Terry Richardson's James Franco in Drag, Courtesy of the artist and OHWOW Gallery

Franco poses in drag for fashion photographer Terry Richardson, as part of the "Rebel" exhibit currently on display at JF Chen.

"There's just a lot of dicks in there. A lot of porno," painter Ty Williams says, shaking his head. "But I get it, though. I understand the prevalence of penises."

We're standing in the alleyway behind JF Chen, a collectible-furniture showroom and exhibit space, at the opening party for "Rebel," an off-site MOCA multimedia extravaganza produced by the world's most famous grad student, James Franco, in collaboration with an all-star cast of contemporary artists, including Ed Ruscha, Aaron Young, Terry Richardson, Paul McCarthy and Douglas Gordon.

Though Franco was somehow involved in all of the projects shown here, and his ongoing obsession with the sexual secrets and adolescent turmoil behind James Dean and Rebel Without a Cause drives the exhibit, the lineup of bigwigs confers an air of legitimacy lacking at some of Franco's previous shows and stunts.

The exhibit itself has been impressively built-out, looking like a soundstage resembling the Chateau Marmont, with videos playing in individual bungalows and shrubbery strewn with blow-up sex dolls and other detritus referencing the art.

And yes, there were a number of penises on display inside, as Franco and his partners grappled with the pent-up, feverish sexuality of adolescence by exploring, among other themes, the homoerotic tension on-screen in the 1955 film, Dean's real-life bisexuality and a smattering of behind-the-scenes affairs that reportedly took place before and during the shooting of the movie.

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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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Scott Groller

Rigo 23 and his collaborators' Autonomous InterGalactic Planetarium (2009-12)

In 2000, members of the Zapatista Air Force launched an attack on Mexican soldiers stationed in Chiapas. Before this, no one knew the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, notoriously ill-equipped and mainly made up of indigenous people who lived in self-governed rural communities, even had an air force. But how they acquired planes was no mystery: they made them out of paper, folding leaflets with messages and poems written across, then snuck up close enough to send a fleet of hundreds into an army encampment.

Six years earlier, in 1994, when the Zapatistas first became known as a movement, they had donned black ski masks ("so that we would stop being invisible") and staged a largely non-violent revolt against the out-of-touch government, taking control of cities throughout Chiapas. No lives would have been lost if not for the Mexican Army's retaliation. "We didn't go to war to kill or be killed. We went to war in order to be heard," said their leader, Subcomandante Marcos. He also called poetry a "favorite" weapon.

The artist Rigo 23, who made the work for his new exhibition at RedCat in collaboration with Zapatista artists, was in San Francisco when the Zapatistas first revolted. He stole a copy of Yo, Marcos, writings by the Zapatistas' leader, from the Stanford Library and devoured its poetic politics. "It was quite attractive, irresistible even," Rigo now remembers.

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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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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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Courtesy Young Art

David Nemeroff and Cara Benedetto's work False Start

This week's list offers artists making rules, breaking rules or trying to figure out what the rules even are. It also includes a walking tour.

5. War against the photograph
Around 2004, painter David Hockney, famous for slick, smart renderings of SoCal swimming pools and uncomfortably posed socialites, regressed. He began taking easel and paints out into the Yorkshire woods, marrying impressionism with plein air. He did this because he'd become convinced painters as far back as the Renaissance had used mirrors and lenses to aid their work. Since the 1400s, he figured, no one has just looked without the help of equipment. Bruno Wollheim's film David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, which screens at LACMA this week, follows Hockney as he tries to escape the influence of the camera. 5905 Wilshire Blvd.; Mon., March 19, 7 p.m.; $10, $7 for museum members. (323) 857-6010, lacma.org.

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Catherine Wagley

Children get their picture taken with the LACMA Rock in Bixby Knolls

"You remember the Emperor's New Clothes?" asked B.T. Tuggle, secretary of the Bixby Knolls Kiwanis Club. He set up a table Wednesday on Atlantic Avenue for Rockapalooza, the party Long Beach neighborhood Bixby Knolls threw during the LACMA rock's daylong stay on its main drag. The 340-ton granite boulder left a Riverside quarry on Feb. 29 for the museum, where it will become part of Levitated Mass, a sculpture by artist Michael Heizer. Right now, it's covered in white plastic and suspended in a 260-foot transporter. "Only in America would we throw a block party for a wrapped rock," Tuggle said.

On its way to LACMA, the rock is passing through 22 cities, traveling at night at around 5 miles per hour. People have come out to see at every stop, but Bixby Knolls is the only place to stage an official celebration.

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Photo by Brian Forrest.

Installation shot of Mike Kelley's Silver Ball

This week's list includes a tribute, disguise, displacement, hoarder and megalith. It runs the gamut, in other words.

5. Banana face
Urs Fischer likes obstructions and disguises. Better yet are obstructions that double as disguises. For his exhibition at Gagosian in Beverly Hills, he's blown up vintage head shots of celebrities to epic proportions, Photoshopped them so they look contemporary, then obscured their faces with discordant objects: eyebolts, bananas, sliced-open peppers. 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills. (310) 271-9400, gagosian.com.

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