This exhibition draws on vocabulary Josef Strau has mastered to great effect: Collections of ramshackle lamps and texts are arranged around his characteristic white paintings, symbols that interface in a willful conceptual static. Exhibiting his works in a self-styled “retrospective,” Strau’s show looks not backward but down—into a constellation of cardboard tunnels and Styrofoam boards, onto low-lying receptacles of information scattered around a room viewers must squat to explore. In a further layer of disorientation, Strau has written monologues that are spoken by an unseen computer; the voice of each monologue cuts in on the others, an overlapping sequence of female monotones that incessantly drown their own content.

Strau’s work is a sardonic intervention, a celebration of contingency parading as a ritual of completeness. This aesthetic of fragility betrays its own purchase as a signifier: Just as there are concealed truths and unuttered variances in the most digestible of narratives, Strau’s anti-narrative deals in cogencies (anti-ideational, anti-commodity) that beg consumption. At the core of this practice is a heady ambivalence, one that questions and complicates the artist’s own sale of ideas in a commercial space. While Strau effectively turns this friction into a kind of play, his work is haunted by the knowledge of how much lies just outside the lamplight, where the white walls of the gallery begin to fade to gray.

— Russell Burge

Conjuring a convincing alternative world, especially in an institution as familiar as P.S. 1, is no easy task. Yet Børre Sæthre manages the feat with just a few key props and some bold interior design. In an interconnected suite of rooms, Sæthre constructs a series of cryptic tableaux in which, psychologically speaking, it’s surprisingly easy to lose oneself. Inspired in large part by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the Norwegian artist uses sound and light to generate an eerie, futuristic atmosphere in which established rules seem to have been suspended. Suggesting a link between emergent technology and ancient myth, he juxtaposes the more-or-less recognizable with the entirely abstract, situating them in an environment that seems to exist outside of time.

A black-painted entrance dominated by an illuminated alcove gives way to a larger room in which four monitors are scattered over a low platform. Geometric animations whirl across the screens while grating electronic sounds play. Next, a mirrored chamber lit by dim fluorescent tubing houses two vitrines, one containing a pistol and two white balls, the other a monitor depicting a video of a naked man. In the fourth and final room, a tank preserves what appears to be a unicorn; approach the creature and it seems to fade into mist. A dreamy ambient sound track completes the scenario. It’s a powerfully surreal finale that only complicates what has gone before, muddling the organic with the artificial, the concrete with the imagined, in a zone of endless potential that Sæthre makes his own.

— Michael Wilson

The project called “C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience),” installed in the museum’s Shaft Project Space, comprises the following: a series of looped videos on monitors in the closet-size gallery, with a driving instrumental sound track playing softly and piles of rainbow-dyed clothing stashed here and there; a projection, on a wall outside the museum, of a related video accompanied by similar music on headphones, beginning daily at dusk and visible through a window in the stairwell beside the gallery; and intermittent performances by the choreographic duo in the videos. The dancers are robbinschilds (Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs). The projection, titled C.L.U.E. Part I, 2007, is by artist A. L. Steiner, assisted by A. J. Blandford; they also shot the footage on the monitors. Avant-rock quartet Kinski contributed the music. When credits roll, the words A MOTION PICTURE hold for a significant moment on the wall, and indeed, “C.L.U.E.” creates just that—a picture in motion or a flowing series of tableaux, in which carefully wrought synchrony seems serendipitous, the physical expression of mind meld.

Costumed in a series of imperfectly monochrome outfits (everything might be bright yellow, but different bright yellows), robbinschilds perform what they call “extra-pedestrian states . . . time-travel and psychedelic filigree.” So there they are in the videos, folded up together wearing deep blue in a desert. Dressed in pink T-shirts, undies, and sneakers, they cavort and crawl on a western road; in purple fedora with zoot-suit-ish jacket and belted vest with elfin hood, they lean together in the gloaming at the ocean. In red, they syncopate by the pay phones under a string of red lights spelling OPEN. In other reds, they wave as a train of red boxcars goes by; in white, in a parking lot at night, they perform a pas de deux under harsh lights, handing their prop—a purse—back and forth while cars and pedestrians pass in reverse, the film running backward to show how robbinschilds and the regular world are in harmony yet in opposition.

It’s hard to describe this work without making lists, because its tenor is episodic, dreamlike, all about intertwined settings, gestures, hues, and sounds. The movement is precise but unprecious, structured by jumping, rolling, walking, wriggling. Touch is key. Though Childs is taller than Robbins, their smooth communication makes it difficult, sometimes, to tell them apart. They wrestle, pull, and restrain each other and are often holding hands, as if engrossed in haptic planning of the next move. Their rainbow motif might recall gay pride, little-girl fantasy, art school foundation classes, or thrift-store merchandising. But of course, it also manifests the visible spectrum, the principle by which color is locatable or ultimately experienced. It’s a clue as to how matter and energy, particle and wave, organize.

Steiner and Blandford photograph a stack of crushed cars in the same spirit as redwood forest or wind-sculpted sandstone, and robbinschilds’s choreography uses the objects of lovely nature and tawdry culture alike as things to be climbed, traversed, fitted into, and bounced off. Ugly-beautiful defines their sartorial style, too: Keds, flats, unflattering pleated shorts and downmarket business-wear, scarves, necklaces, even coffee cups. One thinks of liberated office drones (one of Kinski’s tunes is called “Hot Stenographer”) or weird high school girls who grew up to be, or were already, geniuses. Nonsexual lovers or intermedia nymphs, the “C.L.U.E.” dyad haunts not only waters, rocks, and trees but a power plant, a junkyard, and several desolate corporate plazas. The art diagrams a series of nonconfrontational yet nonhomogenous partnerships: Robbins with Childs; robbinschilds with Steiner, Blandford, and Kinski; big screens with small; visual with aural; indoor with out. It’s hopeful.

— Frances Richard

Of all the identities that photographer Catherine Opie has claimed throughout her career (“leather dyke,” “mother,” “queer” . . . ), “American” may be the most transgressive. In a recent interview with writer A. M. Homes, Opie spent a moment pondering that overused word, noting, “It’s transgressive just to try to live your life the way you actually want to live it,” a point well illustrated by her current midcareer retrospective.

Opie works in series, lending all subjects the same measure of respect, with an aesthetic that ranges from Baroque to Romantic. For her ongoing, Düsseldorf School–influenced “American Cities,” begun in 1997, Opie eschews monumentality, training her lens on such marginalia as alleys and minimal signage. The deadpan views might read as banal if not for the velvety richness of the prints. “Icehouses,” 2001, portraying temporary structures erected by Minneapolis's ice-fishing community, is installed opposite a 2003 series depicting Los Angeles surfers. Both series are as blank as the cityscapes; the ice is devoid of life, and across the room, the subjects in wetsuits lie on their boards waiting for waves. Every image is divided by a horizon line, the stillness of the sky mirrored below. The emptiness is transcendent.

In contrast to these largely unpopulated landscapes are Opie’s well-known portraits of friends—representing a panoply of genders—from her S/M communities. They flank her self-portraits, most notably a classic 1994 photograph: Opie’s head sheathed in a black leather hood, PERVERT freshly carved into her chest in a rather baroque script, meticulously placed rows of needles piercing her arms. Though they could easily be confrontational, the images are unflinching and dignified. This well-timed, elegant survey reveals that Opie has documented, for the past two decades, a search for her version of the American dream. Transgressing all expectations, she has created a vision of this country that is generous, fluid, and open.

— Amoreen Armetta

This exhibition begins with a kiss, almond eyes open. With each image, the tale of seduction unfolds through tousled hair and sheets, gently parted lips and legs. Wingate Paine’s Venus performs for the enamored photographer and for her fictitious, decidedly straight and male lover—the viewer. How innocent this patriarchal scopophilia seems today. In 1966, Paine assembled his seminal collection of photographs in the book Mirror of Venus, with texts by director Federico Fellini and writer Françoise Sagan. He could not have known that a mere forty years later, the seemingly immortal concept he nurtured—eroticism—would no longer be resting blissfully on her nuptial pillow, but would be rather on her death bed, suffocated by hard-core pornography and the digital age of unlimited access. He could also not have known that his gloriously natural Carla, Scarlet, and Sandra, whom he was too restrained to fully expose, would be waxed bare, replaced with silicone and peroxide. “Venus Revisited,” Paine’s first solo exhibition, combines classic images from his book with never-before-seen vintage prints from the artist’s personal archive. The show sparkles with humor, mystery, and, most of all, sincerity. Affixed to the gallery wall, a quote by Fellini prophetically begs, “Why can’t we always live in a house full of women like this?” I’m sorry, Federico, but they don’t live here anymore.

— Cameron Shaw

Although Kate Gilmore describes herself as a sculptor––she often builds and maneuvers through constructions of lumber, plaster, wooden chairs, and plastic buckets in her work—her true medium is video, and like a true material girl, she’s the star in every one. In her third solo show in New York and her debut at this gallery, Gilmore further develops ideas about women and empowerment, but a tempestuous aggression replaces the heartfelt vulnerability of her earlier work.

Captured with a stationary camera in a single take, the four videos in this show portray Gilmore as an urban everywoman: chicly dressed but clearly uncomfortable in her hastily built interiors. Walk This Way (all works 2008) depicts the artist, dressed in fancy black heels, dark tights, and a gray dress, kicking and punching with unassailable determination through two Sheetrock walls. The video unfolds on a monitor at the end of a short, narrow, Nauman-like corridor in the front of the gallery; it is here that the artist was filmed breaking through the parallel walls.

Gilmore trades in her heels for sledgehammers in High Horse and Down the House. In the latter, she is seen from above in a fluorescent-lemonade dress, standing atop a rickety heap of plaster blocks and wood pieces, all splattered with red and hot-pink paint, as she attacks this foundation with all her might. Like Courbet’s The Stonebreakers, 1849, Gilmore’s labors—though fascinating to watch and even more mesmeric to hear through a cacophonous din from all four works playing simultaneously—seem to provide no clear redemption or resolution. The melancholy continues at the conclusion of Between a Hard Place, where after smashing and climbing through five more sheets of drywall, Gilmore turns to face the camera and, taking off her party gloves, reveals an exasperating pathos that simultaneously exclaims “I did it!” and asks “Was it worth it?”

— Christopher Howard

The creatures in Laurie Hogin’s masterful and allegorical oil paintings have fur that resembles that found in chipper and cheap children’s toys. But while the synthetic coats of those plush animals are often the result of noxious chemicals and international politics not associated with the carefree fantasies of kiddie consumers, Hogin’s mutant menagerie does not hide the diseased origins of their unnatural appearance. The Illinois-based artist deploys her remarkable talent for still-life and animal imagery to offer sharp and salient commentary on contemporary consumer politics. Her current focus is the unhealthy progeny of the health industry. “Monkey Brains,” Hogin’s solo show of new paintings at Schroeder Romero, is on view in tandem with “Neurmantic Evening, Psychotropical Paradise” at Littlejohn Contemporary, another exhibition of her latest works. Both shows explore the role that psychopharmacology plays in shaping our behavior and influencing our moral decisions. In the former, freaky primates hold guns in their paws, have dazed expressions, and scream in obvious angst. The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (Diorama with Rozerem and Black Alligators), 2008, depicts a packed landscape populated by sumptuously detailed Day-Glo reptiles, finely feathered birds, and beasts with tortured expressions that all congregate amid little white Rozerem sleeping pills. In What Ails Us: The 100 Most-Prescribed Pharmaceuticals in the Nation, 2008, she presents an installation of one hundred small oil-on-panel portraits of mutant guinea pigs with tortured, rabid features and radioactive coats. These animals represent human pill poppers experimenting with their bodies, health, and sanity, as well as their doctors’ potentially reckless gaze.

This exhibition is also on view at Littlejohn Contemporary, 245 East Seventy-second Street, until January 3.

— Ana Finel Honigman

In this group exhibition, guest curator Lydia Yee historicizes the street as subject and stage, a space onto which artists project their shifting visions of public life. It opens with politically charged photojournalistic candids, such as William Klein's antagonistic Gun No. 1, New York, 1954, which forces the viewer to stare down the blurry barrel of a pistol aimed by a sneering child. Although the show mostly consists of New York–based photography, with an emphasis on performance documentation, it nevertheless showcases a range of practices attempting to model urban experience.

Artists transform the street into a site of institutional and political critique, as visible in George Maciunas’s Fluxus posters. Tehching Hsieh, who refused to be indoors during his One Year Performance, 1981–82, takes such reverence for the street to its extreme. Vito Acconci’s Following Piece, 1969, and Sophie Calle’s The Shadow (Detective), 1981, both reproduce the anonymity and proximity of public life through works about being followed. More lighthearted performances include Daniel Guzmán's pick-me-up video of the artist dancing down the streets of Mexico City; in David Van Tieghem’s video Ear to the Ground, 1979, a percussionist creates catchy rhythms by banging two mallets on poles, doors, grates, and other surfaces.

Martha Rosler’s canonical The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, 1974–75, challenges the capacity of text and image to characterize the street and its inhabitants. Such familiar work is a counterpoint to contemporary, internationally focused pieces such as Sze Tsung Leong’s photographs of staggering Chinese architecture. Activism informs much of this recent work, including the Blank Noise Project’s installation of two monitors facing each other as if in conversation: One presents the perspectives of men regarding street harassment in India, the other offers women’s views. Instead of a dialogue, Kimsooja’s video presents a woman silently standing in various world capitals. Her body functions as witness, at once disrupting and linking the global cities she inhabits.

— Lori Cole

During his long career, marked by a fascination with the melodramatically macabre, the Austrian artist Alfred Kubin created darkly mystical representations of sex, death, and the beyond that trumped even the eeriness pervading the work of his more iconic contemporaries such as James Ensor and Edvard Munch. This first major American exhibition of the artist’s work presents a concise yet exhaustive overview of the medium Kubin preferred for much of his life, illuminating a fantastically bizarre array of his drawings.

Heavily influenced by the occult beliefs of Symbolist circles, the highly prolific Kubin synthesized popular motifs of the time with his own disturbing autobiographical content. The artist’s life contained enough trauma to provide him with acutely dark iconography for much of his life: As a young boy, he witnessed his mother’s death and engaged in sexual activity with a much older pregnant woman; he remained obsessed with suicide for the rest of his years. Kubin’s work transparently reflects these neuroses: In an image evocative enough for those with even the slightest knowledge of his biography, Unser aller Mutter Erde (Earth: Mother of Us All), 1900, a pregnant woman stalks across a bleak landscape, hands raised and manelike hair flowing, as a trail of decapitated heads extends behind her.

The dimly lit exhibition contains Kubin’s drawings for his 1909 novel, The Other Side, which is a lengthy description of an imaginary land based on the themes continually raised in his work. The illustrated text draws comparisons to the work of Franz Kafka and Edgar Allan Poe, among others, and the melancholic chaos evoked by such references is reflected in Kubin’s sketchy illustrations. The completion date for the book—which gained relative popularity in its own time—marks the end of the artist’s productive twelve-year period on view. In addition to serving as a reference for the cultural currency of Vienna during these historically momentous years, this exhibition offers richly cathartic work by an artist who would otherwise likely have remained little known to American audiences.

— Britany Salsbury