If Edward Kienholz had sprung upon us his latest body of work two or three (or especially more) years ago, it is uncertain whether many would have rushed to buy it, whole or piecemeal. What is so fascinating about the dauntlessly cheerful willingness of his public to barter for his hundreds of new watercolors is that Kienholz has negotiated a preposterously brazen and entirely characteristic deal, openly, largely by timing himself right. He is acquiring lots of money and, to boot, most of the possessions he might otherwise have to purchase with it, by trading on a current esthetic vagary: “

It’s taken longer than it should have for Ron Cooper’s work to be shown, not piecemeal in gallery back rooms or in a Plastic Group show context, but on its own. Cooper has worked well and long enough now to merit serious attention—the problem with him is perhaps that the odd retreatingness and quiescence of his art make it seem at first unevolved, rather maddeningly bland, or not satisfyingly stylistic. One doesn’t easily see what’s there. Coming into his present one-man show at the Ace Gallery, for example, I was at first left rather cold by the mildness of its appearance. The four box-like

Edward Moses’ first show in five years (at the Mizuno Gallery) is composed entirely of lithographs executed at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop last year. Moses’ training and experience as an architect is clearly evident in this work which resembles architecture in its structure, but not in the impalpability of its color relationships.

Although not particularly happy at having produced works which were printed (and thus not unique), Moses found it was possible to achieve the color clarity and diffusion he desired only through a graphic process. Moses answers his disaffection with the graphic

Eugenia Butler has re-established herself in her own gallery and has opened with the first one-man exhibition of Allen Ruppersberg. Ruppersberg reorders natural forms by reducing and rearranging them. The sparsely installed exhibition consisted of six pieces exhibited in the gallery, and Location Piece, a large construction built and exhibited in a tacky Sunset Boulevard office building several miles from the gallery.

In the gallery, the most arresting work, Floor Piece, consists of four low muslin-covered boxes about two feet square and eight inches high on which are arrayed a single round grey

The metaphoric title of George Herms’ first exhibition in several years is “Wooden Moonbeams,” a title which might be derived from one of Herms’ own poems. The objects exhibited are intimate in scale and quite formal in organization. “Wooden Moonbeams” are built on smallish square pieces of wood, divided along the diagonals to form an “X” shape. The structure is painted in a flat color, usually black, and the four triangular “rooms” are populated with objects selected both for their appearance and powers of literary evocation.

One of the best such pieces is Wooden Moonbeams No. 7 and 8, subtitled