Packed with variety and energy, ‘Insights’ makes art look simple

MATTHEW OHM’S ‘UNTITLED’
Pity the folks tasked with installing “Insights 2008,” the Cal State Long Beach Art Department’s annual juried exhibition at University Art Museum (UAM). This show seems to grow every year.
When I visited, the installers were still hard at work atop fiberglass ladders, and everywhere [...]

Finally, an exhibit for your inner meddler

Little could be more innocuous and fun than John Underkoffler’s “Tamper: Gestural Interface for Cinematic Design” at the University Art Museum. Wear the special “gesture recognition” (motion-sensing) gloves and pluck images from great old movies—Night of the Hunter, Once Upon a Time in the West—finger-gun them onto a screen, [...]

UAM in the Thunder Dome

LOTHAR SCHMITZ: SURVIVAL STRATEGIES
Every rocket scientist, microbiologist, and physicist I have known (and they are legion; I keep excellent company) has led a double life as a poet, a danseur, a nerdy rock superstar. This always surprises people somehow; they have been led by sterile plastic and white lab coats (and [...]

Sandow Birk gets ugly

SANDOW BIRK’S “THE LIBERATION OF BAGHDAD”
Poor Lynndie England! If you’re Paris Hilton, you can move past the night-vision sex scenes—or at least flood the universe with other images of yourself to make the night-vision recede into the unending tide. But Ms. England can’t show up on a thousand red carpets until we [...]

EYE ON YOU: ABRAHAM LINCOLN STATUE When they built the new City Hall in the mid-1970s, this was supposed to be a redo of the old Lincoln Park, but the new place didn’t come out so well—perhaps because the city didn’t ask Mr. Lincoln. It feels oddly disjointed—and Lincoln relocated seems strangely out-of-place in a [...]

New Romantic Thomas Woodruff fits right in

THOMAS WOODRUFF’S “FREAK PARADE”
If you’re a Southern Californian of a certain age, and you’ve never owned a Taurus, you’ve probably been glared at by Exene Cervenka or shared a beer at least once with John Doe. The LA creative class marinates itself in a whole X ethos: even if [...]