In Catherine Opie’s recent show, titled “Surfers,” not on view were swells, waves, nor any, uh, surf. Some might applaud her “economy” in deploying one break, one vantage (horizon midframe), one camera position for the fourteen predictably largish photos of surfers, small in the distance, waiting for waves, poor dears idling one or two at a time or in a school of a dozen or so. In other images, Opie posed individual surfers, a rainbow coalition of wannabes, with their boards for a series of banal portraits. I have no problem with wannabes. At least they want to be something. In this case, they

Once characterized as a Los Angeles variant on a German photographic tradition that now stretches from August Sander to Andreas Gursky, the work Judy Fiskin made between the ’70s and the mid-’90s is a body of sleekly reductive typologies of different West Coast vernaculars. Always working serially, she has tried her hand at all genres, from landscapes (“Desert Photographs,” 1976) to architectural exteriors (“Dingbat,” 1982–83) to interiors and still lifes (“Some Aesthetic Decisions,” 1984, and “Some Art,” 1989–91). The strict regularity, sharply graphic “look,” diminutive scale, and tabletlike

In Michael O’Malley’s recent untitled sculptures, slim birch cubbies resembling book slipcovers act as hubs of an airy network of wooden ducts and tubes; each self-contained system is suspended above the gallery floor. The blond-wood ductworks produce their own web of associations: We think of modernist and modern-ish furniture design from Mies to Eames to IKEA; the paintings of Piet Mondrian and Peter Halley; programming flowcharts and wiring schematics; the negative spaces of ant and gopher colonies, or mines and subways, converted into positive form. When you succeed in ignoring their dependence