Axel Lieber's two exhibits, Release and My Constructive Everyday, in the Henry are points at which the rays of two traditions of thought arrive and, in the manner of a mirror angled in the neck of a periscope, are continued in a new direction. One ray, sustained by the two colorful chunks of hanging sculptures in the exhibit Release, is architectural; the other, sustained by the strict forms and microstructures in the exhibit My Constructive Everyday, is philosophical.

The history of German philosophy is a series of men trying to determine the essence of things; the essence of the many things (belts, boxes, strings, shoes) that make up our surroundings. This preoccupation is very German, as not every culture has invested (and continues to invest) so much intellectual time into the impossible effort of locating and naming what it is that is final about an object.

Lieber is a German sculptor presently based in Sweden, and his My Constructive Everyday continues this ray of German thought. Lieber is after the same thing that Marx was after: What is in "das ding"? For Marx it was a man's deadened and exploited energy. ("The commodity is…" he wrote in Capital, "essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles, and sense organs.") For Lieber it is these purest of forms, these tight lines and hard angles. Lieber is the Spartacus of things; he liberates eternal beauty from the prison of a consumer product's (belt, cardboard box, fishing twine, Ikea-like wardrobe) use-value. When holding up a pair of pants around a body's waist, a belt is lost in use--we cannot recognize its beltness. But when a belt is pulled and hooked to shape with other belts, the elegant geometric forms in the small, white space, we finally see, in Lieber's terms, their essence, their utter beltness.

The suspended and exploding structures in Release continue a ray of thought that is architectural. Here we see the models of two homes whose walls, roofs, floors, window frames, and stairways, are flying outward. Their center is undone, it seems, by a sudden act of violence. But this violence is detonated from within, and so is similar to the human sculptures of Gunther von Hagens, whose real "plastinated" human corpses are blasted apart from within, as if their hearts were bombs. Hagens' body blasts (limbs, muscles, bones, flesh), however, have the serenity of waves radiating from the impact of a stone on the surface of a pond; we can easily imagine reversing the centrifugal action and reforming the total body. Lieber's blasts are radically chaotic, and the house that once was will never be again.

The architectural discourse sustained by these sculptures is that between the interior and exterior, the private and the public, the particular and the universal, the house and the city. From a distance (by the entry way of the of the East Gallery), the blasted homes look like dense urban neighborhoods. As they slowly rotate beneath a row of angled display lights, the shadow cast on the hardwood floor by each destroyed domicile is a skyline for the total city--a city that is monstrously large, has no center, and is constantly shifting. We see a cluster of apartment complexes, office towers, and parking stacks slowly rising and falling like the living buildings in Alex Proyas' movie Dark City or William Gibson's novel Idoru.

Neither of the two courses that Lieber's two new works are taking is exceptional. Indeed, both are equally exhausted. These days, a thing is just a thing (or its made by another thing--a robot), and Kant's split between noumena and phenomena is only bothersome to students trapped in 200-level philosophy courses. And as Starbucks' design concept of "third space" has revealed, the line between the private and the public is fast vanishing. Indeed, the 19th-century shock (as exampled by the exploding houses) of moving between the two points (the home and the office, the home and the school) has been paved over by a smooth surface of what Gilles Deleuze called "control society" (home office, home schooling, and so on).

Nevertheless, it is always pleasing to see a smart artist--and Lieber's work is smart and beautiful--pursue, and to some degree perfect, old-world concerns, preoccupations, themes, as if the new world around him hasn't changed.