Joe Deutch, still from 'Gun Piece,' 2005. (Photo: Rozalia Jovanovic)

“I’m not really like a gun person,” artist Joe Deutch told Gallerist at Marlborough Chelsea last night. He was standing in front of an open metal briefcase that displayed a gun. “But there was no way for us to legally get it here and show it.”

The gun in the briefcase was fake, part of Mr. Deutch's new exhibition, which opened last night. (He pronounces his name “deech.”) It presents video documentation, photographs, sculpture and ephemera from the performance work that Mr. Deutch has engaged in over the last eight years, the lynchpin of which was a notorious performance that he did in 2004 while a graduate student at UCLA. For that work he went before his classmates dressed in a suit and tie, removed a gun from a paper bag and held it in one hand, while with the other he held up a bullet and showed it to the class (and the camera: he was recording it). Then he loaded the bullet into the chamber with the flick of his hand and placed the gun up to his head. Then he pulled the trigger, which clicked, and lowered the gun, unhurt. He then walked into an adjacent hall, out of sight and set off a fire-cracker, which made the sound of a shot.

The performance left the students confused and angered. Though Ron Athey was the instructor of that class, it was professor Chris Burden who resigned, along with Nancy Rubins, to protest the school's decision not  to suspend Mr. Deutch. He and Ms. Rubins called Mr. Deutch’s performance an act of “domestic terrorism.”

“John Baldessari once said to me, ‘You hate the art world, don’t you?’” said Mr. Deutch, looking at a large poster affixed to the wall advertising the upcoming opening of the Broad Art Museum in Los Angeles. Mr. Deutch, who in his black T-shirt and black jacket looked like Vincent Gallo, had stolen the poster. “I didn’t think that was true. And I still don’t. But there’s definitely something, I’m definitely not being nice to it a lot of times. I’m being sort of reactionary.”

The school investigated whether or not Mr. Deutch had violated school rules prohibiting firearms on campus and posed a threat to students. Mr. Deutch made the fake gun in an attempt to defend himself. He claimed that he had used this fake gun in the performance, which he told Gallerist was not true: the gun had been real.

“I wanted to ask the question, 'Does our ability to make a statement exist anymore?'” he said.

What if he had died? Would that have been the statement he wanted? “No,” he said. “That would have been a weird, icky, awful tragedy. I never wanted that to happen, and I didn’t believe that that actually would happen.”

While it’s been eight years since that performance, and Mr. Deutch has since exhibited work, the show at Marlborough Chelsea is the first time that he has presented documentation from that incident in a gallery setting. And for Mr. Deutch, the debate about what the piece is, whether or not it is art, is still very much alive. He views his current exhibition as an opportunity to place it back within the context of art, even though whether or not he saw it there in the first place is unclear ("I don’t think I really make art about art. It’s more like art about my brain or something").

“What I learned after the fact is that not everything is or can be art,” said Mr. Deutch. “Regardless of the context you put it in. Which doesn’t really bother me now, because I don’t care. If someone were to say, ‘You’re not an artist,’ that’s fine. Just tell me what we should call it. Is it theater? Is it real theater?”

We walked into the next room, which had a black couch in the middle and in which three of Mr. Deutch’s videos played on a loop. One of the videos was a one-and-a-half minute excerpt of the original Russian roulette performance at UCLA. A man in a red jacket was seated on the one black leather couch at the center of the room watching intently. Around him there was a crowd of about 30 people. Behind us, a woman was holding the arm of a man.

“I was a little worried,” she said when the video ended. She considered it art, because it was Mr. Deutch’s “expression” and it made her think. Her friend felt differently.

“Not really,’ he said and shrugged. “It should cause a reaction.”

Another video showed Mr. Deutch taunting a rattlesnake and getting bitten.

“Have you seen this?” one young man nearby said to his friend about the video. They were both in shorts, baseball hats and wearing gold chains. “It’s terrible.”

“Dude,” the other said. “It’s the scariest shit.”

Asked if it was art, one of them said, “Yes—more or less. I think it’s like Jackass.”

Benefit: “Block Party 2012,” at the Arsenal in Central Park
The Horticulture Society of New York (“The Hort”) hosts a silent auction and meet-and-greet with artists, in support of its GreenHouse program, which provides horticultural therapy and vocational training for inmates on Riker’s Island. In support of the cause, artists Barry McGee, Sue Kwon, Chris Johanson and Steve Powers have all donated works, and graffiti artist KAWS has produced something specifically for this event. Photographer Lawrence Schiller has donated one of the just-published photographs of Marilyn Monroe featured in Vanity Fair. The event is free and open to the public. —Rozalia Jovanovic
The Arsenal in Central Park, Fifth Avenue and East 64th Street, New York, 6-10 p.m.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 20

Discussion: "The Radical Art of Bill Bollinger" at SculptureCenter
In conjunction with the retrospective it is hosting of pioneering post-minimalist Bill Bollinger, SculptureCenter invites four heavy hitters to discuss his art: curator Christiane Meyer-Stoll, who spent a decade organizing the show, artist Gary Kuehn, MoMA Associate Curator of Drawings Christian Rattemeyer and art dealer Mitchell Algus. SculptureCenter's director, Mary Ceruti, moderates. —Andrew Russeth
SculptureCenter, 44-19 Purves Street, Long Island City, Queens, 7–9 p.m.

Opening: "Context Message" at Zach Feuer
Stop by Zach Feuer for this terrific and diverse-sounding group show, featuring Michael Riedel, Reena Spaulings, Martin Kippenberger and Bjarne Melgaard, among others. Sounds like there'll be great art, market critique and, if the press release is to be believed, "quilts from a particularly rustic area of America (some might even characterize it as "flyover country") which, about 10 years ago, were celebrated for their coincidental relationship to museum-worthy paintings." Cozy! —Dan Duray
548 West 22nd Street, New York, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Jan Vercruysse, "Works 1990-2011," at Gladstone
Gladstone Gallery will present an exhibition by Belgian artist Jan Vercruysse, his first in New York since 2009, curated by Anne Pontégnie. Mr. Vercruysse started out as a poet, but abandoned writing in 1974 to concentrate on visual art. The show will follow the major periods of the artist's career. —Michael H. Miller
Gladstone Gallery, 515 West 24th Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

THURSDAY, JUNE 21

Opening: "Vision Quest" at Klagsbrun
Amanda Friedman and Taylor Trabulus helm this exhibition, which takes as its jumping-off point the spiritual sojourn that 20th-century artist Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel, a k a Cameron (famed for her role in Kenneth Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome), made into the California desert. The curators have lined up an impressive group of artists, including Sam Falls, Amy Granat, Yugi Agematsu, Matt Hoyt and Jimmie Durham. —A.R.
Nicole Klagsbrun, 532 West 24th Street, New York, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: "Sculpted Matter" at Paul Kasmin
Paul Kasmin opens an impressive double-space sculpture show featuring Arman, Carl Andre, Anthony Caro, Saint Clair Cemin, Tara Donovan, Dan Flavin, Tom Friedman, Katharina Grosse, Richard Hughes, Deborah Kass, Jim Lambie, Sol LeWitt, Jill Magid, Matthew Monahan, Iván Navarro, Anthony Pearson, Will Ryman, Alyson Shotz, Keith Sonnier, Frank Stella and Bernar Venet. —D.D.
Paul Kasmin, 293 Tenth Avenue and 515 West 27th Street, New York

Opening: Sol LeWitt, "Works On Paper (1983-2003)" at Waterhouse & Dodd
Waterhouse & Dodd presents a series of works on paper by Sol LeWitt, executed in the final decades of his life. Many of them have never before been seen by the public. —M.H.M.
Waterhouse & Dodd, 104 Greene Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

Opening: "Joe Deutch," at Marlborough Chelsea
Marlborough presents a mini-retrospective of the work of performance artist Joe Deutch, who infamously nearly got himself kicked out of UCLA for playing Russian roulette in front of a class. Mr. Deutch, whose work builds on a the tradition of Los Angeles performance artists Christ Burden and Ron Athey, went on to do other notorious stunts in the name of art, like having himself bitten by a rattlesnake, taking public transportation to the hospital and then framing the hospital receipt as ephemera. For the "Greater L.A." show in New York, he showed a video called Boot_Reboot, in which he filmed the police struggling to remove a boot he had placed on the tire of their patrol car. —R.J.
Marlborough Chelsea, 545 West 25th Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.