Benjamin Patterson wants you. To make music with your tongue, to cover a shapely body with whipped cream and lick it off, to scrub your face with preserved lemon, and to donate your subconscious to art.

If you head to the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston for its mind-bending new show, Benjamin Patterson: Born in the State of FLUX/us, which runs through Jan. 23, you’ll be instructed to do all of this and more. Don’t be afraid. This is art that wants you to take part.

Thanks to the curatorial skills of senior curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, the first major show dedicated to this founding member of Fluxus puts the “us” in Fluxus. It asks viewers to interact with visual poems, collages, films, scores, objects and books. It even asks us to take a trip into the dark recesses of Patterson’s subconscious. In doing so, the exhibit offers the chance to consider the roads taken by Fluxus artists and roads not taken in recent art.

Fluxus was a loose international collective of artists, many of whom gathered in New York in the 1960s, to change the world of art. No doubt every artistic movement has such an ambition, but Fluxus (Latin for “flow”) sought transformation in a radical mix of genres. Fluxus artist Dick Higgins coined the term “intermedia.”

That idea has become central to contemporary art, as witnessed by Houston’s own Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, dedicated to fostering collaboration across artistic media. Patterson himself was a trained double-bassist who performed professionally before becoming an artist, librarian and arts administrator.

Inspired by John Cage and the earlier 20th-century Dada arts movement, Fluxus artists worked in music, noise, art, sculpture, literature, puzzles, performance, mail art and a host of other forms. Central to Fluxus is what some call a “do-it-yourself” aesthetic. Many Fluxus works are really instructions for creating repeatable but never identical performances or events.

Upon entering the CAMH, for instance, viewers are treated to “scores” for two such events. Duo, dating from 1961, offers a map of symbols and instructions for a performance, asking the performer to whistle, inhale through closed or open throat, or slap the tongue against the soft palate. Variations for Double Bass: After John Cage (1962) asks its performer to unfold a world map on the floor, attach clothespins to the strings of a double-bass, wrap strips of gold-face paper around those strings, and rub an object against the strings.

No Boundaries Art

Fluxus art could happen anywhere. Take, for example, one of Patterson’s earliest interventions. In collaboration with Robert Filliou, Patterson distributed “puzzle-poems,” odd combinations of text, collage and objects, in Filliou’s Galerie Légitime, which happened to be located on top of his head under his hat. Patterson and Filliou spent 24 hours in 1961 wandering Paris by bus, foot and subway to distribute these visual poems. My favorite (Instructions #2) is the simplest. It features a washcloth with the text “Please wash your face” and a slice of preserved lemon as a bar of soap.

Patterson lived in Paris and Germany, where he helped George Maciunas, the veritable father of Fluxus, organize the legendary Fluxus Festival in Wiesbaden in 1962.

Much of what appears in the exhibit is actually potential art or aspirational gestures toward art that may be. This can cause a little confusion, to be sure. But art fascinates most when it questions what can be art and who can make it. As you wander through Benjamin Patterson: Born in the State of FLUX/us, whose works range from the years of Fluxus to the present, try to concentrate on a few signature experiences.

Patterson loved instruments and toys. Perhaps the most visually arresting work is Two for Violins (After One for Violin by Nam June Paik). The work is composed of two shattered violins and a wooden backing, and it balances exacting arrangement with chaotic shattering. The work refers to Fluxus visionary Nam June Paik, whom many consider the first video artist. Paik’s 1962 performance One for Violin consisted of a performer smashing a violin on a podium. Patterson pays homage while sculpting elegance from the violence of Paik’s iconoclasm.

To be sure, much art derives its effect from the power to evoke memory and history. Many of the objects in this show are recollections — photos and films, posters and scores. But Patterson also intervenes in how we are to understand the history of contemporary art. His series A Short History of Twentieth-Century Art constructs from the chaos of a child’s toys and block letters a series of panel celebrating influential visionaries: Marcel Duchamp (with a toy bike), John Cage (with a CD, a metronome and a watermelon) and Gertrude Stein (with praying hands, a bourbon bottle and a pop-up puppet). The series ends hauntingly with letters spelling out “Since Fluxus: This is the end.”

Around the corner in Fluxus Constellation (2003) a series of intermittently flashing dome lights silkscreened with the astrology signs of artists from Cage to Paik and Patterson himself. It was hard not to think of William Dunbar's medieval Lament for the Makers, which remembered the great, dead poets of the past. Patterson's intent was not to mourn what was lost, though the slackening of innovation in art since Fluxus made it feel like an inadvertent elegy.

Don't Just Stand There

Though it offers instructions and demands, Fluxus art encourages participation. For Patterson, this is not merely the mechanical reproduction of someone else’s idea. He wanted audiences to enter the mind-set of an artist. This becomes literal in what, to me, was the most interesting piece in an enlightening exhibit, Blame it on Pittsburgh, or Why I Became an Artist (1997).

One enters a dark room of this piece with a flashlight to illuminate Plexiglas panels silkscreened with sometimes luminescent texts. The texts emerged from a series of psychoanalytic sessions Patterson underwent to understand why he became an artist. The work also documents, sometimes through newspaper articles, the state of Pittsburgh in his childhood years, his evolution through schooling, the impact of growing up African-American, and an extensive family history.

Before I entered this room, I was struck by the humorous iconoclasm and idiosyncratic performances of Patterson. It was a revelation, then, to know that Patterson’s analysis discovers racism as his primary motivation to be an artist. In honor of this aspect of Patterson’s career, CAMH will team up for a performance at the Houston Museum of African American Culture featuring musician and artist Pamela Z on Dec. 4 at 7 p.m.

To make sure he leaves his own special mark on Houston, Patterson has designated the CAMH as a host to the first North American wing of his "Museum of the Subconscious."

In an explanatory pamphlet, Patterson insists we think about donating the subconscious after death. The first annex was established in Namibia and other branches have formed in Israel and Argentina. He also mentioned that the proximity of the Jung Center makes Houston's CAMH an especially attractive location. Participation is simple, and the exhibit provides pamphlets with instructions.

There’s certainly something odd about Patterson’s art and his “Museum of the Subconscious.” But there’s also something beautiful in the idea that the best things we leave behind are the rich and strange treasures of the mind.