Five years ago, “light artist” connoted not only certain materials, but style as well, pigeonholing the artist as equal parts technical innovator and radical esthetician; now, the distinctions among artists such as Dan Flavin, Robert Irwin and Doug Wheeler are obvious and essential. (Irwin is more or less a painter, Wheeler a phenomenologist and Flavin is, well, Flavin.) Doug Wheeler’s single new work is “mature”; that, and the tenor of the times establish Wheeler as an individual(ist) sensibility, rather than a mere technological militant.

The new work is a lighted wall in a large room specially

Not so Peter Zecher’s “Objects,” friendly conglomerations of Dada, assemblage, Pop, “new materials” and funk. They are based quite openly on juxtapositions, abutments of word and image, image and material, and material and the object itself. There are nine comfortably sized objects (life-size to table-top) in the front gallery, and four more two-dimensional, picturesque (and nowhere near as good) pieces in the back. The nine in front are: 1) “fish” scripted in blue neon inside a water-filled glass sausage atop a corrugated glossy green mount; 2) a small, seven-deep arrangement of fuzzy grey “

I admit a prejudice in favor of Ray Parker; many second-line abstractionists, excellent artists, suffered from the presence of the heavies like de Kooning and Kline and the funnel-focus of “serious” art in the late fifties. Some, like Al Leslie, switched styles and survived on the market; others, like Norman Bluhm, stuck maniacally to the heaving about of paint. Parker, like Robert Goodnough, happened to find an open spot within Abstract Expressionism and homesteaded it (in Parker’s case, the tract lies between Rothko and Gottlieb). Although, as students, we had a hunch there was something pretty

Vija Celmins’s graphite drawings are, in spite of the represented landscape space and/or distance, extraordinary in their power. One feels confronted, hit in the face with the images.

There are fourteen small drawings: six views of the moon, seven sections of ocean, one (late) sky which is comparatively negligible, and one large oceania. The moon drawings are taken from satellite photos and involve several variations: “interior” rectangles of magnification or differing views; renderings of glare a la current cinematography; straight down relief-map-like views and more orthodox elevations with

Michael Todd, who has been on the faculty of the University of California at San Diego for the past year and a half, has been given the central courtyard of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla as an exhibition space for an indefinite period. It is a curious setting for sculpture. The building designed by Louis Kahn is “perfect” in its form and detail, a massive and calculated medievalism set on the bluffs above the Pacific. The two four-story blocks of offices and laboratories constructed of concrete and weathered teak fall upon an open court, paved with slabs of travertine,

About two years ago, Eric Orr, a sculptor who describes himself as an environmentalist, began a modest experiment with the class of high school students he taught at the Los Angeles Junior Art Center. Orr had become fascinated with the structural and spatial possibilities to be found within controlled sound sources and sound inputs. Demonstrating that it was possible to define shapes and spaces quite precisely if impalpably with standing waves and patterns of interference of one sound source operating against another, Orr proposed to his class that a tunnel be constructed which would be lined