The man appointed as chief curator of this department is Klaus Biesenbach, 40, a German national, who has been a curator at the museum since 2004. He’d also worked at P.S. 1, the contemporary art center in Queens that is a MoMA affiliate, since the mid-90’s. Sleepwalkers, jointly commissioned by MoMA and Creative Time, is, in many respects, Mr. Biesenbach’s coming out.

It has many times been said—mostly by people outside the art world who favor ostentation, or those within it who do not—that curators are the new rock stars. Over the past decade, there has been a major infusion of capital, in all its precious metaphors, into the art world. Curators are often the brokers and handlers of this currency, moving among different worlds, drawing from one to complement the other.

“In the young, hip group, there are not so many people interested in having the, you know, Van Gogh scholar over to dinner,” said P.S. 1 executive director Alanna Heiss. “It’s very much related to this sense of tension and anxiety and drama, the sexiness of contemporary art in general.”

Mr. Biesenbach has always unashamedly invited celebrity personalities into his purview. He began his curatorial career in Berlin, immediately after the Wall fell. That’s when he and a group of young art enthusiasts occupied an old margarine factory on a street called Auguststrasse in the largely abandoned former eastern city center. They gave it the name Kunst-Werke (now called just KW), and bit by bit built it into a major center for contemporary art and theory. Then Mr. Biesenbach, looking around at what was still missing from the Berlin art scene, founded the Berlin Biennial in 1996.

The openings of exhibitions he curated at KW were often glamorous affairs. He even got someone to open a nightclub in the basement.

“Soon there was this mixture, which is now common to the art scene—this mixture of pop stars, cinema stars, the glam world and the art world,” said Niklas Maak, the chief art critic of the influential German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “But at that time in Berlin, it was shocking, because the art scene was something completely different from the pop and glam business. So, the moment I described in my little article, where Matthew Barney and Charlotte Rampling were dancing the tango in Auguststrasse, which now is the cliché of the merger of two scenes and, you know, the atmosphere of Auguststrasse—so, I mean, if someone would have told me that that was the first scene of a film of a fiction on Berlin, I would have said, ‘Please, take it out, this is too much!’ But the thing is: It happened.”

Mr. Biesenbach explains his immersion in celebrity culture simply: It’s a German thing; you wouldn’t understand. Some years ago, he wrote a controversial article, also published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in which he posed the question “Why are there no global pop stars from Germany?” The answer is complicated, involving a messy batch of historical and psychosocial issues. But Mr. Biesenbach wasn’t waiting around for his countrymen to sort it all out.

“I could ask you,” he said, raising one finger, “who do you know, on a pop star/singer/film director/film actor level, who do you know in our generation that in the last 15 years—not a politician! Not like Mrs. [Merkel], our chancellor, or so—I’m thinking about people like Pedro Almodóvar, like Björk, like Hugh Grant—is there anybody from Germany who made it to a certain recognizability? There’s none. So that’s Germany: being against giving too much attention to one person. But if you play that game … it’s really true, there’s nobody.”

Mr. Biesenbach, who has silvery hair that he keeps almost shaved, does play the self-branding game like the best of them. Like Anna Wintour’s bob, Tom Ford’s hirsute sternum, Philip Johnson’s glasses, his trademark is snug-fitting Jil Sander suits and black-on-black shirt-and-tie combinations. This past July, Berlin was caught in a heat wave, and Mr. Biesenbach, who was passing through KW one morning to pick up a set of keys en route to a vacation on the Italian island of Stromboli, appeared in jeans, sandals and an open-necked sports shirt. It might have been less jarring to see him naked, said someone in the courtyard.

Like a faithful godfather, he shows up wherever German cultural producers of a certain edge—the fresh, the new, the prior-connected—are attempting to make their mark in New York. When the young art dealer Leo Koenig, who belongs to an art-world dynasty in Germany, opened his first gallery in Williamsburg in 1999, Mr. Biesenbach attended the inaugural exhibition. He ended up selecting one of the artists for inclusion in a group show at P.S. 1.

Just over a year ago, he went to the solo exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Gallery for Juergen Teller, the photographer who shoots Marc Jacobs’ ad campaigns. Amid the throng of visitors on the street outside the gallery, he listened patiently to a youthful artist who looked like a big college jock imparting thoughts about his work. Then, during last September’s Fashion Week, he perched front-row at the As Four defector Kai Kühne’s show. The designer’s parents, distinguished-looking seniors, sat nearby. Mr. Biesenbach greeted them formally in German. In these moments, he prefers to step back from the searchlights and let those he’s come to support shine brightest. “Shall we not pay attention to the situation?” he rebuked a reporter interviewing him before the models hit the runway. “Like, it’s disrespectful to Kai. I feel like I’m monopolizing the situation.” Then, for equilibrium, he laughed. “I’m very close to fashion, to music, to film, to architecture, to design,” he said. “Like, we’re here now at a design show. And I know many designers and musicians, but they have to be really experimental and really contemporary and really innovative. That’s the only criteria.”

A few weeks later, on Halloween, he popped in at the launch party for a stylish architecture magazine, Pin-Up, founded by Felix Burrichter, a sociable twentysomething from Düsseldorf. “I can’t stay long,” Mr. Biesenbach said, bypassing the bar. “I have to pick up my costume. I’m going to Courtney Love’s party as a vampire.”

It seems less important to wonder whether Mr. Biesenbach wants to be a rock star and more pertinent to view him as a rolling rock. He belongs to an informal network of foreign-born and transnationally oriented curators with high visibility and mounting influence at American arts institutions. MoMA director Glenn Lowry said that “we had looked over the course of several months at several candidates” to head the new department, but Mr. Biesenbach won out for his “broad international practice.”

Curators similar to Mr. Biesenbach include Okwui Enwezor, of Nigerian origin, who rose from editing a periodical about African art published at Cornell to be selected in 2002 to curate Documenta, the Wimbledon of international art exhibitions, which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. In the wake of this honor, he was snapped up by the San Francisco Art Institute to serve as its dean of academic affairs and senior vice president. “Okwui is a headmaster now,” his longtime friend, Ike Ude, the publisher of the flashy style mag aRUDE, recently said. In turn, Mr. Enwezor deputized Hou Hanru, a noted curator from China who’d been residing in Paris since the early 90’s, as SFAI’s director of exhibitions and public programs. Mr. Hanru, it was reported on Friday, Jan. 19, will also be the man to direct China’s pavilion at the Venice Biennial this summer. And speaking of biennials, remember the kerfuffle last spring over the Whitney Museum of American Art’s appointment of two foreign-born curators—Brit Chrissie Iles and Frenchman Philippe Vergne—to handle its own biannual best-in-show? “How American Is It?” ran one headline. “Beats me!” came the critically engaged chorus.

At the moment, it’s rough going trying to force a collar of “local” or “national” on culture of any form. Artists are crisscrossing the globe, their works laced with worldwide references. The ubiquitous “lives and works” line on artists’ bios has, for many, become the thing that changes most often from one major exhibition to the next. And institutions are responding in turn, pulling in curators who are themselves as migratory in their lives—hence their outlooks. Case in point: the New Museum, the city’s only museum devoted exclusively to contemporary art, recently tapped the globetrotting Massimiliano Gioni to join its curatorial team. Mr. Gioni curated (along with another Italian national and one American) last year’s Berlin Biennial, Mr. Biesenbach’s brainchild.

“I actually think that there is a change of paradigms,” Mr. Biesenbach said not too long ago. “I think until the 60’s, the linearity of things—as in modernism, as in avant-garde—reflected an idea of time as linear, whereas after this, I think we are understanding more and more that things are happening simultaneously, and it’s not Paris giving modernity to New York and New York being the city where everything happens. We have Los Angeles, we have London, we have Glasgow, we have Warsaw, we have Rio, we have Mexico City, we have Berlin, as huge centers of artistic production. So it’s not New York as a single situation.”

The buzzwords for some time in the contemporary art world have been “transnational,” “transcultural” and “internationalism.” Uttering that hieroglyph of a term, “multicultural,” in contemporary art’s inner sanctum is akin to dropping “politically correct” in a conversation with hard-core activists: It belongs to the discourse of a bygone age. Even the word “curator” as a moniker is being reconsidered.

“I don’t think the title ‘curator’ would be that necessarily important to him,” said P.S. 1’s Ms. Heiss, of Mr. Biesenbach. “I think he could find another title. It’s a very overused word anyway. It goes up and down; it’s a little passé right now.”

Mr. Biesenbach is noticeably tight-lipped about his background, and even more so about his inner life. Like Faye Dunaway’s career-obsessed TV producer character in Network, who can talk about her feelings only in the language of ratings and audience appeal, Mr. Biesenbach responds to questions about his self-image by referring to the various exhibitions he organized.

One example: Is he a different person when in New York than in Berlin?

A long pause. “Not so much,” he says softly, “not so much”—followed by a lengthy disquisition on art installation.

“He doesn’t have his own family,” said the performance artist Marina Abramovic, who has known Mr. Biesenbach since he was 21 years old. “He sacrificed a very large part of his private life for the work. Basically, all his life is the work.”

In the early years of their acquaintance, the two experimented with a romantic relationship, despite the 20-year gap in their ages (she just turned 60 last November).

“It was a very short time, yah, yah, about three months,” she said in her sumptuous Slavic accent. “It was really a disaster. It was really funny. We devoted three months together, and we decided we can have like a ‘house life.’ He would make the apple pies, but they were always burning!”

Hermann Weizenegger, a Berlin-based industrial designer, remembers running into Mr. Biesenbach, whom he’s known for years, while on a trip to Rio de Janeiro. The two went to a nightclub, where at one point Mr. Weizenegger drew Mr. Biesenbach’s attention to a young man with an unusually striking appearance. “He went directly to the boy and he talked with him,” Mr. Weizenegger remembers with awe. “They talked for a long time.” About what, Mr. Weizenegger doesn’t recall, but that wasn’t the point. “Klaus doesn’t stop himself,” he said. “He will talk to anybody he pleases or pleases him.”

“I think that what he has an ability to do is, he sees things very specially, and he has almost a filmic understanding of how people move, the direction they’re going—as if situations could perhaps be described on storyboards,” said Ms. Heiss. “Because he knows a great deal about film, he knows a great deal about theater. So, it would be likely that he can be detached enough—it’s perhaps true or not—to see a social event very clearly, you know. He wants to talk to someone because that’s an interesting person, and that’s what he’ll do.”

“It’s a world of simultaneities,” said Mr. Biesenbach. “I do not feel disconnected; I do not see it so linear. I see it more like simultaneous plots that happen at the same time.”

On that Saturday afternoon, a veritable Beach Blanket Bingo was spread out in the courtyard: kiddie pools, lawn chairs and hot tubs situated among environmental sculptures. Patrons stood in line, waiting to buy beer from the museum's keg. An outdoor concert veered between live avant-classical and prerecorded disco rave; it was less irksome than I initially thought, but irksome all the same. The best thing at the museum that day was not anything I saw or heard, but the smell of burgers grilling on the barbecue.

P.S. 1 still claims to having something to do with art, and what brought me there was the exhibition Painting Report: Plane: The Essential of Painting . Curated by Alanna Heiss, the director of P.S. 1, along with associate curator Daniel Marzona, Painting Report marshals evidence to support the contention that "the grand continuity of painting exists." It's certainly nice of the institution to acknowledge an art form it usually relegates to its stairwells and cellar. Not that P.S. 1 has become a friend of painting-if anything, Ms. Heiss' introduction to the show, featured in a museum brochure, is a study in equivocation.

Having cited the Modernist painter Maurice Denis' famous dictum that a painting is "essentially a plane surface covered by colors arranged in a certain order," Ms. Heiss goes on to claim that "the literal surface … [has] become its own metaphor." This is a short-sighted notion of what painting is, one influenced less by Denis-who must be spinning in his grave at this point-than by the inflexible strictures of Minimalism. The "literal surface" of a painting, while an integral part of its structure, can't function metaphorically. Metaphor is provided by illusion, by the fictional space the artist creates, making use of the formal elements of the medium.

One shouldn't be too hard on Ms. Heiss. P.S. 1 is, after all, an institution dedicated to the throwaway aesthetic. When the director dutifully notes that painting "is construed by many as part of an aesthetic system largely consigned to the post-modernist wastebasket," we get a pretty good idea which side of the wastebasket dynamic she's rooting for.

The artists featured in Painting Report are Al Held, Kristin Baker, Fabian Marcaccio and William Scharf. Though each of these artists deals with the picture plane in a singular manner, the exhibition isn't thorough or focused enough to fill out its conceit. Painting Report is more like a random sampling of favorite artists. Mr. Held is given the lion's share of space, due presumably to his seniority and reputation, but also, surely, to the immensity of his paintings. His aggressive pictures of zooming sci-fi architecture have never looked better than they do in P.S. 1's big room. Mr. Held's "ecstatic profusion," as a wall label has it, nearly justifies the scale of his canvases, one of which measures 15 by 30 feet. And yet, despite his sophistication, Mr. Held's vast, spectacular exercises in color, light and space remain just that-exercises.

Mr. Held is Michelangelo in comparison with the other artists included in Painting Report . Ms. Baker's paeans to racing cars are visually astute but materially inert, and Mr. Marcaccio's wall-sized assemblage is over-the-top and ugly, a screed against painting rather than an extension of it. Mr. Scharf's Surrealist reveries are gratifyingly mild in this context, as are the small, art-schoolish paintings of the German artist Magnus von Plessen, the subject of an exhibition in one of P.S. 1's side galleries. Mr. von Plessen has looked at more Gerhard Richter than is healthy for any human being, but his curt paintings of empty industrial spaces aren't without merit: In fact, Nightroom I and Nightroom III (both 1999) are more convincing as proof of painting's viability than anything in Painting Report . As for the viability of high art, P.S. 1 made up its mind about that ages ago.

Painting Report: Plane: The Essential of Painting and Magnus von Plessen: Recent Paintings are both at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, 22-25 Jackson Avenue at 46th Avenue, until Sept. 30.

California Dreamin'

My response to the work of the Bay Area artist William T. Wiley has always been tepid, but in a curious, unnamable way. I don't dislike his art. When looking at one of Mr. Wiley's elaborate mixed-media pictures, I'm amused by its dry and sly fusion of the mythological, the hermetic and the down-home. There's a lot to see in one of his paintings, as well as things to appreciate. The trouble is, I never find myself in front of Mr. Wiley's art willingly-I stumble upon it on the way to something else.

Thanks to A Slow Time in Arcadia , an exhibition at the George Adams Gallery that pairs Mr. Wiley with fellow San Franciscan Roy DeForest, I now understand my indifference. At the bottom of one of his canvases, Mr. Wiley has written his credo: "P.S. I'd rather be laid back-than layed [sic] up or down." It's not that I prefer art that's uptight; it's that I prefer art that gets up and goes. Mr. Wiley's art just sits there, satisfied with its own reclusive self. Even when he makes a funny priapic effigy from a stick, some wire, a provocatively bent section of garden hose and an alarmingly grungy sock, Mr. Wiley does so with a casual disregard-as if he couldn't care less whether anyone ever saw the thing.

The same is true of Mr. DeForest. I'm sad to say so, particularly because in the past I've enjoyed his cartoonish panoramas of dogs, deities and pinched dabs of acrylic paint. Is Mr. Wiley dragging Mr. DeForest down? The issue may be geographical. It was the conceptual artist John Baldessari, if I recall correctly, who defined the difference between the East Coast artist and the West Coast artist: The former worries about how his art fits into history, while the latter worries about how his art fits into his car.

I'm not about to engage in California bashing-not when one of my favorite painters, Richard Diebenkorn, is a son of the state-but a good-natured isolation may be the source of the laxity Mr. Wiley and Mr. DeForest share. I still hold out hope for the latter. Mr. DeForest's Nevada (2002), a kitschy and cutesy mixed-media wall sculpture, is sardonic enough to make me believe that there's more oomph to the oeuvre than is currently on display.

Roy DeForest and William T. Wiley: A Slow Time in Arcadia; Paintings, Drawings and Constructions, 1960-2002 , is at the George Adams Gallery, 41 West 57th Street, until Aug. 23.

Existence of Painting Affirmed

P.S. 1 is now the official amusement park of the Museum of Modern Art. That's the conclusion I reached during a recent visit to Long Island City's

MoMA affiliate. At the gate, an attendant stamped a "P.S. 1" logo on my hand-a ritual usually observed at places like Rye Playland. When I asked if this allowed me unlimited rides on the Log Flume, he chuckled and answered, "Absolutely."

On that Saturday afternoon, a veritable Beach Blanket Bingo was spread out in the courtyard: kiddie pools, lawn chairs and hot tubs situated among environmental sculptures. Patrons stood in line, waiting to buy beer from the museum's keg. An outdoor concert veered between live avant-classical and prerecorded disco rave; it was less irksome than I initially thought, but irksome all the same. The best thing at the museum that day was not anything I saw or heard, but the smell of burgers grilling on the barbecue.

P.S. 1 still claims to having something to do with art, and what brought me there was the exhibition Painting

Report: Plane: The Essential of Painting . Curated by Alanna Heiss, the

director of P.S. 1, along with associate curator Daniel Marzona, Painting Report marshals evidence to support the contention that "the grand continuity of painting exists." It's certainly nice of the institution to acknowledge an art form it usually relegates to its stairwells and cellar. Not that P.S. 1 has become a friend of painting-if anything, Ms. Heiss' introduction to the show, featured in a museum brochure, is a study in equivocation.

Having cited the Modernist painter Maurice Denis' famous dictum that a painting is "essentially a plane surface covered by colors arranged in a certain order," Ms. Heiss goes on to claim that "the literal surface … [has] become its own metaphor." This is a short-sighted notion of what painting is, one influenced less by Denis-who must be spinning in his grave at this point-than by the inflexible strictures of Minimalism. The "literal surface" of a painting, while an integral part of its structure, can't function metaphorically. Metaphor is provided by illusion, by the fictional space the artist creates, making use of the formal elements of the medium.

One shouldn't be too hard on Ms. Heiss. P.S. 1 is, after all, an institution dedicated to the throwaway aesthetic. When the director dutifully notes that painting "is construed by many as part of an aesthetic system largely consigned to the post-modernist wastebasket," we get a pretty good idea which side of the wastebasket dynamic she's rooting for.

The artists featured in Painting Report are Al Held, Kristin Baker, Fabian Marcaccio and William Scharf. Though each of these artists deals with the picture plane in a singular manner, the exhibition isn't thorough or focused enough to fill out its conceit. Painting Report is more like a random sampling of favorite artists. Mr. Held is given the lion's share of space, due presumably to his seniority and reputation, but also, surely, to the immensity of his paintings. His aggressive pictures of zooming sci-fi architecture have never looked better than they do in P.S. 1's big room. Mr. Held's "ecstatic profusion," as a wall label has it, nearly justifies the scale of his canvases, one of which measures 15 by 30 feet. And yet, despite his sophistication, Mr. Held's vast, spectacular exercises in color, light and space remain just that-exercises.

Mr. Held is Michelangelo in comparison with the other artists included in Painting Report . Ms. Baker's paeans to racing cars are visually astute but materially inert, and Mr. Marcaccio's wall-sized assemblage is over-the-top and ugly, a screed against painting rather than an extension of it. Mr. Scharf's Surrealist reveries are gratifyingly mild in this context, as are the small, art-schoolish paintings of the German artist Magnus von Plessen, the subject of an exhibition in one of P.S. 1's side galleries. Mr. von Plessen has looked at more Gerhard Richter than is healthy for any human being, but his curt paintings of empty industrial spaces aren't without merit: In fact, Nightroom I and Nightroom III (both 1999) are more convincing as proof of painting's viability than anything in Painting Report . As for the viability of high art, P.S. 1 made up its mind about that ages ago.

Painting Report: Plane: The Essential of Painting and Magnus von Plessen: Recent Paintings are both at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, 22-25 Jackson Avenue at 46th Avenue, until Sept. 30.

California Dreamin'

My response to the work of the Bay Area artist William T. Wiley has always been tepid, but in a curious, unnamable way. I don't dislike his art. When looking at one of Mr. Wiley's elaborate mixed-media pictures, I'm amused by its dry and sly fusion of the mythological, the hermetic and the down-home. There's a lot to see in one of his paintings, as well as things to appreciate. The trouble is, I never find myself in front of Mr. Wiley's art willingly-I stumble upon it on the way to something else.

Thanks to A Slow Time in Arcadia , an exhibition at the George Adams Gallery that pairs Mr. Wiley with fellow San Franciscan Roy DeForest, I now understand my indifference. At the bottom of one of his canvases, Mr. Wiley has written his credo: "P.S. I'd rather be laid back-than layed [sic] up or down." It's not that I prefer art that's uptight; it's that I prefer art that gets up and goes. Mr. Wiley's art just sits there, satisfied with its own reclusive self. Even when he makes a funny priapic effigy from a stick, some wire, a provocatively bent section of garden hose and an alarmingly grungy sock, Mr. Wiley does so with a casual disregard-as if he couldn't care less whether anyone ever saw the thing.

The same is true of Mr. DeForest. I'm sad to say so, particularly because in the past I've enjoyed his cartoonish panoramas of dogs, deities and pinched dabs of acrylic paint. Is Mr. Wiley dragging Mr. DeForest down? The issue may be geographical. It was the conceptual artist John Baldessari, if I recall correctly, who defined the difference between the East Coast artist and the West Coast artist: The former worries about how his art fits into history, while the latter worries about how his art fits into his car.

I'm not about to engage in California bashing-not when one of my favorite painters, Richard Diebenkorn, is a son of the state-but a good-natured isolation may be the source of the laxity Mr. Wiley and Mr. DeForest share. I still hold out hope for the latter. Mr. DeForest's Nevada (2002), a kitschy and cutesy mixed-media wall sculpture, is sardonic enough to make me believe that there's more oomph to the oeuvre than is currently on display.

Roy DeForest and William T. Wiley: A Slow Time in Arcadia; Paintings, Drawings and Constructions, 1960-2002 , is at the George Adams Gallery, 41 West 57th Street, until Aug. 23.

The new show appears at once to be random and orchestrated and extremely ambitious-a kind of chaos-theory Bienniale. None of the organizers can agree on exactly how many artists are participating or how many exhibits there actually are. God help the soul who had to try to make a map of the thing. In an effort to re-create the original spirit of the place, a handful of artists have been assigned spaces unique to the building and have conceived pieces for these spaces-the attic, the walls of the stairwells, a restroom on the second floor, a janitor's closet on the third. From what I can tell, the artists are by and large extremely earnest, sometimes quite talented, idealistic, energetic, passionate about their work. An impressive number of them are deserving of attention.

Too bad they're being used in a foolhardy attempt to breathe new life into an institution which long before it closed had already been deemed irrelevant, supplanted by countless clones across the river. Remember when the Whitney Museum took young black rappers off the street in the mid-80's and "exhibited" them in its halls? Assigning artists to attics and johns and stairwells is the same thing. No matter how intriguing the ideas, both are contrivances, dreamed up by a curator. The question is, will people take the E train to Long Island City to go to another museum?

Boys in the Attic

Robert Wogan, a 29-year-old artist whose career has consisted of illuminating abandoned industrial sites, appeared at the top of the stairs that lead to the attic of P.S. 1. He's a compact, ruddy-face guy with blond hair and a lot of energy. Over his black Elvis T-shirt he was wearing a plastic surge protector with a long cord, which he'd wrapped around himself like a sash. He was greeted by Nari Ward, a 34-year-old artist whose career has consisted of turning large spaces, such as a fire station in Harlem, into art pieces. Mr. Ward was wearing cutoff fatigues that ended at his calves and a pair of work boots. He had a mustache and the beginnings of an Afro. He said that his work was "excited by being left on the fringes." Good thing, considering his placement at P.S. 1.

Mr. Ward and Mr. Wogan were sent up to attic to create something out of it. Their work will be viewed by appointment, because P.S. 1's staff considered the space too dangerous (liability problems?) to let people go unaided up the rickety stairway to the attic. But that doesn't bother the artists. Or if it does, only a little. "We're cranking," said Mr. Wogan, "so this is going to warrant people wanting to come up here. One, because you are not supposed to. Two, because of the diversity."

"We are in our own world up here," said Mr. Ward.

Mr. Wogan quit his job to spend a month and a half creating a space inspired by the architecture of P.S. 1's upper attic. He has never had a show in a gallery-had never been to P.S. 1, even-and said that he is just glad to have the space.

Mr. Ward, the more established of the two, has a $10,000 grant from the Penny McCall Foundation to complete his project and lives on grants and teaching gigs at Hunter College. He had been up in the attic for several weeks and had even begun to sleep there overnight.

For his piece, he has taken bunched-up bits of paper trash from the offices of P.S. 1, sandwiched them between plastic strips that are approximately 30 feet long, and twisted it all together in such a way that each bag resembles an umbilical cord or intestine. Then he draped them from the rafters of the 60-foot-long attic, formerly the quarters of the school's caretaker. (One afternoon, he was seen reprimanding Ms. Heiss' assistant because she had not created enough paper trash for his purposes.) The piece is called How to Build and Maintain the Virgin Fertility of Our Souls . Mr. Ward said that it is a play on a scientific article by George Washington Carver, entitled, "How to Build and Maintain the Virgin Fertility of Our Soil."

Mr. Wogan's work is not as overtly subversive as Mr. Ward's. His P.S. 1 installation is actually two projects, both of which he refers to as "sculptures," even though they are not free-standing objects that could be cast in multiples, the traditional definition of sculpture. For his first piece, Mr. Wogan will bathe two of the unrenovated facades of P.S. 1 in white halide light, which he promises will make the building "boom like the Empire State Building." Ms. Heiss gave Mr. Wogan the two facades, partly to address community concerns that the corner would be too dark, and P.S. 1 raised $16,000 to light them. His second project is an interesting counterpoint, since it is completely interior. For its execution, P.S. 1 kicked in about $1,000. What Mr. Wogan has done is take a corner of the upper attic, above Mr. Ward's room of entrails, and built a 15-foot-long carpeted tunnel that people have to crawl through before they arrive in a small, shrinelike room.

At the room's apex, he has installed a video screen that will project a recording of him walking through an abandoned hospital building. It will be the only source of light in the piece, which seems part fun house, part womb.

Mr. Wogan, who has never sold any of his art or even received a grant, has been told that his piece will be destroyed in six months to make room for another installation. But he holds out hope that he will join the pantheon of P.S. 1 alumni, such as James Turrell and Richard Serra, and have his work enshrined in the building permanently. "It ain't ever coming out of here," Mr. Wogan said.

Sarah, Destroyer of Worlds

Sarah Sze is a pleasant-looking woman dressed like a J. Crew model whose amiable demeanor belies an unrepressed need to rip open buildings. When she first saw the pristine white gallery where she was to display her art in an exhibition titled Some Young New Yorkers , she decided that the space was so sterile that she would probably send them some of her floor-to-ceiling scroll drawings. But Klaus Biesenbach, the curator of the mini-exhibit, wouldn't hear of it. Ms. Sze, 28, is known for installations that consist of tearing apart architecture and building little environments. "I wanted a space that was a little more derelict," she recalled, "and they were very accommodating. They let me tear a hole in the wall. They just said, 'Go ahead, rip it up, we don't care."

This is her debut at P.S. 1, and she has two exhibitions going on simultaneously there. She admits that she had no idea who Alanna Heiss was when she was first contacted by the veteran artistic director. Her first work, which she refers to as "these sort of orifices," consists of an installation called Ripe Fruit South , that is a two-foot-wide hole in the wall. Once she exposed what was under the wall, she discovered that the entire alarm system for the building was there in what she refers to as "a mother board," by which she means fuses and switches and live wires. In a move that rivals the titillating liability issues of the attic exhibitions, she added water to the electrical installation in the form of a terrarium with a hose and an air bubbler. "It is dangerous for the building to have water and electricity near each other," Ms. Sze said with a noticeable pride. She has also added little boxes with ephemera that relate to the site, such as a digital alarm clock, a birth control pill, a bottle of hand lotion and Tic-Tacs.

Ms. Sze's second piece, Ripe Fruit North , is in a janitor's closet in a third-floor hallway, the back of which she has ripped out to expose yet more of the building's electrical guts. "So more electricity," she said excitedly. Naturally, she has installed dripping water and plants.

In the Toilet

"At first I was kind of shocked when Alanna asked me to do an installation in the bathroom," said Mike Bidlo.

For his art piece, Mr. Bidlo has taken a black-and-white photograph of the famous porcelain urinal that Marcel Duchamp declared to be a work of art and is wallpapering all of the walls with the image.

Mr. Bidlo had been out there in the art noosphere as a guy who is toilet-obsessed. "I think Alanna was smart enough to know that I was working on this urinal or fountain series for a couple of years now," said Mr. Bidlo, who is 43. "She thought conceptually that this was probably something that would work within this context. I was a little taken aback, but then I started realizing that, "Oh, it is an interesting place to do an installation." He paused and looked down, and then he pointed to the ceiling of the bathroom and frowned. "Even though architecturally it is very difficult because of all the beams going crisscross." Nonetheless, Mr. Bidlo said, he found that when he lined up the photographs, they sometimes looked to him like rows of baby bottle urinals or Buddhas. This was a good thing, he explained, since his purpose has been to "subvert the image."

Artist Ascending A Staircase

In one of the stairwells enclosed in wire cages in P.S. 1, Madeleine Hatz was painting directly on one of the old cracked walls. Ms. Hatz is among 13 or 14 or 15 artists (nobody knew for sure) whose work will cover the walls of the two north stairwells; the exhibition is called Vertical Painting . Ms. Hatz's fresco, which ran up and down two walls of the stairwell, consisted of a series of raised reliefs in fluorescent shades of green. They looked like topographical forms that had been zapped by a nuclear bomb. There was something sinister about them, an assessment that Ms. Hatz accepted wholeheartedly.

"It is natural and it is artificial-looking at the same time," she said. "This is something that you see obliquely in parts, and it kind of sneaks up on you." She pointed to the oozing green colors in the cracks of the wall and said that they looked like the malformations she had found in the sidewalks of Long Island City leading to P.S. 1. Ms. Hatz, who once had a studio at P.S. 1, was contacted directly by Ms. Heiss, who had seen an exhibition of her paintings last February. "It was enormous work, an enormous amount of work," Ms. Hatz said of her project, which took two-and-a-half weeks to complete.

Ms. Hatz has been around this block before, and she knows this type of exhibition represents a calculated risk. She allowed that P.S. 1 had lost its steam long before it was closed for renovations. Like the other artists, she'll have done a lot of work, spent her own money and most likely won't get paid for her piece. Chances are good that many people, let alone the right dealer or critic, won't even be able to find her piece. Nonetheless, she had decided to put her faith in the circus. She hopes that the cacophony of exhibitions will create a buzz when it brings out hordes of curiosity-seekers. She called back to amend some of the things she'd said in the interview. She seemed concerned that she might have offended someone. "Everyone in the New York art world is going to come to the opening. It is one of the events of the season." That was the way she preferred to be heard on the subject. Ms. Hatz, like most of the other artists scurrying around P.S. 1, wants Ms. Heiss' atavistic opening to succeed.