Some, mostly journalists, do it with a moment—a death at Kent State or a kiss in Times Square. Some, like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans in the Depression, have captured an era. Most, though, have to settle for smaller changes. Joel Sternfeld, for one, documents not so much history as change itself. He describes an America somewhere between peace and violence, calm and anxiety, a national identity and an unholy mess. He called his breakthrough series “American Prospects,” suggesting both multiple points of view and a hesitant future.

Speaking of change, then, how did he become Joel Sternfeld? “First Pictures,” at Luhring Augustine through February 4, takes him from 1971 to 1980, the year that “American Prospects” had its first gallery showing. It finds him working with a small camera, before his switch to larger formats. It finds him moving from place to place, before tackling a theme as large as America or as focused as the High Line. It also finds a decade uncertain whether it had left the turmoil of the 1960s behind or institutionalized it. It finds a decade, too, between photography in search of America and staging it.

The familiar, for Sternfeld, is not so much unsettling as unsettled. Not much is going on. Nothing much unites the show other than the occasional beer—a six-pack trailing at the waist, post-teens with cans held high, a weary jukebox in New Orleans, or men gathering in their private space in front of the TV. An Adonis, in his own eyes at least, catches some rays. Kids pose eagerly for the camera, holding up their modest triumphs from shopping. Today their grins would turn up an hour later on Facebook.

They could be anywhere. The beaches could belong to Florida or California rather than Nags Head in North Carolina, where Sternfeld passed a summer. The malls, like the kids with their drinks and their smiles, belong simply to suburbia. A gnarly face crosses beneath a street light, with a high-rise blurred in the distance, but one looks in vain for a street sign. One sees already a twin ambition, toward a sense of place and something larger. One can see why Sternfeld was about to go in search of America.

Mostly he is still in transit in the 1970s, from humor to irony, from faces to narratives, and from an America identity to politicization. The surfers and drinkers stop short of the confrontational lifestyles of Catherine Opie or Nan Goldin. Passers-by stop short of the urban freak show of Diane Arbus or Gary Winogrand. Police driving up to a man in shorts pointedly stops short of confrontation. A famously bland decade had room for sex, AIDS, punk rock, and street crime, but leave those to Robert Mapplethorpe and others. The only strangeness here is the strangeness of the familiar.

He called the city series “Rush Hour,” but commuters look more stranded than hurried. They also look at peace with their routine. A pregnant woman at the beach, trailed by a black dog, could condescend to them both, as if she too were inhuman, but instead feels all the more real. Even a child heaped in with the laundry or an ad for a chimp as house pet is downright endearing. In the very first series, “Happy Anniversary Sweetie Face,” a billboard gives “thanks for twenty-five wonderful years,” and I dare you to dwell on the loose metal edges behind it. As Philip Larkin ended a poem, “Never such innocence again.”

But no, Scott Reeder, Sam Moyer, Kadar Brock, and Matt Jones seem haunted mostly by themselves. The work all comes with a history, of choices gone terribly wrong, some made more and more explicit and some effaced or destroyed. Reeder’s even look like ghosts—or at least photograms. The largest, in black and white, is the densest and ghostliest. Others, only slightly smaller and in pale shades, focus on the building blocks of circles, cylinders, or lines. The actual technique, akin to frottage, combines painterly gesture and the absence of the thing painted over.

Moyer’s could pass for negatives, too, or for more of Reeder’s. The elements, though, more closely follow the grid—and then warp it. She also has the show’s only hint of representation, for the wrinkled geometry settles into the illusion of fabric or film. It redoubles and distorts the translucency of paint and the opacity of canvas. And where she at once manifests and hides the flat surface, Brock does everything he can to expose it. He abrades his paintings to the point of gaping holes, which in turn could pass for the deepest colors.

If all-over painting demands geometric rigor and total immersion, Jones carries it one step further. Along with three large paintings, one to a wall, a fourth points down, suspended from the tidy rectangle of a fluorescent light fixture. The thick white spots on pitch black look like star maps, but the black effaces earlier fields of intense color. Up close, one can see color within the spots, almost like making eye contact. Once one catches on and steps back, an entire canvas takes on shades. And then the show has a fifth body of work in actual bursts of color, by one of the four artists, but I had better not reveal the ending of this ghost story.
As for the artists’ hauntings, everyone has something to hide. Reeder painted over pasta, which somehow gets him longing for Arte Povera rather than Jackson Pollock, Mark Sheinkman, and a really good dinner. Brock and Jones say that they attacked finished paintings in fits of and anger. Like most genre fiction, these stories may sound canned. Who knew there was such anger out there, and who knew that disappointment and despair could produce such gargantuan projects? The gallery defends itself against the label “self-consciously ‘clever’ ”—another way of saying that some ghosts deserve a rest.

Reeder’s smoke and mirrors make me think, say, of Cy Twombly, who just happens to have died last year. Moyer simply takes care to distinguish her manifestations of canvas itself from the deep space of color-field painting. Never mind that Morris Louis in his “Veil” series did more than anyone to identify color and image with the thing itself, while she is the one trading in illusion. Never mind, too, the filmy black and white. Still, the show understands the slippage between conceptual art and abstraction everywhere these days. And the combination of physical presences and optical activity is positively haunting.

Schwere’s prints lack Moore’s scale, but they insist even more on the symmetry and grandeur of church-like façades and empty interiors. At the same time, they include a mark of angry humanity that Moore largely omits, graffiti. And I mean words like Vomit, not street art. Pels dominates the room, with two winged dogs glowing in translucent white as they pull not a sled but a damaged engine. They also pull it in different directions, as it chains them down. Over by a wall, gilded toy cars lie discarded in a pile of bones.

Work like this falls somewhere between Surrealism and camp, and your mileage may vary on just where. Schwere, in turn, made me appreciate that much more Moore’s sense of detail, texture, and time. Paradoxically, by sticking to real materials and present-day realities, they may even fall prey more easily to disaster chic. Still, they remember the artlessness of suffering in the present. Pels also takes two bird cages, one with a slipper on a plush cushion, like a caged fairy tale. The other lays to rest a small piece of oxidized Detroit.

James Nares brings to a gallery a wrecking ball—and displays it marvelously as sculpture. Jim Hodges gets two of the largest spaces in Chelsea, for work weighing goodness knows how much, hauled goodness knows how many miles. The gallery even jackhammered a gaping hole for him through rock-solid flooring and, I imagine, Manhattan bedrock. For Leslie Hewitt, the emblems of architecture and destruction are even harder to tell apart. They also make it hard to know where her studio ends and a gallery begins.

All these work in the space between art and architecture—or between building and destruction. They also offer insights into a long-running theme of this site, the fading trend for trash as art and overblown installations. Taken together, they are also the subject of a longer review, in my latest upload. With apologies for the usual housecleaning, most of it appeared recently on this page in an earlier form. That is why I have kept this short, as a kind of postscript to yesterday. I will add another short post today to keep up the pace.

Incidentally, I caught Hewitt’s show at D’Amelio Terras, but the gallery is already history. The two partners in its name will be working separately, one said to be reopening at this same location in the not too far distant future. Time will tell.

Starting in October 2010, Ai carpeted the Tate with hand-painted sunflower seeds. He meant people to walk on them and to loll in them. He meant one to experience their transformation of the vast “turbine hall” into nature. Unfortunately, the museum decided, visitors might breathe China’s landscape and traditions a little too deeply, as human traffic crushed porcelain into dust. Instead of an intimate environment at one’s feet, they became a distant object of contemplation—an anti-Carl Andre. Instead of an installation, they became an enormously weighty sculpture.

Even on the scale of a gallery, Sunflower Seeds weighs more than five tons. At Mary Boone through February 4, it forms a strict rectangle a few inches thick, like an architectural plinth, with room to circulate by the walls. I was hoping that, now in private hands, one could enter at last, but no. One can lean closely to admire the precisely tapered edges and the artistry. Or one can stand back as the tiny traces blend into a drab floor covering of speckled gray. Just as likely, visitors may find themselves contemplating each other.

One can still appreciate the homage to tradition, coupled with a critique of capitalism’s “Chinese miracle.” The millions of black-and-white strokes share the anonymity of factory labor. . . . But wait, how does one know that it is not the other way around? Perhaps one is seeing a swipe at nature and a hymn to exploitation? Surely one should give the weight, the architecture, and so exclusive a gallery their due reverence. Almost a year ago, Terence Koh circulated a floor piece, like visitors to the same gallery now, only dressed as a Buddhist priest and on his knees.

Of course, one has the sheen, the craft, and the still-unfulfilled promise of shared experience, but mostly one just knows. One knows that the work’s heart is in the right place because of the artist—and one’s expectations for art. One knows because the very weight flatters one’s expectations. And that, too, is part of the problem. As with his Chinese zodiac last summer by the Plaza Hotel, Ai is at once a savvy artist, a surpriser, a survivor, and a natural-born crowd pleaser. He may court serious danger, but he always ends up with just a little too much safety, simplicity, and weight.

Speaking of danger, instead of industrial flooring, how about bringing in a wrecking ball? James Nares does just that, and one had better stand out of the way. Back in 1976, he swung an enormous pendulum from a pedestrian bridge over a Tribeca side street. Yet he leaves not just his New York surroundings intact, but constructs of light and steel. At Paul Kasmin (its second space) through February 11, the film comes with photographs, sketches, and Minimalist objects. A stately row of spheres ascends in size across the floor.

They also offer obvious insight into Nares today, better known as a painter. His huge brushstrokes appears calm and measured, like David Reed rendered in Chinese artistry, but they began with a human act. He swings happily between stasis and motion, just as the drawings and photos leave streaks of white across black. If they seem close to Serra drawings, Richard Serra in performance inspired the pendulum by flinging molten lead. Nares, too, speaks of danger, but less to the architecture than to the artist—or to art. On film, the ball becomes the protagonist, like an acrobat, and one can only marvel at how high he flies.

In a sense, art in Bushwick is all about new beginnings, especially in its own eyes. It has seemed downright determined not to become one more entry point to gentrification and the art world, like Williamsburg before it to the west. Where even East Village art grew out of a reasonably small but determined circle, Bushwick has made anything but a scene. It has been all about sprawl, in everything from geography to equally outsize group shows. If it has a hub, that has emerged not on mixed-race residential strips but converted manufacturing spaces, wide empty avenues, and narrow dead ends. On a cold evening, without coordinated openings, it can seem dark indeed.

Could this have been another kind of beginning? On a sunny, warm winter afternoon, one even had a choice of beginnings. Three quarters of a mile further out, Norte Maar epitomized the neighborhood’s “do-it-yourself” esthetic. Curated by “Guilty / (NOT) Guilty” has only four talented artists—Ellen Letcher, Francesco Masci, Alfred Steiner, and Pablo Tauler—but one might never guess from the flurry of sketches and images in painting, ballpoint drawing, and photos ripped from everywhere. They spill across the Bushwick pioneer’s ground-floor apartment, through January 29, as if the dealer had asked thirty or forty of his nearest and dearest friends to contribute a work and stick it anywhere on the walls. And that, too often for my taste, is still exactly what Brooklyn group shows tend to do.

Back at Storefront, through February 5, one could make quite the opposite mistake. It has three artists, but one could easily imagine just one or two. Each works with flat but layered surfaces, completely covered with paint—and each uses geometry to play against the symmetry of the ground. They would not look out of place around 1970, when critics and aspiring artists worried ever so much about pure painting. Only instead of an epistemological question, about the true or proper nature of art, formalism here becomes an entirely practical question about art and illusion: however is that done?

For Gary Peterson, for starters, how could such off-kilter compositions seem so deliberate? His paintings, on a small scale, seem assembled from strips of colored tape on an off-white ground, in slightly off-kilter and incomplete squares and diamonds. But no, he has built those hard edges and abrasions the hard way, in paint. Halsey Hathaway carries the hard edges to a larger and more voluptuous scale, with curved fields whose muted colors clash ever so softly. Some soak into the canvas, becoming brighter close up. Others retain brush marks in a flat but palpable finish, almost the texture of a fabric collage.

Rob de Oude’s edges are even more painstaking, but freehand—and, when it comes down to it, an illusion. His thin, mostly diagonal lines run nearly the breadth of his small paintings, most often in bright primary colors. Wider diagonals and bursts of light ripple outward from the sheer overlap and juxtaposition. Imagine if Georges Seurat decided to copy Frank Stella and Agnes Martin. The results make an intriguing contrast with Robert Sagerman’s dense, leaf-like splotches in Chelsea, at Margaret Thatcher through February 11. His colors look squeezed right out of the tube, into Day-Glo autumn foliage.

Then again, as new beginnings go, everything here seems awfully familiar right now, starting with the very revival of abstraction and its “geometric days.” Even Hathaway comes close to so many others, like Suzan Frecon. And that, too, is part of Bushwick’s open question. One subway stop at last holds at least half a dozen galleries and the largest concentration of studio buildings, not to mention the neighborhood’s one famous restaurant, Roberta’s. Then again, NURTUREart has merely moved closer, its block looked bleak as ever that New Year’s Day, and Deborah Brown has simply reopened Storefront after her partner chose to concentrate full time on, yes, Norte Maar. Still, with luck, Bushwick could learn something from her focus, at a time when art everywhere is mixing up past, present, and future.

Note: at least for now, I have made this a postscript to my two past reports on the neighborhood. I apologize that this coverage of Bushwick has itself become a bit of urban sprawl. To help, I have moved a review of Sarah Baley to go with others who have turned instead to the waterfront.