Last spring I went to a dinner in New York at the loft of the artist Don Dudley. In the seventies he made some great Minimalist works that literalized flatness as structure as well as surface, and he exhibited a modular piece at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1972. By the eighties he was exploring the space between painting, sculpture, and design by producing object-like works that embodied a sense of imminent functionality. I’m not sure how, but the conversation that night drifted around to the subject of Dudley’s having come east in 1968 from LA. This was perhaps a strange time for a young artist to leave, just at the moment when Southern California was emerging with an art-world identity of its own.