The New York art world still craves the next young talent, and the latest show from an established star, to be sure, but its dealers and curators seem increasingly interested in taking a look back to explore what they may be   missing.

Three standouts from the past year: SculptureCenter presented the thorough retrospective that the late, great postminimalist Bill Bollinger deserved in his hometown, James Fuentes and JTT teamed up on a show of Bill Walton, an ace sculptor (1931–2010) from Philadelphia who never had a solo show in New York during his long career, and Peter Fend, a longtime troublemaker, popped up in superb shows all over the city.

In the slide show above, a look at 10 of the year's finest surprises.

Installation view of "Bill Bollinger: The Retrospective." (Courtesy SculptureCenter)

On July 21, the literary journal Abe's Penny will host a poetry reading at SculptureCenter inspired by Bill Bollinger's work in the retrospective currently on view there (recently reviewed by Observer critic Maika Pollack). Anna Knoebel, Abe's Penny's co-founder, "sought poets who deal with form and reference material," according to a press release.

The participating poets are Marina Temkina, Chris Girard and Rachel Levitsky. A musical performance by the band Weyes Blood will follow the reading.

Over the past five years sculptures that are, superficially at least, totally banal—barrels filled with water, pipe pieces connected by rubber tubing, columns covered with sheets of linoleum tile, shelving units—have come to be commonplace in galleries. Bill Bollinger, who died in 1988 and was the kind of artist who might shop for his materials in a hardware store, is a patron saint of this school, and he is finally getting a posthumous, long overdue retrospective in “Bill Bollinger: The Retrospective.”

To make his sculptures, Bollinger arranged industrial objects to which he’d made almost no alterations. Plain and bare, revealing no gesture or emotion, his work is an heir to Duchamp’s assisted readymades. His Pipe Piece (1968/1969), a “U” shape made of two iron pipes connected by an elbow of plastic tubing, or Untitled (1970), a steel barrel filled with water, are aesthetically tight-lipped. Beauty is not the deus ex machina it is with so many minimalists; his manila rope stretched across the floor and fastened with clamps and eye-bolts has none of the taut finesse of a Fred Sandback. Often, what he preferred to do with his found materials was simply subject them to gravity. In Movie (1970), he stands next to a 15-foot tall wooden log and gets it to balance, then walks away, letting it fall. When it doesn’t topple, he returns to the frame to assist it with a playful shove. Bollinger’s is the relaxed counterpoint to Richard Serra’s contemporaneous, more macho interactions with materials.

Bollinger’s art was made on the cheap, using inexpensive processes and prefabricated throwaway materials. When a piece found a buyer, it was sold for a deliberately low price. “Remember it is always possible to make more of these pieces—that is the whole point of selling them so cheaply,” Bollinger wrote to his German dealer, Rolf Ricke, “If you can use more of them, just get the material to assemble them.” He thought of what he made as people’s art. Often, his works were discarded after being shown, and the relic-like manner in which they are displayed today is gently at odds with that quality. Wade Saunders writes of the fate of Bollinger’s two contributions to the famed “Anti-Illusion” exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 1969: “The Whitney’s ‘Receipt of Delivery’ … was annotated as follows: ‘Artist did not wish to have either the fence or the stone returned. A man … took the fence, and Auer took the stone to the dump.’” Such utopian material practices, along with Bollinger’s self-destructive drinking and early death—at age 48—proved sizeable hurdles to his legacy.

The cult of the original Bollinger was in full effect in a recent exhibition at the Algus Greenspon gallery, where the human-size, poured-iron Nike of Samothrace 1973, previously shown at the New York gallery O.K. Harris in 1974, held the place of honor alongside several other original pieces. There was a molding-like steel and black wall piece from 1966 made from anodized extruded aluminum, as well as spray-painted drawings of seascapes (he was not a particularly good draftsman, but horizon lines resonated with his interest in fluids and gravity). But the best work in the Algus show was another Pipe Piece, aluminum pipes of uneven length conjoined like a misaligned pair of chopsticks. The lines and angles generated by walking around the 1967 sculpture were subtle and revelatory.

The SculptureCenter show has a similar piece, but it’s installed less successfully: it’s too close to the wall to be activated by viewers walking around it. The show’s wall labels hint at but don’t explain Bollinger’s tragic biography, which makes the melancholy tone around the exhibition’s archival displays of letters and journal entries baffling for anyone who hasn’t read the excellent catalog. Another question around this rigorously researched exhibition—which originated at the ZKM Karlsruhe in Germany, where Bollinger’s work has never fallen out of favor—is why the increasingly off-base Museum of Modern Art didn’t pounce on it. Shouldn’t such shows of historically important work by influential, but somewhat overlooked, artists be part of that museum’s mission?

The Bollinger show is an important one in part because it puts contemporary art in context. Today’s most provocative painting and sculpture makes critics uneasy and drives an older generation crazy because it is blatantly and unapologetically imitative. Broadly speaking, American art of the post-WWII era first strove for originality, then rationalized a relationship with the past with talk of  “sampling” and “pastiche.” The pervasive postmillennial practice of lifting materials and strategies directly from historical artists like Bollinger, Robert Morris or Frank Stella—with no fig leaf of citation—is the most striking indication of a new direction in contemporary sculpture. Consider ambitious and successful artists like Jacob Kassay, Michael Delucia (who just had an exhibition at Eleven Rivington gallery), Ned Vena, Zak Kitnick and David Scanavino, who exhibit no discernible anxiety of influence.

In The Times, Roberta Smith recently criticized the new generation by saying “a few too many young artists [are] acting as if they have invented the wheel.” Recent art blog posts have come out in passionate defense of the recent revival of affectless monochrome paintings. Then there’s the hipster neo-minimalist sculpture flourishing on the Lower East Side. These are smart artists, and the charge that their imitative relationship with the past makes them lazy or ungrateful perhaps misses the point. With a view to Duchamp’s readymade, such work uses history as another kind of material. It makes us reexamine our assumptions about originality, and our relationship with time. Bollinger himself had a complex relationship with originality; his recouped, barely changed industrial objects feel pertinent as part of a larger trajectory.

editorial@observer.com

Benefit: “Block Party 2012,” at the Arsenal in Central Park
The Horticulture Society of New York (“The Hort”) hosts a silent auction and meet-and-greet with artists, in support of its GreenHouse program, which provides horticultural therapy and vocational training for inmates on Riker’s Island. In support of the cause, artists Barry McGee, Sue Kwon, Chris Johanson and Steve Powers have all donated works, and graffiti artist KAWS has produced something specifically for this event. Photographer Lawrence Schiller has donated one of the just-published photographs of Marilyn Monroe featured in Vanity Fair. The event is free and open to the public. —Rozalia Jovanovic
The Arsenal in Central Park, Fifth Avenue and East 64th Street, New York, 6-10 p.m.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 20

Discussion: "The Radical Art of Bill Bollinger" at SculptureCenter
In conjunction with the retrospective it is hosting of pioneering post-minimalist Bill Bollinger, SculptureCenter invites four heavy hitters to discuss his art: curator Christiane Meyer-Stoll, who spent a decade organizing the show, artist Gary Kuehn, MoMA Associate Curator of Drawings Christian Rattemeyer and art dealer Mitchell Algus. SculptureCenter's director, Mary Ceruti, moderates. —Andrew Russeth
SculptureCenter, 44-19 Purves Street, Long Island City, Queens, 7–9 p.m.

Opening: "Context Message" at Zach Feuer
Stop by Zach Feuer for this terrific and diverse-sounding group show, featuring Michael Riedel, Reena Spaulings, Martin Kippenberger and Bjarne Melgaard, among others. Sounds like there'll be great art, market critique and, if the press release is to be believed, "quilts from a particularly rustic area of America (some might even characterize it as "flyover country") which, about 10 years ago, were celebrated for their coincidental relationship to museum-worthy paintings." Cozy! —Dan Duray
548 West 22nd Street, New York, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Jan Vercruysse, "Works 1990-2011," at Gladstone
Gladstone Gallery will present an exhibition by Belgian artist Jan Vercruysse, his first in New York since 2009, curated by Anne Pontégnie. Mr. Vercruysse started out as a poet, but abandoned writing in 1974 to concentrate on visual art. The show will follow the major periods of the artist's career. —Michael H. Miller
Gladstone Gallery, 515 West 24th Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

THURSDAY, JUNE 21

Opening: "Vision Quest" at Klagsbrun
Amanda Friedman and Taylor Trabulus helm this exhibition, which takes as its jumping-off point the spiritual sojourn that 20th-century artist Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel, a k a Cameron (famed for her role in Kenneth Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome), made into the California desert. The curators have lined up an impressive group of artists, including Sam Falls, Amy Granat, Yugi Agematsu, Matt Hoyt and Jimmie Durham. —A.R.
Nicole Klagsbrun, 532 West 24th Street, New York, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: "Sculpted Matter" at Paul Kasmin
Paul Kasmin opens an impressive double-space sculpture show featuring Arman, Carl Andre, Anthony Caro, Saint Clair Cemin, Tara Donovan, Dan Flavin, Tom Friedman, Katharina Grosse, Richard Hughes, Deborah Kass, Jim Lambie, Sol LeWitt, Jill Magid, Matthew Monahan, Iván Navarro, Anthony Pearson, Will Ryman, Alyson Shotz, Keith Sonnier, Frank Stella and Bernar Venet. —D.D.
Paul Kasmin, 293 Tenth Avenue and 515 West 27th Street, New York

Opening: Sol LeWitt, "Works On Paper (1983-2003)" at Waterhouse & Dodd
Waterhouse & Dodd presents a series of works on paper by Sol LeWitt, executed in the final decades of his life. Many of them have never before been seen by the public. —M.H.M.
Waterhouse & Dodd, 104 Greene Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

Opening: "Joe Deutch," at Marlborough Chelsea
Marlborough presents a mini-retrospective of the work of performance artist Joe Deutch, who infamously nearly got himself kicked out of UCLA for playing Russian roulette in front of a class. Mr. Deutch, whose work builds on a the tradition of Los Angeles performance artists Christ Burden and Ron Athey, went on to do other notorious stunts in the name of art, like having himself bitten by a rattlesnake, taking public transportation to the hospital and then framing the hospital receipt as ephemera. For the "Greater L.A." show in New York, he showed a video called Boot_Reboot, in which he filmed the police struggling to remove a boot he had placed on the tire of their patrol car. —R.J.
Marlborough Chelsea, 545 West 25th Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

Work by Bill Bollinger's in SculptureCenter's temporary annex. (Courtesy SculptureCenter)

The epic and beautiful Bill Bollinger retrospective on view at Long Island City's SculptureCenter is set to contract a bit after this weekend.

A temporary annex that is located down the block from the kunsthalle's main building and that now hosts four Bollinger sculptures will close after today. The space, which had been provided gratis by its owner, has been leased to a new occupant.

It's a sad development. But take heart! SculptureCenter is offering free admission and "#colddrinks," according to a representative at the museum. The Bollinger exhibition will still run through July 30, but today is the last day to see it in its complete form.

While the Bollinger show—a thorough survey of the late Post-Minimalist's nimble achievements from 1966 to 1970 that has finally graced our shores after a grand tour of European venues—should be reason enough to get you over to LIC, it is worth noting that MoMA PS1 is also hosting an open house today to toast new shows by the young German sculptor Esther Kläs and solo projects by Rey Akdogan, Edgardo Aragón, Ilja Karilampi and Caitlin Keogh.

Have a good weekend.

"Nine at Castelli," 1968. (Courtesy Castelli Gallery)

For Friday, a little pleasure reading. In his positive New York Times review of the Bill Bollinger retrospective now on view at SculptureCenter, critic Ken Johnson notes that the artist's "return to art-world consciousness is owed in large part, if not entirely, to a remarkable essay by the sculptor Wade Saunders published in Art in America in 2000."

Happily, Mr. Johnson has found a copy of that essay online and linked to it. It's well worth a read, and follows Mr. Saunders's journey in search of information about the artist, who was a promising young sculptor in the late 1960s and 1970s before falling off the art world radar and dying in obscurity.

Here's Mr. Saunders:

Bill Bollinger's death in May 1988 passed unremarked in the art world, and more than a decade later many who knew him still don't know that he's dead. In his 1970 show in the Starrett-Lehigh Building, Bollinger demonstrated that water finds its own level. But the art world doesn't behave like water. Some artists and oeuvres never find their just level, or any level at all.

To give a sense of just how major a figure Bollinger was in the late 1960s, he showed in the seminal post-minimalist exhibition "Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form" at Kunsthalle Bern in 1969 and the Robert Morris-organized "Nine at Castelli" show at the Castelli Warehouse in Morningside Heights in 1968, alongside Bruce Nauman, Eva Hesse and Richard Serra, among others.

If you're really looking to spend some time with Bollinger this Friday morning—you deserve it!—give Mario García Torres's short investigative book about "Nine at Castelli" a read. Here's Mr. Torres on the exhibition:

The show’s original form, in its aftermath, continues to change. it lives in the realm of rumor, and in Morris’s head, in a mutable state—almost as something that never came to be—just as many of the works themselves also had variable dimensions.

In other Bollinger news, Mr. Johnson notes that Algus Greenspon now has some of his later works on view.

Photo: Castelli Gallery