What do Miss Bedney Flunt, Miss Fludney Bent, Miss Flentney Bunt, and Miss Blentney Funt have in common? Unreasonably odd proboscises and the hilarious misfortune of being drawn by Basil Wolverton. An artist and writer of sci-fi and humor comics from the 1930s through the ’70s and an alum of Mad magazine in subsequent decades, Wolverton showed a consistent partiality for screwball portraiture, and the nearly 150 works in this exhibition constitute “a ghastly gang of goops” (to borrow a phrase from the artist himself). His mid-’60s sketches of illogically deformed heads for Topps chewing-gum cards (one could plan a show simply around the who’s who of cartoonists—including Art Spiegelman, Kim Deitch, Drew Freidman, and Bill Griffith—who have created art for Topps) rank among the show’s most outlandishly gruesome pieces. In fact, Wolverton’s intricate, often dense hatch work and nutty caricatures anticipate much of the cracked subversion of ’60s underground comix, Crumb’s textured satires in particular.

A thin line exists between Wolverton’s jokey grotesqueries and the horrors of disfigurement and mutilation that appear in his postwar illustrations of the Book of Revelations (recently published in The Wolverton Bible). The carbuncle-covered figures in Plague of Darkness with Boils, ca. 1950, for instance, bear resemblance to a host of heinously rendered Mad readers drawn four years later. Wolverton’s unsparing depictions of nightmarish prophecies are relentlessly grim but absorbingly so. There are hints of Goya’s crazed, melancholic Saturn and predictions of Charles Burns’s brooding mutant teens. In most of the biblical drawings on view, men and women are, if not the immediate focal point, very much the purpose. Such humanity is everywhere in Wolverton’s art—as much in the laughably goony portraits as in the fire-and-brimstone ferocity.

— Nicole Rudick

Any photograph with both Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp in frame can hardly avoid being of interest, and Stephen Shore’s black-and-white study of the pair hanging out at New York’s Cordier Ekstrom Gallery in 1965 is no exception. But while sprinkled liberally with the magic fairy dust of art-historical celebrity, it also happens to be a decent picture in formal and conceptual terms. Warhol, standing close to Shore’s lens and behind a camera of his own, turns quizzically in the photographer’s direction while Duchamp chats to then Philadelphia ICA director Sam Green. Like the rest of this body of work documenting the Factory’s heyday, the shot combines an intimate viewpoint with a deceptively casual composition that embodies Shore’s emergent interest in fusing art with everyday life.

Other works from “The Velvet Years” sparkle with a similarly effortless glamour. All Andy’s famous friends, from a glacially beautiful Nico to a shades-wearing Lou Reed, are in the house and playing to type—it’s almost too good to be true. A striking snap of Diana Hall training a revolver at Andy’s head seems to anticipate Valerie Solanas’s later and rather more serious attack, but for the most part, the storied studio looks like a twenty-four-hour party, people, the only clouds in the sky made of silver foil. In the rear gallery are two entries from a series of Manhattan street-life panoramas taken in 2000. Time capsules of the most elegant stripe, they focus on the unconscious gestures and expressions of anonymous pedestrians. A noble exercise, but it’s the Superstars who’ll be remembered.

— Michael Wilson

Mark Flood’s work is difficult to judge, largely because he mocks the entire context surrounding it. In this exhibition, for instance, pieces of cardboard are blithely spray-painted with phrases such as ANOTHER PAINTING, and the installation WART SCENE USA, 2009, offers a map of the United States that highlights New York, Los Angeles, and Marfa as AMERICA’S COOLEST WARTSCENES. The confrontationally adolescent yet cleverly self-aware humor displayed here characterizes Flood’s work, which relies on abject comedy to interrogate the condition and evolution of the art world.

The more surprising part of Flood’s exhibition is, somewhat ironically, his series of large-scale “lace” paintings, the latest installment of a project on which the artist has focused for close to a decade. Although undoubtedly decorative, they explore the parameters of painting and its process by using acrylic paint to vividly evoke the texture of found fabric. One work, Duchess, 2009, consists of a smudged rainbow of paint that simulates ripped lace. Flood’s process provides a sense of both entropy and aesthetic appeal, the former of which is enhanced by the fatalistic titles of some works in the series, including Shallow Grave, 2009, and Emotional Scar, 2009. The artist’s seemingly irreconcilable agendas––a lowest-common-denominator sense of humor and revisionist exploration of painting––are joined in the painting Warm, 2005, which depicts a distorted and faceless female body posed provocatively in a gesture that could as easily be intended to insult as to seduce. In contrast to Flood’s overtly incendiary text-based work, this figure features the same evocation of delicately textured fabric that is found in his lace paintings, a combination that simultaneously disparages and expresses faith in the genre.

— Britany Salsbury

In his habitual deployment of curatorial frameworks derived from instruction-based Conceptual art—frameworks themselves derived from the simple routines and rituals of everyday life—White Columns director and chief curator Matthew Higgs turns mastery of the obvious into a virtue. Making expert use of a jam-packed Rolodex, Higgs specializes in assembling exhibitions and publications in which deceptively straightforward prompts blossom into fascinating composite portraits of art-world communities. Over the past few seasons, the theory and practice of collecting have become regular foci; “Trade” featured works exchanged between artists, while “Male” presented the personal acquisitions of photography critic Vince Aletti. “Collection of . . .” is similar, showcasing art in a range of media owned by six individuals who, however enviable their holdings, generally blanch at the designation “collector.”

Occupying one wall apiece, Michael Clifton, Clarissa Dalrymple, Matt Keegan, Cary Leibowitz, Amie Scally, and Linda Yablonsky each allow the viewer into a previously private world. As Higgs admits, there is little discernible logic to the displays; they reflect the quirks of happenstance and personal predilection. Leibowitz, an artist and auction-house specialist, comes closest to a coherent look via campy drawings and paintings by Tom of Finland, Peter Saul, and David Robilliard, while the teetering stacks of books in Yablonsky’s section not only contextualize her aesthetic but infuse it with distinct personality. A brief interview in the gallery’s house zine reveals that the writer doesn’t even regard the idiosyncratic stash as meaningfully separate from her life at all—asked for concluding thoughts, she responds: “Thank you for introducing me to my art collection.”

— Michael Wilson

Things are not always as they seem. That’s the de facto premise of Ruben Ochoa’s “Collapsed,” an exhibition comprising a fifteen-foot-wide by eighteen-foot-long slab of concrete that leans against a gallery wall and is partially covered with mounds of red dirt also filling much of the floor space. Related to Extracted, 2006, exhibited at LAXART, “Collapsed” continues Ochoa’s exploration of infrastructure, particularly the interminable Los Angeles freeway system; fittingly, his favored materials include galvanized fence posts, cement, dirt, and chain-link.

“Collapsed” functions in several ways. The more obvious is the recontextualization of urban materials––a concrete roadbed, compacted red earth––to highlight the ways our built environment shapes our experience; the more rewarding is the work’s deconstruction of how we see and judge art. Ochoa has left a tantalizing amount of empty space beyond the piles of earth, encouraging curious viewers to pass beneath the hefty concrete. Once safely on the other side, they are met with a surprise: What appeared to be mounds of earth are, in fact, “images” of mounds of earth, lifelike reproductions thanks to a skeletal support of chicken wire and burlap. One discovers that “Collapsed” is not only a site of urban destruction, with its ensuing associations. It is also a platform, a Hollywood stage on which to enact the spectacular discord between expectations and reality. This sculptural sleight of hand is a chance to see form anew, if only momentarily, before inevitable narrativistic impulses carry the viewer beyond the gallery’s threshold.

— Julia Dault

The black-and-white photographs of Unica Zürn’s body—bound by string, coiled, and reduced to a sack of bulbous flesh—are some of Hans Bellmer’s most admired works and, until recently, her mere cameo in art history’s canon. As a remedial course, perhaps, this elegant show offers a bounty of Zürn’s automatic drawings, a few shimmering paintings, and some brilliant pieces of her writing (for which she is most regarded). Although it reprises themes set forth in Ubu Gallery’s similar 2005 show, the Drawing Center exhibition thoughtfully and tenderly examines her short career and mental illness without didactically trying to “rediscover” her and without mythologizing her suicide at age fifty-four or her interest in sadomasochism. The tranquil sea-blue walls and the thick black frames here temper the hotness of these issues, and so do the sweet, nearly oceanic and biomorphic forms in her finely detailed renderings. These creatures hover at the center of her pages, bearing multiple countenances, breasts, limbs, and orifices, though, unlike a Bellmer "Poupeé," rarely do Zürn’s striations recall actual bodies. Instead, forty-nine mostly untitled works here offer roving, repetitive deviations: delicate lines, smudged ink, and twisting spirals appear as faces, then just shapes, and finally as faces, again, through an echolike effect. Intense and otherworldly, they offer a window into a mind that contemporary artists––particularly those invested in psychedelic motifs––should investigate. For some, her work might feel like the sun against their eyes; for others, a beacon in the distance.

— Lauren O’Neill-Butler