In one of his acute essays about Richard Prince’s work, Jim Lewis honed in on the artist’s strange insistence on “facticity as a precondition of artmaking.” Certainly facts (in the form of handwriting, verbatim ads, jokes) perform an important role in Prince’s project—giving credence to Lewis’s conclusion: “As a consequence Prince’s work is as much a matter of its absences as it [sic] presences: there is no beauty, no expression, no imitation of the real, nothing to be interpreted, appreciated, no immediately visible rhetoric, nothing original.” I start here because one of the reasons Prince’s

Our species’ relationship with nature is as long, awkward, and enigmatic as any we have known, and in his second solo Los Angeles show, Olafur Eliasson continues his ongoing meditation on the subject with works that, using culture and technology as an interface, deliver landscapes light, and even rainbows.
Included in the exhibition are two photographic series featuring vividly green rivers in both urban and pastoral settings (in each case, the artist added a temporary, environment-safe dye to the water shortly before snapping the shutter). On one of the gallery walls, one notices the graceful

At the entrance to the museum, viewers were greeted to the exhibition by a sculpture of a larger-than-life black male figure hanging upside down. Executed in bronze and attached to the ceiling by a chain, Alison Saar’s Traveling Light, 1999, functions on one level as a bell, emitting a deep-toned chime when visitors pull a cord at the center of its back. But it is also a representation of a lynching, the violence of the act held at bay while the dignity of the figure shines through. The funereal yet heroic sculpture possesses a determined quality, a resistance to violation that seems to cast a