The synchronous disappearances of Ader, Burden, and Goldstein have been given various justifications: the desire for the dematerialization of (art-) object and (artist-) subject inherent to conceptualism; the omnipresence of death in the context of the Vietnam War; the temptation of magic’s sleight of hand; and a fascination with the morbid and the sublime. Philipp Kaiser, Disappearance — California, c. 1970: Bas Jan Ader, Chris Burden, Jack Goldstein,

What Cassavetes has done is astonishing. He has made a film that tenderly, honestly and uncompromisingly examines the way we really live. Roger Ebert, December 19, 1968

What makes Point Blank so extraordinary, however, is not its departures from genre conventions, but Boorman’s virtuoso use of such unconventional avant-garde stylistics to saturate the proceedings with a classical noir mood of existential torpor and romanticized fatalism. Nick Schager, Slant, July 24, 2003

[Peckinpah] got so wound up in the aesthetics of violence that what had begun as a realistic treatment — a deglamorization of warfare that would show how horribly gruesome killing really is — became instead an almost abstract fantasy about violence. Pauline Kael, New Yorker, April 4, 2016

In 1971, Chris Burden disappeared for three days without a trace. That work, entitled Disappearing, gives its name to this exhibition, which examines the theme of disappearance in the works of Burden and his contemporaries in 1970s Southern California, Bas Jan Ader and Jack Goldstein. Philipp Kaiser, Disappearing — California, c. 1970: Bas Jan Ader, Chris Burden, Jack Goldstein

in·ter·me·di·ate /ˌin(t)ərˈmēdēət/ adjective 1. coming between two things in time, place, order, character, etc. “an intermediate stage of development” synonyms: halfway, in-between, middle, mid, median, intermediary, intervening, interposed, transitional. noun 1. an intermediate thing. verb 1. act as intermediary; mediate. "the theory said that by intermediating between buyers and sellers, middlemen lower the costs of transactions"

In 1969 the police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City's Greenwich Village, leading to three nights of rioting by the city's gay community. With this outpouring of courage and unity the gay liberation movement had begun.