The number of parts that Sam Pulitzer piled into his first US institutional exhibition, “A Colony for ‘Them,’” is so massive that it might take a book to account for them all, never mind the vast amount of text that appeared across the show’s walls. One might go so far as to say, in fact, that this glut of signifiers could be read as a demand that the exhibition not be reviewed, that it would prefer, to borrow a phrase from the critic Dick Hebdige, to continue “hiding in the light.” Hebdige has long written about various subcultures, from mods to punks to skinheads, and Pulitzer himself trades heavily in similar “underground” associations while updating them to correspond with today’s Net-dependent microcultures. I have to admit that I know next to nothing about the groups from which Pulitzer draws, which embrace everything from black metal to fantasy literature—they are too great in number and too complex. So I can only understand this exhibition, on a certain level, as a Wunderkammer stuffed with an immense number of references to obscure interest groups. But was this exhibition made to be understood?

One entered the show the normal way—through Artists Space’s terrifying elevator—but once one arrived on the third floor, it was no longer clear which way to turn. A number of white walls sourced from earlier exhibition architectures conducted the visitor every which way, though a mock-introductory metallic sign posted close to the elevator pointed to the journey’s beginning. While clearly nodding to certain precedents of institutional critique (one might think, for example, of Michael Asher’s late work at the Santa Monica Museum of Art), the exhibition architecture, I’m told, was meant to translate the logic of mud (multiuser dungeon), an early form of online textual gaming, into actual space, and in this sense it continued at least one aspect of Asher’s practice: that of rendering systems visible. Serving as the show’s defining factor, this armature doubled as a display device as well, fleshed out as it was by full-bleed images of pagan symbols and mystic hands (popular among some metalheads) that were matted on the walls like big, sticky subway ads. The work of a host of Pulitzer’s collaborators—a litany of young, largely unknown artists whose names were printed on remote corners of the exhibition literature, with the inimitable Bill Hayden given pride of place—these additions had little impact as works in themselves despite their apocalyptic nature and having been granted such prime frontage. The labyrinthine exhibition was far more interesting in terms of form than in terms of content. (The two here were separable.)

The revelation of the show appeared in the gallery’s back-right corner. There, one found a meticulous staging of an emphatically modest scene: a small mattress stuffed with straw laid on a raised wooden floor, accompanied by a clay jug and a tiny flickering candle. After the viewer moved through the highly schematic exhibition architecture and outsize images, the utter detail of this apparent Williamsburg import (colonial Virginia, that is, not Brooklyn) was startling to see; in fact, it recalled many of the characteristics of our favorite Brooklyn-type commodities today: It was worn, it was brown, it was old—it had character. Clearly, this was meant as a kind of excessive offering to the market gods (give ’em what they want), and Pulitzer made the sacrifice explicit by piercing the platform with a body-modifying one-inch gauge (another subcultural motif, and a frequent element in Pulitzer’s works). A laser mounted on the ceiling pointed directly at the gauge from above, the intersection seeming to articulate the core concern of Pulitzer’s exhibition: the relationship between bodies and subcultures as they increasingly imbricate with technology.

I insist on a clear, if simple, idea behind Pulitzer’s work because so much of the artist’s practice seems invested in an elusive, not to say obstructive, behavior, which reads, in part, as an effort to avoid being pigeonholed as a hot, young, male artist. The exhibition text, for example, was a hermetic piece of fiction (episode 3 of The Trojans) penned by the poet Jeff Nagy and postmarked 1 East Seventieth Street (the address, it turns out, of the Frick Collection). This left me thinking about the many partners in crime Pulitzer engaged in his exhibition. Though their inclusion seemed to suggest an attempt at troubling the author function, or an insistence on the importance of community (in this respect, Pulitzer’s exhibition rhymed with Artists Space’s previous show, the multi-curated Julie Ault vehicle Macho Man, Tell It to My Heart, in uncanny ways), in the end they seem to have been enrolled more as ballast, or bumper, than anything else. Like a gang forming a ring around its leader, this fresh young crop was charged with keeping people away. In so many ways, Pulitzer’s work reads as peer-to-peer file sharing (ostensibly antihierarchical, flush with content), but as I left the exhibition, I felt myself wishing for networks of a different type.

—Alex Kitnick