Lee Friedlander’s new photos confound the notion that an artist’s later work is diluted and less passionate than his earlier work.  The dozens of photos in “America by Car,” crammed into the small mezzanine galleries of the Whitney, are bristling with visual energy.

Taken over the past twelve years during road trips, they document views from the front seat of the photographer’s car.  The vehicle’s windows and doors appear in every shot, but instead of becoming a repetitive framing device they function dynamically, collapsing the huge, often sad space of the landscape onto the intimate interior architecture of the car.  Friedlander’s purposeful, eccentric views gives the familiar landscape a caustic intensity.  What this photographer sees is highly particular.

(Lee Friedlander, Arizona, 2007, from the series America by Car, 1995-2009.)

Most publicity about the powerful Paul Thek retrospective at the Whitney has focused on the “meat” pieces, tabletop assemblages that incorporate exquisitely rendered wax models of chunks of human and animal flesh.

Thek moved on from those works to more performance-oriented pieces, for which he crafted special props that fall somewhere between costume, furniture and sculpture.  Made from simple, recognizable elements like chairs, lumber and glass, they’re irrationally deformed and decorated so that they have an unsettling totemic power.  And yet, like a lot of Thek’s work, they have a certain innocence too.

(Paul Thek, Untitled (Sedan Chair), 1968. Wood, wax, paint, metal, leather, glass, and plaster.)