Dozens of metronomes—dark pyramidal shapes, ticking out of sync—appear as a scattered, otherworldly flock perched on a stretch of stunning badlands rock formations. The little machines, placed so incongruously and carefully in the barren landscape, serve as a powerfully poetic image and, I get the feeling, a kind of spiritual metaphor for Mark Armijo McKnight. His captivating eleven-minute black-and-white film, Without a Song (2024), shot on 16mm in New Mexico’s Bisti Badlands / De-Na-Zin Wilderness, shown here as a grainy, wall-spanning projection, is the heart of his spartanly edited exhibition, Decreation, at the Whitney (which otherwise includes just five photographs and a pair of limestone blocks, etched with sundial faces, that can be used as seating). The moving-image piece is aurally as well as spatially commanding, its sound reaching every corner of the museum’s lobby gallery. Inspired by a 1962 event score for one hundred metronomes by the composer György Ligeti, Armijo McKnight uses the tempo-keeping devices as the main component of his soundtrack, their staccato clamor cresting and gradually winding down. The tick-tick of a final oscillating pendulum recalls the systole and diastole of a racing pulse, a countdown, absurd increments of infinity. When it stops, visitors are left with the white-noise roar of desert wind and a sun-flooded wide shot of stark and fantastic Southwestern geology.