Stellaflage for Puppy Day

Stay glued to your TV sets!

Doug Harvey's zine Less Art, last incarnated as a KCHUNG radio show, will soon manifest in video form!

WImP Out!

Here's my latest Artillery column which coincidentally starts with a shoutout to Tony Conrad, who would've turned 79 today. HBD Schmaltzy!

In Branden W. Joseph’s book, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts After Cage, Joseph precipitates his excursion into the minutiae of the early ’60s New York City avant-garde on Mike Kelley’s concept-like-thing of Minor Histories—a sort of counter-canonical reportage bringing to light overlooked moments in cultural history when long-lost underground communities crackled with oppositional synergy—often to the direct benefit of a handful of derivative but ambitious followers.

 While Kelley’s Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) buddies have been given some serious attention along these lines, another LA art/experimental music collective was almost completely lost from the historical record until last year. World Imitation Productions (AKA WImP) are best known as the breeding ground of the cognoscenti’s favorite LA post-punk band Monitor—themselves almost forgotten until the 2013 re-release on the Superior Viaduct label of their sole self-titled 1981 LP. But the WImP collective initially flourished in an even more obscure subculture—that of quirky anonymous fliers, chapbooks, zines and mail-art communications.

Coalescing in the San Fernando Valley—Ground Zero of the festering suburban carnivalesque—WImP scavenged amongst the thrift stores, theme parks, UFO cult headquarters and record and bookstore bargain bins, collecting and recombining the semiotic DNA of sitcom reality into rich and strange mashups—not only in their Xeroxed collage publications, cobbled together from vintage magazine ads, obsolete civics schoolbooks, fallout shelter instruction pamphlets, religious tracts and so on but in Situationist anthropological expeditions to Disneyland, curatorial projects including exhibits of lost pet posters, thrift-shop art and the infamous “Fix-It-Up” show at LACE... continue
reading Under the Radar: Minor History Needs More Mining at Artillery or ATJ


Interior images from Afraid of Modern Living: World Imitation & Monitor, 1977–1982, by Antonio Beecroft https://soundsonpaper.com/

Tim Hawkinson @ DENK

"Orrery Reflected in Diamonds" installation shot of Tim Hawkinson's show at DENK Gallery.

Stella Socializing at Tim Hawkinson Opening

Photos by P. Wickman