I WAS INTERESTED to hear recently that on the eve of the opening of Abstraction/Construction, a group show curated by Noah Simblist at SOIL, the cooperative's members found themselves in a heated debate spurred by the show's contents. The discussion raged along the lines of content in and criticism of abstract art, and ended when many of SOIL's members--both abstractionists and not--got up and left, insulted in one way or another.

What this brings to light is the power abstract art still has, both in theory and in work, to disturb. This is related to, but not identical to, the kind of discomfort that early modernism invoked, even encouraged. The abstract works created under the banner of modernism (by Malevich and Kandinsky early in the 20th century, by the New York School in the middle of it) were born in opposition to the traditions of art, as declarations that the old ways of perception were dead. But since we no longer hold anything to be universally true--since we are quite comfortable decade-jumping for our aesthetic pleasure--abstract work is no longer revolutionary. Its practitioners still aspire, I think, to the same ideals: work that is about art itself and its materials, work that communicates a kind of spiritual vision by virtue of space and gesture and color. But the work can no longer surprise us; it is hardly likely to provoke us to epiphany. It is only seen as one aesthetic choice among many.

There's a distinct rhetorical feeling about Abstraction/Construction, as if Simblist has mounted an argument against this kind of thinking. It seems to want to confirm the place of abstract work in contemporary art, and I'm not sure it succeeds. Of course, abstraction encompasses a number of different styles of work, and Simblist has restricted his show for the most part (with a couple of exceptions) to artists who work with a strict geometric and minimalist language. The word "construction" in the show's title implies that the common thread in the work is the building of the object, and the process used to get there; and the construction constitutes a great deal of some of the work's appeal--for example, Dylan Mosley's aluminum block cut horizontally in half, and then one half halved again. The object itself is engaging (the irregular edges, the striated pattern on the surface), but then I learned that Mosley had sawed through the aluminum by hand, which took him about a month of hard work. This suggested an engagement with the material that brought it to life for me: the artist's single-minded attachment to the idea, no matter how futile (or Zen) it seems.

There are other clever and surprising examples of constructed objects and spaces, such as Jenny Carcia's colorful stack of wood on the floor, and Jeff Miller's installation of strings intersecting on various planes, illustrating the movement of lines in three dimensions. But in much of the work the reference is less clear, such as in Daniel Subkoff's and Riley Brewster's paintings, both of which seem to be more about layers of color and the thickness of paint. I suppose you could say the works are built out of paint, but this seems like a stretch. These works did not (for me) engage in any kind of dialogue with the other works around them, but seemed almost sheepish in their exuberance next to all the restraint around them. The result was that the show did not answer the questions it seemed to pose; I was not particularly persuaded that anything new was happening in abstract art, no matter how talented the individual artists.

Perhaps part of the problem is context. In Sean Vale's installation Type (shown earlier this year at the Pound Gallery), the paintings were shown with a set of white electric typewriters whose vibrating, inconsistent hum provided an aural equivalent of the work, a series of stark white panels that vary slightly from one to the next. But Vale's paintings here just seem quiet, without the blank-page tension of his solo show. Perhaps a group show about abstraction can't provide the force of a single vision, the opportunity to follow an idea over the course of a series of works. The collection shown here dilutes abstraction's power, rather than builds on it.

In such a relentlessly visual (and literal-minded) age, a show like this feels almost quaint, which may have been why people found it retrograde. But it can also be seen as a relief, a time to see beyond everything into abstraction's vast spaces, and I reckon we could all use a bit of that.