There are three main pieces in Puryear's installation, two of which particularly account for its success. One of them, nobly titled Ad Astra (2006) and made for this exhibition, consists of a sixty-three-foot-long sapling held in a base on caisson wheels. Exceeding the atrium's height, the sapling is tilted, augmenting the impression that the ceiling is too low to hold it. The other vertical piece is Ladder for Booker T. Washington (1996), a thirty-five-foot ladder hung high against the west wall, so that its bottom rung is about ten feet above the floor. In contrast with Serra's installation, meant to force upon the viewer a heightened bodily consciousness, here the body--stationary, gazing upward--is only involved in terms of scale. When I saw the show, the upper part of the atrium was in shadow, which engulfed the top parts of the ladder and the sapling, making it difficult to determine, by eyesight alone, whether the latter's length has been added to or not. (It has.)

Ladder for Booker T. Washington, on loan from the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, is one of Puryear's iconic pieces. The bottom rung is about two feet wide, while the top is, at most, a few inches wide. There are about a hundred rungs in all, set at roughly graduated intervals and designed to create the illusion of a vanishing point at the top. There is something organic about the work, an effect enhanced by the fact that the ladder's uprights are wavy lengths of a single split ash trunk. It wiggles upward, like a runged serpent, against the wall. There is also something vaguely ghostly about the ladder as a whole, which seems to have been bleached or given a coat of whitish paint. Ladders are, of course, natural metaphors for human or spiritual ascent--or in the case of Booker T. Washington, of the ascent of African-Americans in society--step by step up narrower and narrower rungs. Puryear's piece is like an abstract biography of Washington--whose journey, as described in his actual biography, grew more and more difficult--made vivid by the imagined ordeal of placing a foot on rungs that grow ever tinier and more precarious as one approaches the top. Suspended as it is from high on the wall, the ladder suggests how difficult it would be to put a foot on even the lowest rung.

Ad Astra plays a similar game; in its case, the irony is located in its heroic Latin title. The two pieces together express desire and hope. David Levi Strauss, a Brooklyn Rail editor, suggested in conversation with Puryear that the caisson gives Ad Astra a military aura, indicating that its role is to carry artillery shells. But for me, it brought to mind a phrase from a book by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life?--a question he answers by saying, somewhat cryptically, that life is an aperiodic crystal. In fact, the base has just that form--its facets have different shapes, though they are composed of beautifully joined lengths of wood, screwed together with the authority of a master carpenter. That made it difficult for me to think of Ad Astra as associated with field artillery. Its wheels, in any case, are like those from the wagons of the Franco-Prussian War. But Puryear's works do not dictate meaning; his titles, rarely as specific as Ladder, merely prompt the imagination. For me, Ad Astra is not so much a military installation as either a crude movable monument to life, wheeled into ceremonies by a tribe that practices phallus worship, or a push toy for a baby giant.

It is more than monumental--it is a monument. It reaches for the stars, expresses desire and--formalistically speaking--collaborates with Ladder to measure the height of the atrium, subduing the architectural oppressiveness of space upon art. The idea of a movable monument is also supported by a marvelous piece in the main exhibition called C.F.A.O. (2006-7), which consists of a cast of a giant African mask placed in an arbor fashioned from kindling perched, perilously, in or on an old-fashioned wooden wheelbarrow. C.F.A.O., which takes its name from the initials of a French trading company in Africa (Compagnie Française de l'Afrique Occidentale), could be a protest against the appropriation of cultural properties that also has the last laugh. At least moving what looks like an immense African mask on a primitive French wheelbarrow strikes me as pretty funny.

The title of the remaining large atrium sculpture is Desire (1981), licensing the thought that the three pieces are, in the aggregate, a tribute to yearning. A gift from Count Panza di Biumo, whose collection of Minimalist art is widely acknowledged as unparalleled, Desire was installed until recently in an eighteenth-century villa in the Italian province of Varese. Measuring thirty-two feet across, it consists of a single wheel of much larger circumference than those in Ad Astra, joined to an inverted conical basketlike object with a long horizontal pole. Weaving and basketry are signature Puryear features, perhaps inspired by the tools used by the people Puryear lived with in Sierra Leone--nets, cages, coops and traps. (On the back wall of the atrium hangs a work from the mid-'70s, when Puryear's art took on the look of African tools and utensils, called Some Tales [1975-78]: yellow pine, ash and hickory carved into a long saw blade and what look like curvy sticks.) Desire has the appearance of one of those primitive grinding devices in which an ox or a horse is tied to a pole and walks in a circle around a rotating upright. What the object of desire might be is not obvious. Perhaps the wheel makes it easier for a person to apply energy to the device--not as easy as an ox would make it! But that is just an uninspired guess. The word "desire," like the titles Ad Astra and Ladder for Booker T. Washington, slows the viewer down, causing us to play with plausible theories of any given work.

The allusions throughout this great show are too numerous, too arch, too knowing and too smart for me to spoil the fun. Once in a while, an artist appears whose work has high meaning and great craft but, most important, embodies what Kant, in the dense, sparse pages in which he advances his theory of art, called Spirit. "We say of certain products of which we expect that they should at least in part appear as beautiful art, they are without spirit, though we find nothing to blame in them on the score of taste," Kant wrote. I'd like to revive the term for critical discourse. Not a single piece here is without spirit, which is in part what makes this exhibition almost uniquely exhilarating.

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