WHILE MARLENE DUMAS enjoys international renown, opportunities to see her oeuvre in its full breadth and depth in the United States have been scarce. Over the course of her thirty-year career, the South Africa–born, Amsterdam-based artist has had a number of solo exhibitions here, but her work has never been presented comprehensively. This large midcareer survey, organized by Cornelia Butler and on view this past summer at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, was thus both welcome and arguably overdue. Titled “Measuring Your Own Grave,” the exhibition assembled more than one hundred of

A self-described “couch potato” in her youth, Gillian Wearing assimilates television’s vernacular into her videos and photographic projects. She tracks the ways in which the medium’s representations of reality transform our popular imagination and identity formation. Shown concurrently at Regen Projects, Wearing’s video installation Family History, 2006, and painting series “Pin-Ups,” 2008–, draw on the genres and narratives of contemporary television (so-called reality TV, talk shows, make-over documentaries) in an examination of today’s media-saturated culture, where fame, celebrity, desire,

Though better known in the field of sound art, Steve Roden is a polymath artist, most familiar as a sculptor and painter, whose work descends from West Coast abstractionists like Lee Mullican and Peter Krasnow. But Roden also has a Conceptualist’s fondness for plans and systems, combined with the Surrealist and Dadaist penchant for chance and the irrational, and the Expressionist’s drift toward the idiosyncratic and the ego, all of which are subjected to an old-school formalist’s veto.

The bulk of this show was a selection of paintings, drawings, and collages—the latest additions to an ongoing