‘Do It Yourself’ with no directions

“Technically, it’s not that hard,’’ said Obetz. “But it is very time-consuming and labor-intensive.’’

The Volkswagen arrived at the museum in six huge crates, enough to fill a tractor-trailer. The 1989 Beetle had once been used as a taxi. But when Ortega purchased it seven years ago, he wasn’t interested in taking it out for a spin.

Ortega turned the car into “Cosmic Thing,’’ a work that calls for connecting dozens of car parts - from seats and fenders to gas tanks and door handles - to wires, then hanging those pieces from the ceiling. The effect, seen in galleries and museums in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Venice, is to create an exploded, almost anatomical view of an object ubiquitous in Mexico and widely known around the world.

But “Cosmic Thing’’ does not come with directions, only photographs of previous installations. That left the installation here to a team of about a dozen ICA staffers.

On a recent afternoon, two installers kneeled, one holding a side door as the other tried to install in it a metal rod connected to a door handle. Across the room, a staffer examined a series of pieces - brake pads, engine grille, bumpers - laid out carefully on the floor.

“The hardest thing might be keeping track of the parts and not losing anything,’’ said Barry Grady, lead technician at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, which is lending “Cosmic Thing’’ to the ICA for the show. “It’s a very low-tech assembly.’’

There are several ideas behind the piece. Ortega, who was once a political cartoonist, talked during a recent interview of both his personal connection to the Beetle (he drove one when he was younger) and the bigger link the car has had to Mexican culture. He finds it ironic that an automobile developed in Hitler’s Germany was so readily adopted by hippies in the 1960s. He finds it worth noting that the Beetle, because of its low price, made it easy for many people without much money to get wheels. And he says that “Cosmic Thing’’ debuted in 2002, the same year production of the original Beetle was discontinued in Mexico.

In the ICA catalog, Ortega suggests that the timing rendered his installation a kind of “mythical or archeological figure, like a dinosaur in the National History Museum.’’

But “Cosmic Thing’’ isn’t just conversational fodder for art-world types. It’s fun to look at, a car turned into an orderly, skeletal sum of its parts, suspended from above. Ortega covered up the car’s original green color with flat gray paint.

“It looks partly like a flying insect,’’ said Randi Hopkins, an ICA associate curator assisting on the installation. “And I think I like it because it’s so diagrammatic and graphic it almost looks like a drawing.’’

Ortega came to the ICA a few weeks ago to mark off where he wanted “Cosmic Thing’’ and other pieces installed. But neither he nor Jessica Morgan, the Tate Modern curator and ICA adjunct curator who organized the show, were around when the Beetle came out of the crates.

For a week, ICA staffers, supervised by Hopkins and Obetz, worked on the piece in preparation for Ortega’s approval. They knew this installation of “Cosmic Thing’’ would be different from those at other institutions. For one thing, the ICA’s 15-foot ceiling is considerably lower than the 30- to 45-foot-high spaces used for previous installations.

So Ortega decided to have the piece stretched sideways.

First, the installers created a roughly 20- by 20-foot steel grid on the ceiling. That would be where the wires were secured. They began by hoisting up the roof, chassis, and floor body. The seat, dashboard, and gas tank came next. On the third day of installation, Obetz’s crew put the axle, trunk, and doors in place.

A week and a half before the show was to open, Ortega arrived. He gave his assistant a high five, and they exchanged words in Spanish.

“It looks really small,’’ he said, taking in “Cosmic Thing.’’

“When you move the crates out, it won’t,’’ Hopkins assured him.

Ortega circled the piece and looked for adjustments to make. More air was needed for the tires. The emergency brake needed to be pulled up slightly.

“When you have clean lines, it looks much stronger,’’ Ortega said.

He made one dramatic change. The fenders and doors had been hung to line up with each other. Instead, he extended the fenders sideways, a few feet farther out from the car than the doors.

As ICA installers began to unwrap and work on other pieces in the show, Ortega took in “Cosmic Thing.’’ Which version did he like better, the piece in Los Angeles or Boston?

“I like both,’’ he said. “I enjoy the experiment and having the freedom to experiment.’’