With After Nature, an exhibition that opened yesterday at the New Museum, the arts of installation and appropriation have come together throughout the museum's main exhibition space. An apocalyptic view of nature spoiled by war, pollution and other human intervention, the show was curated by Massimiliano Gioni, who took his inspiration from a 1988 prose poem of the same title by W.G. Sebald.

Work made by artists around the world and over time is on view, starting with photograms created by August Strindberg in 1894. The acclaimed Swedish writer placed photographic paper on his windowsill at night, believing that he could capture light from the stars in a perfect communion with nature.

Left: Unacabine (back) by Robert Kusmirowski; The Magnificent Seven by Thomas Schutte (front). Center: Untitled (Cuba), detail, by Roberto Cuoghi. Right: figures and video by Pawel Althamer.

The three main galleries are home to work in a variety of media, with video and sound interspersed with sculpture, photography, a taxidermized horse, and a few paintings. The subject of death, destruction and an occasional ray of hope plays out in pieces that can be sublimely beautiful, as in Roberto Cuoghi's assemblies on glass. These multi-layered mixed media pieces, which recall Laszlo Moholy Nagy's experiments on glass at the Bauhaus, are interpretive maps of George W. Bush's "axis of evil" nations.

In a re-edited segment from Werner Herzog's documentary film Lessons of Darkness (1992), the blazing oil fields of Kuwait, with soundtrack by Wagner, suggest an earthly inferno that all mankind is bound for. And a full-size recreation of Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski's cabin by Polish artist Robert Kusmirowski embodies the banality of evil in much the same way that Richard Barnes' 1998 photographs of the actual cabin are both tawdry and chilling.

But this is not a survey. It is an intensely personal installation by Gioni of work that illustrates Sebald's interpretation of Matthias Grunewald's Isenheim altar. Grunewald's art, with its tormented imagery of death, extreme anguish and physical decomposition, Sebald suggests, is made "after nature." In other words, the spectacle of death from the black plague, and the brutality of the Peasants' War that unfolded during the Medieval artist's lifetime, was reality - or nature - for him. Five hundred years later, terrorism, AIDS, global warming, war and nuclear force exert a similar hold on today's artists.

Not everything collected here succeeds as the curator intended. For example, William Christenberry's well-known photographs of a house being devoured by kudzu seems a little too pressed into service by a text in which his mother warns that nature (the fast-growing vine) is dangerous (it could strangle a child at night).

For the most part, though, the show delivers as a multi-layered art installation in the New Museum's multi-level space. Thought provoking wall texts add another layer of engagement, such as, "I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness...to regard man as a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society," by Diego Perrone.

After Nature is on view at the New Museum through September 21. Please check the website for information about related public programs including a talk on August 16^th with Brian Collins of Ogilvy/BIG, moderated by Brian Sholis, editor of Artforum.com. This Saturday, the New Museum hosts Block Party 2008, a day of art activities and performances in Sara D. Roosevelt Park.