Joyce Kozloff’s exhibition/installation “An Interior Decorated” employs every surface save the ceiling, so the whole overwhelms at first in a dazzling array of color and pattern. A case could be made for the importance of its overall effect, but for me, her art really comes to life close up. You have to get near to see the tiles, to see what they’re made of, how they’re painted, how they’re different from one another, where their pattern-units come from. You have to get down in a prone or prayerlike position on the floor to savor the complex collage of cultural material. The pattern structure

Billy Al Bengston lives in California. His art is every nightmare a New York Serious Art Person ever had about California art. There is the old story about an artist who races cars, surfs, and lives year-round at the beach. And his better known shiny, candy-colored, car spray paintings—well, cars, Los Angeles, and eternal adolescence all go together.

Bengston was temporarily accepted and authorized by the Eastern establishment as a Pop Art devotee. He disappeared from New York after that—misunderstood and forever tagged and shelved. He surfaced, quite to my surprise, in the Whitney Biennial this