THIS PAST NOVEMBER, to kick off a panel discussion about the exhibition “Oranges and Sardines,” curator Gary Garrels asked Amy Sillman—one of the six artists participating in the show—to “describe the situation of abstract painting today.” Sillman adjusted the microphone, took a deep breath, then came up speechless. Finally, she said, “The mind goes blank,” just as Garrels interjected, “Maybe that’s the wrong question.” But his question wasn’t wrong per se—it just didn’t have much to do with the achievement of his exhibition, which takes a more interesting, less expected tack: Garrels asked six

“Many pictures,” Robert Heinecken once noted, “turn out to be limp translations of the known world instead of vital objects which create an intrinsic world of their own. There is a vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph.” This statement neatly divides the history of photography in two and leaves little doubt as to which side of that line Heinecken, who died in 2006 at the age of seventy-four, saw himself on. And, whether intentionally or not, the phrase “limp translations” suggestively points at one of his major fixations. Indeed, a succinct recent survey at Marc Selwyn

Stop-motion animation is generally associated with fairy-tale naïveté, due to its being used, most famously, for kids’ classics like Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town (1970), but, as Nathalie Djurberg shows, this quality is not intrinsic to the medium. In Djurberg’s hands, clay depicts but also distorts, representing the human form for a few seconds before slipping into a series of abject deformations. In such instances, the body seems purely incidental and mimesis beside the point, both of them subordinate to the will of an unruly medium. In fact, the low-tech crudity of stop-motion—its defective

Surely LeRoy Neiman’s sin—committed in the early 1950s, at the apex of Abstract Expressionism, and ensuring him a career of scorn—was to convert the hallmarks of painters like Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock (the splash, slash, dribble, and daub) into a signature for spasmodic expressionist/impressionist pictures of everything from Playboy bunnies to sporting events to presidents. To use Greenbergian language, Neiman pandered to the masses by reducing the avant-garde to kitsch.

Kirsten Everberg’s paintings of White House interiors, modernist buildings, and ancien régime décor and monuments, made

Dave Hullfish Bailey’s latest exhibition looked like a backyard science experiment. Jury-rigged workstations loosely structured the space into three separate areas: one for reading and informational display, another with small science-fair-type geological experiments in water flow and delta formation, and a third in which seedlings of the desert paloverde tree grew beneath fluorescent bulbs. Pieces of raw lumber, plastic ties, extension cords, clamps, pipes, motors, buckets, coffee cans, milk crates, Legos, Xeroxes, old books, saw horses, and a ladder lying on its side made up Bailey’s utilitarian