A kinder, gentler Conceptualist: This is the honorific curators Mark Godfrey and Jenni Lomax attempt to bestow on Douglas Huebler—one they hope will elevate him from his current status as perhaps the most important overlooked figure in Conceptual art.The first large scale exhibition of Huebler’s work in Britain features thirty-five photo- and text-based pieces from the late ’60s and early ’70s and focuses, to quote Lomax, on the “humane and humorous vein” in Huebler’s work. The back cover of the accompanying catalogue boasts a photograph of the artist flanked by Robert Barry, Lawrence

Tradition decrees that Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy, 1964, be “remembered” the wrong way up. The work’s best-known documentary photo shows Schneemann and a co-performer zooming, as if airborne, toward the viewer, their befeathered bosoms defying gravity—a dynamic effect achieved by displaying the photo true to the camera’s view: upside-down. Variously cropped or stretched, this image dominated the press’s representations of the Whitechapel’s “A Short History of Performance: Part One.” Viewed the “right” way up the image is less exuberant.

Likewise, as restaged by the artist and a group of

Encountering images moving in darkness, images that may or may not make sense but which stir up visceral emotions, primal anxieties—what could be more like having a dream than watching a movie? The answer, often, is: walking through a video or film installation. Making your way carefully through the murky labyrinth of disparate elements (moving and still images, lights and pockets of darkness, objects and props disposed through distinct spaces) allows for only one sure experience: losing sight of everything you’re not looking at right then.

Freud spoke of the “navel” of a dream, a point