Friday, January 31, 2014

Doug Harvey's LESS ART Radio Zine Cassette Zine #1


Now available from KCHUNG Records only in this EXCLUSIVE OFFER at the Printed Matter LA Art Book Fair! While supplies last. Slightly higher in Canada.

(This is the Jim Shaw episode of LARZ, which I edited and expanded as a KCHUNG mixtape for the book fair, which is now over. Nevertheless I urge you to seek it out at the next KCHUNG event! $5 CHEAP $5!)

Checked out the fair last night, caught AIRWAY after walking the dogs through Chinatown in the rain. Today is long-delayed F practice, tomorrow is the MCRH then a special edition Less Art Radio Zine about the 'patacritical Interrogation Techniques Anthology Volume 3, followed on Sunday by an LAFMS LARZ with the Potts boys and Dennis Duck. Then Thursday a rare Mannlicher Carcano live performance in dandy San Diego. I guess you could say I'm in a sonic mode.

Thursday, January 30, 2014

AIRWAY Live at MOCA


I have a sudden compulsion to perform CPR...

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Mannlicher Carcano Live at Mesa College


As part of the exhibition Lure: all is not what it seems, international improvisational audio collage and radio art collective Mannlicher Carcano will perform Switch & 'bate, a rigorous deconstruction of delusional consumerist tropes of romantic love, as an inoculatory ritual in advance of St. Valentine's Day. Projections, theatrical gestures, and the detourneeing of copious amounts of love song vinyl may be expected, and opportunities for the public to pledge their troths will be knocking. Unless the van is rocking. In which case rainchecks and/or rain gear will be issued.

Thursday, February 6, 6:30 - 8 PM, Mesa College Art Gallery

San Diego Mesa College, 7250 Mesa College Drive, San Diego, California, 92111-4998

LAFMS on LARZ!


In the first of a projected gazillion shows devoted to the Los Angeles Free Music Society, on Sunday February 3rd, 2014 Doug Harvey's Less Art Radio Zine welcomes founding LAFMS operatives Rick Potts, Joe Potts, and Dennis Duck, fresh from their opening-night gig at the Printed Matter LA Art Book Fair. The LAFMS were a loose aggregation of like-minded audio experimentalists that emerged from Pasadena in the mid-70s; part of a global phenomenon of artists who suddenly came into possession of the trickle-down means of production to make and distribute records, tapes, and magazines. We'll barely have time to scrape the surface of the back catalog of just these three -- Mr. Duck was the drummer for Dream Syndicate, after all, and Rick Pott was 1/3 of Solid Eye, one of my favorite local bands of the 90s -- but we'll have fun trying.

12 Noon Saturday Feb 3, 2014 at 1630 AM in Chinatown, LA or www.kchungradio.org

Photo by Fredrik Nilsen

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Karen Carson is Whom!


Karen's one of those always-surprising artists who switches her game with virtually every show -- although what drew me to make these detail photos was the fact that the consummate paint handling reminded me of her purely abstract work from the 80s - look it up! And get cooking on that retrospective, Vergne!

rADIO fREE 'pITA3 at the LA Art Book Fair


On Saturday, Feb 1st 2014 from 3 - 4 PM, Doug Harvey's Less Art Radio Zine will present rADIO fREE 'pITA3 -- a special program based on the 'patacritical Interrogation Techniques Anthology Volume 3, live from the KCHUNG Radio booth at the Printed Matter LA Art Book Fair.

The program will include live performances and interviews from contributors to 'pITA3, plus a selection of audio materials of varying pertinence, including musical selections by Peter Blegvad, steve roden, Adolf Wölfli, and the Legion of Rock Stars; spoken words from Raymond Roussel, Christine Wertheim, Edward Lear, J&H Productions, pitta of the mind, and Francis E. Dec; experimental theory from Sheridan Lowery and Craig Baldwin; and recordings of glossolalia, inuit throat singing, and scat from the ethnopoetics collection of Jerome Rothenberg.

Copies of the book will be available (with a possible signing event after the broadcast) at the RAM Publications table.

Listen on www.kchungradio.org/stream.html

Sunday, January 26, 2014

Off White


In 1968, Beatle Paul McCartney approached Richard Hamilton, inventor of Pop Art, to design the cover for the follow-up LP to the game-changing Sgt. Pepper album of the previous year. Hamilton came up with a typically droll and elegant solution by taking the opposite extreme to Pepper’s psychedelic horror vacui—a completely white album cover with “The Beatles” embossed at an angle on the front and individually numbered in the lower right corner (making it a limited edition of 3 million or so), improbably linking the Fab Four to then cutting-edge visual art strategies of Minimalism and Conceptualism.

Fast forward 45 years: California-raised artist Rutherford Chang fills a SoHo gallery with the 600+ copies of the original vinyl pressing of The White Album he has accumulated over the last few years, mostly from trolling the Internet. That show—“We Buy White Albums” —presented the collection in a stripped-down version of a retail record store, with bins full of the same LP organized by serial number, a wall of display copies and two listening stations where audience members were invited to audit 4 ½ decades-worth of wear and tear on one of our culture’s most familiar and beloved sound artifacts.



 The real aesthetic payoff was the album jackets, with Hamilton’s minimalist void altered idiosyncratically with tags of ownership, repositioned track listings and more than occasional attempts to provide the psychedelic cover art that never was. On top of this layer of horror vacui graffiti is the abrasion and grime from years of handling, and the frequent random disintegration of the white cover slicks to reveal the brown cardboard beneath.

 The result is a strangely moving inversion of Walter Benjamin’s description of the elimination of an artwork’s unique aura through mass media reproduction—what began, at least in part, as a knowing wink at the vacuous genericism of the globally marketed commodity The Beatles had become, became the tabula rasa for thousands of uniquely individuated artifacts. Presented in a pre-loaded “white cube” gallery space and not available for purchase, Chang’s collection of White Albums were allowed to reveal their truly iconic function.

The second phase of Chang’s project was to compile the accumulated differences into a singularity—a limited edition mixdown of multiple versions of the time-worn vinyl into a dense, off-register thicket of sound. This artifact has just been released via Chang’s tumblr page(though the link to purchase the LP mysteriously vanished after a few days—intellectual property goons?).



Read the rest of UNDER THE RADAR: The Other White Album at artillerymag.com or in the print edition, or ATJ.

Visit http://rutherfordchang.com/white.html and http://100whitealbums.tumblr.com/

UPDATE: Rutherford Chang wrote to say, "the album is in fact a composite of 100 different albums with no mixing at all. Sound engineers thought I was crazy, but that's how I proceeded nonetheless."

Saturday, January 25, 2014

Details of Paintings by Whom?


Here are some detail photos of a recent painting show in Los Angeles. Can you guess the name of the artist? Check back in a day or two for the answer!




 














Monday, January 20, 2014

Pre-Post-Hubris


I just realized that the two main books I'm reading right now with considerable pleasure -- The Cleft (Doris Lessing's second-last, and her last speculative fiction novel) and The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, are about the very beginning and very end of human civilization. I guess it's always been all that inbetween stuff that gets on my nerves.

Thursday, January 9, 2014

Annie Lapin on Less Art Radio Zine


After experiencing some brief technical difficulties, KCHUNG has uploaded the most recent edition of Doug Harvey's Less Art Radio Zine, featuring Annie Lapin discussing her new work, which opens to public view at Honor Fraser this Saturday from 6-8 PM, and playing the music she listens to in the studio, ranging from R.L. Burnside to Mongolian throat singing to the glitch remix of Dolly Parton's Wildflowers. Download or stream it here: Annie Lapin on Less Art Radio Zine

Image: Annie cutting a section from DH's St Sebastian Soylent Rainbow Labyrinth at PØST Gallery
September 4, 2009.

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Marvel Mocks the Underground, Mildly, in 1968


Another discovery in my current scanning frenzy is this page torn from a probably 1968 issue of Marvel's Not Brand Echh, a comic much in the vein of early MAD. What I thought was really interesting was that this is a parody (drawn by Herb Trimpe) of the cover for Big Brother's Cheap Thrills album, drawn by R. Crumb in his underground comix style (also inspired largely by MAD) -- and that it was done almost simultaneously with the emergence of undergrounds. Strange loops.

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Jack Rules the World!


My nephew Jack on the back landing of my parents' house in what - 1993? Must be from when my Dad was dying. Anyhoo, I've been trying to spend a bit of time doing each of the 50 things I swore I was going to accomplish on my break from teaching, one of which was to start archiving all the analog media I have piled up, and this used to be a 35mm slide. I scanned about a hundred so far, so watch for more. Now I'm going to go put this on his Facebook page...

Friday, January 3, 2014

Annie Lapin on Doug Harvey's Less Art Radio Zine


My guest this Sunday (January 5th 2014) will be LA-based painter Annie Lapin. We haven't had a lot of time to work out the details, as Annie's busy finishing up her solo show Forget the Name, which opens at  Honor Fraser Gallery on Saturday the 11th from 6 - 8 PM. One for sure playlist item is the new CD Ritual by flugabonist David Dominique, which features cover art by Annie, and was recorded in LA with a group of local improv and new music luminaries. Tune in at 12 Noon Sunday to AM 1630 or www.kchungradio.org to hear what else Annie has up her sleeve.

Image: Various Peep Shows (Through), 2013 Oil on canvas 82 x 72 inches