It's the Thought That Counts

With Easy Money Hard to Come By, Glitz Gives Way to A Deeper Variety Of Art in Chelsea

NEW YORK -- "If you can't sell, you can't sell out." Could that be why the winter season that opened last weekend in Chelsea, the gallery-stuffed downtown neighborhood beside the Hudson River, seemed more substantial than it has in years? During recent boom times, the new collectors' easy money, and their need to show it off, led to a huge demand for superficial, easy-to-buy glitz. That encouraged artists and dealers to supply it. Now, with the economy tanking and buyers on the run, an unprecedented number of this season's shows feature thorny, un-market-friendly works produced by some of the major figures of the past two or three decades. Many of them even discard the idea of the unique, collectible object. It's going too far to call the works on display unsellable; it's more that they're most appealing to absolutely dedicated collectors, and committed institutions, who are least likely to jam out when the economy goes south.

On Kawara at David Zwirner

"One Million Years," by veteran conceptualist On Kawara -- he refers to himself as 27,791 days old -- is a perfect example of the season's trend. The work on show at Zwirner is building on a project that Kawara launched in 1969, when he began releasing a 20-volume set of books that simply gives a chronological listing of years beginning in 998,031 B.C., 10,000 centuries in the past, and ending in A.D. 1,001,995, looking forward the same span. Zwirner's latest update on the project features a glass-fronted sound booth and an invitation to all comers to sit in it and read from Kawara's books. Each reader's words -- or rather, numbers -- are recorded for posterity, for release on a CD. Kawara has calculated that his "audio book" will require more than 2,500 discs. At the planned rate of one CD a day through this show's month-long run, the project will remain well shy of its conclusion. That's fitting, since Kawara's piece is all about duration and time, and how humans come to terms with them. If just speaking the passing years takes this much time, we can imagine what living them would be. Mortality may not be such a bad deal, after all.

Through Feb. 14. www.davidzwirner.com

Allan McCollum at Friedrich Petzel

Allan McCollum, a 64-year-old New Yorker, has long been interested in repeated shapes, and how they play out in the world and in art. In 2005, that led him to come up with a system for the design and inventory of more than 6 billion abstract forms -- one unique "emblem" for every person on the planet. More recently, he decided to re-inject his artistic forms into the thick of our everyday shape-making. He got four small workshops in Maine -- a maker of copper cookie-cutters, a firm that cuts wooden ornaments with a scroll saw, a provider of hand-crafted rubber stamps and a producer of hand-cut paper silhouettes -- to use their skills to realize 2,232 of his shapes, on display in this show at Petzel. Anyone who has delighted in the array of pot lids in a kitchen-goods shop, or in the screws and bolts on offer in a hardware store, will understand some of the pleasure that the show supplies. But rather than simply supplying such contentment, the project turns it into its subject matter, too. McCollum lets us contemplate our peculiar enjoyment of endlessly multiplying form.

Through Feb. 14. www.petzel.com

Robert Gober and Felix Gonzalez-Torres At Andrea Rosen Gallery

How big is the market for artistic holes? If it is no more than three holes deep, then dealer Andrea Rosen has it cornered in her pared-down January show. High on one wall of the gallery's huge space is a work by well-known neo-surrealist Robert Gober, a 54-year-old American. It consists of a square opening, looking very like the window in a dungeon, roughly cut into the drywall and then closed off by three crude iron bars, with a blue-sky glow shining through them from beyond. Across the gallery, at about eye level, a visitor takes in a pair of very different holes, designed by Cuban-born artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who died of AIDS-related complications in 1996 when he was 38: Two perfect circles, each 12 inches in diameter, are cut into the drywall, side by side so that they only barely touch. Or rather, that's the strong impression that one has at first. Come close enough to look right "through" these circles into a space beyond, and you realize that you can't: They turn out to be mirrors set just behind the surface of the wall rather than holes cut through it. The show's news release invokes windows and mirrors as old-fashioned metaphors used to describe how realistic pictures work. These two examples also seem to reference other, more elevated functions often ascribed to works of art: art as a means of escape and art as a tool for self-knowledge. Both functions seem deliberately defeated by these particular objects: Gober's art prevents escape, and Gonzalez-Torres makes insight come across as vacancy.

Through Jan. 31. www.andrearosengallery.com

Matthew Higgs at Murray Guy

Matthew Higgs, a well-known New York curator who was born in 1964, also makes art. He follows in the grand conceptual tradition of Kawara and McCollum, while seeming to poke fun at the dose of ego in such work. His latest show is called "Art in Crisis -- Pictures in Peril," after the titles of two old books whose covers he had photographed and now presents, matted and framed, as a pair of artworks of his own. The grand calls-to-arms that now and then ring out through the art world become just two more vintage objects taken off somebody's shelf. The other pieces in this show are actual covers, or end papers, or pages, cut from art books and presented as still more matted and framed works by Higgs. Most of them read as pure abstraction, and speak to how the glories of abstract art are most often consumed and encountered: on coffee tables rather than on museum walls. A few of Higgs's pages include a word or short phrase evoking the text-based art of visual poets of the 1970s such as Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth. I don't think Higgs is merely sending up the art that his X-Actoed pages recall: He's also showing how that kind of art is out there everywhere, once we set our eyes to looking for it. And, of course, we couldn't do that if the fine art hadn't been there first to show us how.

Through Feb. 21. www.murrayguy.com

Nick Cave at Jack Shainman

Nick Cave, a 49-year-old artist who is chairman of the fashion department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, doesn't make the kind of esoteric, virtually unsellable work of some of the conceptualists now showing in Chelsea. Cave's pieces seem esoteric in a quite different way. He's best known for what he calls "Soundsuits": "wearable sculptures," or costumes, that enclose their wearers, hiding every trace of their identities. For his second Shainman exhibition, Cave has presented a new series of ultra-shaggy Soundsuits, made from garishly colored hair. Anyone who wore one would look rather like Chewbacca the Wookiee, after an accident in a dye works. Other new suits are more form-fitting, sometimes looking as though they've been assembled out of crocheted pot-holders. These tighter suits are then topped with huge "masks" that conceal a wearer's head and chest behind bizarre constructions of fake flowers, plastic birds or fragments of fabric.

There seem to be clear references, in all this work, to the body-hiding masks and costumes of certain African cultures. But where those outfits reinforce a single cultural identity, Cave's seem meant to set their wearers free. For anyone who, like Cave, grew up black in the United States, there might be something to be said for a new world where every person could choose to look absolutely, unrecognizably different from everyone else.

One last, perhaps surprising note: A week into the show, Shainman had managed to sell a number of such apparently unsellable works.

Through Feb. 7. www.jackshainman.com