Entering the Barbican’s unusually shaped project space, aptly called The Curve—essentially a narrow, curved hallway—one encountered a large screen showing a projected video: In a dark, extremely cramped environment with a dangling utility light, a supine Richard Wilson disassembles his surroundings, cutting and drilling through greasy metal with electric saws and pneumatic drills. Sparks fly, accompanied by a sound track of clanks and bangs. The shakiness of the camera and the staccato editing add to the sense of disorientation.

Behind the screen, initially hidden from view, a classic London

The other day, for reasons unrelated to this assignment, I reread Rhonda Lieberman’s classic essay on Karen Kilimnik, published in these pages in 1994. Naturally, I noticed the artist’s passing reflection, “It must be a fun life being Richard Hawkins. I haven’t met him personally, but it was my impression. . . .” Why did she assume that, I wondered? “Fun” would not have been the first thing that came to mind on entering Hawkins’s recent exhibition. The works shown, which harked back—in two distinct styles—to the art of the first half of the twentieth century, gave an impression, instead, of

Experiencing Tod Hanson’s hallucinogenic, room-size Parlour Collider, 2006, with its allover flat, mostly primary colors and black outlines, was like walking into a Patrick Caulfield or Michael Craig-Martin painting—while buzzed on caffeine. In a dizzying combination of installation, architecture, drawing, and decoration, all the surfaces were painted in a bright yellow, gunmetal gray, or electric blue and covered by innumerable handpainted, endlessly billowing strips of ribbon weaving in and out of regularly spaced columns. It was as if the whole surface had been shredded and left to rearrange