Donatien Veismann’s 'About the Greek Ideal,' 2008. (Courtesy the artist and Envoy Enterprises)

Jimi Dams assembled the sculpture, video, and predominantly figurative paintings and photographs that make up "DIAcussion," his elegantly understated group show at Envoy Enterprises, with the goal of letting the art speak for itself. What it says—with a strong assist from Mr. Dams’s hanging, which draws a single, well-chosen work from each of nineteen artists and groups the pieces in formally thematic twos and threes—is that the variety of formal choices available to an artist is a microcosm of the variety of human beings. Nan Goldin’s photograph Valerie After Lovemaking, Bruno Dressing, Paris 2001, a supine female nude with her head facing left and the colors of real life subtly heightened, hangs above Kelsey Henderson’s oil painting Jenn, a supine female nude with the chalky colors and soft precision of a Philip Pearlstein, her head facing to the right. Next to Jenn hangs Winston Chmielinski’s Soft 7, a supine female nude in bright, simple colors, with her open legs facing the viewer and her upper body smeared beyond recognition. It’s a deeply appealing vision, certainly not wrong though maybe too pat, in which the basic nature of experience remains constant while each person has her own slightly different way of seeing it, perfect for herself but not quite right for anyone else. Johan Tahon’s extraordinary ceramic bust CAMPBELL (black) sits beside Xia Jing’s Underground #1, a large-scale photo of a charcoal portrait of a Chinese miner, and Donatien Veismann’s About the Greek Ideal, a large-scale photo of a photo of a bronze bust of Alexander the Great, on which Mr. Veisman spat: the young conqueror stares through the passing, DNA-charged mists of time. A snippet of Beethoven’s Ninth plays intermittently in Micki Pellerano’s short film Ashlar and Pentacle. Rounding out all this gentle humanism is Carlos Betancourt’s The Cut-Out Army, four photo prints on black canvas of more than a hundred separately posed, eccentrically costumed models. Their number takes the weight off of any given choice but loses none of the benefit. (Through May 26, 2013)

Jill Mason, 'One More Night,' 2013. (Courtesy the artist and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery)

Imagine walking into a costume party inside Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture The Palace at 4 a.m. The theme to this group show is the brief but influential, pre-Surrealist “Pittura Metafisica” movement, and the decorations are meticulous. The room is divided in two by Adam Putnam’s untitled colonnade of 12-foot-high arches. But their unpainted plywood piers and careful but incomplete cardboard crowns make a porous enough impression to leave the gallery’s halves suggestively indistinct. Setting the tone when you first walk in is Kristen Jensen’s Blushing Rock, a roughly shaped piece of white porcelain stained with peach and gray wash. It could almost be a phoenix’s egg, the skull of a woman asleep on her side, or a Brancusi, but it prefers instead to stop short of terminal specificity and float in the undifferentiated power of allusion. Three brown oil paintings by Jesse Chapman get at the peculiar power of dreams to separate the sensation of meaning from any static content. In The Figureheads, four figures float just above the surface of a misty green swamp, against a sky the color of mustard gas. (It’s like the memory of a premonition.) Their features are worn away, and three of them are missing their arms, but their mottled, woody surfaces evoke the unspoken promise of early spring. Trailing down from each figure’s right leg is a deep canoe, its color dark and unbroken. Jill Mason’s oils, in a brighter palette of blues and pinks, also converge figures for uncertain purposes, but she comes at this prewar uncanny valley from the opposite direction: instead of Mr. Chapman’s people, which look uneasily like things, Ms. Mason has objects that wink and vamp like people. Three lovely untitled casts by Jennifer Paige Cohen use stucco, plaster, and fragments of clothing to recreate the impression made in the world by other people’s shoulders and knees. (Through June 9, 2013)

Still from Maria Petschnig's 'Petschsniggle' (2013). (Courtesy the artist and On Stellar Rays)

Everything in our virtual life is clean, transparent, and meaningless. But there’s a nagging disconnect between a body image that’s been catastrophically challenged and dissolved and the body itself, which hasn’t gone anywhere. We’re like children playing hide-and-seek in a house we no longer believe in. So before projecting her videos Vasistas and Petschsniggle onto the walls of On Stellar Rays, Austrian-born, New York-based artist Maria Petschnig covered those walls with hastily slapped up wood paneling and installed a drop ceiling of acoustic tiles. This ought to be claustrophobically ominous, but instead of evoking that dread, it simply alludes to it. Gopa, a kind of drooping, faceless velvet head mounted on the wall, or Mycroft and Sack, two mattresses stuffed like diapers or death masks with lumpy padding, likewise bring to mind Louise Bourgeois sculptures under glass: the language is the same, but it’s been aestheticized or intellectualized in a way that leaves the viewer fascinatingly unsure of her footing. The video Petschsniggle begins with a shot of two identical naked women—Ms. Petschnig and her twin sister—in tight rope nets, laid out in an empty bathtub as if to dry or air-drown. For about seven minutes, in a house decorated just like the gallery, Ms. Petschnig and her twin play twin games: they ride down the stairs on a mattress, they ride each other like horses. They cut a peeled cucumber into pieces. In the bathtub, wearing masks made of stockings, the artist’s sister carefully leans over her and spits on her face while Ms. Petschnig tries not to laugh; in another cut, standing and soapy, their eyes meet for a moment, but no message is exchanged. Maybe a sharper comparison would be to the giddy, blasphemous moment early in the last century when words like “damn” and “fuck” began to explode across the public vernacular even as they rapidly lost their force: in most mythologies, dismemberment is a time of new beginnings.

Installation view. (Courtesy Audio Visual Arts)

Composer and artist Ben Vida began by writing a "score" consisting of a concrete/Dada-style series of letters and syllables. He then printed the score as a poster, and as a book, videotaped himself, Tyondai Braxton and Sara Magenheimer improvising with the meaningless but still recognizably English-based vocals to a click track, processed the voices, overlaid electronic music, added cheery interstitial screens of pure computer color, and built a very pretty kind of abstract spectrograph on a white shelf using irregularly overlapping 12-inch squares of colored plastic. On the one hand, this kind of score is as open as a Rorschach blot: Mr. Braxton scats, Ms. Magenheimer croons and Mr. Vida recites. Mr. Braxton's voice, through the music, continues to sound like a voice and Ms. Magenheimer's does so intermittently, but Mr. Vida's becomes an electronic jaw harp sound twanging in time to the jumpy, stop-motion strangulation of his mouth. If you weren't told it was still his voice, you might not guess. On the other hand, is this really any more variation than you'd find among performances of a Bach prelude, with its ostensibly far more rigorous instructions? Pretext, decision, information, identity: which is which? Mr. Vida suggests we agree to disagree. (Through May 19, 2013)

'Cactus Fan' (2013) by Graham. (Courtesy the artist and Rodney Graham)

Old Punk on Pay Phone, a color transparency mounted on an aluminum lightbox, shows the artist Rodney Graham at almost life size. He’s standing on a sloping wet sidewalk in Vancouver, against a brick wall painted yellow and blue. His black leather jacket is covered in studs and crude lettering, his graying hair is greased up into a faux-hawk, and there’s eyeliner on his eyes. Holding the handset of a much-abused, wall-mounted pay phone to his ear, he looks off in shock—as if he’s just learned, say, that his father has died, and he is realizing for the first time that when it comes right down to it, he’d be glad to put on a necktie for his widowed mother’s sake.

Mr. Graham’s highly integrated idiom of reference, self-reference, self-consciousness, meticulous detail and self-deprecation creates the same effect of art-historical specificity whether his references are specific or not. Paddler, Mouth of the Seymour, which shows Mr. Graham paddling a wooden kayak, is a direct riff on Thomas Eakins’s The Champion Single Sculls, and Cactus Fan looks back to Carl Spitzweg’s 1850 Cactus Enthusiast, while the origins of Old Punk and The Drywaller are more diffuse. But they all feel equally like blunted jokes: they don’t have the trivial immediacy of a punch line, but there’s still enough narrative focus to constrain your view.

Installation view. (Courtesy 303 Gallery)

Cactus Fan is dominated by a small potted prickly pear and four brightly colored balloons. Mr. Graham, in a white lab coat, stares at the point where the balloons’ strings apparently meet the cactus’s round stems, oblivious to the fact that the taut strings, however eagerly upward their synthetically ideal-looking balloons may strain, are tied up much more deeply in the material—that is, around the plant’s base. But is that where Mr. Graham really stands? Probably not: as with a celebrity sighting in New York, the artist’s appearance in his own image wreaks a neat bit of reverse psychology, forcing you to look anywhere but at him. (Through June 15, 2013)

Kiefer's 'der Morgenthau-Plan,' 2012. (© Anselm Kiefer, courtesy Gagosian Gallery, photograph by Charles Duprat)

“The Morgenthau Plan” was an American proposal, first mooted in 1944, to partition and deindustrialize Germany after the war. It was never enacted precisely as planned, of course, but while the war was still going on, Joseph Goebbels was able to use news of the idea to rally resistance along the Western Front. “The Morgenthau Plan” is also the title of an installation that Anselm Kiefer showed at Gagosian’s new space in Le Bourget, Paris, last year, of his current show at Gagosian in Chelsea, and of several of the massive, oil-and-acrylic-on-photo-on-canvas tableaux in the show.

Kiefer's 'laßt tausend Blumen blühen,' 2012. (© Anselm Kiefer, courtesy Gagosian Gallery, photograph by Charles Duprat)

The plan could certainly be the fertile premise for a robust conceptual engagement with—just to pick from ideas cited in the show’s press release—unintended consequences, industrialism, tyranny and social reorganization, or the sinister inadequacy of mere beauty as an artistic goal. But despite the repetitive insistence of the title, written directly on several canvases as well as on the gallery wall, Mr. Kiefer hasn’t quite gotten there yet—which is too bad, because his paintings hardly need any corpus of explanation in the first place. (Maybe “The Morgenthau Plan” is not a depiction but a demonstration of the dangerous inadequacy of verbal ideas.) One der Morgenthau Plan, for example, comprising three canvases fit tightly together, is just under 10 by 20 feet. Each is covered with a close-up, out-of-focus color photo of a field of flowers, and each photo is almost entirely covered with paint. In the upper half of the composition, translucent layers of gray and blue, thick cracks, drips and stains create a sky of misty, fantastic depth. Tilting across that sky are a dozen ovals, thick knots of paint in charred-bone color that are either blossoms from up close or airships from far away. They blow over on black stems or trail down lines of black smoke into the riot of shockwave strokes and nocturnally floral colors that cover the paintings’ lower half. The raw intensity of abstraction is fit into the direct clarity of figuration: dollops of white paint with black hearts have yellow-orange accents, vague little areas of royal blue float without anchor, and algae-colored stains on the bottom are more like the misremembered synthesis of a meadow than like any one thing you’d ever see. (Through June 8, 2013)

Installation view.

Bob Zoell’s enameled metal boxes date back to the ’90s, but they look like omens of where we’re going. In white, gray, powder blue, emergency orange, Starburst yellow and Pepto-Bismol pink, they’re painting-sized containers of nothing, ominously monochrome except for a few black or white horizontal stripes like redactions in a Freedom of Information Act request. Paired with Wyatt Kahn’s canvas constructions—raw monochromes built of irregularly shaped little canvases pieced together into six-and-a-half-foot-tall rectangles—they waver between sweetness and poison, depending on what mercy we can expect from the image when it finally conquers the word. (Through June 2, 2013)

Installation view. (Courtesy Abrons Arts Center)

Untitled (portraits from Deviant Art), 2012, is a spring-loaded misdirection. A dark photo print under beveled matting under hand-etched glass, with the rectangle formed by the bevels overlapping a pale gray cameo-style oval, it’s almost impossible to look at. It’s much easier to see your own reflection. So you move back and forth, trying to find an angle from which you can see what is being so elaborately framed, suspecting with some irritation that it may only be your own face—and all the while, the pear-shaped mountain of snakes etched into the surface is clearly framed by all three frames and visible from every angle. What’s more, before being realized, the collage was designed—like all the alluring collages in Mr. van den Dorpel’s first American solo show, some of them built up with layers of resin or extra pieces of glass—using Photoshop. Mr. van den Dorpel is a programmer by training, and the show, which was curated by Karen Archey, includes two computer-assisted video loops, as well as some assemblages. The material realization of a virtual design that draws on diffuse influences and uses found imagery to deflect the viewer’s gaze from its center, it’s the first collage that’s collage all the way down. (Through June 1, 2013)

Installation view. (Courtesy David Zwirner)

Take Richard Serra’s 1967 artwork Verb List, a piece consisting of 108 terms handwritten across four columns on two sheets of letter paper. It’s a kind of index to the 18 titanic formal experiments, borrowed from museums and private collections all over the world, that have been arranged to loosely recreate the feeling of the artist’s 1968 Soho loft inside David Zwirner’s distractingly opulent new building on West 20th Street. Begin with “to roll.” Scavenge an irregular, four-foot-high ingot of black rubber, scraped or torn into a sandy latex color along one corner. Lean it against the wall. The way it lists to the right brings to mind a dancer striking a supple pose, whose shape looks transitional even as it holds steady—a perfect sculptural embodiment of frozen gesture. But then the soft material reminds you that the piece, Chunk (1967) really is bending the way it looks like it’s bending, even though it’s bending too slowly to see.

Jump to Verb List’s second column and pick out “to support.” Set an eight-foot-long roll of sheet lead on the floor and lean it into a five-foot-square lead plate against the wall. Notice how the bottom edge of the roll flattens under its own weight: this one is called Prop (1968). But a monumental aesthetic—and even Chunk seems to create its own horizon simply in order to fill it—is no match for a subtle conception. Two hanging rubber wall pieces, one folded and tan like a hide, the other more geometric, continue the sense of delicate operations carried out by giant hands. And even Verb List is hardly as literal as it looks. After “to roll” comes “to crease” and “to fold,” and so on, in neat cursive, with a thick graphite line. But a full two dozen of these terms begin with “of” rather than “to”—as in “of entropy,” “of layering,” or “of electromagnetic”—and few of the verbs are as concrete as “to crease.” Given a roll of sheet lead, how do you “dapple,” “flood” or “complement” it?

'Tearing Lead From 1.00 to 1.47' (1968) by Serra. (Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner)

In the next room, this apparent mystery is stripped away to reveal the mystery underneath. One Ton Prop (House of Cards) (1969) consists of four inch-thick, four-foot-square lead plates, streaked and stained. Balanced on edge around a slightly larger square, they fall in against one another, propped corner to corner in a rough open cube. This arrangement, despite its enormous potential energy, is as contingent as a soap bubble: it’s only one of an infinite number of possible ways to arrange four lead plates, and if a plate slipped or fell, the object called One Ton Prop would instantly cease to exist. Triangles of light from the gaps at the bottom pierce through a spiral of quadrilateral shadows.

Strike: To Roberta and Rudy (1969-71) is an eight-foot-high wall of steel jammed into the gallery’s back corner. While One Ton Prop’s repetition makes its components into generic units, blasting away their color and detail, Strike elevates its pattern of orange rust into a universal particular that defies generalization; the choice of its arrangement seems not like the faint, hazardous breath of mortality but singular and necessary. In part, this is as simple as the difference between looking down and looking up, or between walking around and back and forth—the fact that you can’t see both sides of Strike at once gives it a presence that the smaller prop pieces can’t have. But it’s also the difference between diving down to find bottom and then, having found it, using the bottom to spring back up.

(Through June 15, 2013)