The stage is set and lights dimmed. Whenever you might have chosen to enter Geoffrey Farmer’s complex theatrical environment Let’s Make the Water Turn Black, 2011, the play had always already begun and you were late, again. Instead of actors, groups of various found objects and constructed props, magazine pictures, and mechanized sculptures, large and small, enacted the installation’s protracted and looping drama on the sprawling light-gray platform that occupied the center of the darkened gallery.

Clustered in spotlit tableaux and dispersed according to far-reaching compositional schemes, sundry

In his 2010 essay “Tuymans, Loyola, Leibniz,” Mexico City–based artist Pablo Sigg describes painter Luc Tuymans’s canvases as involving a “suspension of the surface that is separated from the depth and weight of matter.” The same could read as a description of Sigg’s own Anemic Cinema, 2008, a pivotal work in the younger artist’s solo debut at ltd los angeles. One of seven works on view, Anemic Cinema takes its title from Duchamp’s 1926 film of the same name and uses as its base content footage from the 1973 movie The Exorcist. Digitally dissecting a nine-minute clip wherein two priests purge

Employing sophisticated strategies of appropriation and montage, Robert Heinecken (1931–2006) developed a practice that anticipated the exploration of identity and mass media subsequently taken up by many younger artists, in particular, those associated with the Pictures generation. This spring, two exhibitions in Los Angeles—at Marc Selwyn Fine Art and Cherry and Martin—afforded a comprehensive overview of the late Californian’s oeuvre.

A contemporary of John Baldessari and Wallace Berman, Heinecken was perhaps best known for his appropriative photograms—works (seen at both