All the action seems to be in Los Angeles these days. Jeffrey Deitch is midway through his first full week at MOCA and has already lined up a James Franco show. Eli Broad is nearing the end of his long where-will-I-found-my-museum tease. It makes ARTINFO wish that there was a wealthy cultural philanthropist available to add some intrigue and manipulation to the New York scene. (Oh, forgot — New York already has one of those.) With the slow summer months here here, though, galleries are readying up some less-expected fare. With collectors out of sight, dealers can let their hair down. Maybe.

WEDNESDAY

Stairway to Heaven,” at Susan Inglett Gallery, 522 West 24th Street, through July 24, opening Wednesday, June 9, 6–8 p.m.

“The last page in the book of modernism seemed to have been printed,” artist Matt Mullican says in the press release. “So we went into the mirror and found a lot of loose ends.” What he and weirdo Southern California compatriots Paul McMahon and James Welling, who round out this show of work dating from 1970 to 1976, discovered was a manic, mannered style of performance, drawing, and photography that continues to serve up source material to contemporary artists today.

THURSDAY

Ben Gocker, “There really is no single poem,” at P.P.O.W. Gallery, 511 West 25th Street, Room 301, through July 16, opening Thursday, June 10, 6–8 p.m.

Rochester-born Gocker got his MFA in poetry, which is a good grounding for the art world: Vito Acconci and Peter Schjeldahl once styled themselves poets, and their hall of fame plaques are secure. (And just look at John Giorno.) Gocker has some writing to share — a handy pamphlet entitled “Egg on a Roll,” for instance, catalogues that humble sandwich’s place in big-city life — but also a helping of childlike sculptures (clocks and notebook paper that would impress Oldenburg) and a pattern-filled paper scroll of “undetermined size,” according to the gallery. One suspects the budding artist may soon choose to desert his librarian day job.

“Lithographs from the Mourlot Studio,” at Galerie Mourlot, 16 East 79th Street, through September 3, opening Thursday, June 10, 6–8 p.m.

The Paris–based Atelier Mourlot first began printing up lithographs in the mid-19th century and has since worked with a good chunk of the intervening time’s greatest artists. The studio's Upper East Side gallery offers a tidy selection of highlights from that collection, including a trippy, lilac-bathed Victor Vasarely Op Art puzzle and some surprisingly potent prints from Le Corbusier. The classics are, of course, here too, like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, whose print work is also explored in the Museum of Modern Arts absurdly pleasurable “Picasso: Themes and Variations.”

FRIDAY

Keith Hennessy, “Almost Nothing, Almost Everything,” at the New Museum, Friday, June 11, 7 p.m.

The promotional image for this free-form performance at the recently “Skin Fruit”-less New Museum shows a bare-chested Hennessy leaping in the air while wearing a Scream mask (Munch, not the movie) and blue wristbands. Though the artist regularly directs a performance company called Circo Zero, which he dubs a gross-sounding “intimate spectacular circus," he’ll be appearing solo here. If museum curators know what they’re getting, they’re not letting it slip. “He might go off on a political rant, he might take questions from the audience,” the Web site explains, though it predicts “he’ll probably change costumes and be naked.”

Noam Rappaport, at White Columns, 320 West 13th Street, through July 17, opening Friday, June 11, 6–8 p.m.

“For a corpse… painting has been exquisitely reanimated — and rereanimated — time and again,” Howard Halle noted in his recent review of Blake Raynes show at Miguel Abreu. You can count midcarrer Rappaport as another one of those pesky necromancers. He’s of the Steven Parrino variety, a perverse fetishist of the medium's raw materials. Canvas gets bunched up on and around frames, sometimes slipping its mooring, paint joyfully brushed across its expanse. Occasionally there’s too much to make a finished work, other times too little. Too cool? Decide on Friday.