Galleries: A look back at art of destruction

If you've visited Haverford College's Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery regularly over the last two years, you've no doubt noticed its predilection for shows that bring attention to under-recognized subjects: countercultural art practices of the 1960s; contemporary art from the Maghreb and the Mahgrebi diaspora of North Africa; and the calamitous effects of Katrina and Sandy on ordinary people, brought vividly to life by Zoe Strauss' photographs.

True to form, its latest exhibition, "Arqueologias de destruccion 1958-2014," organized by Jennifer Burris Staton, trains its sights on a largely forgotten movement of artists, poets, and musicians who made an art of destruction. (Destructivism has some new acolytes, but that's another story.)

In its heyday, the 1960s, destructivism claimed an international, if fluid, roster of artists - Robert Rauschenberg, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, and Jean Tinguely all participated to varying degrees - but Burris Staton, who is based in Mexico City, chose six artists with familial roots or life experience in Latin America.

It's a charismatic cast of avant-garde insiders and exiles: Kenneth Kemble, who was born in Buenos Aires in 1923, studied painting in Paris, and became a member of the local art informel movement in Buenos Aires; Marcos Kurtycz, a graphic designer-turned-performance artist and mail artist, who was born in Poland in 1934, lost much of his family to the Holocaust, and lived in Mexico; Ana Mendieta, a sculptor, video artist, and performance artist born in Cuba in 1948 who was sent to live in the United States when she was 12 (her father spent 18 years in a Cuban political prison for his involvement in the Bay of Pigs invasion), moving eventually to Iowa, and later, New York; Marta Minujin, a conceptual and performance artist born in Buenos Aires in 1943, who lived in Paris and New York before returning to Argentina, and Raphael Montañez Ortiz, an artist known mainly for his destruction works of the 1960s and his founding of El Museo del Barrio, who was born in Brooklyn in 1934 to a mother of Puerto Rican and indigenous Mexican heritage and a Spanish-Portuguese father.

Though the contemporary Mexican artist Eduardo Abaroa's ongoing project "The Total Destruction of the National Museum of Anthropology," which proposes the destruction of the Mexico City institution and its contents, is certainly in the spirit of her show, Burris Staton's inclusion of Abaroa, born in 1968, makes you wonder why no other neo-destructivists were chosen.

This exhibition is short on memorable, singular works of art and is composed largely of films and photographs documenting performances and happenings. The exceptions stand out immediately.

A video by Mendieta showing one of her smoldering "earth-body" sculptures of dirt mounded in the negative spaces left by her prone body on the ground, outlined in burning gunpowder, puts a more personal, poetic spin on destruction than many of her contemporaries' efforts. A found, rusted bedspring-turned-sculpture by Ortiz is a profoundly disturbing object. The soundtrack of odd, cacophonous sounds produced by Kemble and his collaborators to accompany a 10-day exhibition at the Galeria Lirolay in Buenos Aires in 1961 suggests just what their ephemeral installation of a scene of domestic chaos must have looked like, mangled armchairs, defaced bathtubs, and all.

But, too often, this show's seriousness comes across as a cultish appreciation of a minor movement. Surely a video clip of Ortiz - then going by Ralph, not Raphael - energetically hacking up a white piano with an ax on The Tonight Show in 1968 would have lightened things up.

The sculptures, prints, and paintings that make up Tyler Kline's second show with Rebekah Templeton Contemporary Art use the Platonic solids - the tetrahedron, the hexahedron, the octahedron, and the dodecahedron - as models but turn them on their heads, as it were. His aim is to make the perfection of "Sacred Geometry" into something more human - and therefore flawed.

There are twice as many works in this small gallery as need be. Kline's charmingly eccentric sculptures, in particular, which have the physical presence of life-size stick figures, could have used much more white empty space around them, especially such large works as his Hexahedron, Impossibility of Being Square (2015) and The Dove in the Shark's Mouth, also from this year.

Cerulean Arts' "Fictitious Pleasures," a two-person show of paintings by Bill Scott and Alex Kanevsky, catches these Philadelphia painters working on a more intimate scale than you might expect from either one of them.

Scott's gestural abstractions alluding to city views seem more heavily worked than before and also more revealing of his revisions, which gives them more depth. His colors, typically high-key and celebratory, are somewhat more subdued in these new works.

Images of the male and female figure still dominate Kanevsky's paintings, but they're more loosely rendered than ever. His painting, Monet in His Garden, is clearly based on or inspired by one of those familiar photographs of the painter in his dotage, but it's all about lush color and paint.