"DJED" (2009-2011) by Matthew Barney.

The materials of Richard Serra’s two enormous new sculptures, currently dominating the Gagosian Gallery on 24th Street, will be recognizable to anyone who knows Mr. Serra’s work. They’re made from curved, continuous steel plates more than thirteen feet high, rusted into shades from powdery orange to Martian mahogany, and marked with what are or appear to be scales, drips, streaks, stretch marks, shadows, calcium deposits, water stains, and lightning bolts. The rust continues so evenly that it’s only the occasional glint of a silvery, unrusted corner that looks like evidence of the human hand. Seen from above, their shapes are also recognizable: Cycle is a triskelion composed of three floppy, interlocking “S”s, which create three roughly circular clearings and three spiraling corridors. Junction, also made of steel plates doubled into corridors, looks more like a pinched, four-pointed star.

An abundance of visual references presents itself, too. Two great, bowed curves meeting in a single opening—the visitor’s first view of Cycle—seem to mean something clear enough, particularly when, on closer inspection, the one opening actually offers two, one leading quickly into an empty round chamber, the other continuing on with narrow walls that move rhythmically together and apart. Walking between them doesn’t feel like something that should be done in public. But then that tunnel becomes a primordial cave, and the cave becomes the ocean, and the swaying of the walls, the tides, and you pass glaciers and teepees and burial mounds and abattoirs until you emerge into a grotto where a surprising patch of light falls on a splash of brighter orange. When you stop walking, you see nothing but steel.

Because the only place you can see Junction and Cycle from above is in photos on the gallery’s website. The impossibility of seeing the whole of a piece from any single angle, a defining feature of sculpture as a medium, is raised in Serra’s work to a monumental haughtiness. Their size and the size of their fame always draw an audience—people take pictures of their friends against the rust while little children go running past them—but it’s an audience that’s merely permitted, not required. And the pieces are certainly activated by walking. Every step reveals a new grand gesture of color and shape, and a numinous presence seems to hover behind you as you move. But the effect is less like art speaking to you than it is like a striking desert vista changing the way you hear yourself. Even the strips of black rubber hidden between the joints read like some geological buildup. It’s sculpture that can be looked at but refuses to be seen.

Matthew Barney’s “DJED” at Gladstone Gallery, another crowded spectacle, is equally monumental in its conception and also uses large quantities of metal to imposing effect. But where Serra’s monuments can be remote, casting off emotion, images, and ideas with the same indifferent tranquility, the four large sculptures here have, if anything, as many ideas as they can handle.

Canopic Chest, DJED, Secret Name, and Sacrificial Anode, being shown along with a dozen drawings, were made in connection with a multi-part, multiple-site-specific, not yet completed opera—directed with Jonathan Bepler, who also wrote the music—that takes its name and its conceit from Norman Mailer’s 1983 novel Ancient Evenings. Mailer’s novel follows one ancient Egyptian soul through death and rebirth in three successive incarnations; in Mr. Barney’s opera—which hovers over “DJED” like the ghost of Egyptian grandeur over the British Museum—the hero is incarnate as multiple cars: a 1967 Chrysler Crown Imperial, a ‘79 Trans Am, and a 2001 Ford Crown Victoria.

DJED, twenty-five tons of iron poured live during the performance of the opera’s third act in Detroit, is now a smokey gray puddle with two spindly tributaries flowing out to two hard graphite blocks, with a casting of a car’s  undercarriage set beside it. Secret Name is a broken, melting bathtub cast in lead and partially covered in white plastic. (There’s also a short, thick wall of black plastic, a piece of copper with the texture of scorched pig skin, and a self-consciously arranged cast lead rope.) Secret Name shares with DJED the power of its monumental scale, which, even prior to its particular formal details, inspires you to imagine our small American stories with the silent, alien grandeur of the distant past. Sacrificial Anode, meanwhile, a row of crowbars and rods cast in zinc and arranged on a white plastic beam, marks out an intriguing alternate direction: the smallest piece, it’s also the only one that could really stand alone as a sculpture without the context of the larger project.

The supporting mythology of divine incest, murder, and miraculous rebirth, as detailed in the illustrated libretto booklet, seems disturbingly well chosen and fresh. After Osiris, the prototypical Egyptian god-king, is murdered and dismembered by Set, for example, his wife Isis finds and reassembles all of the pieces except the penis, which she can’t find and so replaces with a replica made of gold. Canopic Chest is a bronze casting that looks like a pile of black slag molded into the shape of a car hood and infested with short lengths of protruding wire, and on top of it there rests a long, golden, ibis-shaped crowbar. What could possibly be a better metaphor for where we stand as a country than a reassembled Chrysler sarcophagus with a prosthetic gold penis?

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"Figure Creeping" (2011) by Nicola Tyson. (Photo: Friedrich Petzel Gallery)

The characters that Nicola Tyson paints begin as quick sketchbook drawings and look like soap figurines who’ve taken too many baths. Their extremities are reduced to basic indications and look like the ovals from a drawing class. But while drawing-class ovals support the exploration of some particular model’s anatomy, Ms. Tyson’s ovals are bent primarily on exploring themselves, their own curves and crossings. There is an anatomy being portrayed, but it’s the artist’s own, the force of her tendons, her arm’s range of motion. The mystery of cognition takes the place of ex nihilo creation.

Ms. Tyson’s new show consists of eight large, strikingly bright, apparently flat paintings, as well as nine small sculptures in Petzel Gallery’s second space next door. The paintings’ first impression of flatness—created by duotone backgrounds like bicolor flags and large, unmixed planes of color—is a feint, but a double one, because the careful modeling that slowly reveals itself is so clearly motivated by the sensual pleasures of the brush. Illusions of depth are secondary: it’s all in the moving line.

Figure Creeping, a nearly life-size dwarf with one swollen and one emaciated leg, in a pale blue housedress and oversize forest-green yarmulke, wearing tiny red driving gloves, a mahogany wig and a face like over-chewed bubble gum, is gimping in green loafers down a tilted pink street. The exaggerated perspective of the tilt serves to emphasize that this creep has been put on stage: the painting is a razor-thin cross section of the process of its own making.

Every other painting in the show has two figures (although all the figures were originally drawn separately). Figure With a Sphinx shows a Medieval sensorium in the form of a preternaturally old little boy with receding blond hair and a disembodied head, played by a chihuahua, on an upthrusting tongue of an obelisk. The boy has one occluded blue eye and the indication of a sideways little red mouth with flesh-colored teeth. His arms hang too long, and if he does have hands, we can’t see them. Standing in front of a yellow wall, the boy with a rakish turquoise shirt, the sphinx with a bulldog’s swagger, they’re Body and Mind as New Wave gangsters. But who are they fighting—each other, or the artist?

Two Figures Touching are not. The one on the left has a face, but the sleeves of his green sweater have no openings, and therefore no hands. The one on the right does have hands, but the purple stocking pulled over them is also covering his head. The one has pants with checks and dots; the other a shirt with vertical stripes. This is the method, but what can it do if the player is handless and the referee is blind? It can only follow the line.

Figure With Tree alone shows figures that haven’t been frozen by the viewer’s eyes. The mushroom-headed, spindly-armed, giant-legged maniac on the left is moving; the multiply pink, venous tree on the right, which performs the incredible trick of looking equally like both male and female sexual organs, is moving; even the ground and the deep green sky are moving. The false dichotomies of Figure Creeping and Two Figures Touching are fused into mystical unities.

In Two Figures on Orange, a figure in marine-blue shirt and green hip boots, with a wedge-shape hand made from fingers moving too fast to see, thrusts its pelvis to the viewer’s left. Its head, like an exposed brain, demonstrates the exponential power of crossing lines. One line is practically nothing; one crossing makes only a point. But multiple crossing loops make form, just as moments make time and gestures life. The other figure, a roosterlike red heart with a catcher’s mitt face and plump calves in green and pink hose, turns to the right. They pose like rock stars in front of a rosy, Dutch-orange wall. Figure With Tree, by contrast, looks overheated; and Ms. Tyson’s painting does sometimes risk looking like a decoration rather than elaboration of its underlying drawing; but Two Figures on Orange brings everything together. We see the simple beauty of the gesture, moving like an artery through the center of the work, sustaining the flesh around it without being diluted or reduced.

The sculptures next door sit at about working height, each the size of two fists. With one black bronze exception, they’re all made from white Crayola Model Magic and air dried. Loosely jointed and coiling, they follow the same method as Ms. Tyson’s drawings: ostensibly modeling birds, they really depict hands making things that look like hands making things. Interaction with the medium is the subject of the interaction; the pressure of fingers leaves bumps like knuckles.

While the motionlessness of her painted figures serves to emphasize their artificiality—that is, to draw attention to the primacy of depiction over what is depicted—the birds’ poses are more innocent. Baby Bird looks like a duck with a new inheritance sailing happily into Bloomingdale’s; you can almost see the artist shaping the unfinished fold of her beak. Veiled Bird, a serpentine swan with separately affixed nipples and a washcloth over her eyes, wears its art history lightly. Like a lover posing in the bathroom, it says, “Look, I’m Leda and the swan.”

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Everything is Important and Nothing Really Matters at All (2009), by Mariele Neudecker.

The curators of “Otherworldly”—which consists largely of meticulous models and dioramas, some of them artworks themselves, others constructed by artists only to be photographed—trace the diorama back to Louis Daguerre and posit as its animating question, “What is real?” But that’s not really the question anymore, except insofar as Renaissance perspective, like Newtonian physics or the Ten Commandments, continues to dominate the popular imagination. If there is a question, it might be “What is the difference between art and design?” But there’s no particular urgency to that one either, since art and design, like spectacle and pathos, can so happily be concurrent. In fact, you could say that “Otherworldly” consists of two separate, concurrent shows: one for children and other devotees of technology, and one for devotees of art.

Looking for art, the first thing we confront is nostalgia. And the most complex and generous take on the fantasies of security and control that underlie it is Michael C. McMillen’s The Studio, a found, herringbone-pattern, wicker case with a Lucite handle. If you put your eye to a stainless steel eyepiece in its side, you see a dirty, empty hallway with a half-open door at the other end. But this little studio reveals itself only when, as if making a conscious act of faith, you hold down a separate button on the pedestal to light the little light bulb inside.

Other artists take on nostalgia more directly. Michael Paul Smith photographs models inspired by his small-town childhood. The Diner Interior is so close to verisimilitude that whatever reveals the diner as false—maybe it’s something in the proportions, or maybe the walls are just too clean—makes it jarringly uncanny. Peter Feigenbaum built a block of burnt-out ghetto to shoot; in Hole in the Sky 6, a corner of the pale blue sheetrock behind the row of buildings is pulled away. Lori Nix’s Violin Repair Shop is a photo of a model of an impossibly cozy workroom with impossibly high ceilings that might be located somewhere over Carnegie Hall. Out the window is a line of half-destroyed buildings. Here the nostalgia pertains to method and content at once: does it seem hopeful or pathetic that someone, somewhere, is carefully varnishing a hopelessly old-fashioned instrument while the rest of the world is coming to an end?

Still others push deeper into the uncanny, so that the building of models becomes a sublimation of violence. Frank Kunert’s Menu à Deux shows a long table, covered in linen and laid with silver, that bends 90 degrees around a corner, so that two diners can watch two separate televisions and pretend they’re alone. And just beside a window in the museum that looks out across Columbus Circle to the glinting, black and gold Trump International Hotel and Tower are two enormous, majestically terrifying digital prints by James Casebere. (In this case we have only the photos, not Mr. Casebere’s models.) Landscape With Houses (Dutchess County, NY) #8 shows a pack of large, white-and-gray houses with clean walls and sharp lines set on an astroturf hillside among a loose scattering of above-ground pools and autumnal trees. Their shadows trail down toward the viewer like wakes, as if they’re sailing up away from any human gaze into the empty, annihilating sun. Landscape With Houses (Dutchess County, NY) #3 shows a similar plastic paradise by night, among pines, under an overcast sky.

But concurrence can also be confusing—when we look for technology, we may just find art again. Joe Fig, who builds models of artists’ studios from exact, point-by-point measurements, fully inhabits art as science, or counting as knowing, for good or ill. Chuck Close contemplating an unfinished portrait or Jackson Pollock frozen in the act of casting black paint across a canvas on the floor doesn’t give us as much as Mr. Fig’s portrait of himself in his own studio (Self Portrait 2007), which includes another, smaller model of itself. In that case, Mr. Fig’s counting is contagious: it also has one little ceiling fan; three boxes, 15 large canvases and eight clamp lights in the rafters; a flatfile; three skylights; and a peaked roof 34 shingles long.

And Mat Collishaw’s Garden of Unearthly Delights entrances as technology first—it’s a three-dimensional zoetrope, a giant turntable with multiple sculptured iterations of a single scene spinning under a strobe light—but also marks out the far limit of design as a route to art. “The limitations of the zoetrope,” Mr. Collishaw explains (in a wall label), “mean that you can only really achieve one second of animation before the sequence loops. …  [This] doesn’t lend itself very well to sophisticated movement but is perfectly suited for depicting sex, violence and other animalistic behavior.” In this case, two tiny, naked cave babies try to club three great blue eggs in a nest while a massive sparrow angrily flaps its wings and shakes its head; another baby wields a wooden spear at a snail; a fourth winds up and throws rocks; and a fifth swings a club at a sardine that leaps up out of the table.

Whatever the question this exhibition draws our attention to may be, Junebum Park’s videos 1 Parking and 3 Crossing, shot from a rooftop and showing the artist’s hands apparently moving real cars in and out of parking spaces or herding pedestrians across a busy street, have the answer: the world is what it is, and you do what you can do.

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Sigmar Polke, Untitled (Palermo) (1976).

This modest survey of German painter Sigmar Polke’s photography includes portraits of several Afghan men leaning on a Jeep next to a mud-brick wall; a picture of a teapot pouring crumpled paper into a cup; a picture of Polke’s studio furniture arranged in a sculptural installation; and pictures of Polke’s own collages “Polke’s Whip” and “Menschenkreis.” There is also a constellation of 16 photos made up of 11 views, including variations and double exposures, of Polke’s one-time lover Marietta Anton in a park, smiling and speaking through a veil of twigs; a photograph of an overturned iron bathtub; and two views of a naked couple on a blanket in the grass. There’s a whole series of prints painted and drawn over; eight still lifes of the shadowy adventures of a cucumber; and a grid of nine crackling, dramatic, Blossfeldt-meets-Becher nature studies. Apart from all this, there are the 64 prints and 14 lithographs marching in an unbroken line around the walls of a second branch of Leo Koenig Gallery, next door.

It’s hard to know where to begin, but that’s as it should be: Polke was as prolific in quality as he was in quantity. As Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art curator Paul Schimmel noted, Polke, who died last year, used his camera like a sketchbook; and he treated his photos like paintings, experimenting with, altering or deliberately bungling the development process to create unusual visual effects. Most of his prints are creased and stained. Everything seems unfinished—not in the sense of lacking anything, but in the sense of still being in play. The act of looking takes on a performative weight equal to the weight of the final form. And the viewer too is an equal­—you feel less like a critic entering after the fact than like a friend making a studio visit. When you look at Marietta smiling and chatting in the park, there’s a sense of intimacy but no intrusion. She’s smiling at Polke, but he lets you look over his shoulder.

In this sense, the sum can’t be more than any one of its parts, because every piece is equally whole. You can begin (and end) wherever you like. For my part, I’d choose the studies of the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo, which have never before been shown in the United States.

These catacombs began with a single dried-out monk in the 16th century, but by the time Polke visited, in the ’70s, they consisted of multiple galleries of well-preserved corpses, posed as in a wax museum and wearing the fashions they’d died in. (Photography is no longer allowed there, but postcards are still for sale.) The five large studies here are like X-rays of August Sander typologies: they categorize by accumulation rather than reduction, and they combine innocent fascination with an irony so medievally deep as to subvert its own subversion. (Photography is famously accused of rendering its subjects dead.)

Printed on paper the color of yellowed newsprint, its edges folded into serrations, is the very image of death as humiliation: the sleeves of a male corpse’s gray jacket are pulled forward only because he has no arms, and his skull, with its white face and dirty sides and jaw wired shut, sits directly on his shirt collar for a similar reason; but the effect is of diffident discomfort, as if he didn’t like having his picture taken. Who could blame him? He’s missing his five front teeth.

Nearby, there’s a buddy comedy about death as degradation: two figures sit on the ground like Bowery bums, leaning against a shelf across which a third is sleeping. One of them has a hood pulled over his skull and his skinless chin sunken on his chest, but the other, who has a flowing black tie, rakishly enormous lapels and enough skin left to make something of an ear and an open mouth, appears to be still awake. If you turn quickly over your left shoulder, you might just catch the tips of the great black wings he must be staring at in amazement.

Another two buddies are raggedy confidence men: one has a face as white as a clown’s, with a razor-sharp cheekbone and fringe of brownish hair, and looks up thoughtfully at his deeply shadowed partner, who, in a high, black collar, with a dirty, gray skull, shadow-black eyes, and a rough, white cigarette, is looking down at his hands rolling a cigarette, counting money from a game of three-card monte, reading the Bible and stacking souls. (He’s able to do all these things at once because his hands are out of sight.)

The last two buddies are victims: in matching burlap sweaters they lean against a white wall. One, despite a bonnet, wears a sign on his chest with his name: GIUSEPPE AJELLO. Behind the other’s head, on top of a low wall, is a pair of black boots.

One final corpse in a heavy black coat dozes with his chin on his chest. He’s lost his nose and ears and most of his hair, but not the rest of his skin. Once he was alive, and later his skull will be clean, but every moment is its own moment, and all these views of death are latent in one another.

Im Schatten der Made (In the Shadow of the Maggot) (2010) by John Bock.

Everything we do is in the shadow of the maggot—but why the long face? There’s always something newish under the sun. In a season of group shows and greatest hits, John Bock and the Anton Kern Gallery have transformed the usual repackaging into an absorbing entertainment of transformation. In the front room of the gallery, a black velvet curtain hanging in a square creates a cool, dark theater for Im Schatten der Made (In the Shadow of the Maggot), 2010, a full-length movie written and directed by Mr. Bock and produced by the artist and gallery with the Universal Museum in Graz, Germany, and the Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland, where it was presented last year.

Shot in black and white, Im Schatten der Made is theatrical, hysterical, persistently elliptical. It casually mixes contemporary physical culture, actors with contemporary looks, and contemporary video effects with self-aware but sincere 1920s-style melodrama and worn but still wriggling symbolism. Props from the movie fill vitrines that line the sides of the viewing room, providing a slight subliminal foreshadowing and strange, colorful contrast; a suite of new collages in loose thematic relation to the movie hang in the back room.

The movie opens on one Professor Lehmbruch (played by Matti Isan Blind) at home experimenting with sugar cubes. They might be the interchangeable building blocks of the modern economy, or old-fashioned geometric truths made ridiculously material, but they could also be props from a commercial photo shoot. The cubes are white, the Professor wears black; his collar is white, his beard and mascara are black. In the next room Merle (Friederike Kempter), a wife or anima in trailing white sleeves, marches a marionette up and down and wears a soup pot on her head. When the Professor uses an eyedropper to douse a cube, you can't tell whether he’s filled it with ink or blood.

Enter the true artist, superego, persona, or charlatan: the director, Mr. Bock. He is dressed as a priest, with a large white cross around his neck (presumably gold, but played by white, in film as in traditional heraldry) and a white Bible with a black, Y-shaped cross. Merle curtsies and Mr. Bock announces that he’s on a mission from God. The Professor  continues his manic, uninspired experiments while Mr. Bock, the Priest, steps into the other room, where the camera lingers on the shadow of his hand against the train of Merle’s white dress.

This conjunction of familiar, stagey fakery with the genuine violence that follows is to the point: The camera flips away regularly to a cheery, cartoonishly menacing black puppet of a maggot that’s crawling the walls. The maggot looks more like a worm, and Mr. Bock, who grew up on a farm in Germany, knows that there is no fertilizer more effective than worm castings: acrid and black, like finely sifted dirt, this material seems like the final product of decomposition, a reduction of multiple, once-living forms to meaningless homogeneity. But the worms are alive, and their castings contain the germs of an uncentered but powerfully generative fertility. Après le déluge, the ooze.

In the Professor’s laboratory, a ramshackle studio well appointed with plastic tubing, plastic water bottles, a rotary telephone, a spinning bicycle wheel, and a dancing potato, the Professor declares himself a genius--in a title card reading “Ich bin ein Genie!”--and creates life, or tries to: He constructs, with a porridge of bloody ink, a spandex unitard, a mechanical heart, and straw, the figure of a man. When he flips a the toilet-paper-tube switch, colors flash but nothing happens. And when he is struck with inspiration, it also comes in color: He has a glowing yellow-brown vision of Christ’s fingernail, which reposes in a vial in the church, and he runs right off to steal it.

But it’s not His nails that give life. When Merle enters the lab and finds the inert figure--which shimmers, in her eyes, into an actual man--she bends his arm and bends his finger, just as the maggot bends itself along, and then gives him a kiss. His eyes glow orange like the Terminator. She shrieks and runs out. He staggers to his feet, raises his arms like Frankenstein, and clumps right after her.

This android (Adrian Lohmüller) wanders through an Expressionist forest. He finds his reflection in a puddle. Black makeup on his cheeks look like scars. A glowing blond Christ child appears hanging from a tree, and the android offers it a handful of black mud and pulls at its trailing white gown.

In the church, meanwhile, the Professor lifts the relic vial out of its case, laughing maniacally, but is discovered in the act by Father Bock, who produces an Expressionist cross--its shorter bar is made of two separate, not quite even pieces, so that it carries a faint whiff of a cubist swastika--and beats him to the ground, knocking off his cast-iron top hat. The vial falls and opens and the nail slides slowly out on the surface of a puddle of water.

The raging priest rushes out into the forest, where he finds the android and, in a kind of double-reverse eucharist, extends a fork from his cross and stabs him repeatedly, spraying himself with blood. Like Doubting Thomas, he sticks his finger into the wound and presses the man-made pulse until it gives out. For a moment, everything is red--black blood included--but when Merle, also wandering in the forest, finds the android’s blood, and then his inert body, she performs her own strange double reversal, rolling up a leaf to make a straw and blowing the juice of a blackberry into a large prop penis. The penis descends; the android revives; and he and Merle make out.

But this doesn’t last, either: With the help of a journeyman he’s just met (Heiner Franzen) and his puppet brother, the Priest pulls the lovers apart. The android is drawn and quartered, pulled into pieces by painted stage horses, while Merle is thrown into a bare, pastoral prison cell.

While Merle cowers in dirty straw, the Priest delivers himself of a pompous speech while drinking from a bottle of blood. (He also take a moment to plug in a toaster.) “I’m not a monster (Unmensch),” he says, before kneeling down to rape her with his cross. The important point--and one way in which this work is thoroughly of the moment, or at least the long, postwar moment--is this: The cross is not the priest’s sexual organ; it is his sexual organ that is a cross.

Dissolve into a montage of continued assaults, after each of which the Priest makes himself a slice of white toast, takes one bite, and tosses the rest onto Merle’s body. She hides the slices in the straw, apparently refusing his brutal, mechanistic communion--but once she’s amassed enough, she chews the slices to wet pieces and molds them into a head. She removes her white dress and fills it with straw. She assembles her animus on the floor. And once again, she wakes him with a kiss: The lovers canoodle in prison, in the shadow of the maggot that climbs the walls.

The satire is there if you want it, though it seems beside the point to want it when it keeps such promiscuous company with simple entertainment. But this is not a happy ending, either, because it’s really no ending at all--the priest will come back, the android will be remurdered and resurrected, the willowy blond will scream. The cycle of violence will continue. Be sure to see the decapitated Barbie in the back room, and the photo of Klaus Kinski with a crocheted penis protector.

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Desktop (Cave Paintings) by Allyson Vieira.

The title of this small but powerful exhibition, “Discursive Arrangements, or Stubbornly Persistent Illusions,” is either an ironic feint or it’s begging the question. Centered discreetly but unmistakably around what a Buddhist art critic might call the “emptiness” of images, the show forcefully makes the point that it can’t be quite right, in light of their persistence, to call images illusions.

It was in the 1840’s that a British archaeologist uncovered an incredible stone bas-relief of a royal lion hunt in what was then the Ottoman province of Mosul. It was about twenty-five hundred years before this that artisans in the palace of King Ashurbanipal carved the relief, which shows a bearded royal hunter drawing back his bow in a chariot surrounded by lions leaping, pierced, and dying. And it was in 2009—about six years after our own army built a camp on the ruins of Babylon—that Sophie-Therese Trenka-Dalton went to the British Museum to photograph the entire length of the relief with a large format camera. In 2011 she created the site-specific installation The Royal Lion Hunt by emailing pdfs of those photographs to New York.

The 1:1 bitmap printout of her photographs is affixed to the wall directly next to the gallery’s door, turning around a corner to line up with the shoulder-height gray paint in the hallway. Ms. Trenka-Dalton heightened the contrast, and the effect is startling—lions frozen in mid-leap seem to float out as if in 3D. One suspended, horizontal arrow points at the door; next to the arrow, hanging down from the ceiling, is a small gold medal with a palm tree and Arabic inscription, one of a series awarded in 1983 to Iraqi citizens for supporting the war with Iran. In the office, a found WWI postcard shows captured Turkish shells; behind a closet door are decals of discontinued Iraqi dinars.

The key to all this is scale: to replicate an image at its actual size is to refuse to reduce it, and this refusal translates to the viewer—we’re prevented from thinking of the image reductively. The endless marching over the terrestrial palimpsest, the folly of empires, the long echoes of their folly, the disquieting sameness of kings, the rigidity of the image in spite of the pitting of time—they’re all there, but they’re humbled into silence.

Scale is also the key to Allyson Vieira’s two stunning watercolors. But if Ms. Trenka-Dalton’s reaction to the kaleidoscope of images is to reveal the enduring monumentality of even those that are reproduced, Ms. Vieira’s elegant solution is to seamlessly integrate pictures of pictures with pictures of their picturing. (She takes her inspiration from the F9 button on a Mac, which arranges all the files you have open in a loose grid.)

In Desktop (Cave Paintings), twenty-eight appropriated images of cave paintings, most or all of them presumably from the internet, are surrounded with thick white borders like Polaroids and arranged—along with an image of a bust of Pericles —on a warm gray background. Yellow horses, ochre bison, black elk, and red handprints, numinously present but distinctly other, live happily in miniature, and a column of multi-colored test daubs at the right edge form the artist’s own handprint. The caveman’s cave is Plato’s cave is the computer screen—but because she records this fact without comment, while paying such painterly respect to her small paintings of photos of ancient paintings, Ms. Vieira is able to give us an unmediated experience of her own mediation.

In Desktop (Athens Fire), the images are of the fires that menaced Athens two summers ago and of the fiery sun. The warm gray background is still the cave, but now also smoke, and the human presence—or the presence of people other than the viewer—is, again, discreet: three views of a Winged Victory, a column, three figures in silhouette, a tiny red helicopter. The helicopter, like the Assyrian arrow in the lion hunt, will never get where it’s going, but it can also never fall. The sun shines even through smoke.

Devon Costello, meanwhile, appropriates in oil paint a New Yorker cartoon of three women in a coffee klatch. He has enlarged the image, and omitted the caption, creating a contemporary analogue to Ms. Trenka-Dalton’s and Ms. Vieira’s melancholy resurrection of ostensibly dead cultures. It seems worth noting that though I recognized the triangular noses and palette of grays immediately, I had to look up the cartoonist’s name—he’s William Haefeli. The title, I don’t mind emotional trauma, is the first half of the missing caption.

Timothy Hull—who also curated the show with Lumi Tan—draws faithfully rendered Corinthian columns that ascend into fanciful crosshatching, and then slices the paper into columns, too. Thomas and Renée Rapedius present black and white photos of palm leaves—that is, of a palm-leaf book, a palm paper store, and a greenhouse—over a large green xerox on which silhouettes of the leaves have been arranged in a circle to look like a saw blade. And Ryan Mrozowski, in Untitled (XIII), presents an unidentified page from an art book in front of a lightbulb, behind a frame, so that we can see both its color plates—Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space and Alexander Archipenko’s Carrousel Pierrot, both from 1913—at once. In 1913, the Woolworth Building was the tallest building in the world.

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In a Village Near Paris (Street in Paris, Pink Sky) (1909) by Lyonel Feininger.

Lyonel Feininger was the Zelig of early modernism. Born in Manhattan to a German-American father who fought in the American Civil War, Feininger was sent to study violin in Leipzig when he was 16 but enrolled in art school in Hamburg instead. After an enormously successful career as an illustrator and cartoonist—mostly in Europe but also, briefly, for the Chicago Sunday Tribune, where he debuted the year after Winsor McKay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland—he decided, at the age of 36, to take up oil painting. He had six canvases in the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1911, collided with Cubism, showed with the artist groups Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, was a close friend of Klee and Kandinsky, and taught at the Bauhaus—he designed the cover of the school’s first manifesto—before moving back to the United States in 1937. The Whitney Museum’s current retrospective, which includes oils, watercolors, cartoons, photographs and the manuscript score of a fugue, is the first devoted to the artist in 45 years.

It begins with a disconcerting view of the relationship between fine art and vernacular visual culture at the turn of the last century. In a small side room, around a display of German cartoons, hang eight of Feininger’s Sunday Tribune covers from 1906. In one Tribune cover, a self-portrait of the artist as a marionettist dangles characters with names like Auntie Jim-James and Mysterious Pete. Feininger’s long, knuckly fingers look just like the ones that Austrian painter Egon Schiele used just a few years later. On another cover, Wee Willie Winkie talks to a hot and tired sun as it puts itself to bed under a blanket of clouds.

In the exhibition’s first large gallery, the same cartoon sensibility goes from paper to canvas. The White Man, a pipe-smoker in a white suit, is stretched-out and angular, brushing his black hat against the top of the frame as he hunches past a rosy cathedral tower. His giant feet look pinched from a Giacometti statue, and the tower, shaded halfway into abstraction, from a midperiod Mondrian—but the date is 1907, and the painting was copied from one of Feininger’s own earlier illustrations.

In the next few years, using an eccentric palette of complementary colors—blushing purples and lime-greens—and taut, edgy lines, Feininger produced a series of charming, self-contained fantasy worlds. Carnivals, street games and flâneurs move past massive, hill-like churches, or up and down streets that fade into the distance. His figures are never quite real, but it wouldn’t seem right to call him an Expressionist: if Expressionists use the distortion of appearances to get at emotional truths, Feininger looks more like a caricaturist, exaggerating appearances to get just a little way above them. The relationships are the same but the scale is altered, so that we’re back to childhood­—not flying, quite, but floating.

In Sunday Morning, a man with a tiny head holds down his black top hat as he struggles across a blue river of cobblestones that flow down the middle of a pale yellow town. In City at the Edge of the World (1910), a small group of houses rendered in black ink and white gouache, surrounded by leafless trees, cluster together on a bubblelike hilltop under a passing white balloon. Views like these present an interesting argument about the nature of fantasy—in one sense, he puts us on the edge of the real, but in itself the scene he depicts is without periphery. The effect is reminiscent of gazing into a snow globe.

Beginning around 1912, Feininger adopted the language of Cubism, but not, at least initially, its aims: panels and folds of color don’t disrupt figures but serve merely as decorative textures for what would otherwise be flat images. The Green Bridge II (1916) closely recapitulates Green Bridge of seven years earlier. The lime-green bridge across the top of the frame is the same, an orange lantern is the same and the same Parisian workmen in dark clothing are rocking their way home. But the second painting is enlivened with curves and shadows.

Only after the Bauhaus and the First World War do Feininger’s shaded edges begin to look necessary—he begins, in the 1920s, to overlap dark, translucent planes to accent small patches of light. Church of the Minorites II captures the experience of light in a cathedral: small angular figures at the bottom of the picture scale up into shadows, walls, windows, light and sky; brown walls are transparent, but the light appears to have the weight of a body.

Sometimes a retrospective, by showing the development of an artist’s ideas, lets you better understand single pieces; other times, the pieces become indistinct and knit together into a single portrait of their maker. Commissioned in 1913 to design a wooden train set, Feininger began making little toys as Christmas presents for his sons; but when his sons got too old, he continued making them. Feininger never titled the set, but they’ve become known as the City at the Edge of the World.

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East Wind (video still, 2011) by Cao Fei.

In the 19th  century, Great Britain used gunboats to address its trade imbalance with China. It must have seemed clear enough who was doing what to whom. But in the 21st century, things are more complicated. The gunboats remain ready, but the more visible weapons—if they are weapons—have so far been children’s television characters. In “Play Time,” her fourth solo show at Lombard-Freid, the Cantonese, Beijing-based artist Cao Fei describes, with two videos, a small installation, and a series of photographs, whats being done. If she doesn’t make clear exactly who’s doing it, she does make clear just how unclear it is.

One video begins with a dump truck driving down a tree-lined avenue, past purple fields. Mounted over the truck’s grill is a huge image of Thomas the Tank Engine, the lead character of an animated program that was adapted for British television from a popular children’s book in the 1980s and has been showing in China since 2008. A gang of women clean and polish the windshield and fenders. When Thomas stops to let his driver ask for directions, children assemble. A small boy stares coolly through black sunglasses; an excited young mother tells her reticent son, “Point at the car and say Thomas.”

Thomas continues on to a construction site, where his driver changes a tire, and a gang of dusty workers fills him up with debris. A brief shot of Thomas’s patient, pensive, frowning face is the linchpin of the video: Thomas may be a cartoon train engine, but he knows what he’s doing.

And yet, he’s still a cartoon train engine, and that’s what makes everything so maddeningly fascinating. Cheery music begins to play as Thomas leaves the construction site and joins thousands of middle-class cars on a Beijing highway. He changes lanes. Other drivers smile. He passes the Bird’s Nest, the beautiful, futuristic stadium designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron in consultation with currently-imprisoned Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei. When he stops for gas at a Sinopec station, we glimpse two different pairs of McDonald’s golden arches. More smiling fans. “Who is Thomas always together with?” an excited mother asks her bashful son; a little girl loudly declares, “Thomas isn’t often so upstanding.” The numbers on the pump flash rapidly as Thomas fills up with gas. Workers in matching blue uniforms crowd together for a picture.

On an even prettier tree-lined street, Thomas is stopped by a policeman, who angrily tells Thomas’s driver that trucks aren’t allowed there. “Hurry up and leave,” he says. The driver stops outside a cheap restaurant to lean against the fender with a styrofoam container of rice. A chef comes out to deliver a couple of skewers of meat. Then it’s time to drive again. Thomas’s very big day finally finishes when he arrives at an otherworldly brown landscape, with a mist-obscured stupa in the background, ready to dump his load, sleep a good night’s sleep, and do it all again the next day.

Things move quickly. Ms. Cao was introduced to Thomas the Tank Engine by her first son, who was born in 2009 and is already a fan. The video’s title, East Wind, is also a translation of the brand name of its truck, Dong Feng. Dong Feng was founded in 1969 as part of Mao’s deterrent strategy of building up an industrial base in Western China. “East wind,” said Mao, “prevails over west wind,” but the interesting thing about wind is that it’s not something you can ever quite put your finger on.

All in all, it’s nice to have a job, even if it means being posted abroad. But the plush CBeebies, descendants of the Teletubbies, represent the other side of the equation, having become displaced persons. The fourteen crisp and lovely c-prints of Ms. Cao’s PostGarden series follow them as they wander through the alternately lush and bleak landscapes of modern China. In Back to the Garden, Makka Pakka sprawls in a field of wildflowers with a guitar, while Igglebiggle and Upsy Daisy gaze into the future and the Tombliboos frolic behind. There’s a kind of shock of the real as you approach this photo, so silly and fantastical, and realize that you can make out individual purple blossoms around Makka Pakka’s white legs. In Twilight, Igglebiggle sprawls in the dirt of a misty, refuse-strewn forest, with Upsy Daisy, exhausted, lying across his legs.

The rest of the photos are arranged in pairs for a game of “spot the differences.” In After a Long Day, the CBeebies are wrapped in blankets, squatting under an elevated highway. In the left-hand photo, one of the Tombliboos has a rubber chicken on a stick; in the right-hand photo, he’s only got the stick. In Papa’s Funeral, Tombliboos hold Igglebiggle in a stretcher while Makka Pakka and Upsy Daisy dig a grave. Igglebiggle holds a red handkerchief that might be a flag in one version of the photo; in the other, it’s gone.

Play Time Fingerboard Park Installation is a tabletop wooden construction of denatured architectural signifiers. The “fingerboards,” little toy skateboards, are too big for the ramps, spirals, and ziggurats ostensibly designed for their pleasure. This is as silly as it is cerebral, as ironic as it is literal. It manages to be cheerful without being optimistic. In a way what Ms. Cao is saying is, “What can you say?” But if you live in 2011, you look at all of this, and you know what it means.

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'Subway' (1950) by George Tooker.

Claustrophobia isn’t quite the right word when the tunnels go on forever. Using the endless and endlessly unwelcoming tiled surfaces of the New York City underground, George Tooker’s painting Subway gets at a dread that seems, despite its broad resonance, particular to the year in which it was painted, 1950.

A woman in a red dress under a blue trench coat stands lost and paralyzed between a high turnstile that cages in more than it leads out and the uncanny metal bannisters of another staircase leading down. Behind her shoulders are two incarnations of Cold War paranoia, staring men in fedoras, identical except for the color of their trench coats, buttoned to the throat. (One is brown, but the other is tan.) More trench coats appear in shallow alcoves in the wall and extending into the background. The angle at which the tunnels meet makes for a fish-eye panorama, but the perspective squeezes the other way, so that the composition blurs and trembles. The woman holds a large, mannish hand to her abdomen; there’s nothing to do but trudge on.

Mr. Tooker, who was born in New York in 1920, died in March, and DC Moore Gallery has mounted a memorial show that includes, among other loans, Subway, his most famous painting, borrowed from the Whitney Museum.   Mr. Tooker adopted egg tempera as his primary medium while studying at the Art Students League in the 1940’s. The luminous opacity of tempera is precisely appropriate to his work at both its best and its worst: when his work succeeds, it aspires, like an ikon, to be looked not into but through. When it fails, it flirts with the narcissism of self-effacement, using the language of spiritual yearning to show a world colored by unconfronted psychological traumas.

In 1948, Mr. Tooker found religion on the beach. In the heavy foreground of Coney Island—hidden under the shadow of the boardwalk—a handsome swimsuit Jesus reclines against a red cushion. (He isn’t dead—he’s only sleeping.) His warmly glowing skin is equally informed by the Renaissance, the artist-employing Works Progress Administration and homoerotics. A cornflower Mary in a pale blue swimsuit leans over him tenderly, while behind his head, playing Joseph and the younger Mary as elements of a naturalistic annunciation, are a shirtless man standing watch and his young wife, pulling on a dress over her head. A heavy woman in a pink swimsuit and blue wimple, Saint Anne, sits cross-legged at the bather’s feet. Further away but more brightly lit, at the bottom of the wooden steps that lead down from the walkway raised over the sacred swimmer, half-naked men, women and children run and play in the sand. A muscular man in red briefs leans back to throw a baseball; the catcher is out of sight. Minuscule in the distance, in the middle of the sky, a man who’s jumped off the end of the pier extends his arms in cruciform.

Much later in life, after the death of his longtime companion, Mr. Tooker, who was raised as an Episcopalian, began practicing as a Catholic and painted a large altarpiece for a church near his home in Vermont.

The dome-shaped birdwatchers again puts God between the viewer and the painting’s depths, this time in the form of lithe and delicate little birds in the branches of a tree in Central Park. The leader of a party of birdwatchers, a man in coat and scarf, spreads his hands in reverent wonder. Behind them, rendered with a pretty, late-Medieval artificiality, rises an enormous boulder. But behind the boulder, pathways extend under bridges, open to the sky but no less confining than the tunnels of Subway. The world of the painter, the world of the viewer and even the world depicted are all equally constrained—the only freedom is on the surface. It may be the freedom of the mysterious meeting, across time and place, of artist and viewer, or of spirit and flesh—but it may simply be the sensual escape that the artist himself found in the act of painting.

In 1960, Mr. Tooker moved to rural Vermont, and while he continued using simple allegorical scenes (DC Moore describes them as “without traditional narrative content”), most of the paintings that postdate Coney Island, Birdwatchers and Subway are closely focused on the interior. A few simple colors alternate like the notes of a pentatonic scale. Faces and heads become more phallic or neanderthal, less distinct from one another; edges close in; you think of a child pouring all his attention into a fantasy to shut out a larger and more dangerous world.

In Embrace of Peace, a man and a woman reach for each other from either end of a long canvas. Her sleeves are a sunlit Byzantine red. Behind them is a crowd of couples embracing, but those embraces have nothing to do with their own. In Moonrise, Mr. Tooker turns his attention to a more personal meeting of the sacred and profane. Two men peer out from under an orange and yellow blanket at a rolling green field; blue hills recede toward a darkening sky under a rising white moon. Their bed is the world and the world, full of wonder, is their bed.

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Portrait of the Sculptor, Oscar Miestchaninoff by Chaim Soutine.

Looking at Chaim Soutine’s 1925 oil painting Flayed Beef is like taking mescaline in a slaughterhouse. Many artists start with studies, but Soutine did little drawing; he did almost everything with paint, and you can see it in both the ethereal freedom of his shapes and the fact that he manages to get more color into every square inch than you’d think canvas—or the eye—could hold.

The decapitated carcass is suspended by its legs, as it would be in the market, but Soutine makes it look more like it’s doing an exuberant backflip. Paint is equated with flesh, as in the ordinary artist’s eucharist, but then flesh, in turn, is equated with life—a life unaffected by the death of any one organism, by the exchange of growth for decay. Slaughter becomes the liberation of life force.

Art historians Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow, who curated “Soutine/Bacon” at Helly Nahmad Gallery, explain in their catalogue essay that Soutine was inspired by Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox, which he saw in the Louvre, to buy a carcass of his own. One of his neighbors called the police, because—as you can almost infer from the painting—he tried to keep the carcass fresh, while he was working, by dousing it with extra blood.

Mr. Tuchman and Ms. Dunow also suggest—in fact, it’s the premise of their show—that what Soutine got in the Louvre from Rembrandt, the younger English painter Francis Bacon got in London from Soutine. But while Soutine’s revelation concerns the motion in flesh, Bacon addresses the motion of flesh. For Bacon, as for Soutine, color is no mere partner of line, but a complete force in its own right. But where Soutine simply juxtaposes his colors, leaving their relationships to be implied like afterimages, Bacon pushes them together to create distinct eddies of tension. It’s as if he were using a stripped-down, mathematical rigor to uncover the laws that order Soutine’s explosions.

In Bacon’s painting Triptych (Left Panel), a plucked fowl hangs from a taut line over a pile of its own gray feathers. A dark outline creates a virtual room into which the bird hangs—the taut line stretches through the room’s ceiling to the top edge of the canvas—but aside from the bird, its feathers, and the gray counter on which they rest, we see only a field of rich, bloody orange. A red arrow points to a blushing spot on the bird’s naked breast, and it bucks its legs and flaunts its wings in a kind of Vaudevillian slapstick routine. As in a well-considered joke, this gesture unifies the painting by simplifying it: everything points to the punchline.

Soutine’s maximalism and Bacon’s minimalism continue on the gallery’s second floor, where raw flesh is confined to portraits and landscapes. In The Old Actress, Soutine gives us precariously dignified desperation: her thinning hair; enormous, glassy eyes; and coquettishly dropped shoulder—even the way the red background suggests oncoming hellfire—are attacked with a kind of pantheistic exuberance, as if it didn’t matter what anything does so long as it does it completely. Meanings don’t converge, they concur. The man in Portrait of a Man in a Felt Hat is skinny, but he is also pompous, and nervous, and orange—all of these things separately, and all at once. Woman in Red has a big, floppy personality to go with her big, floppy hat. But it remains a big, floppy hat nonetheless. Praying Man may or may not be Jewish, but the green and yellow brushstrokes of his suit certainly know how to daven.

Bacon, by contrast, digs in. Triptych: Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne shows a woman’s face caught, with layered, overlapping bursts of color, in the act of turning. At a glance, it seems as though the artist is using approximate strokes, as in a first sketch, to feel out the shape of his subject; but the precision of his approximations suggests that the real line is a mathematical ideal that can be approached with infinite closeness but never truly reached; the outer two faces are facing in.

Chaim Soutine as an alchemist of color, Francis Bacon as chemist of the flesh—the progression is clear, even if, as with any narrative of progress, its simplicity makes it feel dubious. It also feels nostalgic, and this is to Bacon’s disadvantage—the clarity we gain with chemistry can’t quite make up for the loss of alchemy’s romance.

In 1982 Keith Haring executed three tapestry-size drawings as live accompaniment to performances by dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones at the Kitchen; Gladstone Gallery is displaying them until the end of June. Dancers, crosses and a dog-headed figure with a giant snake for a penis are rendered in a line that manages to simultaneously convey shape and motion. Red, in which black-outlined figures and the spaces between them are filled in with equally thick red lines, is arresting in its stillness. As with Soutine’s trembling carcass and Bacon’s dancing fowl, you can’t quite believe it’s not moving. A final word from Soutine: “Once I saw the village butcher slice the neck of a bird and drain the blood out of it. I wanted to cry out, but his joyful expression caught the sound in my throat. … When I painted the beef carcass it was still this cry that I wanted to liberate.”

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