Until recently, Richard Artschwager’s work had always been considered an anomaly at the margins of late Modernist practice. Although tied variously to Dada, Surrealism, Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptualism, and long considered seminal in exploring the blurred significations of painting/sculpture, sculpture/furniture, and object/image, the almost fetishistic banality of much of Artschwager’s output makes it extremely difficult to categorize. While his frequent use of Formica, celotex, and media-generated imagery points to a simulationist esthetic critical of Modernism’s innately self-reflexive “

James Casebere constructs and photographs scenes which call to mind childhood’s shadowy visions. He builds miniature tableaux from paper, fiberboard, plaster, and white paint, then lights and photographs them, eventually presenting the photos, blown-up and framed, in lightboxes. This is all we see: not the models themselves but photographic images at least twice removed from the artist’s original constructions. The work seems to have everything to do with the shaping of memory, its vulnerability to manipulation after the fact, and the relationship between photography, nostalgia, and reality.

“Profound Nonsense,” the title of the show, reveals something about Perna’s leanings, his interest in and commitment to absurdity. Perna trusts the messages of silliness, and it works to his benefit. Silliness offers a nuance of meaning, a layer that either confirms or throws judgment. In the center of one room sits Perfect Sense (all works, 1988), a stuffed animal—Dumbo the elephant, to be exact—in a frying pan on top of a cardboard box that once contained stereo speakers, now employed as pedestal. Beside it, a tarred and feathered motorcycle, looking insane and beautiful, entitled El Pollo

In Excerpts from the 9 Symphonies of L. van Beethoven, Für zwei Pianoforte zu vier Händen, Transcription pour Piano à 2 mains, and Für Klavier zu 4 Händen, 1983–85, Stephen Prina continues an investigation into the representation of cultural artifacts. Underlying this investigation are the questions of what constitutes “completeness,” and what is the point at which completeness is exhausted. To explore these questions, Prina in effect produces a palimpsest of the original, often by the manipulation of secondary sources.

The piece is an arrangement of Beethoven's nine symphonies using versions by