“Talespinning: Selections Fall 2004” and “Leon Ferrari: Politiscripts,” are not so much about traditional drawing – creating volume, form, space, and metaphor on paper – as they are about self-obsession, politics, and process.

In many of the 14 contemporary artists’ works included in “Talespinning,” the end products are of less importance than the personal journeys that led to their creation. The artworks, then, become documents or records of

those processes. Content, attached to the work once it is completed, is personal rather than universal. This closes much of the work down into a kind of exhibitionist display: It is not important that the works convey their meanings through their experience, as long as they can be said to mean something to their creators.

Some of the miniaturistic, diaristic art in “Talespinning” can boggle the eye and the mind. I remember being in the Met’s Leonardo drawing show and wondering just how, exactly, Leonardo got his chalk so sharp and fine. His microscopic line was at times unbelievably, inhumanly tiny; its effects unbelievably, inhumanly large. Part of the experience of Leonardo is the fascination with our own disbelief in the artist’s abilities. The drawings are impossible, but there they are to prove us wrong.

Walking through “Talespinning,” I felt another kind of fascination and disbelief, not with the artists’ abilities but with their compulsions. Jonathan Herder makes collages out of thousands of itsy-bitsy pieces of postage stamps. Alice Attie, in an illegibly microscopic hand, transcribes stories or portions of novels into shapes that symbolize their subjects: Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” takes the shape of a coffin; Kafka’s “The Burrow” becomes a tunneling maze. Cathy Ward creates photorealistic, black-and-white scratchboards of intertwining locks of hair that knot or weave together to take the forms of figures, tombstones, and hearts, as well as natural elements such as roots, trees, clouds, and waves.

Jennie White, with a pin, pokes tiny holes in rectangular sheets of white paper, creating flowers and words in a mock “Home sweet home” style that resembles crocheted doilies. Noriko Ambe cuts ravines in individual pages in books or sheets of paper that are then stacked together, to form striated, curving crevices that look like desert landscapes seen from the air. And Eung Ho Park, inspired by the exposed roots of a tree in Prospect Park, created “Roots” (2003), which is pieced together out of 22 sheets of paper that form the shape of a vase-like human head. Each sheet is filled with little, repetitive, linking roots drawn in ink. It took six months to make.

Looking at these handmade works, I was astonished that the artists had bothered. The objects held my attention in the way that watching someone count grains of sand on the beach would hold my attention. I thought, “Wow. Can you believe someone would do that?” Certainly, some of the artists have facility and determination, but their works, often politically loaded or weak in concept, meander infinitely and are without structure.

One artist with whom I was very taken was the Uruguayan Ricardo Lanzarini, who draws minute figures in books of Job cigarette paper. His hand has an Edward Gorey weirdness. His figures wear strange hats and carry suitcases or cooking utensils, as if they were Medieval vagabonds. They fly, Mary Poppins-like, with umbrellas made of pencil shavings. They wrestle, make speeches, or tend to the sick in bed.

A vitrine in the gallery is filled with around 35 of these books as well as hundreds of tiny cutout figures in couples, groups, and piles that appear to have spilled out of, or to have been freed from, the books themselves. The figures are scattered around the books and crawl up and down the gallery wall as if they were scaling the wall or flying. I really like Mr. Lanzarini’s hand and his zany inventions. I only wish the work could take the structure of, say, an illustrated book, instead of aimless, freeform, anti-art confetti.

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“Leon Ferrari: Politiscripts,” which is on view in the Drawing Room, is a merging of calligraphy and political art. The first museum solo show in the U.S. of the Argentinean artist (b. 1920), it is comprised of influential work from the 1960s.

Mr. Ferrari has a varied and at times skillful hand. Some of the pages of calligraphy, or “manuscript drawings,” in the show resemble automatic writing, Asian calligraphy, or the work of Henri Michaux. The artist’s works look like weird alphabets, doodles and squiggles, nonsense writing, seismic tremor graphs. They have the directness of sheet music and the obsessive-compulsive feel of the art of the insane.

At their best, there is tension between forms in the implied grid of the page, or a lyric, waving-baton like stride between loops of thick and thin. But the artist claims not to care about aesthetics. “The messages,” writes Luis Camnitzer in the catalog, “had to evade censorship and probable reprisals … [the] art making was often considered a subversive activity – the emphasis is on efficiency rather than on form.” I did not know that the two were mutually exclusive.

Mr. Ferrari made the works – copies of important newspaper articles, for instance, or descriptions of the process of making a painting – as political statements in a politically repressive environment. And it is the works’ anti-aesthetic stance, their insistence on being illegible, regardless of the reason behind their illegibility, that ultimately keeps them from being engaging beyond a cursory level. They remain interesting documents of a particular place and time.