Prosthetic Enthusiasms and the Meta-historical Bauhoroque

"In retrospect, Machine Project—the Echo Park storefront operating for the last decade as a rapid-fire curatorial clearinghouse for founder/director Mark Allen’s tireless curiosity—would seem to have been one of the most influential artistic endeavors of the new millennium. Bridging the faux-institutional critique of the Museum of Jurassic Technology and Center for Land Use Interpretation with the collaborative rhizomatics of Generation Occupy, MP has been both a model for a host of subsequent networking nodes, and one of the busiest neural clusters in the increasingly web-like cultural underground...

Machine’s latest project is essentially a video zine documenting a representative sampling of typical MP happenings from 2010–12. These range from an opera starring dogs to a guy singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” through a megaphone while climbing a hill in San Francisco; from a relational aesthetics museum residency for houseplants to a drag tableaux-vivant reenactment of scenes from the Marlene Dietrich western Destry Rides Again; from the perverse harnessing of the kinetics of an aerobics workout to churn butter to a workshop on how to escape from the trunk of a car “so that the next time you’re kidnapped it doesn’t have to ruin the rest of your day.”...

An equal but opposite dummy institution is the Boston Visionary Cell, though I’m not sure it ever involved anyone but founding artist Paul Laffoley. Which is fine, because the guy could probably fill two dummy institutions. Since the late ’60s, Laffoley’s information-dense paintings have successfully straddled hermetic mysticism, paranormal phenomena (including alien contact), fringe physics, and utopic architecture and engineering, not to mention some badass graphic design. Articulating an ornately modernist didacticism—while predicated on a radically reimagined psycho-spiritual function for art—his exquisite charts defy easy assimilation by the mainstream art world, as well as the lowbrow and outsider...

When I first encountered Laffoley’s work, I wasn’t clear about his sincerity—could this be merely an elaborate but superficial appropriation of the vocabulary of expanded consciousness and paranoid conspiracy cognition? The newly published Premonitions of the Bauharoque dispels any such concerns, delivering a mother lode of Laffoley’s writings dating back to 1972. .."

Read the rest of Prosthetic Enthusiasms and Perverse Harnessings here, or in the November 2013 hard copy of artillery magazine.

Images: Machine Projects, I Left My Heart; Cabeza Debacle (not included on DVD). Paul Laffoley, The Kali-Yuga: The End of the Universe at 424826 A.D. (1965); The Zodiac Wheel (1967)