Lara Favaretto's "Just Knocked Out" at MoMA PS1 Matthew Septimus/MoMA PS1 In Lara Favaretto's installation, a computer system is used to turn 60 compressed air tanks on and off at different times so that the attached party favors unspool. Donald Rumsfeld was right: there are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. He was not talking about art, but he could have been. Boring artists stick to the knowns. Interesting ones look for gaps in the known. Great ones discover realms of possibility no one had previously imagined. Then lesser artists - as well as critics, curators and art historians - rush in to claim and develop parcels of the new land. Matthew Septimus/MoMA PS1. Just Knocked Out This exhibition, through Sept. 10 at MoMA PS1, looks at works by Lara Favaretto. One of the exhibition's themes is the relationship between art and the industrial world. Eventually its fields will be farmed to the point of exhaustion and left to lie fallow. Whereupon, in time, they may be rediscovered and revived by younger creatives. Which brings us to Lara Favaretto and her exhibition, "Just Knocked Out," at MoMA PS1. Ms. Favaretto is 38 and lives in Turin. This show, organized by Peter Eleey, PS1"s curator, reveals her attempts over the past 15 years to rejuvenate the once-fertile acreage of international Conceptualism and Postminimalist formalism - and, closer to home, that of Italian Arte Povera. Her work is smart but calculated to the point of lifelessness. Nevertheless, she boasts an impressive international exhibition résumé, which includes participation in the 53rd Venice Biennale and this summer's Documenta 13. Ms. Favaretto's best feature is her dry wit. "Platoon" (2005) consists of 60 tall, slender compressed air tanks, each with a spiral-shaped red-foil party favor attached to its escape valve. A computer system turns these tanks on and off at different times so that the favors unspool into air-filled cylinders, briefly standing nearly upright. This is supposed to continue until the air in the tanks runs out, but museum officials are refilling them. It is like a platoon of tired male Minimalists on Viagra. On a larger perspective, you could say it is a metaphor for the winding down of industrial civilization. Another room displays one of those heavy steel plates road crews use to cover up their excavations, an object that is surely meant to evoke Richard Serra's sculptures made of thick steel plates. Attached to a nearby wall, a small silver plate with a slot in it delivers a printed instruction: "Your Money Here." Elsewhere it is not so clear whether Ms. Favaretto means to be satirical. A five-minute video loop called "Eraser" (1997) could be an homage to, or a spoof of, Bruce Nauman. In it you see a white screen, across which fly small, blurry objects accompanied by soft thumping sounds. A wall label explains that it is a recording of the artist throwing an eraser over and over again against her studio wall, recalling Mr. Nauman's videos of the late "60s, in which he repeatedly performs oddly pointless bodily actions. In the exhibition's first room the floor is entirely covered by dirt, now a standard gambit that harks back to Walter De Maria's "New York Earth Room" (1977). A wall label tells us that Ms. Favaretto has buried something in a metal box. The installation is dedicated to a man named Albert Dadas (1860-1907), whose claim to fame was that he suffered from "pathological tourism." This is pedantic, Postmodernist conceptualism par excellence. Overhead in every gallery of the exhibition are scaffolding pipes running between walls. This installation is called "Grid after Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue, 1921" (2012). Here and there little circular windows in one pipe or another expose innards stuffed with yarn - yellow in one case, red elsewhere and so on - as if streams of pure primary colors are circulating through the system. Thus she illustrates something that academic theorists have been taking about for decades: the connection between Modernist painting and the grid structure of the industrialized world. Sometimes it is hard to know if Ms. Favaretto is consciously playing off a known predecessor. An installation called "We All Fall Down" (2012) consists of a glassed-in room with several industrial electric fans blowing a large quantity of confetti about. Alice Aycock created a similar piece more than 40 years ago: "Sand/Fans" (1971), in which the blown material was fine sand. The difference is worth noting, even if Ms. Favaretto didn't know of that earlier piece. While Ms. Aycock's installation evoked natural processes like the formation of dunes, Ms. Favaretto's scene is sociologically pointed: It is the end of a parade, the wan aftermath of Modernism's triumphal march to a future that did not happen. Because Ms. Favaretto relies so much on devices that were once revolutionary and are now deadeningly familiar, it is hard to appreciate the poetry of futility, disappointment and even grief that animates her work. But it is there, muffled though it may be by her hyper-cerebral reticence. At the center of one gallery is a cube - made of compressed, bright-green confetti - that is slowly falling apart along its top edges: utopia in ruins. There is an audio piece here too, which every few minutes produces the sound of people applauding. It is titled "I Believed in Nothing"; the back story is that Ms. Favaretto invited Queen Elizabeth II of Britain to attend the Frieze Art Fair in 2007. The queen did not show up, but Ms. Favaretto supplied applause to help people imagine the royal visit. This may sound ridiculous, but it is kind of profound - like "Waiting for Godot," only a lot less entertaining. "Just Knocked Out" continues through Sept. 10 at MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue at 46th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens; (718) 784-2084, momaps1.org.