Lynda Benglis’s survey at Pace is titled with three verbs, Knotting, Tying, Folding, and the title is the method. Nothing in the show begins with an image. It begins with stock material from the hardware aisle, wire mesh and chicken wire, and an operation anyone could perform on it. The earliest piece, Sparkle Knot IV (1972), is a knotted tube of wire mesh covered in plaster, paint and glitter. The pleated wall works fold the same mesh into accordions and finish it in gold leaf or sprayed metal until the operation and the ornament are hard to pull apart.

This walk follows that idea out the door, because three other shows on it are built the same way: a plain procedure, applied to an ordinary thing, and left legible. Rana Begum’s Louvre series at Lehmann Maupin starts from a part every building already has, the slatted panel of a vent or a blind, and remakes it in metal, stone and glass to see what it does to light. Susan Vecsey at Berry Campbell paints to a schedule: one pour of thinned oil a day on each canvas, a painting arriving over two or three months. Nate Lowman at Zwirner paints keys, the one object whose whole meaning sits in its cut profile.

None of this is a shared style. What these artists share is a working habit: each lets the operation show. In every gallery the thing to look at is what was done, in what order, to what common material. Benglis and Lowman carry the argument hardest. Begum is the most architectural and the most dependent on daylight. Vecsey’s rule is the gentlest and asks for the slowest looking. First Street’s group show, observational painting with no rule in sight, works as the counterweight at the end.