In a 1919 letter written from Buenos Aires to his New York fans, the quaint Stettheimer sisters, Marcel Duchamp casually dismisses the "religious side" of art-making, especially the "silence and contemplation" to which many artists declare themselves devoted.

He then asks urgently how the dollhouse is coming along. (The house in question was currently under construction by fiftyish Carrie Stettheimer, who had chosen to adorn it with tiny artworks donated by her friends, including Duchamp.) Is it any wonder that Duchamp enchants young, very bright artists in general nowadays, and Toronto artist Tony Romano in particular?

No healthy man of 24, which is Romano's age, takes transcendental pieties about art seriously. (Every healthy man will, but not yet.) Nor, if he's lucky, has any man of 24 outgrown boyhood fascination with such guy-thing gadgets as electric trains, clockwork gizmos, and other little syntactic systems of gears, codes, rhymes, switches, relays.

Romano hasn't. But in his case, the common fascination has deepened into a sophisticated interest in computer programming, cybernetic animation, and sound production, the construction of miniature architectural scherzos from model-shop struts, girders, trees and stuff. What Romano does is more intellectually subtle and quirky than Miss Stettheimer's dollhouse. But both projects deliver a similar pleasure: that of seeing some portion of the social world ("home," in Carrie's dollhouse, "suburbia" in Romano's recent work) operating in miniature, according to the potent ensemble of cultural codes and behaviours.

Tony Romano was born in Toronto, but raised in the nearby suburb of Whitby. His day job is working construction in the sprawl of cloned pseudo-Victorian houses carpeting former farmland around Toronto. In other words, he knows his topic suburbia as neurosis and fantasy inside out, quite literally. The mischievously deadpan colouring book Carchitecture, produced in collaboration with artist Tyler Brett for an exhibition in Vancouver earlier this year, portrays a series of "model homes," each an improbable marriage of a vehicle and a tract house. How better to satirize the improbability of contemporary suburbia, with its fantastical architectural lingo of stability and "family values" jamming with the reality of restless mobility, generational conflict, cultural vaucuity?

Suburbia also proposes itself as the answer to a longing for absolute security, presumably unattainable in the big city. This desire, Romano sends up in faintly horrifying architectural models and computer-generated drawings that take it the whole way. His cookie-cutter houses are not merely distributed neatly across the fringe-city landscape, but are also buried there, like deep bunkers in some futuristic war of everybody against everybody else.

Carchitecture and Romano's subsequent works on the suburbs are smart one-liners. They are meant to be one-liners, in the venerable tradition of Duchamp's best absurdist pieces. But this new practice open-handed, precisely targeted, socially critical is rooted in more provocative video productions developed during the artist's years at Vancouver's Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, and at the University of Toronto, where he studied philosophy. Vancouver and Toronto: the two cities bookend Romano's formally eclectic, vividly thoughtful work. In Toronto, he discovered the writings of David Hume (1711-1776)--currently Romano's intellectual angel--who reintroduced into Western thought the radical skepticism launched by the ancient Greeks and pressed forward in recent times by Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. In Vancouver, he was fortunate to have fallen in with gifted veterans of the city's exuberant Neo-Dada passage through the 1960s. Artists like Gary Lee Nova. Romano's If By Chance (2001) is a freshly rethought homage to all his teachers.

Encountering this video presentation in a gallery setting, the visitor sees merely an unpeopled, deliberately unimportant street corner. Press a button on a table before the screen, and something (usually) happens. A woman walks into the scene from stage right, a man from stage left. They do not see each other. Either character in this little street drama may continue to walk toward the corner, or turn back, exchange a glance, or never come within viewing distance of the other. Touch the button again. The same brief, unpredictable actions are repeated, though varied by the computer's randomizing apparatus. But so bald a description communicates nothing of the uncanny experience endured by the viewer. Initial surprise at the unpredictability gives way to frustration about one's lack of control over the process, then yields to a certain irritation.

In each variation of the movements, the man and woman seem destined to encounter each other at the corner of the building, but do not. I press the button again. They appear, and one or the other goes through movement I have seen before, or not seen. I press the button yet again. Same thing. After a few more punches at the button, and a few more movements toward a meeting that never occurs, I become bored either simply bored--or bored into an understanding of the ingenious situation that has been created by my participation.

For Romano's piece actually features three people, each indispensable for the realization of the work. Along with the man and woman in the animation, I, too, am an actor, setting in motion processes I cannot dictate, and that refuse to give me the satisfying closure--the sense of getting it, of mastery--that I expect to have after viewing an artwork.

In the end--if there can be said to be an end to If By Chance--I am thrown back against hitherto unquestioned beliefs about my status as viewer. What god gave me the privilege of being gratified by every work of art I see? And by what divine command were all artists mandated to give me that gratification?

I can turn away and smugly say to myself: "Well, before there was Romano, there was Duchamp. Such aggravation is just a fact in modern art." But to indulge in such historicizing would be to miss the crucial point about Romano's project: that the Duchampian gesture--when performed by an artist of such remarkable intelligence and conviction, and in supple command of his technical medium--can reveal the enslaving force of our will to power and mastery, and our nagging unwillingness to allow things (including artworks) merely to persist in their being.