The St. Petersburg Paradox, installation view, Swiss Institute. (from left to right) Sarah Ortmeyer. SANKT PETERSBURG PARADOX, 2014; marble chessboards, copper, iron, brass, and aluminum chess tables, natural ostrich, rhea, goose, chicken, mallard, quail, emu, and duck eggs, artificial marble obsidian, alabaster, and onyx eggs; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv. Tabor Robak. A*, 2014; 14-channel HD video; 9:46. Courtesy of the Artist and team (gallery, inc.). John Miller. Labyrinth I, 1999; acrylic on canvas with sound component; 54 x 70 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures, New York. Kaspar Müller. Tropic of Cancer, 2014; laser prints on A3 paper; each 12 x 15 ½ in. Courtesy Galerie Francesca Pia, Zürich, The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, and Federico Vavassori, Milan. Cayetano Ferrer. Remnant Recomposition, 2014; carpet remnants, seam tape; 18 x 60 ft. Courtesy of the Artist.

The St. Petersburg Paradox courts the aesthetic of the crapshoot table. The main gallery floor is divided into two sections by a half wall painted the dark forest green of a billiards table. Behind the wall, blocked off like the VIP section of a gambling hall, is a platform area upholstered with Cayetano Ferrer’s Remnant Recomposition, a patchwork of casino-floor carpet samples whose clashing patterns abrasively hum. One almost hallucinates the stale cigar smoke of the parlor, the flash of card sharks’ green visors. Also on the main floor, Sarah Ortmeyer’s elegant installation SANKT PETERSBURG PARADOX creates a delicate maze of upended marble chessboards and tables, upon which onyx, obsidian, alabaster, and actual bird eggs precariously rest. The work impresses upon viewers the fragility of chance.

The exhibition romances the poetics of the gamble as well. For Bad Faith (1994), Douglas Gordon wagered his entire allotted budget for an upcoming exhibition on whether or not it would snow in Stuttgart on the upcoming Christmas Day. Underneath the wall text of Gordon’s poetic letter detailing the bet, two television sets feature analog video of solitary windows overlooking the blue dusk of Stuttgart streets on Christmas Eve, capturing the final hours in which Gordon’s wager would be won or lost. These tense vistas expose the sentimental side of gambling. Looking through these melancholic windows, we are held aloft in the purgatory of hoping, in an elongation of that crucial moment when the dice are still in midair. It seems it may snow any minute in Stuttgart, 1994, but it does not.

Ericka Beckman’s brilliant and terrifying video YOU THE BETTER, installed in the Swiss Institute’s basement, approaches the “game” as a philosophical concept that resists logic and is prone to turn hauntingly absurd. Viewers must pass through an ominous black doorway and round the bend of a brick-lined hallway illuminated in dark blue to access the thirty-minute video, which depicts a single team inscrutably battling what seems to be an imaginary opponent in a repetitive, basketball-like game with ridiculous rules. Unseen cheerleaders encourage the team of five as they compete against no one in the dark gym: “Don’t Surrender! Don’t Stop! Get that ball right over the top!” In Samuel Beckett’s existentialist masterpiece Endgame, characters in a displaced room circle round each other like the last few chess pieces on the board, their speech unraveling into empty cliché. A similarly desperate sense of futility pervades Beckman’s desolate gym. Beckman’s video presents a horror situation in which arbitrary rules possess cosmic significance, and the repetitive throwing of the ball becomes a desperate attempt to uncover what this meaning might be. Perhaps hell is having to play the same game over and over again.

Ericka Beckman. YOU THE BETTER, 1983; HD video from 16mm; 30:00. Produced with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts.

In cheery opposition to the mortal gloom of the basement, Tabor Robak’s A* shimmers on the gallery’s main floor. A carbuncle of fourteen massive HD video screens combined to display a stunning composite image, A* demos a series of animated, mobile-phone-style games characterized by flashy graphics and a series of perpetually good-natured wins and losses. A* is a shrine to the mindless variety of digital gaming. The stakes are low; these mesmerizing puzzles, here displayed at an almost religiously large scale, might be played forever without risk of material loss.

Whether or not we should “take the game seriously” is another paradox this exhibition presents. At the threshold of the main gallery, Giovanni Anselmo’s untitled work, an Arte Povera masterpiece from 1968, taunts viewers with a looming, if presently neutralized, terror. While the constituent concrete slabs may at first appear innocuous, the stones are in fact hugged by two fraying, live electrical wires only just too distant from one another to connect. The dormant stone and its potential electrical threat stand as a warning of a risk we may not take seriously—but perhaps we should.

Often drawing more attention to its curatorial frame and philosophical underpinnings than to the works that compose it, The St. Petersburg Paradox positions itself as omnipotent casino—a haunting maze of chances taken, some trivial, some fatal. The exhibition’s pieces are positioned like a series of strategic moves, provocatively elucidating the presented theme. In this show, the house most certainly wins.

The St. Petersburg Paradox is on view at Swiss Institute through August 17. Swiss Institute, 18 Wooster Street, New York City, 10013.

Nina Canell. Perpetuum Mobile (40kg), 2009-2010; water bucket, steel, hydrophone, mist-machine, amplifier, cable and 40 kg cement; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie, Berlin/Düsseldorf.

What if we thought of the substance of art not as media, but as matter? Matter exists continuously, whereas media must be elevated to the status of an art object. In turn, by making art, artists are performing manipulations, not transformations. The process shifts from an alchemical to a quotidian one.

The works in Under Destruction I and II inspired that thought experiment by presenting creation and destruction as interdependent—and sometimes as the same. The well-curated exhibition features cerebral, oft-kinetic sculptures, installations, and media projects dating from the past twenty-three years. It’s a welcome introduction to contemporary European, American, and Latin American artists and their open-ended works that provides little resolution and much room for interpretation.

A group exhibition originating at Museum Tinguely in Basel, Under Destruction appears in New York in three consecutive and heterogeneous chapters, all at the Swiss Institute. Under Destruction I was a quiet, poetic prelude featuring understated sculptural works made with commonplace objects. Nina Canell’s Perpetuum Mobile (40kg) (2009–2010) is an elegant example. A bowl of water sits on the ground next to a paper sack of cement. Activated by sonic vibrations, the water is frothed to a fantastical mist, which solidifies the adjacent building material imperceptibly.

Seductive illusion has little pull in this show—forms result from materials and processes. Nina Beier and Marie Lund’s History Makes a Young Man Old (2011) is a crystal ball that was rolled to the gallery from its place of purchase in a site-specific performance. The marks of experience obscure the clarity for which the material is valued; it’s not much to look at, and that is the point. In Monica Bonvincini’s White (2003), a cube of cracked safety glass houses an armature of neon tubes, interchanging structure and surface. Pavel Büchler’s Modern Paintings (1999–2000) is a series of abstract paintings collaged from found paintings that have been cut up and put through a washer.

Liz Larner. Corner Basher, 1988; steel, stainless steel and electric motor with speed control mechanism, 10 feet high. Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin.

Two single-camera media works hint at the active destruction in the next chapter. Micheal Sailstorfer’s Untitled (Bulb) (2010) shows a light bulb fracturing on impact. Originally shot in high-speed HD video and then transferred to 16mm film, it literalizes the high compliment that digital images can achieve film quality. Alex Hubbard’s Cinépolis (2007) adopts an action painting–like procedure for video, in which a projection screen is destroyed in service as a canvas for blowtorched Mylar balloons, tar, and feathers.

Everything the first isn’t, the second chapter is: noisy, spectacular, and physically stressful. Under Destruction II is a dissonant factory of counter-production. The influence of Jean Tinguely’s kinetic machines is acute. Visitors control the speed of a wrecking ball that demolishes the gallery walls in

Liz Larner’s Corner Basher (1988). Whacking the sheetrock at low speeds is pleasantly subversive. But at the highest setting, it whips around with the frightening velocity of a trebuchet, and the centrifugal force threatens to topple the machine. I felt a palpable breech of safety; Larner had created a scenario that cast my limits in high relief.

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