Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, N.Y.

Eleanor Antin's 100 BOOTS on the Ferry in the Upper Harbor of New York City in 1973.

This week, snarky performance artist Eleanor Antin remembers Stalin, Paul McCarthy pulls a chair out from under a fictional Natalie Wood and sculptor Emily Counts turns a fax machine mystical.

5. What's war got to do with it?
In the trailer for their new exhibition and performance series, Arjun Neuman and Kestrel Burley wear Bavarian costumes and send mini missiles at each other from across a sidewalk. "Breaking and Entering: Studies in War, Sex and Fear" at Human Resources includes three performances that explore why war is still such a gendered, mostly male thing and why conflicts play out in our minds like a "Sunday comic strip." 410 Cottage Home St., Chinatown; Fri., May 25-Sat., May 26, 8 p.m.; Sun., May 27, 7 p.m.; $10. (213) 290-4752, humanresourcesla.org.

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Courtesy of the artist

Daido Moriyama's photograph Untitled (2011)

This week, artist and sunglasses designer Alex Israel debuts the talk show he shot in the Pacific Design Center, trombonists perform in a downtown art space, and fringe physicists reinvent gravity.

5. They're a collective, not a choir
The trombone is purportedly the brass instrument with a range closest to the human voice -- it's like a Southern preacher, only "with greater amplitude," said poet James Weldon Johnson. It's also one of the oldest instruments. "Trombone choirs" are old things, too, with centuries' worth of arrangements made just for them. But because the Los Angeles Trombone Collective is expressly not a choir, it avoids all of this. Its members favor retooled trombone solos or music not meant for trombone at all. This weekend, at alt-art space the Wulf, the collective will interpret John Cage and debut new live trombone electronica. 1026 S. Sante Fe Ave., #203, dwntwn.; Sat., May 19, 7:30 p.m. (213) 488-1182, thewulf.org.

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Matthew Marks Gallery

Charles Ray's Sleeping Woman (2012), made out of solid stainless steel

This week's list includes an awkward, bearded voyeur in West Hollywood, a picture of a white horse in a Chinatown basement and stereoscopic images of made-up archeology in Crenshaw.

5. Underground Malibu in 3-D
The name "Malibu" comes from "Humaliwo," a word the Chumash Native American people used to mean "where the waves crash loudly." Benjamin Lord calls his new portfolio of stereoscopic photographs the Humaliwo Chambers, because they imagine a web of chambers and tunnels in the Malibu hillside. The photographs -- dense archeological fantasies of miniature coliseums in sand or rock formations covered in graffiti -- are meant to be seen in 3-D through a sterescope viewfinder. Lord has set one up and laid out his portfolios at the end of the main hallway in "Pale Fire," the new show Lily Siegel curated at Latned Atsar. 3222 W. Jefferson Blvd.; through June 4, by appointment. latnedatsar.com.

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Patrick Connor

Jennifer Moon, Prison Relic #2: Typewriter, 2012.

This week's list includes a show about incarceration, Lena Dunham's dad and art for gamers.

5. Behind bars
Artist Jennifer Moon was incarcerated for nine months, though nothing in her current exhibition at Commonwealth and Council tells us why -- except to say she was "a common criminal," not a "political" one. The show does tell us that Moon obsessively picked loose hairs out of her cell bedsheets each morning, dabbled in tobacco smuggling and had a prison romance. Spare photographs of objects she possessed or acquired behind bars hang above little cardboard shelves. There's a book called Where I Learned of Love resting on each, and if you read the bookmarked paragraphs -- which doesn't take long at all -- you'll piece together how Moon learned to assert herself, let herself go and love what she had all at once. 3006 W. Seventh St.; through May 5. (213) 703-9077; commonwealthandcouncil.com.

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Susan Vielmetter Projects

Karl Haendel's drawing Tired Dylan (2008)

[Update: This article previously referred to the MOCA festival curated by Mike D as a fundraiser for the museum. Mercedes sponsored the exhibit, but it was not intended as a fundraiser. The item has been corrected below.]

A festival run by a rapper, a Cadillac in a gallery, a soap opera cast with women in white, "taking account of oneself" taken to its extremes: It feels like spring.

5. So what'cha what'cha what'cha want
Until May 6, the Beastie Boy's Mike D is moonlighting as a MOCA curator. He's organized a festival of audio-video art at MOCA. Backed by Mercedes Benz, the festival has no admissions charge and will, MOCA hopes, bring in several thousand visitors. The artist line-up includes Public Fiction, which is the name of the experimental space Lauren Mackler runs in Highland Park. Mackler has orchestrated her own, quirky festival-within-a-festival at the Geffen. She'll present a panel on cults, a set by electronic improvisers NGUZUNGUZU and a broadcast by homeless, artist-run radio station KChung. 152 N. Central Ave., Little Tokyo; events daily through May 6. (213) 626-6222, moca.org.

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Overduin and Kite

James Lee Byars' The Red Tent (1989) and The Chair for the Philosophy of Question (1996)

The artists on this week's list have endearing idiosyncrasies: James Lee Byars' obsession with the perfect atmosphere, Cai Guo-Qiang's spiritual pyromania and Dasha Sishkin's perverse approach to glamour.

5. Clothing-optional fantasies
If Shel Silverstein, who brought the same twisted humor to his children's books that he brought to his Playboy cartoons, had collaborated with stylishly dark Truman Capote, the results might have been something like Dasha Sishkin's paintings at Susan Vielmetter Projects. These crudely glamorous images show topless or bottomless figures with Pinocchio noses and eyes on their behinds immersed in one long, confusing party. 6006 Washington Blvd., Culver City; through May 12. (310) 837-2117, vielmetter.com.

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Melodie Mousset

"Removing Boulders," from The Rock and Eagle shop

Everything's social this week -- jokes with friends spur a pop-up shop, a four-course meal becomes an exhibition and a group of artists tries to figure out why time can terrify.

5. Dinner-party graveyard
In late March, Jason Kraus invited 12 people to dinner. Everyone had to commit to come seven nights in a row and eat the exact same four-course meal. Each night, Kraus set a new, specially constructed wood table with identical but different china, glasses and silverware. After the final dinner, he cut up the tables and turned them into cabinets. All seven tables-turned-cabinets now hold the stained napkins and cleaned plates, cups and utensils. They're on view in "Dinner Repeated" at Redling Fine Art. It's like a shrine to a party you missed. All you can do is spot the anomalies -- the red wine stains on one shelf, the lipstick marks -- and guess at what happened. 6757 Santa Monica Blvd.; through May 12. (323) 230-7415, redlingfineart.com.

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Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery

Elad Lassry, Man (Ice), 2012

Future and past feel like they're on a collision course this week -- especially in William Leavitt's deceptively mundane drawings of suburbia gone awry and Dennis Hoekstra's and Noah Olmsted's ghostly, garish re-envisioning of the Pacific Design Center.

5. Modern-day mythmaker
Charles Garabedian didn't get the memo, or maybe he just tossed it out. While his peers veered further toward pared-down abstractions (Robert Irwin started making white acrylic discs) and hard-to-grasp conceptualism (Doug Huebler exhibited typewritten "explanations" of black-and-white snapshots), Garabedian dug deeper into mythic narrative: He painted biblical characters topless on TV screens or floodwaters sweeping through Culver City. Work from 1966-76, the first decade of the 89-year-old artist's still-going L.A. career, currently hangs at L.A. Louver, on the second floor. 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice; through May 12. (310) 822-4955, lalouver.com.

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The Box L.A.

Leigh Ledare's Double Bind (2010)

Pacific Standard Time, that half-year, regionwide paean to L.A.'s art history, officially ends on March 31. A show of vintage photographs and one last performance event send it off. Everything else on this week's list is forward-looking.

5. Rebel with a camera
When MOCA staged its big Dennis Hopper retrospective in 2010, it showed glossy, blown-up versions of Hopper's The Fort Worth 400. The exhibit included none of the vintage, 6-by-9-inch 1960s prints of hippies, artists, the Kennedys, Warhol and roadways. Small, scuffed, yellowed and animated by time, these prints by the guy who seemed to be everywhere and know everyone are at Craig Krull Gallery as part of Pacific Standard Time. 2525 Michigan Ave., #B-3, Santa Monica; through April 17. (310) 828-6410, craigkrullgallery.com.

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Courtesy Cardwell Jimmerson

Ben Sakoguchi's "Untitled" painting from 1968

The lineup is excitingly diverse this week: a reprise of Christian Marclay's now-famous 24-hour film, some lush landscape, a little-known L.A. painter, art like a vintage horror movie and (hopefully) not-boring performance.

5. Landscapes for inmates
Kelly Poe's photographs of rural landscapes are almost too pretty -- deep blue desert skies and forest floors so lush they seem like fantasies. They are fantasies, in a way, since Poe made these images after seeking out seven environmental and animal-rights activists who had been labeled domestic terrorists and imprisoned. She corresponded with the activists, asking them about the most comforting outdoor places they remembered; then she tracked down those places and tried to make her photographs of them as mesmerizing as they were in the activists' descriptions. At LAX Art, you can view the images and read the sometimes arduous correspondence between the artist and inmates with too much passion and time on their hands. 2640 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A.; through April 14. (310) 559-0166, laxart.org.

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