Snot-nosed yet affable, young and bored to death, the character Chris Wilder broadly sketches in his latest outing enjoys swap meets, the Butthole Surfers, thinking about bugs, and watching daytime television. As personas go, his is not entirely unattractive. The problem is that Wilder doesn’t lend the sketch much detail; he doesn’t describe so much as broadcast what’s already a threadbare stereotype. Compiled from an array of abject artifacts, such as brightly colored fake-fur pillows and shag-carpet toilet-seat covers, Wilder’s work avoids the look of self-important art, suggesting instead a

When Charles Arnoldi began exhibiting in the early ’70s, his work offered a delicately organic alternative to the high-gloss formalism that dominated current Los Angeles painting. While everyone was flexing their heads about flatness, surface, and edge, Arnoldi was making paintings out of tree branches. Debarking the branches, gluing them into rectangular formations, and painting them with various colors, Arnoldi coasted for over a decade, but, as so often happens with art-world innovations successful enough to become trademarks, Arnoldi wore the gesture out.

While adopting the conventions of

Kiki Smith’s sculptures and installations focus on the body, specifically what “civilized” society has proscribed as taboo: sex, death, disease, and their various excretions. Given the hegemony of the far right in the ongoing struggles for abortion rights and the financing of AIDS research, it is not surprising that many artists have made the body their current cause célèbre. However, with trendy post-Conceptualists citing Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Georges Bataille (and, by extension, the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch) as their theoretical gurus, it’s important to

George Stone’s latest kinetic installation, Men and Women, 1991, consists of twin metal mechanisms, mounted from floor to ceiling in the middle of an otherwise empty gallery, each holding a video monitor that moves up, down, and around the structure of shiny metal poles. The videotapes show slow camera pans that move along and around the nude figures of a man or a woman, gradually revealing every inch of the subjects’ flesh. It becomes quickly apparent that the motions of the monitors in the gallery mimic exactly the movements in space of the cameras that tracked the now-absent figures.

The