During the past five years, Kit Schwartz has travelled around Europe and the United States with a list of 12 questions to ask people in the art world—historians, critics, museum administrators, curators, collectors, and art dealers. All the responders know beforehand what the questions will be, they agree to answer, and they know their answers will exist in context with all the other answers given to the same question. Generally speaking, an interview, per se, can either stimulate a standard, by-the-rules statement of what the responder thinks the interviewer wants to hear; or it may get extremely

Cindy Snodgrass’ collages—delicate, artificial flowers, eggshells stuffed with feathers, and dials from old watches—contrast with the 35-story, Mies van der Rohe tower, whose massive exhibition space is often dominated by formal, abstract, large-scale art. Hung in the center of each lobby window, these collages reflect the same idea as Snodgrass’ pneumatic sculpture, in which flexibility is planned after the exigencies of site: what altitudes allow a maximal spread, what is the reflection from the surrounding architecture, what are the projected weather conditions, and what guy wires can be

By existing as metaphor—tongue-in-cheek, humble, elegant, witty, sensual, and dry—Thomas Kovachevich’s paper performers communicate on a variety of levels. The visual set-up has elements of science, art, and dream. Four metal basins, or “stages,” are placed side by side, on an elevated square platform. Three basins hold a little water on which float various materials: a square drape of crimson satin, a tossle of powder blue satin with inlets of water, and a large, heavy, white paper triangle island. The fourth basin is empty, a dark, matte texture that contrasts with the water, which steams

This exhibition includes four kinds of painting by Harold Gregor, all Photo-Realist, and based on Midwestern land and light. They include landscapes in which a frontal or three-quarter view shows sky and a densely grown field; “flatscapes” in which an aerial view of farm, field, road, creek, and an occasional car is tipped as if to slide downward on the canvas; scenes in which an oblique view of trucks and people depict farming activities; and barns or corn cribs, in which most of the canvas is taken up by the image of the simple structure.

The first three types are done well, but add little to

Most of the designs by these Chicago architects are for fixed, intelligible, logically placed and constructed forms that shut out the physical world, in one way or another. Stanley Tigerman’s Little House in the Clouds is split into symmetrical halves, each a smooth, curvilinear silhouette that looks like a continuous roof. One half is the house; the other is cropped shrubbery, a mirror-image symbolizing man’s ordering of the natural world in his own guise. Stuart E. Cohen, too, shows man defining himself through his product. His Kindergarten Chats facade is an anonymous box-with-triangle-top