Using references when the premise is to eliminate them, is like filling a slot instead of creating new channels

Formulating an external structure of support is to lose a great deal of strength

—Sturtevant, 1978

Fact: I once sat on a panel with Michael Lobel and Sturtevant where Sherrie Levine, Thomas Crow, T. J. Clark, and other pooh-bahs were in attendance. When Sturtevant asked Levine about the word, there was no consensus over for whom, where, or when “appropriationist” was let loose; and neither woman had much truck with the word in relation to her work.

Lauri Firstenberg based her exhibit and

Hirsch Perlman’s black-and-white shots of crude, robotlike figures fashioned from cardboard and propped and piled in an empty bedroom debuted at this gallery in 2001. His second Los Angeles show follows up with four new groups of prints, also black-and-white: doubt-laced attempts to construct something enduring, substantial, meaningful, and grand from the humble and ephemeral materials and fleeting acts of humdrum existence.

For three related series known as “My Reproof,” “Sketches,” and “Apparatum Armorum Ineptum,” Perlman layers more unsure narcissism onto the Pygmalion/Frankenstein impulse of

Mindy Shapero’s image-objects would seem to fit snugly into a West Coast tradition that stretches from John McCracken to Liz Larner; but Shapero, though a recent alumna of the USC graduate program, is a recent transplant from New York, and on closer inspection her work bears as little resemblance to the concerns of this particular region as to those delimiting the more general parameters of contemporary art.

Starting with the smallest constituent parts, Shapero builds her paper works steadily outward by a process of incremental accretion. Some remain modestly scaled, while others rise up on stilts