Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled

Photograph: Benoit Pailley, Courtesy of the New Museum of Contemporary Art

The opening shot of the New Museum’s “After Nature” show sets up themes that should break the heart of even the most mildly patriotic American: Just off the elevator on the second floor, Roberto Cuoghi’s jewellike aerial maps of nations demonized by the current administration speak to the Bush team’s stunning incompetence and to America’s declining stature. Nearby, Huma Bhabha’s fragmentary, masklike face, cobbled together from clay, chicken wire, scraps of wood and old Styrofoam, evokes the crumbling monuments of a civilization in ruins. As to why the mighty have fallen, Werner Herzog provides an answer with his magnificent film Lessons of Darkness (1992), shot in Kuwait after the first Gulf War. It is a staggering vision of an apocalyptic inferno: Surging plumes of smoke rise from burning oil wells. Petroleum floods the desert. Mute children cry black tears. Set to music from Verdi’s Requiem and Wagner’s The Ring cycle—which is itself a story of downfall brought on by greed—it is operatic in scope and visually riveting, for both the horrors it depicts and the lushness of its cinematography. Like the final act of a Greek tragedy, it lays bare the costs of human folly.

Curator Massimiliano Gioni explains that Herzog’s film provides the conceptual linchpin for “After Nature.” Given the film’s multivalence and the tenor of current debates about carbon emissions, resource use and the Iraq War, the show could have gone in any number of intellectually potent and emotionally tough directions. Instead, what follows this tour de force overture is an exhibition of mostly tepid work, intended to explore artistic mythmaking and “nature after a trauma.”

Floor three, for example, is devoted to messianic dreams and maenadic excesses. Expressions of the former include Eugene von Bruenchenhein’s lushly painted visions of mythological beings and swirls of cosmic energy, and the Reverend Howard Finster’s handwritten sermons decrying avarice and aggression. Excess, if it can be called such, is represented by Diego Perrone’s large-scale photographs of naked men romping among large holes dug by the artist, and by a Tino Sehgal piece in which dancers, as instructed by the artist, writhe on the floor. While Von Bruenchenhein and Finster express a sense of impending disaster and moral urgency, their status as oft-exhibited outsider artists, as well as Finster’s hillbilly English (sample line: “people brings earths pollution, earth wars”), marginalize their passions as crackpot millennialism. Perrone and Sehgal, trendy art-world insiders, come off as embarrassingly scripted and patently false.

Robert Kusmirowski, Unacabine

There are, however, some transformative moments in the exhibit, when the individual (whether that means artist or viewer) can be seen transcending ego—the root cause of the destruction and deracination this art reflects. In Artur Zmijewski’s video An Eye for an Eye (1998), a young woman washes a man with multiple amputations while two other naked men, one missing a leg, form a three-legged unit to climb stairs. Turning the title’s punitive nostrum on its head, the video posits a model of community and tenderness that is all the more effective for the disquiet these heavily scarred bodies provoke.

But Zmijewski’s offering is more the exception than the rule. For the most part, the other themes explored here—including nature as unknowable mystery, the yearning for a lost Eden and man’s alienation from his identity as part of the natural world—are disposed of rather superficially. The exhibition suffers from a lack of nuanced work, which in turn seems to stem from a deficit of curatorial sensitivity.

Take the wall text describing Erik van Lieshout’s Untitled (2008), which the artist filmed while visiting his mother in Tanzania, where she volunteers with people dying of AIDS. The film includes a viscerally heartrending image of a man inflicted with festering lesions, yet we read that the artist is “attempting to reach the world’s end” while reflecting on “the impossible absurdity of death.” Tanzania is the end of the earth only to those who feel an implicit First World superiority, and death is not impossible or absurd but painful and imminent to the people Van Lieshout has recorded. If there is anything to learn from Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness, one of the few worthwhile things in this otherwise forgettable survey, it is that this sort of thinking leads to the kind of hell the director so eloquently presents.