CAUGHT IN THE ACTS

In response to last Sunday’s article “No Canvas Required,” by Suzanne Muchnic, on the MOCA/Geffen exhibition “Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979”:

The Museum of Contemporary Art’s Paul Schimmel must be crassly hypocritical or blithely ignorant or have a highly attuned sense of the ironic to curate an exhibition of objects documenting an essentially anti-object art movement.

When I saw the similarly intentioned “In the Spirit of Fluxus” exhibition in San Francisco, I was constantly being warned by the uniformed museum gestapo to “step back--look but don’t touch,” even though the objects were originally intended to be interactive.

It is said that you become that which you fight against. One hopes that Schimmel and his staff are aware that their exhibition is, in itself, an artistic event and they are approaching it with the same action orientation as did the artists they are celebrating.

PAUL ZMOLEK

Rancho Mirage

Muchnic’s delightfully sardonic article prompts memories of “The Day of the Painter,” a short subject shown in 1960 with “Never on Sunday” that concerns a painter with a studio on the Hudson. He pours paint on plywood sheets, shuffles and slides and drives his Jeep back and forth over them, cuts them in equal squares and lines them up on easels along the bank. Soon the big New York art dealer arrives in his seaplane, makes judicious selections, pays and departs. Whereupon the artist chucks the rest in the river!

MARVIN H. LEAF

Rancho Mirage

I would like to announce to art lovers everywhere that, in a spare room in my house, I have re-created my acclaimed 1965 installation “Bedroom of a Typical American Teenager.”

The installation includes moldy pizza fragments, half-finished homework assignments and unwashed clothes on the floor and Beatles posters on the wall.

And, for a mere $100,000, I will not only re-create the installation in your very own home but will also perform in it nude! (For $150,000, I will wear clothes.)

RICHARD SHOWSTACK

Newport Beach