The Good Stuff

10. "DRAWN FROM ARTISTS' COLLECTIONS," UCLA/ARMAND HAMMER

While there were more historically and regionally significant museum exhibitions mounted in L.A. this year, neither Sam Francis nor Eleanor Antin could turn my crank for more than a piece or two. Mounted in an apparent package deal with ex­Drawing Center, new Hammer director Ann Philbin, this show wasn't conceived or realized here, but it makes the list because of the unparalleled insight it gives to the way artists look at art. From Howard Hodgkin's exquisite collection of 17th-century Indian-elephant miniatures to Chris Burden's sketch of his flying-steamroller sculpture (from Ed Ruscha's collection), what this show conveys is a catalog of ways in which ideas are communicated through the eye, as compiled by participants in the conversation.

9. BURT PAYNE 3, "IT'S STARWEATHER OUT THERE," TRACK 16

In a year without a Tim Hawkinson show, the closest thing was this elusive joker, virtually the only "mainstream"-style artist on Track 16's roster. Unjustly overlooked by the art establishment, Burt Payne 3 puts a white-trash pop-cultural spin on the L.A. school of awkwardly translated everyday objects. While Payne's smart-ass indifference occasionally results in work that borders on plagiarism or parody, it just as often hits home: Pieces like Cane (a motorized blind man's cane swinging back and forth at the viewer), BP3 Does HA (a limited-edition CD of the artist whistling a cover version of Herb Alpert's greatest hits) and 1973 Grammy Award Nominees and Winners in the Following Categories (the names of those honored spelled out across a whole gallery wall in large twigs) inexplicably find targets you never suspected even existed.

8. JESSICA BRONSON, WORLD PICTURE, MOCA

This installation, consisting of a rickety re-enactment of a helicopter pursuit and crash over a Los Angeles freeway projected on a pair of enormous arced screens, combined the dorky charm of the decrepit slot-car simulator ride at the Griffith Park pony arcade with a defeated version of the super-Happenings of Expo '67 and John Cage's Variations IV. Bronson has taken on the difficult mantle of being an actual artist in a medium overrun by trust-fund kids with three laser-disc projectors, 200 hours of footage of their boarding-school chums shooting up, and nowhere else to go but the Whitney. It is much to her credit that, in spite of possessing all the identifiable criteria for what is usually an annoying exercise in self-indulgent technological pissing, Bronson's works are consistently arresting and, pardon my French, beautiful.

7. "ODD GLOSS," ROSAMUND FELSEN GALLERY

As refreshing as it is to see the many recent curatorial projects focused on visual similarities in the artworks (as opposed to similarities in their descriptions), better still is a show such as this, organized around subtle conceptual similarities between works that might otherwise never be connected. In a group show that echoes his own artistic strategies, sculptor and curator Gordon Haines fashioned a synergistic pastiche from other artists' work. Knitting together pieces as seemingly diverse as Emanuel Tet's ballerina-and-Marie-Antoinette dolls-'n'-food paintings, Jason Millbrook's fake redwood stump table and Rebecca Ripple's build-it-yourself Wokey Dome, "Odd Gloss" compelled the viewer to examine the process of association or leave bewildered. Or both. A strong argument for curation as an artistic medium unto itself.

6. BLORP ESETTE (TRANSPARENCY RECORDS)

A budget-priced four-CD of the Los Angeles Free Music Society's late-'70s/early-'80s compilation records, with almost three hours of new material, this offering amounts to a retrospective of the scraggly nascent L.A. audio art scene's skronks, bleats and scratchy loops in the studio and live at the first Doo-Dah Parade. Compiled by Ace Farren Ford and Rick Potts, Blorp Esette is technically a reissue, except nobody ever heard the originals and half the material is previously unreleased. Including tracks from Smegma with Wild Man Fischer, the Reverend Toad-Eater, the Doo Dooettes, Henry Kaiser, Joe Potts, the South Pasadena Free Music Ensemble and long-unavailable album art by Captain Beefheart, the collection basically lays out the parameters for what has become a burgeoning subculture of unsupervised and as yet illegitimate artistic fecundity as well as being a sound document of a specific cultural moment.

5. MEG CRANSTON, "LIFE, DEATH AND MISCELLANEOUS," ROSAMUND FELSEN GALLERY

A most peculiar show, consisting in part of a pair of baby grand pianos (one a raw shell, one fully functional) presumably representing Death and Life and apparently made by carefully deconstructing a single original keyboard. The miscellaneous conceptual fallout of this duality filled the next gallery with a phantasmagoria of plunger-footed Yellow Donkeys, mummified bunnies, desperate little drawings and abbreviated Jessica Stockholder­like agglomerations from Smart & Final, made all the more spectacular each Saturday afternoon, when a hired pianist performed American show tunes on Life.

4. THE REVEREND ETHAN ACRES, "JESUS FREAK," PATRICIA FAURE GALLERY

Highlighted by a Sunday service during which the artist donned a Lycra stretch-fit uniform to deliver a sermon equating ULTRAMAN with Jesus, the Reverend Ethan Acres' second solo exhibit at Patricia Faure further materialized his improbable conflation of autobiographical Southern evangelical Christianity with contemporary art practice in the form of several intricately stitched-together soft sculptures illustrating literal readings of biblical metaphors (including the fabulous Samson's Lion, with its spinning, humming bee swarm). By linking what is generally considered a vestigial manifestation of pre-Enlightenment white hetero patriarchal superstition with a heartfelt engagement with the language and history of formalist artmaking, the Reverend Acres continues to address the only two remaining taboos that can actually make waves insidethe art world.