THE INFINITE STARBURST OF YOUR COLD DARK EYES marks the launch of the collaboration between PKM Gallery and Bartleby Bickle & Meursault.

Bartleby Bickle & Meursault (BB&M) is a bureau for creative guestwork, an experiment, a work in progress which stands in passionate refusal of all that is banal and soulless in the experience of contemporary art. Leaving behind a decade all too appropriately dubbed the "naughts"—the years of excess and narcissistic gratification that imploded with bankruptcies both financial and moral—we embark on an endeavor to imbue our little patch of the art world with poetry and ardor, with intellectual fascination and sensuous wonder.

This exhibition brings together the work of nine artists, installed in both the PKM gallery space and the BB&M viewing room: Young-whan Bae, Hyunjhin Baik, Jonas Dahlberg, Michael Joo, Sanggil Kim, Lee Bul, Noori Lee, Richard Prince, and Thomas Struth. At BB&M, the art is complemented by our personal artifacts, a few cherished books, pieces of vintage furnishing, a desk lamp beloved of Le Corbusier, and music and film clips, creating a physical context that suggests the contours of our inner life.

This exhibition has no curatorial agenda worth expounding (besides, we are allergic to the sort of rote, quasi-theoretical patter that has become endemic in presentations of contemporary art). Our choices have been guided only by our affinities—emotional, intellectual, sensual—elicited by the works. Taste and sensibility, in short. This is not to say that these works are without ideas, but their appeal and significance resonate beyond whatever relevance they have to any critically approved "concepts."

Still, there are associative strands, tangents, and convergences, an organic aesthetic logic that emerges from this seemingly disparate grouping. Thomas Struth's photo of prelapsarian wilderness, for instance, finds a counterpoint in Michael Joo's sculpture of antlers sectioned and reassembled with stainless-steel rods (from a series titled "Improved Rack," with a nod to Duchamp's readymade), a succinct reminder of how conceptions of nature are inextricably bound up in human contextualization.

And Noori Lee's delicate watercolors of politically freighted images (the reflecting pool at the 9/11 Memorial, an array of surveillance cameras in a German town), rendered unfamiliar and enigmatic by the displacement from their source in news archives, induce a suitable state of mind for Jonas Dahlberg's silent video—essentially one extended tracking shot in conscious homage to Antonioni's The Passenger—of an intricate scale-model recreation of New York's Gramercy Park as it once existed in a long-vanished era of genteel bohemianism.

There is also the interplay between Sanggil Kim's photo of Kisho Kurokawa's icon of Metabolist architecture, the Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo, now disintegrating and slated for demolition, and Lee Bul's suspended female figure of fragmented mirrors and crystals which gestures both backwards and forwards, to Fritz Lang's robot Maria in Metropolis, for instance, and the historical avant-garde's dreams of a progressive future that increasingly took a dystopic turn as the last century unfolded.

A common thread running through these various works is their essentially elegiac tone. Though nearly all were created in the early years of the new century (indeed the new millennium), the prevalent mood here is fin-de-siècle, very, very late 20th century, of ruins and fragments, spectral traces of histories concluded and memories evanescent. And, of course, an inescapable confrontation with dead ends in modes of artistic expression—captured convincingly, if claustrophobically, in Hyunjhin Baik's large canvas, a dark swamp of a painting with washes of Old Masterish burnt umber covered with drips and clots that are a knowing, self-conscious quotation of the latest iteration of the Neo-expressionist vocabulary.

This is art whose beauty is suffused with a sense of loss. Even Richard Prince's joke painting, with its appropriation of old-fashioned Borscht Belt comedy, resonates with a plangent melancholy. Young-whan Bae's "Pop Song" series of wall panels mine a similar vein of debased language, using shards of broken liquor bottles to form the words to old popular song lyrics that are overtly sentimental yet unexpectedly affecting. Bae's piece newly commissioned for the exhibition extends this method to a literary passage—our selection, our "pop song"—taken from Miss Lonelyhearts, the surreal tragicomic satire by Nathanael West: "They had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything. Money and fame meant nothing to them. They were not worldly men."

A declaration so disarming in its artlessness, so simple in its construction that an implacable purity burns through the stock phrases. It is the purity of a dying star blazing toward extinction, shedding gross matter, becoming only brilliant light.

Organized by JAMES B. LEE