate from the intentions of the author, then we are forced into a very limited art-going experience. What we have on our hands when that becomes the case is an all but empty amusement park where everyone that shows up takes a quick ride on the tilt-a-whirl, and then moves on, throwing their ticket stubs on the ground while in pursuit of the next thrill.

Sean Ripple is an artist and writer based in Austin, Texas.