Nam June Paik’s practice, like that of many of his Fluxus peers from the late ’50s and early ’60s, has existed in uneasy contradiction with the co-opting attempts of the art establishment to circumscribe an ephemeral, often aleatory body of work within an ongoing Modernist/post-Modernist historicism. In much the same way that Joseph Beuys and John Cage have, Paik has become part of the international art elite, his work defined and disseminated in terms of a specific historical time and place. On its own terms, Paik’s work itself has evolved from a dynamic, audience-participatory deconstruction

A collaborative installation here by mother and daughter Betye and Alison Saar, called The House of Gris Gris, 1990, was a collision of the natural and the fabricated—a hut with walls of twigs and moss sandwiched between industrial screening. The work marked out the potential power of art to deal with boundaries, to operate in an “in-between” position. The rest of the exhibition was like a prolonged odyssey or three-dimensional scrapbook. It was prefaced by an intimate, dimly lit foyer in which family photographs and childhood drawings of both artists were exhibited. To each side of this room,

David Smith’s works on paper have incredible presence, dignity, and weight. They seem almost musical in the tense balance they strike between force and restraint, elegance and primitivism, the human and the monumental. The 50 works in this show, executed in oil, tempera, and “egg ink” (ink mixed with egg) date from 1952 to 1960; all but one are untitled. Calligraphic, hieroglyphic, ideographic, and highly gestural, they are as unparaphrasable as the best poetry. Some pieces bring to mind odd-headed stick figures; notation or diagrams for some contemporary tribal dance; curled metal; claws or

Charles Garabedian has consistently painted some of the freshest, most idiosyncratic and emotionally compelling paintings to come out of Los Angeles. His territory is standard: landscape, still life, abstraction, and the figure, and he has made the most of these modes for 25 straight years. At various times all of these genres have crawled and blurred their way into one another in his pictures. In a painting of a cityscape is a solitary arm, lacking a torso, fitted neatly within the archway of a building. Inside a still life are abstract markings, nonsensical calligraphy, and stonelike frozen