Wonders Never Cease

Marie Osmond performing Hugo Ball's Karawane. I'll repeat that; Marie Osmond performing Hugo Ball's Karawane. Somehow I can't help thinking it's somehow connected to this:

On Beyond Impasto

The current issue of Modern Painters, containing my cover story on Mike Kelley & Jim Shaw's noise band Destroy All Monsters, also has a couple of reviews I penned - the first concerns Linda Stark's recent show at Angles...

"For her first show in the recently relocated Angles Gallery, Linda Stark has created a mind-bending tour-de-force of radically idiosyncratic paintings-cum-objects that nevertheless tackle a number of unspoken assumptions underlying Modernist and contemporary painting practice.

Combining two distinct bodies of work – the six titular Adorned Paintings and a smaller, untitled black series (which offer a potent rhythmical counterpoint to their larger, more exuberant cousins) – the show represents a return to the painstakingly crafted high-relief pictorial oil painting that first garnered the artist attention, after an intriguing but less crowd-pleasing foray into resinous art-as-magical-talisman Potion Paintings in 2007.

The title series is remarkable, pushing the dualism of painterly materiality and decoration to absurdist lengths, juxtaposing meticulously built-up color fields of microscopic skin textures (“paint as flesh” taken to a clinical extreme) festooned with clunky high-relief simulations of costume jewelry ranging from kitschy peace symbols to surreal meteor-like gold nuggets. The works all possess a hallucinatory quality – the intricate contoured ridges and carvings seem impossibly sharp, as if the air in the gallery were hyper-oxygenated.

Two works seemed to exert the most hypnotic pull -- Fixed Wave (2011), a floral/entomological/oceanographic/gynecological configuration that teeters on the brink of terrifying with its saturated bathroom-fixture palette of turquoise and lavender; and Ruins (2008) – an anomalous landscape which is in fact a depiction of a depiction of Stonehenge, copied from a found tee shirt and adorned with a pink geometric necklace (also based on a found object) resembling some kind of cotton candy spacecraft schematic..."

Read the rest of the review in the current issue of Modern Painters (if you can still find a copy in LA) or look around online.

See the flat digital version of the show here.

I also contributed a brief write-up on an overlooked show by "one of the most interesting object-makers of the much-touted Vegas art scene of the early 00s who recently resurfaced in LA with a group of sumptuous sci-fi flavored sculptures at the Peter Mendenhall Gallery. Wayne Littlejohn, whose glossy, enigmatic biomorphic abstractions were standouts of the Ultralounge and Las Vegas Diaspora exhibits, offered up a half dozen works that tread a quixotic line between the painterly Finish Fetish sculpture of Ken Price and the special effects modelmaking of films like Aliens or Avatar. Littlejohn’s earlier mutant jellyfish forms here take on a futuristic mechanical aspect, in works such as the exquisite wall-mounted 2 Blue, which resembles the fetal stage of an interplanetary hotrod." You can still see the work online here.

Linda Stark Fixed Wave 2011 Oil on canvas over panel, 36 x 36 x 3 inches, Ruins 2008 Oil on canvas over panel, 36 x 36 x 3 inches; Modern Painters March 2012 cover; Wayne Littlejohn 2 Blue 2010 - 2011 Sculpted Polystyrene with Fiberglass and Automobile Paints 37" x 22" x 22"

Unstable Octet

Artillery just published my review of Kramer's Ergot 8, in which I compare the latest version of the flagship comix anthology to Duchamp's Large Glass. But Tulsa didn't understand the Duchamp part and cut it out. Now I don't understand the review, so here's the restored director's cut:

The Withdrawal Method

One of the most unlikely essential hipster accoutrements of the boomboom zeros was an ambitious comic anthology helmed by CalArts dropout Sammy Harkham, who went on to found The Family bookstore and Cinefamily repertory film theater – twin lodestones to Westside Angeleno cognoscenti. Back in 2003 Kramer’s Ergot #4 sent shockwaves through the comix community, bearing witness to a festering neo-psychedelic underground previously below the mainstream’s radar – in an upscale format that put even the most prestigious contemporary “graphic novels” to shame. Ratcheting it up yet a further notch in 2008, the lavish full-color 21 X 16 inch hardcover extravaganza of KE7 coincided with the collapse of the economic bubble, and appears to have bankrupted Harkham’s beloved Oakland-based publisher Buenaventura Press.

Three years later, Harkham has resuscitated the KE series with a new publisher – PictureBox, whose own retired Ganzfeld series often overlapped with the KE vision and roster. KE8 is at once an exercise in back-to-basics and an aggressive reassertion of the title’s avant-garde status. A relatively modest 9 X 7 inch beige clothbound tome, KE8 looks like it popped in from a parallel 1970s universe, with an embossed gold and orange geometric abstraction on the cover, several sections of sumptuously incorrect retro airbrush abstractions by Robert Beatty (also the cover artist), Takeshi Murata’s ridiculous high-fashion still-lifes featuring VHS b-movies and Coors light beer cans, a bleak Jimbo parable from the always-dazzling Gary Panter, and a generous selection of Oh Wicked Wanda! comics reprinted from the pages of Penthouse: a vintage softcore Russ Meyeresque response to comic icons Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder’s Little Annie Fanny in Playboy.

The sequence of Wanda stories (composed of intricately crafted watercolor paintings) included here chronicles a portion of the heroine’s ongoing attempt to create a museum of live celebrities (Bobby Fischer, Martin Bormann, Marlon Brando) kidnapped and frozen in erotic tableaux vivants. Combined with the near-crackpot polemic by punk icon Ian Svenonius (he claims that Pop Art – specifically Camp – “helped vanquish human movements for social justice forever!” – which I guess means we can all go home now) that serves as the book’s forward, this prescient Body Art curatorial fiction seems to be framing some kind of radical critique of avant-gardism and kitsch, and their mutual discontents.


What exactly this critique consists of is never spelt out, which is what allows Harkham’s curatorial intuition to triumph. Most of the narratives included here seem fragmentary, unsatisfying – Wicked Wanda leaves us dangling, her museum unfinished -- and several stories actually hinge on some form of coitus interruptus. Even those that give the people what they want -- like C.F.’s explicit Warm Genetic House – Test Pattern or Kevin Huizenga’s appropriated Silver Age sci-fi conundrum – frustrate on a more structural storytelling level, clipping the money shot or rendering it redundant. Johnny Ryan’s Mining Colony X7170 manages to have its cake and eat it, yet still be less filling, as an EC space opera filtered through Rory Hayes carries the thwarted consummation to cosmic proportions, while delivering a fatalistic Noir narrative arc that would be killed in the first test screening.


This same not-quite-gelling quality expands to encompass the whole anthology, which paradoxically makes it succeed in spite of itself, and situates itself in the context of one of the central strains of Modernist theory and practice as exemplified by one of its iconic artifacts, Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even AKA The Large Glass, which the artist identified as a “delay” as opposed to a painting, and which was left “definitively unfinished” in 1923. The convoluted symbology of The Large Glass depicts an incomplete mechanism of sexual courtship whose purpose – as with much of Duchamp’s owuvre – is to defer penetration and consummation indefinitely.


As an allegory for the creative act and for the Modernist agenda, this almost Tantric avoidance of climax delivers unparalleled staying power. By the early 70s – the very period to which KE8’s design and conceptual template aspires – Modernism had shot its wad and disintegrated into the myriad competing niche markets we know today as The Art World. But Duchamp’s legacy was just digging in its talons. By situating KE8 at this historical and aesthetic fulcrum, Harkham conjures a parallel universe in which the evolution of comics didn’t culminate with the profoundly unerotic bang-a-second jackoff of the Marvel Entertainment Group and its subsidiary promotional tie-ins. As such, Kramer’s Ergot 8 is as compelling an argument for curation-as-art-practice as the best group art shows in galleries or museums, but I’m fucked if I know what the fanboys will make of it. Its not like they’ve ever expressed some crying need for prophylactics.

Kramer’s Ergot 8
Edited by Sammy Harkham
PictureBox, Brooklyn, NY 2011
also available through D.A.P.

Images: KE8/Large Glass Intertextual Intergration by DH; from KE8: from JIMBO by Gary Panter, from Oh, Wicked Wanda! by Ron Embleton & Frederic Mullalley, from Get Your Ass to Mars by Takeshi Murata, from The Ultimate Character 2002 by Ben Jones, Ain't It So? by Tim Hemsley

Clear the Grid! Encyclopedia Duff's on the Case!

Super-googler Sean Duffy seems to have solved "The Mystery of That Freaky Wood Carving I Bought at the Corner Furniture/Thrift Store a Couple of Weeks Ago" (see "Score of the Millennium (so far)") - Wayne D. Martin seems to have come from a renowned family of Appalachian woodcarvers and instrument makers - there are several web pages devoted to the family and their work, curated by Drs. Rachael and Richard Heller, who are quite a phenomenon in themselves - accomplished scuba divers, biological scientists, semipro Disney fanatics, authors of bestselling diet books, children's literature, and a Da Vinci Code-style thriller called The Thirteenth Apostle.

The five Martin brothers were the sons of Marcus, a fiddler who is shown playing with Bascom Lamar Lunsford of I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground fame, and if I'm reading right, Wayne may have been the artist responsible for this beautiful "still life" scene, which is just one of the many amazing carvings reproduced here. Thanks, Sean - now go do them taxes! Revenuers is gittin itchy - them Afghanastanis ain't gonna kill themselves y'know! Hyuk hyuk!

The Patter of Tiny Brains

Call for Submissions - The Patter of Tiny Brains

This is a call for submissions to a phone-in audio exhibition to be presented as part of 323 Projects. The audio artifacts should all be in some sense generated by children, up to and including adolescents. This can include documentary recordings of in utero sounds, babies crying or cooing, or teenagers cussing out their Mom; skits, sound diaries or letters, or recorded homework assignments; original musical compositions or cover versions of popular songs; or electroacoustic audio collages – in short, any sound recording created by or featuring kids. A companion compilation CD, LP, and/or downloadable album is also anticipated.

I am also willing to consider collaborative projects between post-adolescent artists and children, eg: a band with mixed age membership, or an adult-remixed sound piece made from child recordings. I welcome any found material, as well as any appropriate public domain recordings, and would appreciate leads to copyright material whose inclusion might be practically pursued. I have limited technical capabilities, but can transfer recordings from phonograph or cassette to digital format, and may be able to arrange the same for reel-to-reel or other formats.

The show is scheduled to open April 6th 2012, so please don’t delay in getting in touch with me at dghrvy@gmail.com -- if possible include an mp3 file and all information with your email. Deadline to receive your audio file is April 2nd, but the sooner the better! Also, please forward this to anyone you think might be interested.

Image: Our poster boy is the subject of this anthology I curated a little while back, available for free DL from Pleonasm/Redacted via the FMA.

Lost Mowgly Booger Treasure!

I found one of the great missing pieces from my Revised Janson series while rooting through flood-damaged paper ephemera archives for collage material. Behold! The David Code Unravelled!!!

Score of the Millennium (so far)

Except maybe for the Sons of Dolemite script. There's this store on the corner of our street and Sunset that used to be a low end furniture store, layaway plans on dinette suites type of thing, but has fallen on hard times and morphed partially into a thrift store. On poop walk Tuesday morning I caught sight of this thing set out by the front door, and had to check it out.

Ten bucks! What the hell is it? The inscription on the side of the top hat says "Wayne D. Martin Feb 4, 1935 June 20 1993" - is it a grave marker or something? The inscription on the top seems to rule that out. And check out those finely detailed choppers. Lee Lynch's gonna pee his pants when he sees this!

Happy Lupercalia!

"In Roman mythology, Lupercus is a god sometimes identified with the Roman god Faunus, who is the Roman equivalent of the Greek god Pan. Lupercus is the god of shepherds. His festival, celebrated on the anniversary of the founding of his temple on February 15, was called the Lupercalia. His priests wore goatskins. The historian Justin mentions an image of "the Lycaean god, whom the Greeks call Pan and the Romans Lupercus," nude save for the girdle of goatskin, which stood in the Lupercal, the cave where Romulus and Remus were suckled by a she-wolf. There, on the Ides of February, a goat and a dog were sacrificed, and salt mealcakes prepared by the Vestal Virgins were burnt."

(from the Wikipedia entry)

Images: Above, Lupercus; below, a selection of fresh Lupercalia greetings)

F for Formica

A bootleg-quality document of our set at the Mike Kelley tribute at The Box Gallery, Feb 11 2012 is available via the F for Ache blog.

Image: Detail from Mike Kelley's final artwork, created for LAFMS show at The Box

It's Showtime!

‎'F for Ache' will be participating in the Mike Kelley tribute performance at The Box, 805 Traction Ave, L.A. 90013 Saturday Feb 11, 12 -7 PM. It looks like we'll be going on around 2 or 3. Strange that this'll be only our 2nd live performance for an audience.


‎'

Now in Past Tense!

I wasn't really planning to weigh in writing-wise on the passing of Mike Kelley, but Artinfo decided to post my already-completed upcoming Modern Painters cover story on Destroy All Monsters, so here's an excerpt and the link...


"Prior to 1994, if you mentioned the name Destroy All Monsters to punk aficionados, it conjured only a minor footnote: a band in Michigan rock music history known for the participation of the former Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton and the MC5 bassist Michael Davis. But by the time its first single, “Bored,” was released in 1978, three of the band’s four original members had left; two of them, Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw, had headed west to attend graduate school at the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles.

During the course of the next two decades, Kelley — who died on February 1 — and Shaw rose to the upper echelons of the international art world. Their work prompted considerable interest in the little-heard earlier incarnation of DAM, which also included the filmmaker Cary Loren and the chanteuse Niagara. In 1994, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and the music critic Byron Coley issued a lavish three-CD set of archival DAM recordings, which was a revelation to many. It garnered unexpected critical accolades and prompted a series of reunion projects, including performances, recordings, art exhibitions, and publications that brought together various ephemera, such as the collective’s eponymous post-psychedelic, pre-punk zine.

Although the intervening years have seen a steady stream of DAM-related activities and artifacts, 2011 saw a significant increase, culminating in a small retrospective at the Prism Gallery, in West Hollywood, accompanied by a lavish catalogue published by the co- curator Dan Nadel’s imprint, PictureBox. The title of the book (and the exhibition), “Return of the Repressed: Destroy All Monsters 1973–1977,” provides a strong hint that the DAM reclamation was largely part of the co-curator Kelley’s ongoing exploration of the recovering, reconstruction, and archiving of lost personal and cultural histories, and as such, it manages to short-circuit or repurpose most of the problematic absurdities inherent in exercises in DIY subcultural nostalgia..."

Read the rest of Punks Out of the Past: Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, and Destroy All Monsters here

Triumph of the Sloth

OK, I've been kind of slothful myself since I failed to beat my last year's blog post count, but at least I didn't roll back to the previous year's meager 72. And we've been busy busy in spite of the unemployment round here, some of which I'll be catching up on shortly. First off though we have the big news of the weekend: our designated resident sloth Chloe AKA Winway Pleats Please earned her NW2 title on Sunday, the first among our whippet herd to get an advanced degree. For those who haven't been following the blog for long, NW2 is the second level of initiation in the Order of Fun Nose Work, a new canine sport based on bomb and drug detection training, which originated right here in Los Angeles (well, Long Beach and Pasadena if you want to get picky).

Chloe spaced out on her first run at the NW2 last year, but this time around she not only made the cut (one of seven to succeed out of thirty in the trial), but she had the 2nd fastest time on the exterior search (the event she screwed up on last time) and the fifth best time overall! Due to our "No whippet left behind" policy, she'll have to wait for Nigel and Portfolio to catch up before taking a stab at her terminal degree. But hot damn, then I'll finally be able to find out where I left that big bag of heroin! What I don't use for the pain, I can sell to schoolchildren so Chloe can finally get that brown contact. Life is good.

BAD Disney Girls from Behind

At the WeHO Book Fair, Sept 30. Who be these beguiling wenches? Disgruntled inbetweeners? They dispersed before I could lock in a fix. But not before I snapped a couple pix.

A Flurry of Beacon Press

It's official! "Works by... Doug Harvey... complete the sizable presentation!!!" Chris Knight reviewed China Adams' The Loop Show in the LA Times, also noting that "Conceptual art in the 1960s partly proposed that enough objects already exist in the world, eliminating the need for artists to make more. Trash to the rescue. At the Beacon Arts Building, a wide-ranging exhibition titled The Loop Show seems to propose -- at least indirectly -- that the Conceptual dictum is now second nature to artists working with throwaways."

Kudos to the Institute for Figuring on the extensive praise Knight rightfully lavishes on their twin crocheted trash corral reef scultptures, which he declares "the tour de force that steals the show!" Watch for exciting new developments on the IFF front in the new year. Read the rest of Chris Knight's review here.


At the other end of the hygiene spectrum, Coagula demon Mat Gleason named Arataland! his Number 2 for 2011! We're Number 2! We're Number 2! Anyway, Mat kindly singled out the curatorial gesture of "bestowing the glory of a solo retrospective on an artist who was not of sufficient institutionally-approved status that would ordinarily warrant this career milestone" as worthy of note, which -- apart from grooving on Arata's oeuvre -- was the point for me.

Even though he missed the point on Chain Letter, I'd have to say Mat's own unbridled curatorial project in the BAB's Critics-as-Curators series Tel-Art-Phone was one of the most surprising and entertaining shows of the year. And I'm not just saying that because I was in it. Read the rest of Mat Gleason's Top 11 Art Shows of 2011 List here. Then use the money grandma sent you for Christmas to order a copy of the exquisite Arataland! catalog.

Images: Institute for Figuring, Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef 2011, DH Cryogenic Angel 2011 photo by Heather Stobo; BAB Director Renee Fox and Michael Arata at Arataland! photo by Mat Gleason (?)

More Proof of the Transmigration of Canine Souls

Behold! Here is Chloe, bedecked in a festive whippet-deconstructed reindeer oven mitt -- the very same in which greyhound Reyna posed a few years ago for her organization's holiday newsletter centerfold. Mere coincidence?

Melancholia Rising

Whoa! Except I would have left all those gorgeous spoilers for the end, and started it cold as another dysfunctional Scandinavian family get-together potboiler. Because there's always a chance of some one watching it cold, and how mind-blowing would that be?


As usual with Mr. Von Trier's oeuvre, M.A. and I were practically the only ones laughing in the movie theater. And sobbing. And I peed my pants. But I mean, c'mon people. "It tastes like ashes!"?! Classic! Lighten up, for God's sake!


PS: The DougH on the Go! Reader who can identify the most Tarkovsky references wins a special prize. Email your entry to dghrvy@gmail.com.

The Order of Things

This old cast iron stove makes a fine support for our new-to-us flatscreen TV as we enjoy Fireplace For Your Home's famous old-fashioned, wood-burning fireplace and natural crackling yule log fireplace videos.

Santa & The Doodle-Li-Boop

Click here to see a video of the 78 record playing.

An early childhood obsession and subject of much early turnatablist experimentation ("Why don't you look in the closet??tesolc eht ni kool uoy t'nod yhWWhy don't you look in the closet??tesolc eht ni kool uoy t'nod yhWWhy don't you look in the closet??tesolc eht ni kool uoy t'nod yhWWhy don't you look in the closet??tesolc eht ni kool uoy t'nod yhW...") turns out to have been written by the founder of The Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (SINA), Alan Abel. There's a documentary on netflix/hulu about him, called "Abel Raises Cain" - you can also still get this and a few dozen other peculiar holiday recordings here:

Download Outsider XMAS Vol 1
Download Outsider XMAS Vol 2

Tracklists in Comments.

And Vice Versa

LA Night Driving Curbscapes Pt 4

LA Night Driving Curbscapes Pt 3

LA Night Driving Curbscapes Pt 2