The brightly lit parking lot in downtown Los Angeles throbbed with 2,500 spectators, each of whom had just paid eight dollars and signed a waiver absolving the event’s sponsors of responsibility for injury or damage resulting from this piece of performance art. Following a ferocious drumroll of publicity, unprecedented in the history of local performance, San Francisco’s Survival Research Laboratories was about to commence an hour of explosions, collisions, destruction, desecration, mayhem, and simulated murder titled Extremely Cruel Practices: A Series of Events Designed to Instruct Those

Alexis Smith’s new series of collages is collectively titled “Jane,” 1985, and consists of juxtaposed fragments from the memories and myths associated with famous Janes of film and literature. As usual, Smith’s source is mass-media and pop-culture imagery from the late ’40s and ’50s: maps to movie stars’ homes, key rings and costume jewelry, old newspaper clippings, painted neckties, and pieces of fabric. The fragments are then tied together loosely by a text —isolated phrases and sentences which allude to, but refuse to embody, a wider narrative.

Smith’s strategy is to accentuate the paradoxes