In his 1938 book Homo Ludens, Dutch cultural theorist Johan Huizinga identified behavior "play" as a civilizing functions, and necessary to the development of culture. 15 years later, the proto-Situationist Ivan Chtcheglov, would bemoan the languor and absence of play in modern life, saying "‘We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun... The hacienda must be built." In a gutted four-story Georgian mansion in Mayfair, a one-off venue, otherwise East End gallery Paradise Row has staged a group show of some 50 works and performances in response to the resolutely non-functional theme of play.

In his Artnews review of Jack Youngerman’s first New York solo show, at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1958, the poet and critic James Schuyler wrote of the paintings that “the images they suggest are like the illusions in clouds that no two people can both see or agree upon.”

The compact survey “Reflections on the Electric Mirror: New Feminist Video” brings together five artists working individually and two collaborative duos, all of them 30-something women. Despite gender and generational uniformity, these artists could not be more varied in their sexual politics.

Despite the forward-looking nature of their name, the San Francisco-based collective Futurefarmers, who play off the nomenclature of an agricultural organization established in the early 20th century (Future Farmers of America), presented a museum exhibition with a very 19th-century feel. Items in the large main gallery included a row of five movable wooden oars coming out of a wall, an old two-person tree saw and a schoolhouse chalkboard.

DETORIORATION, THEY SAID brings together four US-based positions from a generation embarking on its thirties. The title of the exhibition refers to a set of artworks that articulate entropic effects without referring explicitly to process. Curated by Raphael Gygax, the works by these artists investigate a consumerist modernism-obsessed Western culture with an unmistakably loud and colorful under-belly.