Postwar Art Gets a Nervy Makeover

In keeping with curatorial fashion, the show includes all mediums, but not too much painting, please. It fully embraces the medium only in the show’s final, painfully compressed Twisted section, where works by Philip Guston, Jim Nutt, Peter Saul, Lee Lozano, Leon Golub and Christina Ramberg — all dealing with the body — come as a huge relief. And of course it adheres to the inflexible unwritten rule: No exhibition of postwar art today is complete without something by Robert Smithson or Dan Graham, preferably both. (Smithson’s gridded cantilevered wall sculpture from 1967 is nicely unfamiliar although it has been in the Met’s collection since 1981.)

The opening Vertigo section — whose focus is the breakdown of ideal geometry and the mounting abuse of the grid — gains speed in its second gallery. Mel Bochner’s photo-relief of a crumpled grid rises from the wall like a cyclone; Lygia Clark’s tabletop sculpture, “The Inside Is the Outside,” pursues an irregular geometry in stainless steel and Henri Michaux’s mescaline-inspired drawings indicate chemical stimulants. Here you’ll find Dara Birnbaum’s 1979 video “Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry,” which frantically repeats the grid of “Hollywood Squares” with the fake gestures and expressions of the contest show’s guests.

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One of the best things is Lynda Benglis’s “Now,” a short video from 1973 in which facing profiles of the artist growl at each other like “Jurassic Park” dinosaurs. Unfortunately these sounds are confined to a head set, but nearly all the remaining films and videos, by Gary Hill, Anna Maria Maiolino, and Carolee Schneemann are audible — and provide the show’s real spine and a suitably delirious soundtrack.

The Excess section is announced by a largish sculpture of tiny grids rising to three Alpine peaks by Sol LeWitt, whose underlying irrationality and obsessive repetition was first noted by the critic Rosalind Krauss in a 1978 essay on the artist that was Ms. Baum’s original inspiration. The LeWitt plays off Alfred Jensen’s gorgeous but inscrutable number sequences organized in a bright, thickly painted grid, as well as examples of Hanne Darboven’s oceanic writing and counting pieces and, less predictably, Jennifer Barlett’s early enamel paintings, full of antic dots. Farther along, the dense confetti-like buildup of two small paintings by Howardena Pindell goes the distance with better-known and similarly obsessive sculptures by Yayoi Kusama and Eva Hesse. The sound accompaniment is Tony Conrad’s eccentric 1976 video “Cycles of 3s and 7s” in which he repeatedly divides and multiplies on a calculator, narrating the action as the machine clicks away.

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