Robert Gober took four years to make his new untitled installation at the Geffen Contemporary, two to think it, two to craft it. The result doesn’t so much exceed expectations as it utterly defeats them. Nothing here is quite what you would expect—of Robert Gober, or of contemporary art.

Just to begin, Gober’s piece reinstitutes the tradition of the grand narrative summation. Such summations rarely constitute an artist’s best work, strained, as they often are, under the weight of definitive answers, defensive posturing, or high purpose: Gustave Courbet’s The Artist’s Studio, Paul Gauguin’s Where

The question of how things grow is not unlike the question of how things come to be. In Ginny Bishton’s photocollage on vellum, a thing of wacky wonder, the grids of individually cutout color photographs of fruits and garden vegetables—asparagus, squash, red peppers, yellow tomatoes, bananas, blueberries, cherries, potatoes, mushrooms, kiwi, limes, cabbage, string beans—can be seen at once as a garden, a commentary on color theory and the abstract nature of the world around us, and a flag staking out Bishton’s turf. When viewed in conjunction with her drawings, the collage’s exploration of the

For those of you who thought camp was dead, Reverend Ethan Acres has arrived to demonstrate that it was just festering in the open wound that is Las Vegas. Acres, recently featured in “The Vegas Show” at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery, is the product of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The art world’s current focus on Las Vegas seems to be another sad attempt to recapture some of the glitz and instant marketability of the ’80s. This strategy takes a page directly from pop music by promoting a form of regionalism—searching for an art-world equivalent of Minneapolis or Seattle.

Acres has all the

Robert Gober took four years to make his new untitled installation at the Geffen Contemporary, two to think it, two to craft it. The result doesn’t so much exceed expectations as it utterly defeats them. Nothing here is quite what you would expect—of Robert Gober, or of contemporary art.

Just to begin, Gober’s piece reinstitutes the tradition of the grand narrative summation. Such summations rarely constitute an artist’s best work, strained, as they often are, under the weight of definitive answers, defensive posturing, or high purpose: Gustave Courbet’s The Artist’s Studio, Paul Gauguin’s Where

The question of how things grow is not unlike the question of how things come to be. In Ginny Bishton’s photocollage on vellum, a thing of wacky wonder, the grids of individually cutout color photographs of fruits and garden vegetables—asparagus, squash, red peppers, yellow tomatoes, bananas, blueberries, cherries, potatoes, mushrooms, kiwi, limes, cabbage, string beans—can be seen at once as a garden, a commentary on color theory and the abstract nature of the world around us, and a flag staking out Bishton’s turf. When viewed in conjunction with her drawings, the collage’s exploration of the

For those of you who thought camp was dead, Reverend Ethan Acres has arrived to demonstrate that it was just festering in the open wound that is Las Vegas. Acres, recently featured in “The Vegas Show” at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery, is the product of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The art world’s current focus on Las Vegas seems to be another sad attempt to recapture some of the glitz and instant marketability of the ’80s. This strategy takes a page directly from pop music by promoting a form of regionalism—searching for an art-world equivalent of Minneapolis or Seattle.

Acres has all the