Some people ask me how a British art critic gets a greencard. Too modest to use the phrase “alien of extraordinary ability,” I have concocted a story in which the INS were sent the exhibition catalog for “Sensation” — the survey of Young British Artists in the Saatchi Collection seen at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999 — with bookmarked pages on Tracy Emin and Damien Hirst: “aesthetic asylum” was duly granted.

The crack also obviates the second question: Who would leave London at its very moment of artistic ascendancy?

Two of the less sensational stars of the British neo-conceptual movement — Darren Almond and Michael Landy — have New York shows up now that beg another question: What happens to a YBA when he grows up? So much of the art in “Sensation” was inherently expendable, trading in one-line jokes of questionable taste, smart-aleck references to other art or news events, or depending for its frisson on a collision of hot subjects (sex and death) and cool delivery. Rotting meat and flies in a pristine glass vitrine set the paradigm for such art.

Messrs. Almond and Landy in their “Sensation” period conformed to a prevailing triteness. Mr. Landy reconstructed a costermonger’s stall in the gallery with impeccable, literal precision. Mr. Almond had an oversize overhead fan revolve slowly in a room it mostly filled, almost hitting the walls.

Mr. Landy’s preoccupation with ownership and identity took on the grandiose form of a performance piece entitled “Break Down” in 2001. After cataloging all 7,006 objects in his possession — clothing items, his car, works of art by friends, a postage stamp — he had a team of volunteers dressed in blue overalls systematically break down and pulverize these things through specially constructed machinery in a public event in a former department store in central London. Like a Hirst sculpture, the weird energy of this exercise had to do with the fusion of existential angst and stylish dispassion: a clean nihilism.

As a gesture, it was evidently hard to follow. His new exhibition at Alexander and Bonin picks up the theme of machinist destruction and pays homage to another artist’s obsessiveness. In 1960, the young Swiss artist Jean Tinguely arrived in New York determined to construct a machine whose sole purpose was self-destruction. This “Homage to New York” was “conceived like Chinese fireworks, in total anarchy and freedom,” according to the artist. Tinguely’s whimsical, clanking mechanisms made from rusty recycled machine parts recalled Klee’s Twittering Machine, Alexander Calder’s mobiles, Alfred Jarry’s ‘Pataphysics, and the twisted machine aesthetic of Dada. Indeed, two New Yorkers who were semi-retired veterans of the original Dada movement, Richard Huelsenbeck and Marcel Duchamp, supported Tinguely’s successful bid to stage his performance in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art.

True to the spirit of its own absurdism, Tinguely’s machine “failed to fail” according to plan and had to be put out by a firefighter after spluttering around and exhaling ominous smoke for 27 minutes. Mr. Landy has borrowed several fragments of Tinguely’s machine from MoMA and the Jean Tinguely Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, which form the centerpiece of his own exhibition.

Mr. Landy’s own contribution takes the form of large-scale drawings in various media, including oilstick, charcoal, gouache, and oil. This range of materials belies a consistency of touch — a dull draughtsmanship that has neither the efficiency of good illustration nor the expressivity of real drawing. The source materials of his reconstruction also vary, from press photographs, documentary sources, the remaining fragments to Tinguely’s own drawings. But again, the differences fail to resonate. Whether the lines are rendered in sgraffito, with white on black, or more conventional ink or pencil lines on paper, the effect is dreary and underwhelming. There is a hint of early Hockney in the handling of “H.2.N.Y. Self-Constructing, Self-Destroying Machine” (2006), but the graphic artist more usually evoked is Heath Robinson, the humorist who depicted Victorian domestic labor-saving ingenuity gone haywire.

Among the documentary materials gathered in the catalog — the last word on its concluding page —is the flier handed out at MoMA by the Mexican mystically inclined artist Mathias Goeritz. Truer in many way to the energy of the orignal Dada, Mr. Goeritz declaimed, “STOP the aesthetic, so-called ‘profound’ jokes! STOP boring us with another sample of ego-centric folk art!” His protest echoed that of the British critic David Sylvester, heard to mutter on leaving the museum that he would have nothing to do with “tuxedo Dada.” These put-downs make clear that in 1960 the quaintness of Tinguely’s gestures were already understood — that he was recycling an iconoclasm that was itself iconic.

A photomontage above the reception desk imposes Mr. Landy’s head, sporting a baseball cap and a knowing, laddish grin, on Tinguely’s shoulders, “Homage to New York” behind him. It is a sad gesture, however, as nothing of the revival transcends the original, which itself was secondhand. The forlorn Tinguely objects are doubly nostalgic — for the Victorian machine aesthetic, and for the Dada deconstruction of it — whereas Mr. Landy’s limp doodles and fussy faux scholarship fail even to rise to the level of nostalgia.

***

Mr. Almond’s new show is very much business as usual. His fourth at Matthew Marks, it is a hightech, expensive-looking installation that shoots for enigma and hits obviousness.

In the first gallery you come across an initially intriguing apparatus, 12 feet tall and more than twice as wide as it is high. Soon the mystery is solved: “Mono Chrono Pneumatic Red” is a clock. Four figure-eights cut out of the steel flip to tell the time to the nearest minute on a 24-hour clock. It couldn’t be more opposite to Tinguely in style: It does one logical thing very well, and is spotlessly clean. The flip mechanisms are operated by gas cylinders, linked to a computer and viewable from behind. From the front the clock is red, while the supporting equipment is yellow, white, red, and blue — the respective colors, you can learn from the press release, of the flag of the People’s Republic and a Tibetan prayer flag.

This links, therefore, to the three-screen video playing in the back gallery, its sounds filling the whole space. In the center, young Tibetan monks are chanting their lessons while on either side of them a high-speed train pounds through a desolate landscape. The press release informs you that this is a passenger train taking tourists to Tibet.

The chanting, the pounding, the ticking of a clock. Time.

Come back, Damien and Tracy. All is forgiven.

Landy until March 31 (132 Tenth Ave. at 19th Street, 212-367-7474); Almond until April 14 (523 W. 24th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-243-0200).