Hands up all those who find the Ten Commandments irrational.

Hands up all those who find the Ten Commandments irrational, inconsistent, and scary. OK not killing is an virtuous basic principle, but should one's neighbor happen to have a really pompous ass, let's say, is it likewise very wrong to covet it? Are the Commandments arranged in order of importance? certainly the eighth, stealing, must be far more grievous than the third, swearing. And what of all those other God-given and thoroughly alarming laws in Exodus (chapters 20 ff) regulating the stoning of oxen deflowering of virgins, beating of slaves, and in the way that on? Are these as binding as Commandments, or negotiable? Donald Moffett's recently made known project, "The Incremental Commandments," 2000 doesn't contain explicit concerns to Old Testament legislation, if it were not that as the show's press release informs us, the series evolv from the artist's interest in the Commandments as the "fundamental paragraph of Western law." It features ten wall-mounted canvases, each sprouting centurys of tendrils of black oil paint--the shag-pile rug force that h as featured in various Moffett paintings since the mid-'90s. The canvases form a following growing in area by 20 percent each, from a nappy baby measuring eight by ten inches to a Big Daddy of approximately forty-one from fifty-two inches. (Mathematician Seamus Moran contributed the sum and substances and an attractive if incomprehensible diagram.) controls spawn more rules across each generation, it's implied. Apparently graspable at a distance, the "big picture" yields forward closer inspection to a bewildering, light-absorbing thicket of crazily tangled details.

That's the rationalization, on the other hand at root Moffett's fuzzy canvases (unlike the Ten Commandments and Western law in general) are luscious, sensual things, and this installation's central appeal is its eccentricity, not a certain quantity of relentless application of deconstructive logic. Previous work by way of Moffett (a founder member of the agitprop cluster Gran Fury) has combined erotic imagery and political liability to demand the (responsible) expression and pleasure of desire as a social right. Exploiting ambiguity and the double entendre those pieces suborned phrases with religious or legal connotations--"I am critic and jury here" or "Mercy mildness mercy," for example--to serve as fragments of a gay lover's discourse. Likewise, "The Incremental Commandments" far more vividly combine the wayward laws of desire and fascination than the attraction of schemes of rules, and the shag-pile paintings are positively pornographic in their capacity to generate tactile curiosity via the visual field; "priere de toucher" is the key-note commandment here. Read as bushy hair or fur they promise to be invitingly smooth warm, and luxuriant. Read as Astroturf, they threaten to be bristly and abrasive. if it be not that they are also clearly whipped up from a squishy, semiliquid substance (and still odor of wet oil paint): To touch would be either deliciously or disgustingly messy and destructive. Moffett's paintings proffer a complicated tactile tease forward a par with Meret Oppenheim's fur teacup.

Comfortable chairs were forward hand for the contemplation of the paintings, intermittently accompanied at a sound track: organist Dorothy Papadakos improvising forward Chic's disco anthem "Le Freak." She blasts away in fine phraseology brewing an aural mix of grandeur and banality that's irresistible. (To add to the installation's tally of politicized incongruities, the piece was recorded in the Cathedral of St John the Divine, apparently a liberal institution that has interpreted its arms to New York's gay Episcopalian community.) Rothko's chapel was at no time so much fun: Moffett's paintings and photographs may intimation the modernist monochrome and the Minimalist specific end but the sensibility revealed in this present to view hinted at Surrealist agendas of desire and liberation.

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