Western Project 3830 Main Street Culver City, California   90232 310-838-0609 www.western-project.com July 29–September 9, 2006 Tom of Finland invites an intimate, comedic gaze. If there were two keys words for his work, they would be “freedom” and “narrative,” rather than “hot” and “hunky” as some might hazard. True, the topics of a Finland portrait … Continued

A fascination with prehistory links Mr. Heizer’s Stonehenge-like “City” to these sculptural objects, though his architectural forms are fastidiously hard-edged in comparison with the flint-facetted tools. But for all his insistence on freeing himself from European precedents, to explore instead an American sense of wide open space and anti-individual scale, Mr. Heizer’s prehistoric sensibility has a long modernist precedent with deep roots in European culture.

Zwirner & Wirth Until September 9 32 E 69 Street, between Madison and Park Avenues, 212 517 8677 Yes Bruce Nauman Of all the avantgarde artists to emerge in the 1960s, Bruce Nauman is the most deserving of the epithet “counter-cultural.”  Be it high or popular culture you are talking about, Mr. Nauman’s emotionally difficult, … Continued

NANCY RUBINS: BIG PLEASURE POINT Josie Robertson Plaza (Lincoln Center) until September 4 Broadway, between 62nd and 65th Streets NANCY RUBINS: COLLAGES Paul Kasmin Gallery until August 18 511 W. 27th Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-563-4474 HELEN BROUGH: EMULATED FLORA 70 Washington Street, permanently installed between Front and York, 718-222-5555 E.V. DAY: BRIDE … Continued

Byars’s exhibition at MoMA PS1 continues through September 7.

PS1 Contemporary Art Center until September 25 22-25 Jackson Avenue at 46 Avenue, Long Island City, 718 784 2084 A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, July 20, 2006. If you missed “the body” as the de rigeur theme of artists at the “transgressive” cutting edge of avant garde art between, say, … Continued

Cheim & Read 547 W25 Street, between 10 and 11 Avenues, 212 242 7747 Until September 9 Like the artist it celebrates, “The New Landscape/The New Still Life: Soutine and Modern Art” is bursting with energy and ideas. The show presents Chaim Soutine 1893-1943) as a father figure of different traditions, American Abstract Expressionism and … Continued

New York Studio School 8 West 8 Street New York NY 10011 212 673 6466 March 30 to May 13, 2006 The achievement of the American artist Sandra Fisher  (1947–94) was overshadowed during her lifetime by her husband R.B. Kitaj and other School of London artists. Now, 12 years after Fisher’s  death from a cerebral hemorrhage, … Continued

Alexandre Gallery 41 East 57th Street, 13th Floor New York, New York 10022 212-755-2828 May 13 to June 23, 2006 Relationships between the individual and and the communal component of artistic achievement bedevil every generation. T.S. Eliot insisted that every innovation gestates in an affinity with indispensable predecessors. Robert Musil declared that ·”·it is only … Continued

Museum of Modern Art 11 W 53 Street New York City 212-708-9847 June 11–September 4, 2006 The literature surrounding the Douglas Gordon retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art emphasizes time and sociology, while I prefer to think of the work as sculpture; this makes the catalog, which is full of mass-media images, seem beside … Continued