Transformation is replacing illusion in today’s art. The paraphernalia which seemed essential only a short time ago has been shelved. Perspective may survive, but it can stand a season’s rest. The actual thing is now bodied forth, when not in actual fact as sculpture in the mass, then as a cast or print of the actual object; not a picture but a replica is replacing the former illusionist’s magic reproduction.

During periods of experiment with new methods and materials the artist almost invariably abandons romantic expression and nostalgia, and the work becomes classical and formal. An exposition

The experimental attitude among artists which has turned many painters to sculpture, and has induced many sculptors to paint or color their surfaces, has also extended itself to graphics. The Hollis Gallery is exhibiting just such a show of experimental prints by Karl Kasten, a painter, and Claire Falkenstein, a sculptor. Kasten has made collages which he inks and then runs as a master, through the press. He has made these printable collages of objects with a slightly raised character, flat in the main, but having some thickness, as metal, cardboard or plastic, rather than paper. (Two of these

William Geis and Bruce Nauman, whose sculptures are now being shown at the San Francisco Art Institute, began the season by joining in a group project in transformation called the Slant Step Show in which the participating artists took a common object, ambiguous but functional, a very used slant step, which had probably been devised for a very routine but specialized purpose, but whose shape seemed to epitomize the anti-functional, or even impossible, and produced their own variations on its shape and meaning.

Geis’s sculptures in plaster are large objects of an organic nature, but they are not

Don't Cry For Me Babey at the de Young Museum is a profound, sympathetic story of the lives of the agricultural workers of the San Joaquin Valley. Ernest Lowe made the photographs over a six-year period, from the spring of 1960 to the spring of 1966, and his photographs show a way of life that has gained little in dignity and security since Steinbeck described it in The Grapes of Wrath in 1939. Many of the workers are still migratory. They follow the crops, picking cherries or apricots, sacking onions, pruning grapevines, and many of them live in ramshackle cabins or in dusty campsites beside

The Dilexi is showing Harry Kramer. Each piece is a deliberate development of a known object into an anti-functional extension of itself which nonetheless is very active in its mechanical involvement: a relentless continuity of an absurd unfunction.

The man-made, and man-influenced nature, is present even in the more pastoral reaches of modern life as Richard McLean’s exhibition of paintings at the Berkeley Gallery attests. McLean’s cows are alert and perfect as the examples on posters for livestock shows. His fleecy ram is mounted not on a hillock or turf, but on an inclined plane of sheet metal.

At Gump’s the gallery goer will return to an idyllic set of landscapes suffused with light and painterly nuance. Art Holman has left behind the abstract linear vortex of past exhibitions, but curiously enough the bed springs, manhole covers, can lids, etc., seem much more real and natural.

—Knute Stiles