Chris Doyle, "Smokescreen," 2010, Duratrans on LED light box. Courtesy Sam Lee Gallery, Los Angeles.

The same E.B. White responsible for Charlotte’s Web—still, to my mind, one of the most stabbing child-geared depictions of the circle of life—was also the obsessive stylist behind Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, that little book that told America, “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words” (and still receives hate mail). But long before he did either of these things he wrote essays—swaths of them, and most of them crafted, endearingly, almost to a fault. He would later refer to one particular essay, written in 1939 and called “Here is New York,” as a “period piece.” But today it feels weirdly prescient. Especially when, after meandering through idol worship (White was staying just blocks from where Earnest Hemingway punched Max Eastman in the nose), neighborhood boundary lines, and the “cold guilt” of the Bowery, White winds down with this: the subtlest change New York has undergone of late, “one people don’t speak much about,” is that the “city, for the first time in its long history is destructible.”

A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges. . . . The intimation of death is part of New York now: in the sounds of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

White’s fixation on jets overhead had to do with World War II era paranoia; the twin towers hadn’t even been built.

But his foresight, however uncanny, isn’t what makes White’s essay compelling; it’s his reliability as a craftsman. I trust White to understand destruction because he understands the preciousness of construction so well, building up sentences word by word, and paragraphs sentence by sentence.

Chris Doyle, "History of the 20th Century I," 2009, Duratrans on LED light-box. Courtesy Sam Lee Gallery, Los Angeles.

Artist Chris Doyle understands construction too, as his current exhibition at Sam Lee Gallery in Chinatown shows. The landscape Doyle depicts, often industrial but never really urban, is far less specific than the cityscape White wrote about. It’s a series of built-up vignettes, shown in lightboxes, small prints loosely based on the dimensions of dollar bills, and, most prominently, a 6 minute, 26 second video animation. Called Waste_Generation (also the name of the show) and informed by the romantic ruins of Hudson River Painter Thomas Cole’s Desolation, the video cycles through images of nature and the trappings of manufacturing as they collide and merge with each other. These 6 minutes took a year to compose, and all images were hand-drawn on a computer tablet and then animated using flash. I imagine it’s quiet soundtrack, composed by collaborator Joe Arcidiacono, took a comparably long time. As a result, each moment has an immense intentionality to it, and the video’s careful craftsmanship seems, potentially, like an antidote to the man-made devastation it depicts.

Chris Doyle, "Green/Green," 2010, Duratrans on LED light box. Courtesy Sam Lee Gallery, Los Angeles.

The press release specifies that Brooklyn-based Doyle’s reinterpretation of Cole is, in part, an attempt to react to 9/11. It’s hard to forget a fact like that, though it’s just as hard to know what that means, and knowing probably isn’t that important. That the currency, buildings, and waste heaps that cycle through are treated as tenderly as the foliage and blooms is what’s important.

E.B. White ends his essay on New York with a tribute to a tree, a willow, “long-suffering and much-climbed.” Says White, “whenever I look at it nowadays and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: ‘This must be saved.’” Of course, it’s the effort White puts into constructing a description of this tree, a “marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death,” that preserves it, or makes preservation in general seem like a worthy cause. The weird, embodied foliage that grows and wilts in Doyle’s animation has a similar effect: by taking the time to create, carefully, these images, Doyle suggests an understanding of destruction goes hand-in-hand with an understanding of what it takes to craft destructible things.

"Permission to Fail," 2010, Mixed media, Dimensions variable: 90 x116 x 20 inches.

A show with as defeatist a title as Permission to Fail should be anything but healthy. Yet “healthy”  nicely describes Macha Suzuki’s unpretentious installation at Sam Lee Gallery. Stationed at the intersection between ambivalence and ambition, Permission to Fail rejects the fragmented nostalgia and aimless grandiosity that has infected too much recent art, opting instead for a quirky brand of pragmatism. Luckily, Suzuki’s pragmatism sidesteps tedium, and the exhibition functions as a psychological dream-scape in which even the well-adjusted must grapple with life’s weirdness.

All of the sculptures in the exhibition consist of typical craft-grade materials, the likes of which could be found at Michaels or Home Depot: MDF, t-shirts, pebbles, spray foam, cotton balls, yarn, and fake grass. While Suzuki doesn’t mask the normalcy of his oeuvre, he executes each work as if he were Charles Ray on a budget: clean edges, deliberate surfaces, precise proportions.

Two geometric birds hang above the gallery’s entrance, suspended from the ceiling. White with sleek surfaces, the birds have only one wing a piece and, at first glance, they look like the two severed halves of a single animal. Their co-dependence doesn’t seem to bother them in the least, however, and this is just one instance in which Suzuki turns failure into a fact of life that, while certainly more intriguing, isn’t much more debilitating than mismatched socks.

"Just a Tree," 2010, Mixed media, 91 x 24 x 35 inches.

Below the birds, a life-sized male figure in a striped sweatshirt, crisp new shoes, and the outline of a cell phone in his front right pocket holds an angular orb as if performing some hipster ritual. Suzuki’s doppelganger–the figure’s proportions mimic the artist’s exactly–and the exhibition’s protagonist, the man has a papier-mâché tree trunk  in place of a head. Like in a dream that only becomes a nightmare once you wake and untangle its strangeness, the tree trunk seems natural, even rational.

The figure of child in blue and red pajamas and a mask for a head perches on a shelf and another child figure, called The Rider, straddles a headless creature with a cotton-ball laden lamb’s body and wolf’s legs. The Rider’s geometric helmet head, which resembles the man’s orb,  has white antlers growing out of it. Each figure in the show dresses trendily, wearing the sort of clothes that announce their wearer is “with it” but don’t draw too much attention. No more or less innocent than the tree-headed man, the children, while the size of toddlers, channel the precocity of adolescents who genuinely believe themselves grown-up and capable. Their covered heads suggest that they’ve also encountered enough grown-up threats to make them wary, though not necessarily inhibited.

"Nice Try," 2010, Mixed media, 45 1/2 x 45 1/2 x 21 inches.

Two targets–one black with a green rim, one white with a blue rim–hang on walls that would be adjacent if not for the gallery entrance. Evenly spaced arrows that have all missed their goal puncture the targets’ peripheries. The whole show is full of near misses like these, yet none undermine the fact that Suzuki’s approach to disappointment feels more measured  than desperate.  The head coverings, rather than effacement or jaded attempts to escape identity, present as viable strategies for relating  to a prefabricated world. If you masquerade as material, the material environment will more likely embrace you, and you’ll be better able to protect what’s really yours–the body and face beneath that no one sees. And if you fail consistently, cleanly, and smoothly, sending the arrow into the target’s periphery every time, then the difference between failure and success gradually becomes null. Maybe this is still a nightmare in which the only way to beat the big, ungainly world is to wear a tree trunk on your head and fail expertly, but it’s a nightmare in which the main players refuse to sweat the small stuff and seem comfortable with themselves, even if they can’t be themselves without masking themselves.