Nick Relph and Oliver Payne / Rirkrit Tiravanija

Venice Biennale Golden Lion winners Nick Relph and Oliver Payne return to New York with their latest production. Twenty-five-minute-long Gentlemen, 2003, reprises many of the duo’s signature motifs: an ambulatory survey of London, a euphoric overload of pulsing lights and propulsive rhythms, the fugitive presence of wayward twenty-somethings. But this time, human figures appear only at the video’s beginning and end, shadowed or blurred into anonymity; in between, the artists stick to abstract images of industrial design. Their camera closes in on harshly glaring neon tubes, pans across shower-tile caulking, or pauses on the monochrome of a bathroom door. The mesmerizing effect is compounded by the sound track, a hypnotic Morse Code endlessly rattling off an inscrutable message. Layered over the beats is a young Brit droning on about cultural commodification and spinning biting wordplays. His monologue of disaffection becomes increasingly hard to decipher and difficult to endure, ultimately recalling Robert Creeley’s poem “The Language,” in which the last lines evince the speaker’s real fear: that for all of the talking, words can never penetrate real meaning.

In the outer gallery, Rirkrit Tiravanija presents twelve white panels, each stenciled with a sentence (“I can see the whole room and there is nobody in it”) from an undeclared source. Though somewhat reminiscent of Christopher Wool’s early-’80s word paintings, Tiravanija’s sentences are aloof, staring back at the viewer and disclosing nothing. It’s an interesting extension of Payne and Relph’s semiotic thread, hinting at the inherent shortcomings of language.