The New York Times
Art in Review
April 17, 1998, Friday

By Ken Johnson

Hey, You Never Know

534 LaGuardia Place
Greenwich Village
Through April 30

Want to know what the kids are up to these days? Check out this unruly, entertaining show of work by 26 mostly little-known youngsters, assembled by the impresario Kenny Schachter and installed in a rented storefront a block north of SoHo. Sprawling assemblages, intricate machines, videos and abstract as well as representational paintings fill the raw space with visual and auditory cacophony and an invigorating feeling of creative ferment.

Mr. Schachter's own piece, a video called ''Rock,'' embodies something of the show's cheerful openness to possibilities no matter how pointless or inane: it's an endless tape of a young man in a recording studio seen only from behind as he writhes around and screams continuously into a microphone. Some of the most compelling works, however, are marked by deadpan understatement. Pamela Lins, for example, presents ordinary objects rudimentarily carved from styrofoam, like a pair of boots or a football helmet candle holder, each mounted on a pedestal unaccountably equipped with a louvered vent.

On the other hand, there are a few works of real technical accomplishment, like Bonnie Seeman's delightfully creepy porcelain cups, trays and ewers appearing in the form of leaves and intestinal viscera. And the best, or at least the heaviest, one-liner of the show is a big welded-steel treadmill by Dave Arnold, a brutal Rube Goldberg-like contraption in which giant metal hammers threaten to clobber the runner who slows down; it's called ''The Motivator.''