John Bock and Bendix Harms

In the latest wild addition to an already respectably neurotic oeuvre, John Bock shows confounding sculpture and video in this collaborative show with German painter Bendix Harms. Harms’s large, brushy paintings are engagingly Gustonian, all sloppy execution and flabby, distorted renderings of the human form, though seemingly without Guston’s political preoccupations (no phlebotic heads of state here, alas). But Bock’s work is the main attraction. The centerpiece of the show is a large freestanding metal structure: Visitors can climb in and explore its small, dark anterooms, which seem designed to provoke claustrophobia and psychic disequilibrium, cluttered as they are with debris, trash, bottles of Pepto, and other detritus left over from one of the artist’s trademark lectures/performances. Do a character’s nervous eyes in the video Astronaut, 2004, result from the rigors of his strange activities, which include playing air guitar behind his back to the Cure while wearing what appears to be a large red diaper? It’s hard to say, but Bock’s work continues to effectively toe the line between dense symbolism and gleeful unruliness.