Amy O'Neill, 'OMG,' 2012. (Courtesy Swiss Institute)

Ever since Claes Oldenberg proposed making a teddy bear large enough to obstruct a Manhattan intersection, shading the banal into the monumental has been a favorite sport of artists with a liking for the absurd—and the requisite Koonsian ego. This month, Soho nonprofit the Swiss Institute plays host to another variation on the time-honored theme, with uneven results. Elements of Amy O’Neill’s “HLUSA” are striking enough, but, while not without its subtleties and potentials, the project as a whole doesn’t add quite enough to the inherent fascination of its subject to make for something likely to endure as an independent meditation.

Ms. O’Neill’s show, which takes its title from an abandoned biblical theme park called Holy Land USA, pairs a video of the park’s site with a linked array of sculptures and paintings. The show’s namesake roadside curiosity is located in Waterbury, Conn., but, as depicted here, it appears isolated from its real-world environs inside a bubble of wistful fantasy and picturesque decay. A weird blend of low-rent tourist attraction and outsider art endeavor, its battered faux-Egyptian and faux-Israelite mini-buildings are sign-posted by faded hand-lettered signs indicating key sites such as Herod’s Palace and the Wailing Wall. Even without the wintry light and choral soundtrack, it would be difficult to go far wrong with this gift of a subject, layering as it does a haunting melancholia over an instance of down-home American eccentricity.

In the main gallery, a walled enclosure houses three long rows of pyramidal sculptures. Cast in gypsum cement and embedded with shreds of burlap sacking, these dun-colored forms supposedly reference scenes from the video, but come across more as generalized references to its shabby, windblown texture. Some of them are also embossed with fragments of text drawn from the abbreviated languages of tweeting, text messaging and slang, some more familiar than others. Will any of these emergent verbal constructions last as long as the tombs at Giza, or be considered as emblematic of a culture millennia hence? Ms. O’Neill implies that not only can we never know, but that even hazarding a guess is something of an Ozymandian exercise.

A row of small panel paintings in the gallery’s mezzanine repeats this point, its spattered, multicolored fasciae embossed with abbreviations and acronyms: “DOA,” “IDK,” “TOS” and the all-conquering “OMG.” Unfortunately, piling example on example adds little to the project in terms of complexity, and the ugliness of these works’ surfaces (are they meant to suggest marble?) is a visual turn-off that lingers in the memory for all the wrong reasons. More effective, because at once simpler and more actually monumental in scale, is the work on the Swiss Institute’s silvery exterior. The three “words” “ZEB,” “PEC” and “SOP” have been painted in simple black capitals across the brick façade in a font that strongly resembles one favored by Jenny Holzer. The use of existing architecture rather than a simulation or suggestion thereof adds heft to Ms. O’Neill’s representation of language, thought and belief as fleeting, at least in their specifics.

Through Jan. 27

Ranged around the walls of the gallery’s main room is a set of circular canvasses, each a little under four feet across. Recent entries from an ongoing series begun in 1994, they are densely worked but without any identifiable foci; for the most part, they could be spun into any position without losing or gaining much in terms of either look or significance. Skip the video at the gallery’s entrance and it’s difficult to see what unifies these combinations of painting, drawing, print-making and collage; watch it for even a second and all becomes clear. These colorful discs are not only traces of Mr. Kuitca’s liking for routine, but they also record a specific situation—each was made at the same table and takes its shape and size from that well-used piece.

Just as this process involves the salvaging of something previously abandoned—the artist found the table in his parents’ garden—so its content is based on cast-offs: canvases that, for whatever reason, didn’t make the grade. Mr. Kuitca repurposed these former failures as tablecloths and, like a kid at a family-oriented diner, proceeded to cover them with doodles, largely ignoring the original pictures’ meanings and orientations. But the surfaces also served more obviously practical purposes; like most sketchbooks, they became repositories of phone numbers and e-mail addresses, installation plans and expense calculations, and they soaked up numerous ink and coffee spills. The works’ titles incorporate spans of dates that reveal each as having taken up to half a year to complete—their end-points were enforced, presumably, by simple lack of any remaining space.

Mr. Kuitca regards “Diarios” as a set of Warholian documents of everyday life, produced in parallel with his regular practice. He also sees it as a way of “corrupting” the practice of painting with other mediums and processes. What remains unclear is why it might be necessary to marginalize the process of experimentation in this way; the idea of incorporating other media into painting is hardly a startling one, and the layered textures and combinations of image, abstraction and text in these works are familiar from a host of other artists’ oeuvres—Mark Bradford’s collage paintings in particular spring to mind. So while the format of the series is likably accessible, the results are, visually and ideationally, less satisfying.

Through Dec. 16, 2012

Up until Swiss artist David Weiss’s death in April, he’d been making artworks with his longtime collaborator, Peter Fischli. As the influential and prolific duo Fischli/Weiss, they translated outwardly banal images and ideas into extended series that reveal the extraordinary in the everyday. Their photographs of airports from around the world, taken between 1989 and 2000 and currently on view at Andrew Kreps Gallery, are no exception. On display are six large color shots—a hefty tome at the gallery’s front desk documents some eight hundred others. Titles aside, there are few clues to the location of any given view—it might be Zürich or Paris, Amsterdam or Rio de Janeiro—but while their subjects are, pointedly, almost interchangeable, the images themselves vary in composition, color and a thousand incidental details. Taken through the windows of waiting rooms and lounges, the reflections of which are layered over scenes of shuttling baggage trucks and rain-streaked tarmac, they evoke a litany of daydream-like, transitional moments.

Accompanying the Fischli/Weiss photographs is a set of small sculptures by Frank Benson, displayed on simple pedestals. They are not outwardly connected to Messrs. Fischli and Weiss’s project, but nevertheless complement it nicely. Mr. Benson, a young Brooklyn-based artist, has taken time out from a practice that typically revolves around intricately detailed naturalism to produce a set of abstract forms. The seven works from his “Extrusions” series on view at Kreps are all short strips of unglazed ceramic that slump endearingly this way and that like wayward ribbons of cake frosting (albeit in earthy gray as opposed to candy pink). Like the photographs that surround them, these variations on a theme make the most of very little by pinpointing moments of accidental beauty. Incorporating the element of chance into what would otherwise have been a mechanistic-minimalistic exercise, Mr. Benson’s unassuming sculptures parallel the tight focus and chance poetry of the airport photos.

At David Zwirner, two exhibitions interact in a looser manner. The late Al Taylor’s quirky “Pass the Peas" and "Can Studys" and James Welling’s subtly investigative “Overflow” have an intriguing correspondence. Again, the pairing involves photographs by one artist (here Mr. Welling) and sculptural works by another (Taylor, from whom there are also numerous works on paper). And again, the recognizable subjects of the photographer are (mis)matched with entries from an extended run of tweaks on a basic formalist model.

Mr. Welling’s show also constitutes a kind of internal pairing, in that the strongest and most extensive of its three parts is based around a response to another artist’s oeuvre, that of the American painter Andrew Wyeth, who died in 2009.

For his series Wyeth, Los Angeles-based Mr. Welling traveled to Maine and Pennsylvania to track down sites associated with his late subject. In the process of finding and shooting locations painted by Wyeth, Mr. Welling aimed in part to reassess his own creative development, not simply following in his hero’s footsteps but identifying lessons learned and borrowings made. The task was not always straightforward, and the photographer often strayed from the path he had laid down for himself—to poke around the painter’s disused studio, for instance, or explore other elements of his storied rural milieu. Distinctions between the historical and the projected (or purely imagined) quickly become muddied as everything begins to take on the look and feel of a picture by the creator of Christina’s World. And the iconic Olson House is, of course, depicted repeatedly, its richly weathered textures detailed with a loving, even painterly eye.

Mr. Welling’s Fluid Dynamics series, a set of large, splashy abstract photograms made using colors selected from the Wyeth photographs, is substantially less compelling, but the generous viewer might still find it a passable bridge to Taylor’s more experimental show. Taylor, who died in 1999, was something of a maverick, an artist who looked to other disciplines as much as to art for his themes and methods, and gradually moved from a straightforward painterly practice to an active fusion of drawing and assemblage. A winningly eccentric group of sculptures from the early ’90s titled Pass the Peas features a sequence of loops, coils and circles fashioned from various kinds of tubing. These are studded with plastic bottle cap rings positioned as if following spiraling trajectories around them, and accompanied by lively drawings that look a bit like Brice Marden’s from the same period.

Can Studys, the other major series represented here, is a related grouping from 1993 that incorporates constructions made from tin cans, wire, wood and steel bands. Wall-mounted (though just barely) these precarious arrangements are also matched with drawings; the attempt to extend line engagingly into space is strikingly successful in both. Concerned with the fundamental operations of light and shade, gravity and balance, the graphic and the solid, these playful, agile, deceptively casual works made from everyday materials look almost subversive in Zwirner’s sleek headquarters. They put me in mind of the wonderful B. Wurtz retrospective that Matthew Higgs curated for Metro Pictures last summer—still further evidence of the power of a good pairing.

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Mr. Rakowitz focuses on the Beatles’ famous breakup in 1969, applying his special mastery of the archival form to an intricate picking-apart of this traumatic and still-contested event. The iconic subject alone all but guarantees a degree of fascination, and the artist’s worrying over fine detail will appeal to lovers of the flowcharts of influence and cross-pollination that Pete Frame compiled in his “Rock Family Trees” books. But Mr. Rakowitz’s research goes beyond the more familiar aspects of the Fab Four’s parting, tracing a lesser-known connection with contemporaneous events in the Middle East. We learn, for example, that Paul McCartney had planned a series of concerts—which would have been the band’s first in three years—at large venues across North Africa, a proposal reportedly nixed by Ringo Starr and replaced by a low-key farewell in the form of an abbreviated lunchtime set on the roof of EMI’s London offices.

“The Breakup” began life as a radio series commissioned by Al Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art in Jerusalem. Taking the audio tapes of Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s Beatles documentary Let It Be as his starting point, Mr. Rakowitz expanded his production into the multimedia collection currently on display. A group of vitrines is stocked with artifacts ranging from letters and other printed ephemera to recordings legitimate and bootleg. In one, an array of albums is annotated with handwritten captions that pinpoint various possible beginnings-of-the-end: “Yoko says something here,” indicates one, “Did she interrupt the band? Does the inclusion of a new entity spark their dissolution?”; “[Brian] Epstein dies of a drug overdose five days after ‘Your Mother Should Know’ was recorded,” offers another. “So this groove must be the final moment the band was truly together.” Mr. Rakowitz here infuses slabs of vinyl with the aura of the Dead Sea Scrolls, leaving us to decide their ultimate significance.

He certainly isn’t the first to reanimate a musical figure or appearance—see Slater Bradley’s doubling of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, for example, or Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s restaging of legendary shows by the Smiths and the Cramps—but in persuading a defunct Palestinian Beatles cover band to reform and play the mop-tops’ final set on the roof of the Swedish Christian Study Center in Jerusalem, superimposing them against the Old City and the Dome of the Rock for a new video and pressing up the performance as an LP, he steps up to a still-higher level and more thoroughly enmeshed variety of reflexive play. In their first two-person show, Ms. Kilimnik and Ms. Gordon—the latter of course a “famous” musician in her own right as a member of Sonic Youth—also seem to be aiming at a problematization of the idea that any work, whether consumed “live” or as product, can be considered definitive or understood without a multiplicity of contexts. But while both artists have put their names to oeuvres of unarguable influence, their efforts here are only intermittently engaging.

The double-header is centered on a pair of videos separated by some 25 years. Ms. Kilimnik’s Bananarama Guilty, 1987, is a self-consciously dissonant remix of golden-era MTV pap in which a televised concert by the mega-selling girl group is cut with a maelstrom of interference and other material, including fragments of Madonna vehicle Desperately Seeking Susan and a cheesy fashion segment. Ms. Gordon’s Proposal for a Dance, 2012, is scripted for “two performers, two electric guitars, and two Rodarte dresses” (the label-specificity of the last component perhaps a nod to the Fashion Week shenanigans surrounding the show’s opening). Its subject is a claustrophobic performance in which the participants’ convulsive writhings seem to both produce and interpret a wall of dissonant sound. The aesthetic, which overlaps with a litany of experimental music sub-genres from punk rock to post-rock, is not without power. But where Mr. Rakowitz’s project is in part about the existence of an external fan-base—the Beatles’—Ms. Gordon’s feels reliant on the indulgence of her own.

The remainder of the show, a ring of black glitter and a “performative” wall-splatter by Ms. Gordon and some early-’90s Manson-family-referencing scrawls and recent flag paintings by Ms. Kilimnik, looks half-hearted, a hodgepodge. Susan Philipsz’s installation is, by contrast, a tightly focused affair that bypasses the pop-rock continuum altogether in favor of an allusion to the work of Franz Schreker, an Austrian composer whose opera Der ferne Klang (“The Distant Sound”) gives the show its title. Schreker’s piece concerns a composer who realizes only on his deathbed the significance of ambient sound. Berlin-based Ms. Philipsz, who made her name with site-responsive works exploring singing and song, here manipulates instrumental and environmental sounds, fragmenting Schreker’s composition over two walls dotted with speakers so that almost every note is physically separated from the rest. Stirring other sounds into the mix, Ms. Philipsz turns music back into (gentle) noise and underscores its capacity for defining physical space as well as psychological mood (which in this case is wistful, pining, and melancholic). A video and two large, murky photographs of trains passing in the night add to the atmosphere, but finally it’s what we hear that lingers in the memory.

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An Ear to the Sounds of Our History by Sharon Hayes

On the face of it, French artist Annette Messager and American Sharon Hayes could hardly be more different. Ms. Messager, using a rich formal and symbolic palette, delves deep into the magic and mystery of early childhood; Ms. Hayes, with a visual vocabulary that is stripped to the bone and an emphasis on the sense of sound over sight, focuses on the communication of some decidedly grown-up social and political issues. And yet, there is a kind of common ground: both artists involve the viewer in an investigation of oft-hidden facets of the psyche and their intermittent emergence into the light of the everyday.

The Hat (Le Chapeau), 2012, the piece that opens Ms. Messager’s exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery, is a conical witch’s cap that twirls on a wire while a strategically placed fan blows a skirt of long brown hair up around it like Marilyn Monroe’s dress. It’s a striking, playful image, one that very much sets the tone for a show in which the dark arts take center stage. Most of the space is occupied by two large installations. In one room is The Black Continents (Les Continents noirs), 2012, an environment, inspired by Gulliver’s Travels, in which a swarm of large black “flying islands” suspended just below the ceiling is dimly illuminated by several swinging light bulbs. At the other end of the gallery is Et range ta chambre (And tidy your room bedroom), 2007–2009, a multipart arrangement of toys, furniture, figures and unnamable abstract forms. In between the two is a small group of ink drawings dominated by a single word: chance.

Ms. Messager—whose closest aesthetic relatives, Louise Bourgeois, Christian Boltanski and Sophie Calle, can also trace their origins to France—is a confirmed bits-and-pieces artist, an inveterate collector and maximalist crafter who likes to amass, arrange and manipulate quantities of images and objects. Her work also shares with that of her compatriots an unabashedly emotional cast that can hew toward the sentimental. When it succeeds, however, which it does here, its material richness and quasi-surrealist symbolic drama have an immediate allure. Looming shadows usually come across as something of a sculptural cheap trick, but the shapes thrown by the hovering clumps of metallic and painted paper that approximate chunks of urban and rural landscape in The Black Continents manage to give the artist’s ossified take on Swift’s haunting vision of a drifting microcosm a disarming, amateur-dramatics feel.

The same sense of slightly softened anxiety marks Et range ta chambre, in which Ms. Messager threads a row of separate sculptures into a meandering sequence. Pinned onto dozens of ropes lining the walls are hand-illustrated badges grouped by theme. One column features images of skulls; another, real pressed leaves; a third, teapots and teacups. In front of these are positioned various objects, including a dreamcatcher-like metal hoop fringed with strips of rubber, several small figures and vehicles upholstered in black leatherette, and an incongruously colorful arrangement of plastic Lego blocks. There is also, in Arbre architecture, 2009, a tiny room setting and, in Black Cones, 2009, a dangling cluster of the titular forms enveloped in netting. The whole assembly has a gothic, fetish-y, Alice in Wonderland styling that will be too rich for some viewers’ blood. But inhabit this messy den long enough and some order will emerge, as elements of fantasy and dream are brought together with motifs from the waking world.

Ms. Hayes’s “There’s so much I want to say to you” also frames a set of individual works as interconnected elements of a master installation. Occupying the Whitney Museum of American Art’s third floor, a selection of old and new projects by the artist are corralled inside an environment produced in collaboration with fellow artist Andrea Geyer. Space Set/Set Space, 2012, is a kind of modular display system modeled after those used in trade shows, a utilitarian plywood structure that incorporates stages, steps, screens and platforms. Suggesting a more functional version of something that British conceptual sculptor Liam Gillick might design, it’s an ideal environment for work that often revolves around ideas of communication and performance, private and public contexts.

As her exhibition’s title suggests, Ms. Hayes returns again and again to the possibilities and limitations of speech. A frieze of covers from her collection of vintage spoken-word albums reveals a thoroughgoing interest in the historical influence of oratory—before TED talk podcasts, there were aural “reviews of the year” and Malcolm X Speaks to the People in Harlem. A particular focus is the distorted, suppressed or underacknowledged meeting of the personal and the political, and she often places herself at the center of its investigation. Everything Else Has Failed! Don’t You Think It’s Time for Love?, 2007–2008, for example, is an audio installation that documents her recitation of a monologue outside a Midtown office. Over a five-day period, Ms. Hayes addressed an unnamed lover in a mode that unnervingly juxtaposes personal expressions of longing with concerns around living in a time of war. I March in the Parade of Liberty but as Long as I Love You I am Not Free, 2007–2008, incorporates early gay liberation slogans and fragments from Oscar Wilde into its mix-and-match script, to still more heartrending effect. “We will not hide our love away,” rails the artist to passersby, “we will not be silent!”

The more inextricably Ms. Hayes fuses her voice with others’, the more powerful its impact, even when the flaws of her delivery are deliberately underscored. In the video installation Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screeds # 13, 16, 20 and 29, 2003, the artist is shown reciting from memory a series of statements made by Patty Hearst, the California heiress who was kidnapped by the militant group in 1974 and ultimately declared her solidarity with it. As Ms. Hayes speaks, an unseen audience offers constant corrections, transforming the strident words of the original communiqué into a stuttering, stumbling exercise in recall that throws both original text and later restaging into doubt.

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