Return to the real? A youth-oriented survey at P.S.1 presents work, much of it politically aware, by 160 New York City artists who have emerged since the millennium

Greater New York 2005 took up residence at P.S.1 just in time for the opening of a flurry of spring art fairs in New York City. The sprawling exhibition was preceded by a buildup of expectations based in part on the freshness of the first edition of this show in 2000. Once again, Greater New York was posed as a full-scale collaborative effort between the curators of P.S.1 and the Museum of Modern Art. It includes more than 160 artists selected from a pool of over 2,000 submissions generated by both professional recommendations and an open call for proposals. The curatorial team that selected the final show was composed of P.S.1 director Manna Heiss, MOMA director Glenn Lowry, P.S.1 curatorial advisor Robert Nickas, P.S.1 curator Amy Smith-Stewart and MOMA curator Ann Temkin, and headed by Klaus Biesenbach, who is a curator at both museums.

Shows such as Greater New York, the Whitney and Corcoran Biennials, and so forth promise to provide a snapshot of our moment, yet their scope is inevitably limited. Greater New York's restrictions include the requirement that artists reside in the New York area (defined in the press release as New York City's five boroughs and "nearby towns in New Jersey") and that they be artists who have "emerged" since 2000. (In fact, there are a number of artists in the show, such as Christian Jankowski and Walid Raad/Atlas Group, who have been around a bit longer than that.)

But beyond their stated aims, large-scale survey shows like this also have various unspoken agendas. They are meant to flush out new talent, with the hope that some of these discoveries will become permanent (or at least semi-permanent) fixtures on the art scene. They seek to define the rising generation of artists, who, it is presumed, will shape the next chapter in contemporary art. And of course, they are demonstrations of the curators' acumen in creating a cogent picture of the ever-more-disorderly currents of the day.

Greater New York 2005 actually succeeds to a surprising degree in addressing these various missions. It is, as expected, a very youth-oriented show, including a number of artists still in art school. It is also heavily tilted toward males. (Opening day protesters pointed out that only 37 percent of the participants are women.) However, newcomers are balanced with some artists with more exposure, including Sue de Beer, Banks Violette and Amy Cutler, three stars of the last Whitney Biennial. More traditional approaches such as narrative painting and drawing are in generous supply, but so are videos, animations and installations. The rambling layout of the former schoolhouse allows for some wonderful juxtapositions, site-specific installations and dramatic placements, and clearly offers some of the less familiar artists the best presentation possibilities of their careers thus far.

In keeping with the post-election cloud that lingers over the exhibition's geographic arena, the mood of many pieces is anxious or apocalyptic--though apocalypse is often conceived in a campy vein. There are a surprising number of commentaries on political and social realities. In this, the show differs from the two exhibitions to which it has been inevitably compared--those being the 2000 incarnation of Greater New York, with its abundance of pre-9/11 insouciance, and last year's Whitney Biennial, which more inexplicably exhibited a deliberate disregard for unpleasant truths. By contrast, the artists here frequently resort to political references and seem at least somewhat aware of the dangerous currents unleashed nationally and internationally by the events of the last four years.

The most direct reference to the war in Iraq appears in Steve Mumford's "Drawings for Baghdad Journal," which presents watercolors of the current mayhem in Iraq based on the artist's eyewitness sketches. The first installment of this series was created in August 2003 and presented a relatively benign, embedded reporter's view of the invasion [see A.i.A., Feb. '04]. These more recent drawings, of which a selection is on view, take us deeper into the subsequent chaos, with images of prisons and prisoners, explosions and bomb-ravaged city neighborhoods.

Upstairs on the museum's third floor, a cluster of video works presents further political commentary. Mathilde ter Heijne's faux-documentary video Suicide Bomb (2000) explores the phenomenon of the female suicide bomber by pairing images of women posing as suicide bombers and simulated explosions with a dispassionate voice-over discussion of their desirability for this job. Group think is the subject of artist team caraballo-farman's Reason is a name given to collective thought (2002-03), which offers an abstracted video image of a cheering crowd whose heads and hands dissolve into a cascade of confetti. Christoph Draeger's Helenes (Freedom), 2005, pairs subtitles from what appear to be excerpts of George W. Bush's speeches about the international advance of democracy with flickering World War II-era documentary images of the bombing of Dresden, atomic explosions and the everyday lives of civilians in wartime. The starkness of the images clearly belies the optimism of the speeches.