By Catherine Fox

For the AJC

By turns provocative, amusing and occasionally annoying, the Contemporary’s “Substitute Teacher” is a wide-ranging exploration of knowledge and its discontents.

The works chosen by curators Regine Basha and Stuart Horodner, The Contemporary’s artistic director, address the history of knowledge, the changing means of its apprehension and the vagaries of language and nonverbal communication. But discontent rules.

What is a substitute teacher, after all, but an opportunity to play hooky in the classroom? Students went to creative lengths to mislead, confuse and distract the poor temporary teacher.

Many artists in this show have devised similarly creative ways to undermine authority, question conventional wisdom and mock the systems society has invented to impart it. You might call videos by Daniel Bozhkov and Michael Smith theater of the absurd. The Bulgarian-born New York-based Bozhkov ridicules the trivial factoids that comprise the test for American citizenship (i.e., how many stars are in the flag). Michael Smith plays a character who defines knowledge as rote facts and spends his time parsing facts into ever-more complicated and meaningless diagrams.

One of the funniest pieces, Andrea Fraser’s “Little Frank and His Carp,” deflates the pretention of museum-Accoustiguide lingo. The protagonist, a visitor at the Guggenheim Bilbao, finds the patter unwittingly and uncontrollably erotic.

The fluidity of meaning is a recurring theme. Like an O’Henry short story, the surprise ending of Luis Camnitzer’s “Loved Ones” requires a recalibration of all that came before.

Glenn Ligon alters meaning by changing contexts. In 1988, he appropriated “I am a Man,” the words on placards carried by sanitation workers in a historic 1968 civil rights march, in a text piece that prodded viewers to reconsider the poignant, angry assertion in a different era of identity politics.

He repositions it again in “Condition Report” by pairing a print of the earlier piece with one on which an appraiser has marked its flaws, which, like other forms of objective measurements, does not get to the heart of the thing.

Brian Dettmer’s sculptures are incarnations of obsolescent knowledge. The Atlanta artist skillfully carves up old books, often encyclopedias, to create elegant objects that repurpose outdated knowledge and their increasingly dinosaurish printed vehicle.

Some of the works, however, are, to continue with the school conceit, sophomoric. “My Videotape Cassette” by Joe Sola and Will Eno verges on self-indulgent overkill – though it’s worth the time to see Rainn Wilson, who plays Dwight Schrute on “The Office” TV series, send up the sensitive actor type.

Lisa Anne Auerbach has picked a ripe object of satire in sloganeering clothing, but the warmed-over Jenny Holzer sentences on knitted skirt and sweater sets strike me as one-liners.

But, hey, live and learn. Isn’t that the point of school?

Catherine Fox is chief art critic of www.ArtsCriticATL.com.

“Substitute Teacher.”

Through May 16. $5; $3, students and seniors, children under 12 and members free. Free on Thursdays. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays; until 8 p.m. Thursdays; noon-5 p.m. Sundays. The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. 535 Means St., Atlanta. 404-688-1970. www.thecontemporary.org .

Participating artist Mira Schor will speak at 11 a.m. on Saturday, April 10. Artistic director Stuart Horodner will conduct a tour at 6 p.m. Thursday.

The bottom line: Playful, thoughtful, subversive.