Provided photo

“Untitled” is Laura Owens’ 2009 take on Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s 1914 “Girl in White Chemise.”

Continuous Present

Ends Jan. 3, 2010. Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St. Free. 203-432-0600, artgallery.yale.edu.

In Continuous Present, the current exhibition at Yale University Art Gallery, a very loose curatorial conceit ties together the work of a disparate group of seasoned and established artists. Simply put, each piece explores some kind of existential phenomena.

According to curator Jennifer Gross, the show was initially inspired by Rodney Graham's whimsical film, "City Self/Country Self" (2000) which, projected on a wall-sized screen, confronts visitors as they enter the gallery. A four-minute loop, set in a French village and featuring flamboyantly costumed characters, features the artist playing both an urbane gentleman and a hayseed.

In a carefully planned sequence accompanied by a ticking clock, the gentleman kicks the hayseed with a pointy boot, whereupon the hayseed, whose pants are outfitted with special padding, falls down, loses his hat, bends down to retrieve it, gets kicked again, and so on. The piece is clearly about the travails of life in general, but in the context of this show, it more precisely defines the creative process as a series of successes and failures that drive artists' changing perceptions of themselves.

With Graham's little movie setting the tone, the exhibition cleaves into two broad categories of existential exploration. In the first, conceptual artists Graham, On Kawara, Francis Alÿs, Peter Fischli, David Weiss and Roni Horn visually chronicle the routines and rituals that mark time in everyday life. In the second, Franz West, Thomas Nozkowski, Gabriel Orozco, Dieter Roth and Laura Owens demonstrate their presence in the creative process by making drawings, paintings, sculpture and prints which, to quote Gross' curatorial statement, are "phenomenological projects weighted with human presence."

Among the first group, Kawara's paintings are the most starkly obsessive. For more than 40 years, Kawara has been making one small painting a day. On each canvas, he paints that day's date in a simple sans serif font in white, centered on a darker background. All artists impose aesthetic limitations, but Kawara is legendary for his engagement with disengagement. He aims to debunk the romantic myth of the passionately inspired artist and supplant it with the reality of the dry habitual practice of serial repetition.

Similar conceptually, Francis Alÿs' piece contains a looped animated drawing of a woman pouring liquid back and forth from one cup to another. The video is set low on the wall opposite a leather sofa, so that viewers can comfortably watch the endlessly repeating action. Where Alÿs creates an inviting space in which we watch the wistful animation of tedious endeavor, Kawara's art practice has itself become a tedious endeavor.

In the other category, the artists have produced projects without overtly superimposed conceptual framing, yet they still plainly reference the creative process. For these artists, making art is a vital, intuitively corporeal, often playful undertaking grounded in the stopped-motion moment of creation. Franz West's globular, crudely modeled forms made of papier-mâché and Styrofoam, mounted on welded chain links and set on plywood pedestals, ooze the joyous handmade quality of projects I saw in my daughter's 3rd-grade art classes. Seventy year old Thomas Nozkowski's small-scale oil paintings, dating from 1973 to 2009, show a serious artist's heartfelt engagement with the humblest of materials: canvas board and paint.

Although most of the work has been shown elsewhere, one piece was created specifically for the show. Gross commissioned Laura Owens, known for repainting pictures by earlier artists, to work from a painting in Yale's permanent collection. Owens chose Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's "Girl in White Chemise" (1914). In the original, the girl has the sort of knowing come-hither look that was commonly painted by Kirchner's male contemporaries. Owens recasts the girl as an innocently cheerful teenager, painted brightly in acrylics and oils, surrounded by her record collection and her cats. By supplanting the leering male artist's gaze with that of an ingenuous confidant and co-conspirator, Owens has rendered the image more relevant for present-day viewers.

Many of the pieces in Continuous Present have been shown in other contexts, but assembled here they create a wonderfully convincing testament to these older artists' lifelong consideration of process. According to Gross, the exhibition took five years to organize as she added and subtracted artists to suit the evolving theme, and the selection does seem somewhat random.

One could argue that all artists make work that touches in some way on the loosely defined theme, and I would have liked to see more women represented (only two of 11 artists are female). But these are minor quibbles.

I first saw the Peter Fischli/David Weiss film "The Way Things Go" (1987), in which a Rube Goldberg-like setup unfolds over the course of 30 minutes, at MoMA last year. Then it reminded me of a good day in the studio, with one unexpected turn leading surprisingly to the next and culminating in a small triumph.

Sharon L. Butler is an artist and associate professor of visual arts at Eastern Connecticut State University. She blogs at Two Coats of Paint.