Gung Ho in SoHo

David and Erik's Art Tours begin at one P.M. or thereabouts at Novecento, a small restaurant toward the bottom end of West Broadway.

David is David Kelleran, who is 32, and Erik is 29-year-old Erik Oppenheim. The Art Tourists, a group of Austrians on my first tour, kick in 10 to 20 bucks a head. This is no doubt welcome, but Kelleran and Oppenheim are visible presences in SoHo; their work is much to be seen in group shows, so their real drive is a love of the action. "Dealers are not going to tell people the truth," Kelleran observed.

The tour took us to the studios of three young artists. Oppenheim led the way at a fast lope. "Next year we'll have a bus," he told us, cheerfully if implausibly. Our first visit was to Anthony Feyer, who paints canvases based on many visits to a snake-handling sect in West Virginia. Neither tour guide volunteered his own opinion, but Feyer talked lucidly and fielded a number of questions. The second artist, Trudie Reiss, makes small, enigmatic paintings and creepy objects out of fun fur. "Compare and contrast— that's our motto," Oppenheim said efficiently. The third artist was a pale young woman named Ashley King. Her work consisted of writing on hung sheets of stiff white gauze. RILKE SAID BEAUTY WAS JUST THE BEGINNING OF TER-

ROR, ran one of Ms. King's dicta. "How do you like your studio visits?" I asked her. "I used to get really nervous. I used to shake," she said a wee bit shakily.

A couple of Saturdays later the Art Tourists were mostly young Germans. One of them, Susanne Reinhardt, was carrying a small rubber sculpture, an anatomically correct rendition of the female pudenda sitting atop a bar of milk chocolate inscribed "Milka." "Can you explain that?" asked one of the tourists. "What should I explain?" Reinhardt asked unanswerably. This tour was given over not to studio visits but to a look at some of that handful of galleries that are determinedly not playing it safe in these touchy times. We began in American Fine Arts, Co., which is run by Colin de Land, who walked around his show, which included several charcoal drawings of prison windows on glassine spattered with bird droppings. The next stop was Exit Art, a rambunctious gallery recently relocated on Broadway. David and Erik seemed confident that they were walking their charges into the 90s.

ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST