Hermann Nitsch

A naked man is lashed to a large wooden crucifix and slathered in the blood of a freshly slaughtered bull. A canvas is smeared with crimson oil paint and pig entrails that glisten sickeningly beneath a spotlight. This is the grotesque world of Hermann Nitsch, a self-proclaimed "ritual artist" whose bizarre works are drawing large crowds -- and allegations of blasphemy and animal cruelty. A retrospective of his work, on view through Jan.

A naked man is lashed to a large wooden crucifix and slathered in the blood of a freshly slaughtered bull. A canvas is smeared with crimson oil paint and pig entrails that glisten sickeningly beneath a spotlight. This is the grotesque world of Hermann Nitsch, a self-proclaimed "ritual artist" whose bizarre works are drawing large crowds -- and allegations of blasphemy and animal cruelty. A retrospective of his work, on view through Jan.

While the art community is expressing its outrage at the barbarism of the Rushdie contract, a small section of the art world is perpetrating its own brand of barbarity. I am referring to the article "Apostle of Performance Violence Tells Why He Does What He Does," Feb. 23) about John Fleck, an artist whose work I have appreciated in the past. Anything an artist does to a consenting adult, including her/himself, is OK. What is not OK is suffering inflicted on non-consenting creatures, be they children (as in Hermann Nitsch's work)

While the art community is expressing its outrage at the barbarism of the Rushdie contract, a small section of the art world is perpetrating its own brand of barbarity. I am referring to the article "Apostle of Performance Violence Tells Why He Does What He Does," Feb. 23) about John Fleck, an artist whose work I have appreciated in the past. Anything an artist does to a consenting adult, including her/himself, is OK. What is not OK is suffering inflicted on non-consenting creatures, be they children (as in Hermann Nitsch's work)

Denzil Hurley comes from Jamaica, and his small untitled paintings are shorthand memories of colors and forms baking under the sun or sequestered in darkness, as translated by someone who has absorbed the lessons of contemporary abstraction in art school. Quick and rough in a way that's at once offhand and effortful, these intimate works are done an injustice by being spaced at huge, grandiose intervals along the wall of the cavernous front gallery.

Aline Barnsdall was, by most accounts, an odd bird. Heir to an oil fortune, she could afford to be described as freethinking, eccentric, radical, temperamental. Or, maybe those were just the words folks used 80 years ago to describe women who lived so independently. She came to Los Angeles from Chicago with dreams of building an artists' colony. She hired Frank Lloyd Wright to build a house atop Olive Hill, now Barnsdall Art Park.

Like most major art museums, Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art gets a rush of art gifts at the end of each year, when collectors typically make tax-deductible contributions. It now appears that 1999 was a particularly good year for MOCA--and not only because of tax breaks. Of the 120 works added to the museum's collection last year, 17 pieces were donated in honor of Jeremy Strick, who succeeded director Richard Koshalek last July.

Raphael Montanez Ortiz destroyed a piano the other day. It was a ritual slaughter. He hovered around the instrument--an ancient, decaying upright probably no longer loved by anyone--as if taking measure of his foe and the small audience that was gathered in a gallery of the Museum of Contemporary Art's Geffen Contemporary. He chanted a bit and then lifted his ax and began swinging.

ART Too Gutsy for Some: Animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot asked Austrians on Friday to boycott a six-day performance piece by Viennese artist Hermann Nitsch that is to include the on-stage slaughter of three bulls. Nitsch plans to subsequently use the bulls' blood and entrails to create art. The animals are to be slaughtered by professional butchers under the observation of licensed veterinarians.

The new exhibition that opened Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art sports a big title that's an even bigger mouthful. "Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979" doesn't exactly flow trippingly off the tongue, but it does suggest two things. One is that the wildly diverse paintings, sculptures and installations under scrutiny can't be corralled by a universally accepted name, like Pop or Minimal art.

In a 1972 collage titled "Train," Austrian artist Valie Export pasted together nine black-and-white photographs into a horizontal strip almost 77 inches wide. The railroad subject is romantic, while her picture is anything but. The image of a stationary train was made by standing near its middle, pivoting from one side to the other and shooting a sequence of photographs. The nine pictures were then lined up in order like, well, the cars in a train.