by Richard Gleaves

Fringe Theories (at Agitprop through January 9) is billed as "the work of five artists and scholars that thrive outside of traditional and accepted rules and boundaries."

What's most striking about the show as a whole is not its fringiness but rather an odd formal emphasis on oldness: old newsprint, old photos, old paintings, old sculpture. The work itself is recent, but — with the exception of Keith Engeron's modest deployment of corporate logos and Tony Allard's use of layered space — otherwise avoids the look and feel of contemporary art.

It's interesting to contemplate just why this is.

My first thought was that the curator (Katherine Sweetman) was asserting the notion of fringe theories as a historical phenomenon: a plausible hypothesis given how the 1960's engendered greater cultural weirdness (spoon bending, pyramid power, Kirlian auras) than we experience today, while in times pre-60's the absence of science-based consumer protection laws enabled entire socioeconomic classes of theory-pitching charlatans and mountebanks (Pirelli in Sweeney Todd).

A brief conversation with the curator dispelled this hypothesis: it turns out she wasn't aware of the thread of antiquity running through the show. But the thread was still there, and in need of explanation.

My second thought fit better: namely, that the curator was subconsciously mapping the notion of "fringe" to outsider art — though the artists themselves were not necessarily "outsider" — and that in doing so the formal baggage of outsider art was serving as a de facto constraint on the work selected for the show. Hence the virtual lack of contemporaneity, and the focus on traditional forms.

And what, pray tell, is the formal baggage of outsider art? Simple: the esthetic engine driving outsider art is the pairing of traditional form with eccentric content. The work must be recognizable as drawing or painting or sculpture. Only savvy professionals with insider credentials can adopt forms such as digging holes in the floor or cooking in the gallery — if an institutionalized schizophrenic were to try this, they'd get solitary, not a retrospective.

A few additional thoughts:

• The show copy implies that Noah Doely's ghost-story photographs overlay a contemporary sensibility on traditional techniques. In fact his images are straightforward (and beautifully executed) derivations from the historical genre of occult photography.

• Allard's newspaper installation was the sole work in the show to offer extended visual pleasure: wallowing in the information overload made me think of how often pigs look happy.

• Agitprop's gnarly upstairs corridor space finally met its match in the muscle-bound sculpture of DJ Brelje and Erich Winzer. I'm nearly certain that putting the very same objects in a white-cube space would gag me by their overstatement. Yet I'm equally certain that any white-cube art hung in this rustic environment would die a thousand deaths. Here the fit's perfect — Fringe Theories is worth seeing solely for this rare conjunction.