Recycled Junk Becomes Art in New Museum's Opening Exhibition , Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

According to Bloomberg news, to inaugurate its radical new seven- story building in Lower Manhattan, the New Museum of Contemporary Art delivers a show most institutions wouldn't touch: an obstacle course of recycled trash, surrounded by completely blank walls.

Almost every one of the works in ``Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century'' -- the first of a three-part exhibition focusing on assemblage, visual and sound collage, respectively - -has been constructed from found junk, in wholly unexpected ways.

Rachel Harrison, one of the more established names among the 30 young international artists in the show, hangs old handbags from the handlebars of a bicycle that sits on a pile of purple rocks. A long pole extends to a publicity photograph of Mel Gibson in ``Braveheart'' that she pinned to a dangle of fake fur scraps.

John Bock, a Berliner, displays small, precious sculptures made from cut-up magazines, milk and egg cartons, paper bags, Q- Tips and olive oil bottles. He turns them into messy yet formally elegant table-top sculptures.

Mexico City's Gabriel Kuri takes on sexual politics, suspending and twisting a rainbow-colored strip of plastic inside two white mesh garbage cans that he has set on top of one another, lip-to-lip, like same-sex lovers.

The 100 works on view, strewn over three floors and lit like a science lab by stark white fluorescent tubes, would be as pointed as they are peculiar if they didn't seem so one-note in approach, material and scale.

Backed Into a Corner

Installed by the curatorial team of Richard Flood, Laura Hoptman and Massimiliano Gioni in the museum's bunkerlike, white-on-white exhibition spaces, the show features no other art to set off the sculpture.

It suggests that artists, even with new money, new technologies and hybridization of media, may have backed themselves into a single, small corner, trading irreverence for cleverness. Perhaps when the collage section brings color and texture to the walls, the show may not seem so wan.

The emphasis on cheap, hand-crafted sculpture -- physical objects with clear personalities of their own -- is a welcome relief from the monumentalism that has been rampant in contemporary art, where galleries are the size of department stores and offer slick, oversized, overproduced installations of video, photography, painting and sculpture.

Since its founding 30 years ago, the New Museum has proudly taken risks on art and artists, exhibiting vacuum cleaners in its windows (an early sculpture by Jeff Koons) and being first to mount an entire show of women artists whom it characterized as ``bad girls.''

Stacked White Boxes

Now it has the first completely new museum built in New York since the Guggenheim opened in 1959 -- an equally unusual structure composed of unevenly stacked white boxes, designed by Tokyo's Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa.

With its skylighted, windowless white rooms and relatively small footprint on the Bowery (formerly flophouse row), the museum provides a casual intimacy that contrasts starkly with the mammoth impersonality of the Museum of Modern Art uptown.

Lacking a permanent collection that would obligate it to maintain a particular public profile, the New Museum is freer to experiment. This makes for a lively experience of art, even when the execution of ideas doesn't quite meet ambitions.

The fluorescent lights and currently empty walls also make the place seem as underground as a speakeasy, adding to a sense of discovery that flows from the unfamiliarity of many artists in ``Unmonumental.''

It's something of a miracle to get a nonprofit art institution built today on Manhattan real estate. The expense alone, never mind the people to please, is daunting -- and spelled out (by name) in Jeffrey Inaba's ``Donor Hall'' mural in a lower-level hallway.

This is clearly a museum with real spunk and energy, hard not to admire simply for existing, much less looking good. It still has to find a way to live with its limitations. For now, though, with so much ahead, there's every reason to keep coming back.