Like most of his previous performances, Michael Kelley’s Reflections on a Can of Vernors draws its images from history and geography, and has at its core a central image that forms its title and is echoed in its props. It is a good deal longer than the works that preceded it, and there is a lot more talking; it is, to quote Kelley from the performance, “afflicted with the sin of oratory.” That the piece is long and long-winded is not surprising. His most ambitious work to date, Reflections . . . is Kelley’s history of America.

In spite of the performance’s expanded text, its ostensibly familiar

When the Swedish artist Oyvind Fahlstrom died of cancer in 1976, at the age of 48, he left many paintings and drawings and a few large-scale three-dimensional installations. His most ambitious effort in the latter genre was Meatball Curtain: Homage to R. Crumb, realized in 1969 for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s controversial and well-remembered “Art and Technology” show. High spirits and high ideals collided in a recent revival of the piece.

There is little advanced technology involved in these large freestanding painted metal-and-plastic figures, who owe their shapes and existence, if