Private Enemy--Public Eye: The Work Bruce Charlesworth; Essay by Charles Hagen; Edited by Trudy Wilner Stack and Charles Stai

Charlesworth conveys a disorienting vision of the banalities and horrors of everyday life in his offbeat art, mixing mediums of videos, film, ``photo-novellas,'' installations, theater pieces, short fiction. His mini-stories, combining absurdist elements with the borrowed conventions of detective fiction and mass media, are punctuated by sudden catastrophes and springboard leaps into other stories. ``Franz Kafka meets Rodney Dangerfield'' is how Hagen, former Artforum editor, accurately describes the genre-splicer's eerie universe. Charlesworth's photographs render commonplace objects generic in intensely bright colors, transporting the viewer into a hyperreal realm, where a dark tornado gathers tremendous force over a tiny house, and where a volcano takes on reflected reality in a man's eyeglasses. (Dec.)