Courtesy Mungo Thomson

Mungo Thomson proposes a piece in which viewers enter to find a cloud of marijuana smoke.

In 1966, Robert Smithson, famous for piling up mud and black basalt in Utah's Great Salt Lake and sculpting it into a 1,500-foot coil called Spiral Jetty, went rock hunting with sculptor Donald Judd. They went in New Jersey, where Smithson was from, and spent an hour chopping away at a lump of lava in the center of a Montclair quarry, because they'd heard lava lumps yield quartz crystals.

Then they stopped at a nearby ice cream bar to eat "AWFUL AWFUL" ice cream bars -- "awful big and awful good" -- Smithson writes in an essay on the trip published posthumously (he died in a 1973 plane crash while surveying sites for a Texas earthwork). They also saw flashy roadside signage and abandoned excavation equipment, and visited another quarry that "resembled the moon." For Smithson, rock hunting meant fantasy, infinity and chaos, but also kitsch curiosities.

"Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974," an exhibition about to open at MOCA, aims to show how land art like Smithson's involved so much more than just an "escape to nature" impulse. Curated by Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon, it has been in the works since 2007 and has suffered some hiccups, understandably, given that the show is about artists who make milelong drawings in desert sand or grow hog pastures in galleries. It originally was scheduled to open April 8, but that was pushed to May 28 to make time for more fundraising.

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Courtesy the artist, Blum & Poe and Gladstone Gallery

Carroll Dunham's Sketches for The Alienist (1997)

Before the New York Studio Program moved from Lower Manhattan to DUMBO, art students there used to gaze from their studios into the apartment painter Carroll Dunham shared with his wife, photo artist Laurie Simmons. Sometimes they could watch the two eating dinner. Maybe they could see the artists' daughters -- Lena Dunham, who now, years later, co-writes and stars in HBO's new series Girls, and her younger sister, Grace Dunham -- but the daughters don't factor into stories I've heard. Even Simmons, who has exhibited her smart photographs of paper dolls, sex dolls and dioramas in New York since 1980, barely warrants mention.

Seeing Carroll Dunham was the coup, which makes sense. For college-age artists trekking through art's past in hopes of finding out what it means to be of the present, he's an attractive pit stop. He's the solitary, obsessive artist who kept painting even after painting had begun to seem passé, who gravitates, as if unable to help himself, toward crude, adolescent, sexual imagery -- his figures have penis-shaped noses, exposed assholes, caricatured breasts, often painted in cartoonish colors. Yet he has the confident hand and compositional savvy of an abstract expressionist, so everything he does, no matter how disturbing, feels serious.

A mini-retrospective of Dunham's drawings opened at Blum & Poe gallery in Culver City just a week after his daughter's show Girls debuted on HBO, and runs through May 26.

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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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Stefanie Keenan/WireImage

Melanie Griffiths gets grilled by Alex Israel.

See also: James Franco's MOCA Show Opening Night: 'There's Just a Lot of Dicks in There'

In the span of a week, MOCA has subjected us to not one but two art installations that are heavily dependent on celebrity for their content. James Franco's "Rebel" opened the weekend before last at the JF Chen showroom, and this past Saturday night Alex Israel had a video screening and performance of his most recent project, As It Lays, at the Henson Soundstage. Both shows were conspicuously located not at MOCA itself but at pop-up locations in Hollywood.

Franco, a famous actor, and Israel, the son of a well-known art collector, are probably sincere aficionados of culture who believe that they are following a vision. Just like other artists who are less blessed with connections and resources, they work with what they've got, and their lives/backgrounds provide the fodder for their work. It just so happens that Hollywood is that fodder. Franco takes the myth of James Dean and all of its attendant psychosocial issues and "blows it up" through a multilayered re-examination of the film Rebel Without a Cause, while Israel makes odd artistic confections out of a series of short interviews with high-level celebrities. But both projects fall significantly short of gelling into cogent, persuasive works of art.

Franco buoys "Rebel" with a wealth of interesting ideas and observations on acting and the James Dean legacy, as sketched out in his exhibition essay, entitled "Some James Dean Shit." He also enlists a team of impressive, credible artists to join him in his explosive exploration.

But the result is just a loud, immature assault on the senses that is offputting in its many shameless excesses. Naked women with machetes reinterpret the film's famous knife fight scene, cartoon cats give each other blow jobs, and dead celebrities like Natalie Wood and Brad Renfro are the subject of garish odes. All of this is nestled within a gratuitous re-creation of the Chateau Marmont hotel that feels like a truly misguided Disney theme park.

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Kevin Scanlon

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2012 issue. Check out our entire People 2012 issue here.

The art world sometimes takes itself too seriously. Franklin Sirmans doesn't. But that doesn't mean he isn't a serious player. He just knows how to have fun, even while doing significant work.

The proof in Sirmans' pudding are shows such as "The Beautiful Game: Contemporary Art and Fútbol," organized to coincide with the 2006 World Cup, and "One Planet Under a Groove" from 2001, examining the influence of hip-hop on contemporary art.

Jean-Michel Basquiat "was making music in the late '70s, doing hip-hop before you could really call it that, and was with all of those graffiti artists," Sirmans says. "It was about all of those things coming together."

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photo by Jacy Wojcik

Photo booth art by Jef Aerosol

The 2012 International Photobooth Convention was held this past weekend at the Electric Lodge in Venice. Yes, a gathering for hard-core enthusiasts of booths where you sit and get your photo taken.

But let's clear things up. These are not the digital photo booths of today. They are not the kind your cousin Denise had at her wedding, which seemed like a good idea until everyone was taking hilarious photos of themselves instead of paying attention to the cake-cutting ceremony and she cried.

These are the photochemical booths of yesteryear. The kind that haven't been made since the '70s/early '80s, can be expensive to maintain, require chemicals, and are a pretty rare commodity. Rare in the sense that, as convention co-founder Brian Meacham explained, these photo booths may have gotten new shells in the '90s but the moving parts are hodge-podged around from different machines. Even rarer in the sense that, we learned, all the old photochemical photo booths in Europe have been trashed, save a few Swiss booths now in Berlin; all the rest are digital. There is a growing community for photochemical booth fanatics and artists and this was their Comic-Con.

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Kevin Scanlon

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2012 issue. Check out our entire People 2012 issue here.

Standing in his studio at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Dan Goods places a small cube of gel in a visitor's hand. He looks the visitor in the eye.

Then he gets out the blowtorch.

"Trust me," he says with a grin.

The flame hits the translucent cube, but there's no heat coming through the cube's bottom. When the flame is extinguished and you pass your hand over the top, it's barely warm.

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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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Courtesy of Performa

Actors Annie Fox and Rafael Jordan in Liz Magic Laser's work I Feel Your Pain (A Performa Commission)

Shakespeare famously wrote, "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." He was speaking metaphorically, of course, but in this age of total media saturation and dominance, when everything we see on TV and in the movies is choreographed and manipulated for maximum audience response, his words have the disturbing ring of literal truth.

It is this observation that galvanizes much of the work of Liz Magic Laser (her real name), a New York-based artist who just opened "The Digital Face," a show of videos and collages at Various Small Fires in Venice. Laser is an up-and-coming artist known for directing provocative performance art pieces with a heavy degree of audience interaction. She has been receiving strong notices for her work from New York art critics, and this is her first showing in Los Angeles.

The centerpiece of this well-curated introduction to Laser's oeuvre is I Feel Your Pain, a long video work with several tricky layers. Laser first pored over thousands of hours of news interviews, political speeches, press conferences and even self-help and advice books, adapting and splicing together chunks of their texts to shape a melodramatic narrative script.

She then hired professional actors to bring life to the script and had them enact the play while sitting amongst a theater audience that had been gathered for this purpose. The play was filmed in episodic scenes and projected onto the screen of the theater, at the same time that it was being acted out. Thus, the audience members were both viewers of the play and extras acting in it.

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Photo by Lenika Cruz

Arcana Books settling into its new space at Helms Bakery

If you're one of those shoppers who struts into bookstores, clutching a latte in one hand and wrangling a book off the shelf with the other, Lee Kaplan thinks you should be a little ashamed of yourself. Lee and his wife, Whitney, own Arcana Books on the Arts, one of the best bookstores around for new and used books on contemporary visual arts. Not only is that latte a threat to the merchandise in a commercial sense, but it's also a nasty slur against the bound and printed page.

"We're not big fans of liquid in our store," says Lee. Embarrassed, I recall that I walked in for our interview with a big, dumb, styrofoam cup of coffee. "A majority of people would walk in with their bag from Barnes & Noble and their cup of coffee. We'd say" -- his voice becomes light and decorous -- "'Can we please check those at the counter for you?' And they'd assume we were accusing them of stealing, turn on their heels and walk out." Lee swivels his eyes as if to say, I don't get it. "But most people would peek their head in and think we were too weird."

Thanks to a series of fortuitous events, Arcana has happily ditched the Barnes & Noble foot traffic runoff and its longtime home on Third Street Promenade -- where it had been since 1989 -- for newer, much nicer digs at the Helms Bakery building in Culver City. A soft opening is set for Tuesday, and customers will be able to look around and make purchases, but there is still much work left to be done for Lee, Whitney and their seven employees.

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