History, not buzz, is the subject, and a fascinating history it is, from Robert Frank’s unvarnished photographic views of post-World War II America, to a video of Joseph Beuys sweeping the streets of Berlin clean of trash and ideology in the 1970s, to digital montages by Fatimah Tuggar uniting today’s streets of New York and Lagos, Nigeria. Vigorously realized in jagged brush strokes of lurid pinks, greens and yellows and shades of charcoal black, the paintings depict stylishly dressed female streetwalkers and furtive, darkly cloaked men on the nocturnal, vertiginously tilted streets of an infernal city on the brink of a world-destroying war. The best moment is on the fourth floor, where the elevator doors open on the stunning, tragicomic spectacle of Zoe Leonard’s dead tree held up by cables and stanchions and Maurizio Cattelan’s full-size horse hanging high in the air, with its head seemingly buried in the wall. Between Michael Bauer’s elegant, genielike abstract painting and Alex Hubbard’s hat-trick video abstraction, links are formed by the morphing geometries of Mark Barrow’s painting and Frank Haines’s sculpture; the opposing uses of representation deployed by Rashid Johnson and Alan Reid; the angular profiles and doublings of Erin Shirreff, J. Among the contributors are the Irish journalist Patrick Cockburn; the peace activist Kathy Kelly; the writer Jalal Toufic; the artists Natasha Sadr Haghighian, Trevor Paglen and Martha Rosler; and the artist collective Friends of William Blake. THIS IS NOW’ An ambitious but muddled effort to extend the activist spirit of the Vietnam War protest days into the Iraq war era, this exhibition presents a mix of politically motivated artworks dating from the 1960s to the present by more than 60 artists.

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