Scott Cantrell

SANTA FE, N.M. – Ars longa, vita brevis, an old Latin proverb tells us: Art is long, life short.

Au contraire, proclaims the Site Santa Fe International Biennial, the American Southwest's outpost of the international cutting-edge art circuit. Coordinated by Lance M. Fung, a New York-based curator and former art dealer, this summer's show embraces ephemerality.

As the seventh installment in the museum's series – thus the title, "Lucky Number Seven" – this biennial comprises site-inspired works not meant to exist beyond it. Indeed, most of the materials will be recycled back into the community.

Santa Fe's art scene is a big part of the town's appeal for the North Texans who swell the streets, shops and eateries each summer.

To most visitors, art here means the stuff on Canyon Road, heavy on American Indian imagery and motifs. But Site Santa Fe, in the rapidly redeveloping rail-yard district south of downtown, has made a mission of showing edgy works less likely to find a place in a suburban dining room. Even at Site Santa Fe, Texans are second only to Californians on the tally of visitors.

"Lucky Number Seven" is international, all right, but the accent is on emerging artists rather than the usual suspects of the Venice and New York, Singapore and São Paulo pack. In fact, Mr. Fung made a point of seeking artists he'd never heard of, asking for recommendations from contemporary-art galleries and museums in 17 countries, including Bulgaria, Egypt, Turkey and Korea.

In the end, 25 artists were chosen and brought to Santa Fe for orientation. Each artist or collaborative team was given $7,500 to create a new work. Some works would be shown in and outside the museum itself, others at other sites around the city.

Architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, whose projects have included the acclaimed American Folk Art Museum in New York, were tapped to re-format the museum's interior. The result is a system of zigzag ramps, walls and stairs that break up the former warehouse into irregular spaces and quirky perspectives.

Before you even walk into the building, you can see two artworks and part of a third. Above the entrance are three giant Xs made of halogen floodlights. Titled Tri-Christus, London-born artist Nadine Robinson's work plays on both religious and sexual associations.

Nadine Robinson

Tri-Christus, 2008

In Greek, X, or chi, is the first letter of Christ, and Ms. Robinson's equal-armed Greek crosses also evoke the Crucifixion. On the other hand, we all know what XXX symbolizes on a video store. (Alas, the work is lighted only for a couple of hours at night, when I was at the opera.)

A long entryway to the museum is framed in two-by-fours and two-by-sixes and shaded by a fuzzy yellow mesh. Snaking through beams overhead is a brown intestinal thing that terminates in an explosive dump inside the museum. This is Story Line, by Eliza Naranjo Morse, Nora Naranjo Morse and Rose B. Simpson, a family of artists who belong to the Santa Clara Pueblo near Santa Fe.

Made of clay, willows, nylon and other materials, the piece is very much a product of the earth and thus tied into traditions of American Indian craftsmanship. Other stretches of it are displayed elsewhere in the city. That it's already, and quite visibly, cracking and disintegrating outside certainly plays into the show's theme of impermanence.

Conventional painting and sculpture are hardly central to the Santa Fe Biennial. But Soun Hong's Sidescape both clusters and scatters fuzzy oil paintings small and medium-large around corners of the Williams-Tsien ramps. For his anatmospheric perspective, artist Scott Lyall had assistants paint a long wall in what looks like Max Beckmann renderings of kitsch images. He then separated the fresco into vertical panels and screened it with laser-perforated vinyl, lending a milky, pixelated look.

The Abduction, by Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni, recasts a kitschy bronze of children riding a horse down a steep slope into a disturbing scene of violation and loss. After the show, the artists plan to recast the piece in its original form.

From Turkish artist Ahmet Ögüt comes another irreverent take on calamity. His Clear Blue Sky Versus Generous Earth is a sendup of the hood paintings on low-rider cars popular up the road in Española. Hung on a wall, the hood portrays a legend of a cow falling out of an airplane onto a boat while an audio loop tells the story. Nearby rows of red tote bags imprinted with civil defense warnings from Los Alamos heighten the whimsical absurdity.

The largest of the installations in the Site Santa Fe building is Egyptian artist Wael Shawky's Telematch Suburb. A sofa on a spacious platform in the middle of the big room offers a panorama of culture clashes.

Studio Azzurro

The Fourth Ladder, 2008

A heavy-metal concert in a rural Egyptian area is projected on one wall, and on another appears a video loop of people entering and leaving a pyramidal mud shed in a desert. A plasma screen shows a noisy English lesson with young children. A series of grotesque watercolors on another wall was inspired by works in Santa Fe's Museum of International Folk Art. A beat-up washing machine is shoved into a corner.

Most arresting, and maybe most gimmicky, of all is the interactive video The Fourth Ladder, by the Milan collaborative Studio Azzurro. A huge projection shows a slow procession of people from the Santa Fe area up an incline. Touch an individual figure, and he or she will stop, turn toward you and tell about a place that holds a special emotional or spiritual import.

A busy schedule at the opera kept me from seeing most of the off-site installations. But the Santa Fe Opera parking lot was the setting for one of them, Hiroshi Fuji's Kaeru, fanciful quasi-chandeliers made of plastic water bottles hung from high light poles. Some suggest translucent marine creatures, others chaotic remains of outdoor festival concerts.

Although you wouldn't know it from some of the pretentious wall labels, this year's Site Santa Fe Biennial is about not being "great" art – in the sense of collectible and marketable. The show is a mishmash of the arresting and the willfully inconsequential.

But it will keep people talking, at least for a while. And for an artist, or curator, there's nothing worse than not being talked about.Plan your life

"Lucky Number Seven" continues through Jan. 4 at Site Santa Fe, 1606 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, N.M. $10 ($5 for students and seniors); free on Fridays. 505-989-1199, www.sitesantafe.org.