Rob Pruitt’s first act in the New York art world was cut short when a 1992 exhibition at Leo Castelli was universally deemed to be racially offensive, but after several years in the wilderness, he recovered, becoming a producer of accessible Fluxus-y fun and games like “101 Art Ideas You Can Do Yourself,” a genuine and popular “Cocaine Buffet,” and “The First Annual Art Awards,” complete with red carpet. At the Dallas Contemporary, Pruitt has two super-sized galleries full of paintings in glitter and acrylic, all on the subject of the panda, a trademark image and lifelong obsession of the artist’s. These paintings (all from 2011) show the big cuddly bears in any number of clichéd, incongruous and off-color situations, and did I mention they are all covered, literally, in glitter? In a brilliant piece of exhibition design, the central floor space is occupied by large rectangular pools built from Perrier cartons, with fountains in the center, creating a pleasing fengshui. (Unfortunately, as far as I could tell, the water filling the fountains was not, in fact, Perrier.) Among countless artworks that try to be funny, Pruitt’s are the few that can prompt an actual laugh out loud; at the same time, they do not entirely dispel the fear that his vision of art amounts to nothing more than an indispensable accessory to a fashionable lifestyle. In his shameless, ingenuous enthusiasm as much as his staggering productivity, Pruitt is one of Andy Warhol’s heirs; I’m not sure, however, if his work cuts quite as deeply as the latter’s “traumatic realism.”

David Jablonowski, Powerslave, Revolution Main (Signature Series), 2011. Courtesy Gallery Luettgenmijer, Berlin; Gallery Fons Welters, Amsterdam and the artist.

Amsterdam-based David Jablonowski’s installation Many to Many (Stone Carving High Performance) at the Dallas Contemporary, incorporating vegetables, glass, steel, LCD screens, digital projectors, and video, scrambles the relationship between sculpture and pedestal. The gleaming rectangular glass and steel forms, which would serve as Minimalist works in themselves, are penetrated by projected moving images, becoming makeshift screens. Contrastingly, flat-screen monitors, lying on the floor still bearing their yellow EPA Energy Star stickers and playing inane instructional and entertainment footage, serve as nominal “pedestals” to fragmentary plaster forms which count as “sculptures.” Of course, it turns out to be quite impossible to study a sculpture when its pedestal is babbling at high volume. In asking how video’s moving image transforms the sculptural situation, Jablonowski adapts a question first posed by Nam June Paik to the iPad era.

Image at top: Rob Pruitt, Untitled, 2010 (detail). Courtesy Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York.