Nothing is more contemporary than retro, the self-aware salvaging of a recent past that is the subject of nostalgia while many of its qualities and questions remain current. The collaborative duo of Chicago artists Robert Davis + Michael Langlois have their version of late 1960s psychedelia so down pat that their exhibition “Looking into the Rays” provided that giddy Austin Powers–like subsumption into a charmed past, though here with some intimations of dissonance and dread. For Davis + Langlois, the late ’60s are every bit as much Altamont as Woodstock.

The exhibition took its name from a screen

“As a term, pluralism signifies no art specifically. Rather, it is a situation that grants a kind of equivalence; art of many sorts is made to seem more or less equal—equally (un)important. Art becomes an arena not of dialectical dialogue but of vested interests.” In his 1985 essay “Against Pluralism,” Hal Foster aligned the ideology of pluralism with the function of market forces. Today, that correspondence is an all-pervasive reality, clearly evident—colored by varying degrees of self-awareness—in the work of such artists as the young German David Lieske.

Lieske recently enjoyed his first US