DougH On The Go!

Triumph of the Sloth

2012-01-30T18:32:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-29T23:11:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-29T17:30:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-29T12:20:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-28T12:28:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-26T10:29:00.001-08:00

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

2011-12-25T14:52:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-24T10:45:00.000-08:00

LA Night Driving Curbscapes Pt 4

2011-12-20T12:18:00.000-08:00

LA Night Driving Curbscapes Pt 3

2011-12-20T12:12:00.001-08:00

LA Night Driving Curbscapes Pt 2

2011-12-20T11:58:00.001-08:00

LA Night Driving Curbscapes Pt 1

2011-12-20T11:52:00.000-08:00

Conjuring the Purp

2011-12-18T10:44:00.000-08:00

Don't look at the fat ass losers or freaks, look at my Street Art Portfolio! He's on for day 3 in Long Beach in 15 minutes, so I'm posting this sympathetic color magic talisman to bring the purple home.

The Cryogenic Angel, Chapter One

2011-12-17T17:32:00.000-08:00

The first 1 1/4 chapters of my new improvised experimental graphic collage novel "The Cryogenic Angel" are currently on view as part of "The LOOP Show" curated by China Adams at the Beacon Arts Building in Inglewood. The novel will ultimately consist of 64 50 X 30 inch collages, 16 chapters made up from 4 individual eruptions of cultural detritus, shifting orientation through 4 directions in a counterclockwise rotation. The first chapter is entitled "History Lessens" -- sorry about the lo-res images, I'll post some better ones when I get them; but to read the fine print you really have to see them in person.

The LOOP Show
Dec 3, 2011 – Jan 15, 2012
Beacon Arts Building
808 N. La Brea Avenue
North Inglewood, CA
90302

GALLERY HOURS
Thurs - Sat 1 - 6 PM
Sun 1 - 4 PM

HOLIDAY HOURS:
Dec 24 - Jan 5
By Appointment Only
To make an appointment:
gallery@beaconartsbuilding.com

Why Aren't I Blogging?

2011-12-16T11:16:00.000-08:00

I don't know, but if I'm going to reinforce my ObComp fear of slipping into a downward spiral of diminishing annual post numbers, I need to post at least 22 new important bulletins in the next two weeks! The self-gauntlet is thrown! Let the posting begin! Q: What do you call a dead pink incense elephant atop a Thomas Kinkade spice rack? A: A start.

Young's Monsters of Art Reception Report

2011-11-02T19:59:00.000-07:00

Young Summers' documentation of the MoA opening Monday night: Robbie Conal & Peaceful Rock Zombie

Distressed Eye-Mirror Cornucopia, unidentified reflection, Peter Frank, & Renee Fox

Dave Corbett & George Lopez

Butoh Diva Ghost Angel with Marnie Weber's monster

Anna Siqueiros won the best costume prize -- more photos to follow...

It began with a potato...

2011-10-30T23:21:00.000-07:00

I usually get my DIY Printmaking students to collaborate on a giant potato print done in the Chuck Closey pointillist style. For some reason this semester I came up with an image of Frankenstein in a beret and it seemed to inspire them. Here's Young Summers putting some finishing touches on it.

Later, when we moved on to spray stencils, I kept working with the image, and added the caption "Monsters of Art" -- and I was all like "That'd be an awesome tiitle for a show" and Arata was all like "Let's do it!" So we did and it's opening tonight, Halloween, October 31st, and it is awesome.

Here's a bit of a previrew... above: Ernie Ramirez's professional accoutrements; below: Victoria Reynold's oil painting Lord of Fat

Above: Marnie Weber's concrete-slippered monster from her most recent series thereof; below: Marcel Azevedo adds the necessary didactics to complete the potato Frank. Actually it wasn't really complete until we framed it with Monsters of Art themed prints from the class...

Above: Josh Miller's Cato at the Gate of Purgatory which I advised him to include on the condition that Cato be rendered monstrous by the addition of a tail, which may be seen here; below: Arata fixes a hole while in the foreground Don Suggs' Blue Eyed Devil awaits hanging.

Potato Frank finally complete, with stalwart printmaker/installers Idowu Ajibola, Maria Ana Sampaio Nunes , Robert Zargoski, Young Summers, Karisa Ballard, and Will Carrico taking a deserved rest. It wasn't until Steve Hurd dropped off his painting that we realized Frank was not yet complete... but you'll have to check out the show to know what I mean.

Monsters Of Art
Curated By Michael Arata and Doug Harvey

Suzanne Adelman, Michael Arata, Marcel Azevedo, Tony Beringhele, Jimmy Chertkow, Derek Curry, Justin Cole, Scott Davis, Denise Davis, Mark Dutcher, Bill Farroux, Jennifer Gradecki, Kio Griffith, Doug Harvey, Steve Hurd, Kristi Lippire, Josh Miller, Kenneth Ober, Ernie Ramirez, Victoria Reynolds, Anna Siqueiros, Laurie Steelnik, Don Suggs, Dani Tull, Jeffrey Vallance, Keith Walsh, Matt Wardell, Marnie Weber, WLAC Printmaking Class

Opening reception October 31, 6:30-9:30 PM
Costume Optional, bring treats to share

Live music by East of Lincoln
featuring jazz recording artist Diane Hubka

West Los Angeles College Art Gallery
9000 Overland Avenue (just S of Jefferson)
Culver City, CA 90230

Regular hours: Monday-Thursday 10AM - 4PM
Exhibit up through December 1, 2011

Dumpster Score of the Century (thus far)

2011-10-21T20:48:00.000-07:00

There's this big recycling dumpster I park by every couple of days, and there's often some weird-ass shit there. About six weeks ago, some one left literally thousands of pink leather cell phone cases still in their original packaging there. I thought about taking them, then realized that was just nuts, then came back for them the next day. I had remembered I was supposed to make a piece for China Adams' curatorial project LOOP, about recasting cast-off consumer material as objets d'art, so perfect, right?

Some one beat me to it. In their place were several boxes of shooting scripts -- not that rare a sight in LA (Dani Tull once exhibited a monumental curved wall a la Tilted Arc made from stacks of them). Dogs were waiting and I wasn't that interested in sorting through a bunch of literature anyway -- but a couple of titles caught my eye -- Puppetmasters II & III, and this baby: some kind of sequel to the oddball Blaxploitation classic Dolemite, starring comedian Rudy Ray Moore.

If you haven't seen Dolemite, get thee to a netflix cue -- and meanwhile check ot the bits on youtube, including this spectacular rendition of the African-American folkloric recitation The Signifyin' Monkey, whose titular protagonist derives from that rascally trickster figure of Yoruba mythology, Esu Elegbara. Rudy Ray as Dolemite delivers another classic toast in a weirdly flat street corner performance of Shine and the Titanic.

Anyway, I'd never heard of the sequel, which doesn't signify much. But when I started searching online I could find no reference to this movie anywhere, even though there was some kind of shooting schedule tucked into the script. I took the mystery to Mark Jason Murray, the man behind the Rudy Ray Moore is Dolemite! Official Website who informed me that not only had the story never been produced, but that the author, Jerry Jones, didn't have a copy. As far as anyone could tell, I had stumbled across the only surviving version of the script! Here's what Murray had to say:

“Thanks to Doug Harvey and his scavenger instincts, a lost part of Rudy Ray Moore history has been re-discovered! THE SONS OF DOLEMITE… the DOLEMITE sequel that never was. I’d been looking for this script and information in regards to it for years! Thankfully, it is now a part of the Rudy Ray Moore archives and further reference material for my biography on Rudy Ray Moore. You are the man Doug!”

So there you have it. I'm the man. And maybe Small Form Films has their next big production prepackaged and ready to roll? Oh, and the bidding starts a hawf-a-million dollahs!

Posture Lessons for Young Ladies

2011-10-20T23:17:00.000-07:00

"Look around everywhere you turn is heartache; it's everywhere that you go. You try everything you can to escape the pain of life that you know. When all else fails and you long to be something better than you are today. I know a place where you can get away; it's called a dance floor, and here's what it's for: so vogue."

— M. Ciccone

"For many -- especially those on the outside — Los Angeles' swinging, glittery nightlife is one of the most attractive features of the city. There's always something going on, and more often 50 things. Or 500. In a city whose hard currency is celebrity, no effort or expense is spared in the pursuit of being seen — or in creating the impression that your party is the party. As a result, an entire industry of event planning and management is running full steam in LA, 24/7 — including an unlikely substratum of photogenic young things who are rented by the hour to flesh out the fabulousness of your guest list.

It is in this odd simulacral corner of the contemporary cultural landscape that Deborah Vankin and Rick Mays have set their graphic novel Poseurs — though I'm not sure that anything as crass as a storefront "We the Party People" outlet, replete with a balding, cigar-chomping sleazeball boss with a heart of gold — has actually sprung up yet. But who knows, it's Hollywood after all. Vankin is familiar to LA readers as a cultural journalist and editor with stints at LA Weekly, Variety, and the LA Times (including its recently euthanized weekly tabloid, Brand X), but this is her first foray into the graphic-narrative medium.

It's an impressive debut. Poseurs follows three teenagers working the party circuit — Jenna is a half-Jewish, half-Cherokee wannabe photographer who stumbles into "We the Party People" online, after being fired from her waitressing gig; Pouri is a wealthy Taiwanese "parachute kid" who is constantly dodging the Skype scrutiny of her overseas parents, who naively believe she's about to ace her SATS; Mac is a lowly busboy with some kind of pathological language disorder that makes him spew random slanguage — he prides himself on being the ninth-most frequent contributor to urbanthesaurus.com.

If this all seems insistently web friendly, you're picking up on one of the most conspicuous motifs that identifies the story's demographic skew: Poseurs was originally slated to be part of DC Comics' Minx graphic novel series, designed to lure teenage girls into the depraved world of comicdom — and texting, uploaded videos and accidentally swapped cell phones play appropriately pivotal roles in the story line..."

Read the rest of Strike a Pose in the current Artillery Magazine or online at www.artillerymag.com

Buy Poseurs on amazon.

Spacefolio

2011-10-18T00:10:00.001-07:00

"I... see ... dead... pixels!"

Whoah!

Mid-Wilshire Madness!

2011-10-14T20:01:00.000-07:00

Two adjacent sculpture shows opening Saturday night promise untold riches! Sorry, I've been collaging photo captions from old National Geographics for the last 2 hours. I have bills to pay, you know! Seriously though, directly following Lee Lynch's triumphant debut at Steve Turner Gallery, his longtime cohort in Fireworks/Flugeldar Christian Cummings (also the co-initiator of Chain Letter) is occupying the same space with a group of his recent cast aluminum experiments, made in his home foundry using cast-off styrofoam and other commercial detritus to create his idiosyncratic updates on Eduardo Paolozzi's 3D collages.

Just down the street at Peter Mendenhall's gallery, Wayne Littlejohn -- one of the original Student Bolsheviks and a core figure in the Vegas art scene of the last two decades -- is showing his slick, exquisite fiberglass artifacts in his first LA solo show in some time. Finish Fetishistic craftsmanship collides with biomorphic abstraction and Buddhist iconography in a binge of glossy eye candy that dovetails neatly with the current renewal of interest in Ken Price, Craig Kaufman, Billy Al Bengston, early Judy Chicago.

Christian Herman Cummings - Beside My Self
Steve Turner Contemporary
6026 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90036
October 15 - November 12, 2011
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 15, 6 - 8PM

Wayne Littlejohn - Slippery
Peter Mendenhall Gallery
6150 Wilshire Boulevard, Space 8, Los Angeles, CA 90048
October 15, 2011 - November 12, 2011
Can't find a time for the opening, but I'll guess 6 - 9PM

Images: Wayne, Christian, Wayne, Christian. Details TK.

Hi Good Screening with Lynch & Weber

2011-10-04T18:12:00.000-07:00

Lee Lynch
The Murder of Hi Good
September 10 - October 8, 2011

Steve Turner Contemporary, 6026 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90036 (across from BCAM at LACMA). Open Tuesday through Saturday, 11am - 6pm, or by appointment.

Conversation with Lee Lynch & Marnie Weber
Thursday, October 6

Screening at 7:30

Conversation at 8:30

Doors open at 7

Image: Lee & Marnie (and Elias, Dave & Cory) on the gambling tent set of "The Murder of Hi Good" (photo by DH) -- Marnie plays an old west variation on her Spirit Girl character; a sideshow act consisting of a bound, porcelain-faced dancing girl whose astral body performs the hoochy-coochy! Worth the price of admission alone! And I'm not just saying that because it's free!

Mel's Hole Catalogs Available!

2011-10-01T17:26:00.000-07:00

And they'll probably be cheaper than the $175 new copies are fetching on amazon. I'll be attending the West Hollywood Book Fair to sign books for the Grand Central Press, who published the amazing catalog for the exhibit Aspects of Mel's Hole: Artists Respond to a Paranormal Land Event Occurring in Radiospace that I curated at the Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana in 2008, based on a geographical anomoly outside Ellensburg, Washington and first brought to public attention by the owner of the property - Mel waters -on Art Bell's Coast to Coast radio show in 1997.

This was an amazing exhibit (designed and installed by Andrea Harris and her crack team, while her husband Mike was having a kidney transplant!) that not many people saw; but the catalog remains and is pretty effin great if I do say so myself, due in no small part to the spectacular design job by Wendy Peng (this is the slipcover/exhibition poster). I need to put up some documentation of the show on my website soon. As soon as I find some documentation of the show. Does anyone have documentation of Mel's Hole: Artists Respond to a Paranormal Land Event Occurring in Radiospace?

Images: Jeffrey Vallance The View from Mel's Hole (2008) site-specific sculptural installation, approx 8 ft diameter; Wendy Peng Slipjacket/poster for Mels Hole catalog, 2008; Marnie Weber Mel's Hole: a Love Story production still for Super 8 film, 2007 - 2008

PS: I'll also be available to sign "The Original Art of Basil Wolverton: From the Collection of Glenn Bray" and "Thomas Kinkade: Heaven on Earth" for which I wrote essays. Oh, yeah, Noonish at 647 N. San Vicente Blvd. West Hollywood, CA

Hot Tub Wake

2011-09-24T22:45:00.001-07:00

Pictures of Dave Scardino and Linda Day's backyard lighting effects, with emphasis on the hot jacuzzi device, taken at Linda's wake.

Afternoon Delights

2011-09-22T10:32:00.000-07:00

This weekend I will be participating in what looks to be an awesome panel discussion with my fellow artist/curators in Carl Berg's Role Reversal exhibition at the Jose Brudis-Biada Art Gallery, Mount Saint Mary’s College Challon Campus, 12001 Chalon Road, Los Angeles, CA 90049. Other panelists include Robert Gunderman, Roger Herman, Micol Hebron, David McDonald, Christopher Miles, Paul Paiement, Christopher Pate, Max Presneill, Tyler Stallings, Laurie Steelink, Inmo Yuon, & HK Zamani! Saturday, September 24, 3:00 - 4:30PM

Then on Sunday afternoon sometime between 1 and 4 PM (probably towards the end) I'll be at the Beacon Arts Building for the closing of the Adelman/Walsh extravaganza The Optimist's Parking Lot, which was going to be a panel discussion, but has recently been reimagined as a pancake-fueled "informal Q&A."

"More bacon?" "Yes Please." Now that's my kind of dialectic!

Saxondale Streaming

2011-09-22T10:13:00.000-07:00

I finally got around to watching Saxondale, a two-season British TV series from 2006-07 about a former rock roadie (now indie pest controller) by comic genius Steve Coogan (Alan Partridge, Tristam Shandy, The Trip), because it leaves Netflix streaming tomorrow. It is, of course awesome - each episode begins with a men's anger management group therapy meeting in a children's library and ends with a section from the most-played vinyl in my DJ sets - Hocus Pocus by Focus. Impeccable.

What Dreams May Come Again?

2011-09-17T11:48:00.000-07:00

"Sometimes when I’m looking at Sean Duffy’s work, I get the weird feeling that I’m eavesdropping on somebody’s near-death hallucination – or even their trip through the Bardos to whatever’s beyond that great white light. It isn’t that the sculptures, paintings, installations, etc. Duffy has created over the last two decades are morbid – or particularly spiritual.

But imagine you’re walking through the Mall, and you start to notice that all the items on display are a little strange – a music store displays only a couple of old-school vinyl obscurities, in huge quantities. The furniture emporium contains weirdly mutated iconic Modernist design at one end, and generic office decor repurposed into some kind of post-apocalyptic zen garden at the other, with a bunch of weird-ass lamps made from castoff electric fans and plastic gascans in between.

The home entertainment big box is chockfull of perversely customized equipment from that parallel universe where John Cage’s multiple- turntable audio collage chance compositions topped the charts. And don’t get me started on the Auto Zone! The point is, everything is a little off, sometimes way way off. But it isn’t random – each distortion has the distinctive stamp of being related to a specific person, like in a Philip K. Dick story where supposedly benign fragments of objective reality start turning into explicit personal messages. Only the messages aren’t for you. They’re for Sean Duffy.

And they’re from Sean Duffy. But are they the same guy? One of the most compelling aspects of Duffy’s oeuvre is the fact that it straddles the two personae that every artist has to reconcile – the inward-looking, self-reflexive, isolated human consciousness that comes up with the goods, and the outward-facing, collectively mediated social animal that puts them on display. And although this whole Personalized-Shopping-Mall-of-the-Damned scenario sounds a little solipsistic, anyone who’s seen Duffy’s work can attest to its genuine popular appeal..."

Read the rest of What Dreams May Come Again? Sean Duffy’s Consumer Paradise by coming to the Book Release Party and Recerd Player Tordimint TONIGHT and buying a copy of the copiously illustrated volume. Free Tee-shirt with first 20 signings!

Saturday, September 17, 6:30 - 8:00 pm

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
6006 Washington Boulevard, Culver City, California 90232

Image: Sean Duffy Beam Down 1998 Fun fur and clear upholstery vinyl on panel
Click here to read my review of "teach me to love" Sean Duffy's 1998 debut at Deep River gallery.

Book Release Party & Recerd Tordimint!

2011-09-17T10:52:00.000-07:00

Oops! Wrong Picture!

SEAN DUFFY
FRONT FORTY PRESS
Saturday, September 17, 6:30 - 8:00 pm at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
6006 Washington Boulevard, Culver City, California 90232 phone 310.837-2117 www.vielmetter.com

Please join us for a book release of a profile on Sean Duffy, published by Front Forty Press, Chicago, with and essay by Doug Harvey and an interview by Veronica Fernandez.

PLUS: Sean Duffy, Doug Harvey and guests in a DJ Recerd Tordtimint!

FREE T-SHIRT with first 20 books signed

Images stolen from Christine Siemens and Sean Duffy

Faüxmish Debut Coverage

2011-09-16T14:05:00.000-07:00

Been a crazy couple of weeks, which may be why I just found these two reports on the Faüxmish debut and record release party: Anna Siqueiros includes a bit of Faüxmish performance video, plus live sketches and snapshots on her blog

SIQUEIROS LIVES ON!: Faüxmish LP Release Party and Debut Public Performance! Live Sketches

and Carol Cheh delivers a typically elegant precis of the lineage, concept and execution of the band on her LA Performance blog Another Righteous Transfer. Thanks, ladies!

Recent Work of a Revelatory Nature, and Otherwise

2011-09-16T10:31:00.000-07:00

I was intending to do a separate post on the Role Reversal exhibit at Mount St Mary's, but most of the photos I took didn't work out -- some even seem to have vanished entirely from the camera's memory card. Maybe I will anyway, but I also realized I hadn't posted images of the new sculpture I made for the Optimist's Parking Lot show, and then I came across a forgotten very early LA piece in a strange location, so I thought I'd wrap them all up in one blog post and be done with it.

So this is Potato Tree, which I put together for the OPL show curated at Beacon Arts by Keith Walsh and Suzanne Adelman. The pre-rotted umbrella skeleton was going to be my contribution to Chain Letter, for other people to pin or hang their smaller works on, but since 1. I had to park 3 blocks from Bergamot 2. There were already 3 patio umbrella sculptures in the main space by 10 AM, and 3. Lynne Berman had already created a freestanding wooden edifice for others to adhere to, I decided to leave well enough alone. And, as I was to discover during the OPL install, the term "free-standing" wouldn't really have applied in this case.

The potatoes themselves will be familiar to anyone who has closely followed my career since the mid-90s - but for the other 6.9999... billion of you, I'll try and back it up (although I appear to not have put any documentation of them on my website yet). The first Pomme de Terre Froid appeared under the bench in a jail cell with a straitjacketed Houdini dummy as part of the Jeffrey Vallance-curated Magic Show at the Magic and Movie Hall of Fame, O'Shea's Casino, Las Vegas. There's an image somewhere, I'm pretty sure.

They originally had those eyeball toys - clear plastic balls containing a plastic eyeball suspended in fluid? embedded at every point where the spray foam exoskeleton criss-crossed. Inside the chickenwire structure was another toy called a bumble ball -- which looked like an old-timey sea mine -- containing an off-center battery-operated motor that kept it jumping in random directions. Wedged into the potato, the motion transferred to the larger structure, causing the entire object to shiver, shudder, and creep across the floor (unless it was jammed under a jail cell bench), and the eyeballs to spin wildly.

They multiplied, and appeared in a number of shows -- they had an empty Venice cottage to themselves in Detours, huddled on a stained off-white indoor/outdoor carpet, then one was crammed in the bathroom of Malibu Sex Party at Purple, then a free-range threesome comprised a central component of my installation St. Sebastian Frothy Elvis Carmen Miranda Moby Dick at DADA 96. They popped up several more times over the years, in gradually deteriorated states, but from 2003's Glass Beets and Blind Potatoes exhibit at the downtown YMCA until OPL they had been sitting in our front yard, biding their time. Clearly these tuberous champions are just getting their second wind!

Potato Tree was revelatory in the sense that I had no idea what it would look like (or how it would stand up) until I assembled it. My wall piece for Role Reversal, R.O.G. (Rectilinear Occlusion Gear) 01 (including Chain Letter leftovers and unauthorized contributions from Christine Siemens, Hector Romero, Daniel Hawkins, and others)was engineered so as to collapse to a size that would fit into Carl Berg's car. I assembled it in its collapsed state, and wrapped it up without actually seeing it, so it wasn't until the reception last Sunday that I actually got to see how it turned out. Revelation the second.

Finally, at Linda Day's wake AKA (One More) David & Linda Party, I was confronted in the bathroom by a piece I had forgotten about entirely -- a little glow-in-the-dark "Cathy' painting I had put in some $100 Xmas fundraiser show or something - was it at POST? Anyway, Linda bought it which was crazy because I would have given it to her. But that's Linda. She also bought 5 copies of the Gordon Haines issue of Less Art, so you know Dave's sitting on a comfy little nest egg right there.

The Gordon Haines issue of Less Art, 1st and 2nd ("Now with google eyes!") edition.

Pop Daddy Gone

2011-09-13T22:08:00.000-07:00

Solway-Jones just sent me a copy of this piece I did for the WEEKLY (but which doesn't seem to be in the online archive) when Richard Hamilton (who just died) showed at their weird first space over by the St. Vincent de Paul almost exactly 10 years ago.

Pop Goes the Easel
August 10, 2001

"A short drive up Alameda Avenue from the still-burgeoning Chinatown enclave of young galleries, a new venue for contemporary and 20th-century avant-garde art has appeared in the unlikely neighborhood of Lincoln Heights. After a couple of group shows and a FLUXUS show featuring American expatriate Ben Patterson. Gallery 2211 is currently presenting a modest but compelling survey of British artist Richard Hamilton’s explorations of computer-assisted printmaking technologies dating back to the early ‘70s. Hamilton is best known, somewhat inaccurately, as the father of Pop Art. While it’s true the movement took its name from the Tootsie Pop held by the muscleman in Hamilton’s seminal 1956 collage Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (above), the artist’s vision has more to do with his reputation as a Duchamp scholar than with the po-faced “critique” of consumerism attributed to Warhol, Lichtenstein et al. Nevertheless, Hamilton was borne to international prominence through his 1962 exhibition of Pop paintings in a group show alongside Peter Blake, R.B. Kitaj and David Hockey, and his subsequent place in popular culture (designing the Minimalist cover and photo-collage poster ⎯ “Edition 5,000,000 Approximately” ⎯ for the Beatles’ White Album) has pigeonholed the artist’s work in spite of its obvious grounding in art history, engagement in classical art technique, and subtle and ambiguous content.

Richard Hamilton, The Heaven Free of Stars (1998)

Hamilton has also been dedicated to the somewhat ghettoized art of printmaking, particularly its ever- evolving relationship to technology, and has been, since the‘70s, perhaps the most high-profile artist exploring the impact of digital media on this ancient technology. The oldest digital piece in the exhibit ⎯ a suite of perspectival diagrams on semitransparent Mylar leading up to a gorgeous high-relief white-silicone cast depicting a sequence of automobile-tire treads ⎯ was suggested to the artist in 1971 by Carl Solway, Cincinnati art dealer and father of Gallery 2211’s Michael. Solway recognized that the complexity of the original schematics, abandoned by Hamilton in the early ‘60s as ridiculously labor-intensive, could be easily calculated and rendered by then-emerging computer-graphics technology. The result is a wry, gorgeous spin on Duchamp’s chocolate-grinder imagery from his masterpiece Large Glass.

Most of the other works in the show are Iris pints of images created using the Quantel Paintbox program over the last decade, exploring the no man’s land between originals and reproductions. Hamilton’s two self-portraits appear at first glance, to be blown-up Polaroid images altered by hand application of paint ⎯ a strategy in keeping with much of Hamilton’s earlier work. The paint instead turns out to be part of the original photo, applied to a sheet of glass held parallel to the camera’s picture plane. In another work, Hamilton completes a print begun in 1949 as part of an unpublished suite of illustrations for James Joyce’s Ulysses, creating a slightly disturbing but surprisingly coherent hybrid of image-making technologies and artistic decisions generated half a century apart. A set of digital images of empty rooms ⎯ previously made into paintings for 1997’s “Dokumenta X” ⎯ is altered to include slightly off-kilter photographs of a model posing, on a later occasion, in the same rooms. It is this sort of unclassifiable, experimental, idiosyncratic conceptual and visual play that has kept Hamilton an important and challenging artist in to his 80th year, and the only drawback to his exhibit is its lack of sprawl."

PS: The Washington Post said that "The Gagosian Gallery said that until a few days ago, Mr. Hamilton had been working on a major retrospective that will travel to Los Angeles, Philadelphia, London and Madrid in 2013-14."

Faüxmish LIVE at Human Resources 110902

2011-09-13T09:38:00.000-07:00

A brief segment of the secret second set/LiTTLEROCK afterparty showing Marnie Weber and Doug Harvey playing the theremin with farm implements, as Dani Tull prepares to shred. Video by Fernanda Tellez Gonzalez.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0G2kQ7QYKA

Coming to a Tee-Shirt Near You Soon!

2011-09-12T19:29:00.000-07:00

... and possibly gallery...

R.O.G. (Rectilinear Occlusion Gear) 01

2011-09-10T23:53:00.000-07:00

I made a new piece for this show and I haven't seen it myself, though both Carl Berg (who curated) and Chris Miles (who's also in it) said it looks good. I made it to collapse and fit into Carl's car, and the process was such that I never saw it unfolded. It includes some bits left over from Chain Letter, some unauthorized appropriations of other artists work, and some found and thrift store art. And the stretcher bars were previously used by both Pamela Fraser and M.A. Peers.

I'll post an image when I get one. But check out that line-up. Boy howdy, group shows don't come much better than this: Bob Gunderman, your humble blogger, Micol Hebron, Roger Herman, David McDonald, Christopher Miles, Paul Paiement, Christopher Pate, Max Presneill, Tyler Stallings, Laurie Steelink, Inmo Yuon and HK Zamani. The basic idea is that we all curate, but what a powerhouse team of just plain artistes!

Role Reversal
Opening Sunday, Sept 11, 3-5pm

MAP, DIRECTIONS & MORE INFO at: www.msmc.la.edu/gallery

SHOW DATES: September 6 – October 18, 2011

GALLERY HOURS: Tues - Sat 12 - 5 PM
Closed Oct 13 - 14

Panel Discussion with artists - Saturday 24th, 3-4pm

The Lincoln Enigma

2011-09-10T17:01:00.000-07:00

Just found this awesome bit of documentary footage by Jimmy Chertkow of the Mannlichercarcanoplex 01 from July 2010 -- what is particularly mysterious is the fact that Michael Q. Schmidt is singing the "I could be another Lincoln" bit from The Wizard of Oz's "If I Only Had a Brain" to Lee Lynch as Tin Man, while the former sculpture prof of USC sculpts a bust of Lincoln from clay in a vintage 16mm projection behind them. Some one here is a genius!

Hi Good Opening Tonight!

2011-09-10T13:59:00.000-07:00

Here's a handful of my production photos from the first Hi Good shoot, details to follow.

Lee Lynch
The Murder of Hi Good

Steve Turner Contemporary
6026 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90036 (across from BCAM at LACMA)

September 10 - October 8, 2011
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 10, 6 - 9PM
Gallery hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 11-6

Steve Turner Contemporary is pleased to present The Murder of Hi Good, a single channel video installation by Lee Lynch. The centerpiece of the installation is Lynch's sixty-minute dramatic, revisionist western that relates to the murder of California's most infamous Indian hunter who lived in Tehama County in the 1870s. Lynch has been working on this project since 2007 and it will be making its world premiere.

Born in Redding, California in 1980, Lee Lynch earned a BFA in film from California Institute of the Arts (2005) and an MFA in Fine Art from the University of Southern California (2009). This is his first exhibition with the gallery.

Painting as Time Machine

2011-09-09T12:18:00.000-07:00

"I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea of paintings as mechanisms. I recently met the eccentric visionary artist Paul Laffoley, who insists that many of his two-dimensional mixed media works are, in fact, interactive devices capable of distorting local space-time – with a variety of effects including time travel, group telepathy, and contact with alien consciousness. Form follows function.

Of course, this way on thinking isn’t entirely alien to contemporary discourse about more mainstream art – albeit couched in somewhat less specific and more academically respectable terms. Mark Rothko’s signature abstractions are said to “function” properly only under certain lighting conditions, viewed from a particular distance. Ad Reinhardt, Bridget Riley, Robert Irwin, and many others have been identified as technicians exploring and manipulating the relationship between an artifact and the viewer’s consciousness. In fact, any artist statement or review referencing phenomenology is basically pointing at the same territory.

But why stop there? It isn’t really a stretch to imagine the cave paintings of Lascaux as DIY virtual reality simulation rides, to see medieval icons as self-hypnosis eye-fixation objects, or to consider the Renaissance obsession with perfecting perspectival trompe l’oeil as the quest for a better retinal mousetrap? Tibetan, Australian Aboriginal, Navajo, and other non-Western traditions are open about the sequential, psychologically operative processes encoded in and triggered by their visual art traditions.

What really got me thinking along these lines are the recent paintings of Linda Day, whose elaborately composed 2003 digital glitchscape Pulse series I characterized at the time as “intricate stripe paintings saturated with the spectrum and perceptual idiosyncrasies of the Southern California landscape.” While these works still bear up to that reading as analogous representations of a localized sensorium, in retrospect they seem less illustrative, and more like – well, mechanisms. .."

Read the rest of Kicking Away the Crutches in Bullet Time: Day’s Long Journey into Now in the catalog for Linda Day's 2008 HORIZONS show at Jancar, which is still available at BLURB: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/437665

Linda's final exhibit OU-BOUM has been reinstalled at ANOTHER YEAR IN LA through Sept 9th, when there will be a small memorial happening.

Anna Siqueiros: Chicken Artist

2011-09-07T11:45:00.000-07:00

After much delay, I have uploaded this remarkable performance to youtube in honor of Anna Siqueiros' birthday.

My Top Ten Faüxmish Collage Covers

2011-09-05T17:37:00.001-07:00

My favorite 10% of the 100 collage jackets Marnie Weber, Dani Tull and I created for the limited edition red vinyl debut LP by Faüxmish.

Blurbage for the Zacharia Juggernaut

2011-09-01T18:28:00.000-07:00

Check it out! Pull quote! That's my second, after the DVD jacket for Matthew Barney's The Order: From Cremaster 3. Watch out Peter Travers! Now how do I collect my royalties on this?

LiTTLEROCK opens at the Laemmle Sunset 5 tomorrow night! Tickets are available online. The cast and crew will be in attendance for the 8 pm screenings on Friday the 2nd and Saturday the 3rd for a Q and A afterwards.

Thanks to Mr. Jimmy for the heads-up!

Faüxmish LP Cover Collages in Progress

2011-08-31T14:07:00.000-07:00

And there's 94 more where they come from!

Faüxmish LP Release Party and Debut Public Performance!

Friday, September 2 · 8:00pm - 11:00pm

Human Resources
410 Cottage Home St in Chinatown, 90012
Los Angeles, CA

Please join Faüxmish to celebrate the release of their debut LP & CD ‘F for Ache’ and to witness the band's debut public performance. This will also be the ONLY OPPORTUNITY to view the entire run of the limited edition of 100 collaborative collage LP covers created by the band members! The LPs, limited CD version, and other merchandise will be available for purchase.

$5 donation at the door

Faüxmish is an experimental power trio featuring Marnie Weber, Dani Tull, & Doug Harvey.

Faüxmish is a Los Angeles art-rock supergroup that came together over a shared engagement with American spiritual sects who remove themselves from established social norms and create their own culture as outsiders.

Taking as their motto “Simplicity Through Noise,” Faüxmish have developed a practice rooted in improvisational ensemble playing using electric guitars (played with rubber mallets and other extended as well as traditional techniques) and vintage synthesizers, in various combinations of three.

Initially conceived as a ‘wall of sound,’ the group’s music rapidly developed a complex and idiosyncratic audio vocabulary drawing on the members’ widely divergent individual musical backgrounds, which range from noise to prog, post-punk to film scores, and 90s alt-rock to improvisational audio collage. The results range from dreamy ambient soundscapes to theatrical rock songs.

Redacted Records is proud to announce ‘F for Ache’ -- the debut release by Faüxmish. The album is being released in two different limited edition configurations
– a 12” vinyl LP in a numbered edition of 100, with a hand-silkscreened cover and a unique collaborative collage on each back cover, created by the three band members. The LP also contains one track unavailable on the CD version.
– a limited CD edition of 500, with covers individually personalized by the band members, and featuring a wealth of integrated bonus tracks.

They Should've Tackled Jacob Two-two

2011-08-27T22:26:00.000-07:00

Now there's a songfest waiting to happen! I actually met Jerry Lieber once, at what was perhaps the nadir of his career -- the 1983 premiere of his and Stoller's musical adaptation of Mordecai Richler's 'The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz' at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton. I was a mere usher, and drunk to boot -- but I had been a little obsessed with these guys' songcraft, and had been mixing their stuff in with John Cage and Suicide on my Saturday night radio show at CJSR. I told them, and they were gracious, but plainly very anxious with the production at hand -- which in fact turned out to be disastrous, and one of the most legendary fiascos in Canadian theatre history. I think it was even called 'Duddy!'

Above Mordecai Richler

Chain Slaw Skip Diving

2011-08-27T10:25:00.000-07:00

Whew! Just finished marathon three-day deinstall of Chain Letter. Many stories and interesting photos to come, possibly in print-on-demand book form. My favorite moment came on on the second day. The scruffy but amiable gent pictured here is noted LA performance artist Skip Arnold, whose contribution -- after standing in line for a couple of hours -- was to remove and leave his Austrian cowboy boots. He arrived in his socks to retrieve them, but they had been in the F1 space, which had been deinstalled the day before -- like many, Skip hadn't got the email with the revised deinstallation times.

We searched through the stuff Christian and I had rescued, and looked through the scraps left in F1 to no avail. Skip wasn't too distraught, but wanted to check the dumpster. We thought the dumpster had been emptied, but in fact the art had just been buried by black bags full of oozing restaurant garbage. Hooray! And there, very close to the top, were Skip's boots. He shook them off, slipped them on, and strode off into the west. God bless you, Mr. Skippy! And thanks for contributing to the magic that was Chain Letter!

Photo by Christian Cummings

Olfactory Consolation Prizes

2011-08-20T20:22:00.000-07:00

Spent the day in San Pedro at the National Association of Canine Scent Work (NACSW) sanctioned NW2 K9 Nose Work® Trial in hopes that Chloe would become the first whippet to achieve that level of olfactory sophistication. Alas, it was not to be. After a sensational performance on the first element -- the container search -- she dawdled distractedly over the vehicle search, looking around at the audience before finally getting down to the task at hand after two and half minutes. Close call! Then the interior room searches, which apparently went well, though there was no room for spectators.

After an inordinately long break, the trial resumed with the exterior search. The chips were stacked against her, as Chloe can't detect odors around blue picnic tables-- and I'm pretty sure some of the judges were wearing undergarments after we expressly indicated that she has issues in this area, so it can't really be said to have been a "fair" trial. This is undoubtedly why she timed out, wandering around the prep school lunchyard like an extra in a zombie movie -- ruining her shot at the title. Happily, when it came time for the "debriefing" (too little too late!) it turned out she had placed 3rd in interior and 2nd in container out of 30ish dogs! So even though "Pleats Please" can not at this time add any more initials after her name, she did get these lovely rosettes. Next time we'll make them paint the picnic tables chartreuse, and ace the motherfucker!

PS: I had to take this photo with 'Photobooth' because I lost my camera. Has anyone seen my camera?

Cory's Hi Good ADR Session on youtube

2011-08-14T00:04:00.000-07:00

Spent the afternoon at a Burbank recording studio for the ADR session for Hi Good, shot some footage for the "Making of..." doc -- but since Cory's getting all this press for LiTTLEROCK right now, I figured now's the time. Check it out on Youtube.

LACE-UP

2011-08-08T18:15:00.001-07:00

A few shots from the Unfinished Paintings panel discussion at LACE on Sunday afternoon (11/08/07) -- in keeping with the concept, the discussion was vigorous but left a lot of questions unanswered. Mine in particular. Here we see me trying to use the "explainin' hand" technique to compell the other participants (Lily Simonson, Brad Eberhard, moi, exhibition curators Josh Aster and Kristin Calabrese) to submit to my searching interrogatives.

Despondent over my lack of success, I decide to levitate my sippy cup of vodka to demonstrate my connection to higher vibrational contexts. Kristin saw it. She told me later. Jimmy Hayward, far right, is plainly skeptical, claiming to have seen Art Pepper levitate across the bandstand at the Surf Club in 1952. Embrace Failare tee shirt by Kilduff of Van Nuys.

Defeated, I replace my protective goggles ("They're all around us and we never knew it - you can only see them with these special glasses!") as Carol Cheh (far left) hums the closing theme, Jackson Browne's Boulevard. Cuz nobody gets it like they want it to be. Next time I email my questions in advance. And I'd better get answers this time. Next time.

Photos by James Chertkow.

SASSAS Listening Party Playlist

2011-08-06T17:59:00.001-07:00

I've had a couple of inquiries as regards my playlist for last weekend's SASSAS Listening Party, so here, as best as I can remember, it is:

Audience Induction by Damon – Teegarden & Van Winkle - Experimental Groundwork
Boogieman - Dolphin Explosion - Boogie Man
Pony People - Wounded Lion - Wounded Lion
Noon Balloon To Rangoon - Nervous Norvus - Stone Age Woo: The Zorch Sounds of...
John of the Sword - Animals & Men
Take Me Home Country Roads - Arthur Nakane & His One Man Band (I've listened to this early late 70s? self-released LP for years, and just found out the dude still plays in Little Tokyo and on the SM Pier!)
Songs Hurt Me - Marnie - Songs Hurt Me
Grassy Grass Grass - Woody Guthrie - Songs to Grow on for Mother and Child (1947)
Renaissance of Smut - Mrs. Miller - Does Her Thing (as far as I know, the only commercially released single to begin with the word "Kienholz")
Vain World Adieu - Alabama Sacred Harp Singers - Sacred Harp Singing
The Song of Mr. Phonograph - Tom Recchion - (single 78 played at 33)
Hocus Pocus – Focus - Moving Waves
All is Loneliness – Moondog - The Story of Moondog
Audience Dehypnotization by Damon – Teegarden & Van Winkle - Experimental Groundwork

Photo by Marlene Picard, Original collage LP cover by Marnie

Chain Letter Part Two Part One

2011-07-29T22:24:00.000-07:00

Man, this whole Chain Letter thing has blown up like crazy! I have a bunch of other stuff to catch up on here, but I figure the people might want to see these photos. This is actually the second batch, as the first -- from the install -- are on another computer. These are from the opening, which was awesome.

There must have been a dozen unscheduled performance artists or more (not including the Round of Applause Parade that circulated through the entire parking lot, picking up participants as it went along, crusade style). Word in the parking lot was that this was a father and son team, rocking a minimal papier mache euro-puppet look to great effect -- here they are unmasked, digging the Keith Walsh Experience.

Many kind souls contributed additional victual provisions including a bonus beer keg (on top of the six that crippled Wayne Blank) and this inventive erotic red velvet wanker cake, which was devoured and/or demolished in rapid order.

Is it possible to take a bad picture of this show? I can't match many of these works to their artists -- we'll just have to wait for the catalog...

Last of the Evening

2011-07-24T01:45:00.001-07:00

Blessed be the Biscuitmakers. That guy made off with Micol Hebron's birthday cake!

All Roads Lead to Faüxmish

2011-07-21T12:34:00.000-07:00

Faüxmish's debut LP "F for Ache" is still at the pressing plant, but its artisan-tooled jacket is touring Italy as part of Michael Arata's "One Night Stand -- Italian Style" traveling exhibit. Here it is installed on the wall of the Coliseum. "I did not know men could build such things" -- Juba the Gladiator could have been speaking of the finely crafted, hand-flocked beauty of this exquisite collector's item!

Last Chance for Cut & Paste Extravaganza!

2011-07-01T11:03:00.000-07:00

If you haven't seen Elliott Hundley's amazing new collages (and sculptures and paintings) at Regen Projects II at 9016 Santa Monica Blvd, today's the last day. They're open until 6 PM, so no excuses! I'd say more, but I just finished a 5000 word essay on the work, and figured I should get the work out fast. These are some detail shots I took. Free prize to the first person who can identify the works from which they are extracted! Leave guesses in Comments.

ARATALAND! Review in Whitehot Magazine

2011-06-30T09:52:00.000-07:00

Shana Nys Dambrot has written an excellent review of the ARATALAND! exhibit for whitehotmagazine.com, based on the idea that Henry Miller dreamed it all early last century. As art theory goes, it's more plausible than most. Thanks Hank. Thanks Shana!

"Innocenceland is the most diverse concentration, with samples from a dozen series laid out in a labyrinth of smaller rooms and corridors radiating off the building’s loading dock. The psychological purgatory of the periods and series collected in this grouping is exacerbated by sense of decentralized wandering that the layout necessitates. There’s a map but it doesn’t really help. You get separated from your group, you find yourself alone, you become anxious, and room after room is full of objects most people don’t care to be left alone with. “In the next room, which is the parlor, all the relatives are assembled. They sit in a semicircle, waiting for me to enter. They sit stiff and rigid, upholstered like the chairs. Instead of warts and wens, there is horsehair sprouting from their chins.” (HM) A small number of sculptures from 1991-93, the Little Virgins feature flickering electric candles and spokes of soiled, black and white saddle shoes, filled with wax and acquired by trading the girls for donuts, one donut per pair. They are old shoes, outgrown -- it’s not like he was waiting outside some Catholic school in a van with a box of them. He asked their parents. But he’s fine playing the role of apocryphal pervert, and the creepy ritualized religious overtones and vague menace triggered by the mere sight of little lost children’s shoes are a major clue that the entire amusement park may have been deadly serious all along. Little Virgin Dress (1993) is a child-size wall sculpture of a white lace churchgoing dress with an under-skirt blossoming of sexy plastic flowers, and doesn’t help his case in that regard. It also rewards viewers for bending slightly to look up a little girl’s dress, making them complicit in the perversion. Nervous laughter and a slight hint of alarm is a common reaction..."

Read the rest of Arataland! at Beacon Arts Building, Los Angeles here.

Sawdust City Premiere

2011-06-19T19:48:00.000-07:00

Sawdust City tells the story of a posse of drunken reprobates who get all jiggy with the erotic dancing and the Mr. Bubble up in the Standard Hotel... oh wait, no, that was the after-afterparty. See below.

Sawdust City is actually a brilliant tragicomic holiday road movie from Wisconsin-bred Angeleno writer/director/actor David Nordstrom that premiered last night at the LA Film Festival, and will screen two more times -- Thursday, Jun 23rd 10:00pm at the Downtown Independent, and Friday, Jun 24th 3:50pm at Regal Cinemas L.A. LIVE 10. Click here for tickets and more info. Don't pass up this opportunity to climb on board the Small Form juggernaut!

Further descriptive text TK.

It is Begun...

2011-06-11T16:07:00.001-07:00

New Work by Hector Romero

2011-06-10T13:04:00.000-07:00

A selection of remarkable recent works on paper by extraordinary Brooklyn painter/drawer Hector Romero, who may be with us in LA soon. Hector's been mining this rich vein of abstraction melding into cartoonish figurative graphics and back again since we were in grad school at UCLA, and the whole Providence-centered flurry of similar work came and went without anyone picking up on this masterful strain. Now is the time! (PS - I uploaded these images larger than usual because of the amount of detail in them -- click on each one to get a larger view)

To the Limit, Silly Phase, Now Who's Crazy, Nemo, Miracles, Las Palmas, Favorite Part, Fat Lip, Early Raveen, Cult Favorites, 6 valves All works pencil or mixed media on paper, 2010

Canine Freestyle Scratchin'

2011-05-31T22:26:00.000-07:00

To compensate for my lack of critical blogging over the course of the Spring Semester, I have posted my 3rd video to youtube -- a delightful funny animal number that will undoubtedly be the ground zero of one or more paradigm-shattering human/canine sound art collaborations. Thank you for your support.

The crowd is swelling, but there's still plenty of bacon...

2011-05-22T14:23:00.000-07:00

Carol Cheh said I should be live blogging instead of working on my Art History Powerpoint, so...

Teenage Wasteland Party Shoot

2011-05-21T15:40:00.000-07:00

Made it out to E 150th street off the Pearlblossom outside Palmdale last night to partake of some small form simulacral party action for the much-anticipated follow up to Mike Ott's Littlerock. And boy howdy let me tell you if fake parties aren't just as good if not better than the real thing!

Lee Lynch and Cory Zacharia in some ill-defined hostage situation. Nobody was clear about what was going on but Walter seems to approve. And it seemed to get Cory's thespian juices stirring.

Dave Nordstrom (who's Sawdust City debuts at the 2011 Los Angeles Film Festival between June 16 - 26) kept a tight rein on things from his luxurious production offices.

Scary Cory. Unfortunately, the filmmakers didn't get any of Walter's extended whipped-cream antics in the can, so this image will have to stand as the historical documentation. There was so much more though. So much more...

FREE PANCAKES AND BACON! (with attendance of panel discussion)

2011-05-19T00:44:00.001-07:00

This Sunday May 22 at the Beacon Arts Building (808 N. La Brea Avenue Inglewood, California 90302) from 1 -4 PM, there will be pancakes!

Plus sausage and bacon, coffee. Courtesy IHOP. This is not a Put-On!

Plus at some point an ARATALAND! panel discussion with me, Arata, Pagel, Mat Gleason, Carol Cheh,and Shana Nys Dambrot (if she can hobble down)... and YOU! I think it's set for 3 - that's what it said on the invite - but there's been talk of moving it up so people can still get to the COLA show after. Check back here or on facebook.

UPDATE: Looks like we'll start at 2, but keep yakking for the stragglers, for as long as any of us can stand it. OK, my top ten Pere Ubu songs...

Don't miss this last chance to see this historic show! Here's what the critics have been saying:

Rainbow larvae. Hello Kitty bombs. Secret pine cone messages. Such inspired madness may sound like the contents of a precocious and/or demented child’s toy box but in fact, they're the building blocks of Arataland!, the “mid-career survey of artworks by Mount Washington's Michael Arata:" a description that, while factually accurate, can’t begin to convey Arata’s mix of the playful and the disconcerting; the observational and the interactive.

Read the rest of Kim Axelrod Ohanneson's review/interview here

In the 32,400 feet square art space that used to be used for storage is a massive collection of Arata’s works, some that have been previously seen and excitingly, those that have never been displayed in public. Expanding over the space of three floors in the four-story building, the exhibition has many installations that guests can ponder over as well as play with. Composed of small to large-scale installations, the show ignites a youthful energy in the viewer with its bright pop colors and whimsical forms.

Read the rest of Cindy Kyungah Lee's review here

Arataland! wants to be slick but can’t help itself from slipping on the proverbial banana. For Example, in Arata’s Pet Spaces photos, Arata re-creates the poses of Victoria’s Secret models as the ideals of feminine beauty, here is the catch, its Arata making the poses in the photographs. In Pet Spaces, Arata absurdly mocks his own masculinity and fascination with the Venus of our time typified by the Victoria’s Secret model. By mocking the model of beauty, Arata’s sexiness itself is nullified, that he chooses to decorate the areas of his own portraits with googly eyes is no wonder. The googly eyed negative “Pet Spaces” are as goofy as they are sad. In Arata’s own objectification he seems to turn the mirror on us. Through him we see desire as spectacle that prods us into such poses in the first place, and makes us all look a little pathetic.

Read the rest of Mary Anna Pomonis' review here

The sense of opening up that one gets upon ascending to the fourth floor mirrors the overall feeling one has while traveling through this exhibition. Arata's ideas truly bloom in these spaces, which are clean and neutral yet casual, lacking the stiff formality of a museum space. His individual works bloom as well, whether being showcased in the broad light of the fourth floor, or peeking out from unexpected corners between galleries on the second; they seem to simply live and breathe everywhere. Arata says that his artmaking process begins with a massive junk pile of ideas and material, which he stores in his mental warehouse; the ideas that are good enough to work on are then moved into his mental library. It is fitting that his finished work now finds an apt showcase in a warehouse of another kind.

Read the rest of Carol Cheh's review here

Visions of Pagan Renewal

2011-05-03T14:54:00.000-07:00

Boy Howdy and if that weren't the hootinest hollerinest Walpurgisnacht celebration in all of Inglewood this year! By which I mean of course One Night Stand: Walpurgisnacht, a temporary subdivision of ARATALAND! consisting of a one night guerrilla show featuring 30-some artists, many of whom created unique objects or performances on the theme of pagan renewal (or something). Here, for example we see Matt Wardell installing a 10 LB APE kiosk as Steve Hurd and Young Summers look the other way in pious terror.

Brad Spence nailed his street cred with a site-specific homage to Michael Arata's Pet Space series on the advertising mural of an adjacent building.

Rebecca Ripple's Prosthetic Suburban Awning dangling ominously before a terrified and bewildered Hurd.

Electomagnetic oscillations from dueling totem poles by Don Suggs and Dani Tull created a wormhole that swept Eamonn Fox and Lee Lynch back in time and space Medieval Hibernia where they will remain trapped until they recover the lost Hexenbesen (Hibernian for "penis roomba") left there by Ross Rudel, via Mel's Hole. OK, hold on -- here's where it gets complicated...

Before and after shots of Mary Anna Pomonis' tantric alchemical performative installation.

DJ Green Light/Green Heat vogueing in front of a photo of Arata's butt. More barely-concealed masonic iconography.

Steve Hurd hurting everyone's feelings. I guess this is the kind of attitude you need to make it to the top.

The two ends of Arata's Hot Dog Exchange. Drawing theme options included Virginity, Pets, Magic, and Reproduction.

An unscheduled gymnastic performance by...? Who was this amazing kid anyway? She was doing cartwheels across the parking lot for hours!

Gypsy jazz band Meme Lateef invoking Captain Howdy (seen in window in upper left - detail following).

It is perhaps regrettable that Captain Howdy's global reign of fire will bring an end to civilization as we know it, but thanks to everyone who helped close it out on such a high note!

Get Your Art Out of the Gutter!

2011-04-19T17:25:00.000-07:00

One would have to be a true believer in the equally far-fetched hypothetical purity of either museums or graffiti art to get really hot under the collar about Jeffrey Deitch's MOCA magnum opus "Art in the Streets." Therein lies the ambitious exhibition's weakest link: the unsustainable suspension of disbelief required to entertain belief in this grandly operatic storyline, and its protagonists. You know the story I'm talking about, right? The one about how the stuffy repository of historically significant cultural artifacts and the scrappy band of semiotic revolutionaries established détente in order to move art history and human evolution forward into the bright, bright future.

Art historically, the most raggedy tag on the funkiest dumpster is more significant than anything MOCA or any other museum could muster at this point. In terms of bestowing legitimacy on an enterprise, the equation actually runs diametrically opposite to how it's being promoted: "Street Art" — even in the degraded illustration-school-grads-deregulating-public-space-to-establish-a-marketable-brand-identity incarnation — has far more cultural currency than the exhausted and exhausting stock rotation of the art fashion industry. I'm just sayin'.

The only thing Deitch and MOCA have to offer Street Art is that other kind of currency — the regular kind; the kind you need in order to buy spray paint. This has been the real problem and challenge of graffiti as an artform since it first leaked into high art through works by Jean Dubuffet, Helen Levitt, Jacques Villeglé, Antoni Tàpies, and others — more than half a century ago. How do you monetize and control anonymous amateur pictographic trespassing and acknowledge its potency as visual language, without undermining the proprietary fiscal monopoly of the professional art world?

Read the rest of Don't Believe the Hype here

Images: top & bottom; Street Market by Todd James, Barry McGee, and Stephen Powers (aka REAS, TWIST, and ESPO); middle: 1992: Freight Trains

The Shopping List

2011-04-19T11:35:00.000-07:00

>
One Night Stand: Walpurgisnacht
A Subdivision of ARATALAND!
April 30th 7 PM - ?

Beacon Arts Building
808 N La Brea
Inglewood CA 90302

"Forget it, Jake, it's Magic Candletown."

2011-04-15T20:01:00.000-07:00

“We want to call it ‘Perform! Not!’,” says Small Form Space spokesman Lee Lynch “and instead of new genres grad students, fill Chinatown with civil war re-enactors, LARPers [that’s Live Action Role Players – I had to ask too], and those superheroes and muppets that panhandle on Hollywood Blvd.”

Image: Chinatown Beautification Project guerrilla modifications to the Chinatown West Plaza Koi Pond/Wishing Well, Chung King RD, Los Angeles, Ca on March 3rd 2011

Not sure what else got edited out, or how it ended up in the Newspaper of Record (thought I was writing for the International Herald Tribuene) but you heard it here first: Chinatown Lives!

Banksy at MOCA (Silverado Omen)

2011-04-14T15:40:00.000-07:00

"Best in Show"

This Dog was discovered in a Southern California taxidermist's freezer where it had been left uncollected for seven years. It was absolutely not killed by Bansky for the purposes of this exhibition.

First Dispatch from ARATALAND! Opening

2011-03-31T12:19:00.000-07:00

Since I was still installing the finishing touches on ARATALAND! at 9:30 PM on Saturday, I only managed to snap two photos during the course of the evening. No worries, though, there was some one documenting all the proceedings and the results are forthcoming. In the meantime, the two I got worked out nice: behold Beacon Arts director Renee Fox trying out her new desk (this is the actual clearance -- NOT POSED!) and Artillery Magazine Svengali Tulsa Kinney demanding a more editorial portion of wine from the beleaguered bartender. Things get awful dark at the top of the art world pyramid!

ARATALAND! Opening TONITE!!

2011-03-26T14:01:00.000-07:00

3 AM -- the Artist tests his relational game theory environment "Rollers". It's like curling, but not much. Come out tonight and try your hand. High score wins a free meal at IHOP!

ARATALAND! A Mid-Career Survey of Artworks by Michael Arata
Curated by Doug Harvey
Saturday March 26th, 2011
7 - 10 PM

Beacon Arts Building
808 N. La Brea Ave., Inglewood, CA 90302.
www.beaconartsbuilding.com

ARATALAND! Installathon Plus

2011-03-20T23:52:00.000-07:00

What is... The Flock?!! Find out Saturday, March 26, 2011 at the Beacon Arts Building... IF YOU DARE!

Been spending plenty time down there myself with the construction of ARATALAND! -- here is the visionary imagineer himself posed in front of one of his architectonic Monet Haystack sculptures.

Trained professional nurses will be on stand-by alert prepared to treat anyone who collapses in abject terror on March 26th when they come face-to-face with... THE FLOCK!!!

Since I was installing anyway, I sat in on the panel discussion for David Pagel's excellent show "Pieceable Kingdom" (today was the last day) -- which was pretty normal until I noticed these helper entities who seemed to be feeding Pagel his lines. Officer Barbrady, I call Shenanigans!

PS: THE FLOCK!!!!!

Last Chance for Splendidness!

2011-03-18T10:57:00.000-07:00

"Few artists maintain their balance as elegantly and consistently as Phyllis Green. And I’m not just referring to gravity and its discontents – though Green’s always-inventive engagement with this oft-disregarded central pillar of sculptural practice also sets her work apart from the herd. The balancing act to which I refer consists of operating simultaneously in a multiplicity of universes which are often deemed entirely discrete – if not mutually exclusive. Figuration VS abstraction, surface decoration VS truth-to-materials, frivolity VS gravitas, sociopolitical observation VS aesthetic formalism – these are some of the received polarities whose borderlines function as highwires to Green’s exquisite bodily surrogates.

This manifest skepticism towards falling in with one camp or another stems partly from Green’s training and on-again off-again involvement with ceramics. As anyone familiar with the course of contemporary western art is aware, the role of clay in the canon of high art has been a more turbulent and contentious issue than that of performance art or photography, oscillating from centrality to outer darkness according to prevailing academic, curatorial and critical biases. Sculptors working with fired and glazed mud – when not adopting a position of radical ahistoricim - have had to develop sharp instincts to avoid being ghettoized as hippy craftspersons.

Often the result has been work that deliberately throws itself at the mercy of the opposite camp by overtly mocking the conventions and vocabulary of traditional ceramics – decorative figurines engaged in post-modern orgies, soup tureens painted with political atrocities, that sort of thing. Phyllis Green’s oeuvre has avoided such abject literalist groveling while playfully challenging assumptions from either side of the fence, creating – for example -- surfaces that read like elaborate psychedelic glazes which are, in fact, built up from thin layers of tinted industrial polymer cement then sanded to a glass-like and fractally decorative surface, or biomorphic forms that look thrown or pinched but are constructed from lumber, chickenwire, and similar building contractor materials. But probably the most significant ongoing reference to ceramic fundamentals in Green’s work is her complex and ongoing exploration of the archetypal Vessel...."

Read the rest of Woman on Wire: Phyllis Green’s Fabulous Stunt Doubles in the bee-yoo-tiful catalog available from OTIS.

And go see her show today or tomorrow! Last chance, mudheads!

Department of Fine Rats

2011-03-04T10:23:00.000-08:00

If there is a single image that symbolizes the outsider status of "Lowbrow" art (in spite of the movement's transformation into a marketing side-stream for illustration professionals) it's the iconic figure of Rat Fink — the grotesquely oozing, drooling, contorted cartoon rodent that served as the corporate mascot and alter-ego of Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, 1960s custom-car designer and figurehead of a marketing empire that encompassed plastic model kits, silk-screened tee-shirts, decals, and other mass-produced artforms. Rat Fink is to the Juxtapoz set what Duchamp's "Fountain" is to Modernism — in more ways than one, as it turns out.

As I wrote in my 2003 essay "Brother Rat Fink and the Eruption of the Grotesque in Popular Culture" (published in Doug Nason and Greg Escalante's "Rat Fink: The Art of Big Daddy Roth, Last Gasp"): "It's virtually impossible to assess the full formative impact of Rat Fink on the generation of Americans that was to make up the counterculture.... Rat Fink and the other hot-rod weirdos entered the pop vernacular with a speed and depth of penetration unthinkable to the captains of the advertising industry. My own first exposure to the character was in the form of a sketch by another kid at school. It was Rat Fink all right, and widely recognized and appreciated, but it was a copy of a copy of a copy; its authorship and Kustom Kulture provenance lost to us. Only its iconic resonance held our attention and fired our imagination."

Now it appears that this authorial indeterminacy was closer to the mark than many realized. In a new book from Last Gasp, the family of an obscure but influential Los Angeles graphic designer makes a convincing claim that Don "Monté" Montéverde — not Roth — was the author of the quintessential Lowbrow mascot. Bill Selby's "Monté: King of the Monster Age Decal" tracks the career of the UPS driver turned decal designer, whose rough-hewn monsters, devils, aliens, and fork-skewered eyeballs ("Pass the Mustard," 1959) were an enormously influential and previously unacknowledged element in the postwar rise of the pop-culture grotesque...

Read the rest of I Smell a Rat! here.

...and Perversities Yet to Come.

2011-03-01T15:02:00.000-08:00

For Immediate Release: February 28, 2011

Beacon Arts Presents
Arataland!
A Mid-Career Survey of Artworks by Michael Arata
Curated by Doug Harvey

Saturday, March 26, 2011 – Sunday, May 22, 2011
- With Additional Exhibition Events on 4/10 & 4/30 -

LOS ANGELES, CA — Beacon Arts continues its Critics-as-Curators series with Arataland! A Mid-Career Survey of Artworks by Michael Arata curated by art critic Doug Harvey, opening Saturday, March 26, 2011. Arataland! will be the first museum-scale retrospective devoted exclusively to the work of this important Los Angeles artist, and the first monographic exhibit hosted by the Beacon Arts Building during its inaugural Critics-as-Curators series. Drawing on three decades of sculpture, painting, drawing, photography, installation and performance work, Arataland! will transform the Beacon Arts Building into a theme park exploring the complex and idiosyncratic vision – darkly humorous, playfully erotic, conceptually quirky, and often confrontational – that animates Arata’s oeuvre.

The exhibit will run for eight weeks closing on Sunday, May 22, 2011 with a Critics-as-Curators panel discussion from 1:00 to 4:00pm. Beacon Arts is located at 808 N. La Brea Ave., Inglewood, CA 90302. For additional information please call 310-621-5416 or visit beaconartsbuilding.com as well as on the BAB facebook page.

Arataland! A Mid-Career Survey of Artworks by Michael Arata will kick-off on March 26th with an opening reception from 7:00 to 10:00pm. Join the artist for the unveiling of a new mural on the side of the Beacon Arts Building – a large rendition of a piece from Arata’s Pet Spaces series. Additional special events include “Deconstructing Arataland” an exhibition walkthrough and conversation with Michael Arata and Curator Doug Harvey on Sunday, April 10th starting at 1:00pm. At the end of the month on Saturday, April 30th, or Walpurgisnacht (a Northern European pagan renewal ritual), join the gallery for “One Night Stand: Walpurgisnacht” from 7:00 to 10:00pm. Like one of Arata's famous One Night Stands – his series of one-night guerrilla exhibitions held in motel rooms dating to the late 1990s – the evening will center around a hot dog/drawing exchange, whereby guests can create a drawing in exchange for a hot dog in a bun branded with Arata’s signature. A 60-page catalog, containing a map of Arataland! will also be published in conjunction with the exhibit and will be for sale at the gallery. All Arataland! events are free.

A native of Northern California, Michael Arata has been active in the Los Angeles art scene since relocating here in the early 1980s. His restlessly creative mind has led him from prescient large-scale site-specific installations addressing ecological sustainability, through elaborate arrays of sculptural works detailing the biological life cycle of angels (including the “larval” stage) to elegiac paintings of the hairstyles of unidentified possible victims of an LA serial killer, and interactive game sculptures conflating minimalist formal aesthetics with the impregnation of flamenco dancers and lawn bowling.

With Duchampian wit and impressive formal chops, Arata has amassed a formidable body of work, consistently undermining the sweetness of his primary-hued entities with dark – but deeply humanistic – undertones; balancing confrontational statements on politics, religion, bestiality, and poop with an open, playful and unaffected relational agenda; and layering his always entertaining pop discourse between enigmatic, personal symbolic systems often deriving from scientific or historical sources. Entertainment being the key word – Arata’s work may alternate between endearing, outrageous, brain-tickling, and laugh-out-loud funny, but it is never, ever boring. – Doug Harvey

Of Perversities Past

2011-03-01T14:19:00.000-08:00

I've been so swamped I haven't been able to link to my already-online activities -- couple of reviews need regurgitating. But first, I just realized I never plugged this show and I don't even know if it's still up... it isn't, damn. But check it out online: Narratives of the Perverse II, a rowdy, crowded group show which had one of my recent Flash Fudds (comic collages I began doing at age 11). I don't have a photo of it, but here's the detail Jancar Gallery put up on their website.

There were lots of great works included -- paintings by the always reliable Charles Karubian, Judith Linhares, and Dani Tull; a video homage to Courbet's L’Origine du Monde (1866, below) by Micol Hebron (I walked in at the designer sunglasses sequence, and LOLed); and Roger Herman's father's documents proving his Aryan status in Nazi Germany. It's a something-for-everyone kind of affair. If you ask nice at the gallery, maybe they'll show you that video.

Awash in Ruins with Uncle Chaz

2011-02-25T11:36:00.000-08:00

Non-Angeleno readers may not have heard of Charles Garabedian, whose biggest East Coast splash was arguably made as part of Marcia Tucker's landmark 1978 "Bad" Painting exhibit at the New Museum. Reverse provincialism we're used to, but the embarrassing thing about Garabedian's current five-decade retrospective isn't that it won't be traveling to MoMA — your loss, toots! — it's that it won't be traveling to MOCA. Or LACMA. Or the Hammer. I don't often weigh in on museum politics, because, frankly, I don't give a shit — but, please, come on. I don't know a single painter in L.A. that doesn't worship at the altar of Chaz, and it takes Julie Joyce at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art to make this happen? Prophets without honor, and all that — but couldn't we skim a little off Jeff Koons's plastic surgery fund?

Good on Julie, though, who recently landed upcoast after a decade or so at Cal State L.A.'s Luckman Gallery as one of the city's very interesting cloud of small institutional curators who've taken up the slack of the major museums' regrettable interpretation of internationalism. Because Garabedian is a talent of international stature — say along the lines of Guston-if-he'd-lived — and anyone interested in the possibility of painting as a living practice should see this show. The Guston parallel is pretty apt — Guston actually grew up in L.A. (where he and Jackson Pollock were kicked out of Manual Arts High for publishing a communist zine!) and he was obviously looking at a lot of the same art as Garabedian — just ten years earlier. Their work trembles on the same threshold between figuration and abstraction, and their spatial constructions are the same mix-up of the serene geometrics of Piero della Francesca and the cascading contents of Fibber McGee's closet (look it up on Wikipedia, whippersnappers!).

Known primarily for his deceptively awkward figuration, Garabedian's greatest strengths — even taking into account his experimental narrative accomplishments — lie in his astonishing and hard-won formal chops. Grappling elegantly with such syntactical elements as scale, surface, color, line, composition, materials, and illusionistic forms and spaces — with a visual vocabulary as historically informed as it is idiosyncratic — his work can literally take your breath away. In the old-school museum architecture of SBMOA, the monumental "September Song" (2001-2004) and "The Spring For Which I Longed" (2001-2003) seem even more humongous (300+ square feet) than they did when originally shown at the ginormous-enough LA Louver Gallery in Venice.

The gallery these two behemoths dominate covers the most hyperoxygenated period of Garabedian's oeuvre; at the age of 70, the artist hit his prime, propagating a sequence of virtuosic paintings that integrated and transcended his illustrational/decorative impulses in a mythologically charged improvisational extravaganza. Paintings like "Calendar" (1995) and "Garden" (2001) juggle sensual and pictographic modes of abstraction that honor the ancestors while raising the dead: Exquisite Fauvist brushwork bursting crackpot/neo-classical linearity from within, unleashing a tsunami of beautiful semiotic ruins...

Read the rest of Charles Garabedian here.

Do whatever you have to to see this amazing show at Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State Street, Santa Barbara, California -- up through April 17, 2011

Images: In Anticipation, The Watchers 1985 - 88; Daytime TV 1966; The Spring for Which I Longed 2001 - 2003; Calendar 1995 (diptych)

See more of Garabedian's work online at LA Louver's website.

AiA Review of "UNSUSTAINABLE"

2011-02-10T11:05:00.000-08:00

The eight mixed-medium works (all 2010) in Doug Harvey’s “Unsustainable” are undeniably indebted to Rauschenberg’s Combines, but the similarities are primarily formal. Where Rauschenberg transformed refuse into high art in a way that reflected American notions of democratic inclusiveness, Harvey’s approach is more in tune with our current state of environmental and economic crisis: Rauschenberg gone to seed. Harvey’s work reeks of rot and decay. The artist leaves paintings (his own as well as secondhand finds) outside, exposed to the elements, sometimes for more than a decade. He then embellishes the degraded surfaces with old house paint, found objects and gritty materials like aquarium gravel. Stretcher bars are exposed at the canvases’ ripped corners and shredded edges; mold and grime coexist with chipped paint, industrial spray foams and faded, warped and torn photographs.

A Romantic melancholy pervades the grunge, though it is occasionally tempered by a dark humor. Few worldly endeavors prove worthwhile in Harvey’s work, the artist consigning to existential doubt or parody everything from art to religion and politics. The dried-mud residue of a defunct ant colony remains on the left side of The Dignity of Labor. On the same battered canvas, the artist has painted a horizontally bisected composition, the lower half presenting what appears to be a subterranean complex of tunnels and chambers, while the upper half erupts into an abstracted, neon-colored and more intricate version of that network form. The piece suggests that human systems, including the contemporary art world, are essentially not unlike ant colonies: elaborate hierarchies of workers toiling to sustain communities that will eventually die out.

The Eye of Horus, a projection screen with a square foot of dirt collected from the grave of chess champion Bobby Fischer adhered to its center, presents a more tangled meditation on art and life—referencing, among other things, Malevich’s radical Black Square and Duchamp’s re-envisioning of art as chess game. Placed high in a corner of the gallery, this shrine elicits thoughts of hero worship and genius, while also confronting the viewer with the great leveler: death.

The sense of degeneration in “Unsustainable” was conveyed most acutely in Dream House, which suggests an aerial view of a residential property ravaged by fierce weather. Although designed in a modernist style, the house—represented by a dilapidated architectural model found by the artist and affixed to the canvas—is hardly a machine for living. It sports funguslike growths (made of foam) and has been defiled by stains. The driveway, a border of white gravel along the assemblage’s right and bottom edges, remains empty, clean and apparently unused, perhaps emblematic of the abandonment of the American Dream. Recalling ancient ruins, Dream House compels the viewer to consider civilization in relation to the devastating forces of nature. If a hopeful thought could be inspired by such wreckage, it might be that after destruction comes the possibility of new creation.

—Constance Mallinson

See most of the rest of the show here.

Dueling Bowlders

2011-02-07T23:19:00.000-08:00

A bicoastal set of unrelated incidents has stirred up a heated discussion in the art world and beyond that harks back to the culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s, when right-wing politicians and pundits, like Jesse Helms and Al D’Amato and Pat Buchanan, along with religious leaders like Donald Wildmon and Pat Robertson, launched a concerted attack on the National Endowment for the Arts for supporting artists and venues engaged in “anti-Christian bigotry,” as Wildmon tagged Andres Serrano’s notorious photograph Piss Christ. They successfully campaigned to cancel a 1989 exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and passed legislation forbidding the NEA from funding artists and institutions that “promote, disseminate or produce obscene or indecent materials.”

Strangely, the central figure in the more high-profile of the current controversies is a repeat player—David Wojnarowicz, who won a lawsuit against Wildmon over the misrepresentation of his artwork in 1990. Wojnarowicz, an outspoken gay activist as well as a gifted visual artist and writer, died of AIDS-related illness in 1992. This past November 30, a condensed version of his film A Fire in My Belly—which contains an eleven-second sequence showing a crucifix crawling with ants—was removed from the exhibit “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in response to complaints from William Donohue of the Catholic League and Representative John Boehner, neither of whom had seen either the video or the exhibition.

“Hide/Seek” is a landmark exhibit in several ways: it’s the largest and most expensive show in the NPG’s history and the first major survey exploring gay identity to be mounted in a federally administered institution. Curators Jonathan Katz and David Ward took pains to create a scholarly and minimally provocative reassessment of the history of American modern art, with the hope of integrating the insights and revelations of previously suppressed gay and lesbian cultural history—a process that has been under way since the 1960s but suffered a distinctive chill in mainstream institutional support in the wake of the late ’80s commotion.

Offense was nevertheless taken, and within hours the NPG, with no public debate and after consulting only one of the curators, removed Wojnarowicz’s film from its unobtrusive video kiosk near the back of the exhibit—whereupon all hell broke loose. Outrage went viral online, from bloggers like Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes (blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes), who devoted blow-by-blow coverage to the unraveling gaffe, to scathing op-eds in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post. Protests were organized, including guerrilla screenings outside—and projected onto—the NPG. The Andy Warhol Foundation led the pack in demanding the video’s reinstatement at the risk of losing future funding. Museums, commercial galleries and nonprofit project spaces lined up to present the censored work, and several versions were made available on the Internet. MoMA acquired a copy for its permanent collection. It was even aired on Fox News...

If you think this sounds like a tiresome, second-rate rehash of what was a farfetched and poorly scripted piece of political theater the first time around, you’re not alone. A good portion of the liberal outrage seemed to be over the poor quality of the script they’d been handed. The bastards didn’t even bother to find a new scapegoat but dug up poor David Wojnarowicz, who had been a physically and sexually abused street urchin before teaching himself to make art, and had allegedly created the film in question as an elegy for his mentor and lover Peter Hujar, who had just succumbed to the same deadly virus that was coursing through the artist’s body. The guy’s not allowed to put some ants on a plastic crucifix? Jesus! Even the conservative pundits didn’t seem to know what to make of it, quickly switching to the real issue, your American tax dollars promoting homosexual perversity. Ellen DeGeneres grabbing her boobs! As a briefly glimpsed Mexican tabloid headline screams in Wojnarowicz’s film, ¡¡Sacrilegio!!

Crypto-fascist hypocrites lining their coffers by pandering to the lowest common denominators of ignorance and xenophobia isn’t news. The fact that the Smithsonian folded so quickly and awkwardly is. Wojnarowicz’s successful Supreme Court case against Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association was the turning point in the 1980s witch hunts, and it made him the martyred poster boy for gay rights and freedom of speech. Did Smithsonian officials actually imagine no one would make a fuss? They had gone out on a limb to present a historical benchmark in tolerance, then sawed the branch off behind them because some crackpot blowhards said to. Unfathomable.

Subscribe to The Nation to read the rest of The Return of the Culture Wars - my debut column - here.

Chloe Rehearses Her New Act for SeaWorld

2011-02-05T11:18:00.000-08:00

Lazy, yes, but a little close for comfort

2011-02-05T10:23:00.000-08:00

Wow. Untidy was good as well, though. Thanks to Mr. Homegrown (via Mr. Frauenfelder at BoingBoing of course) for the tip. This should lighten the load considerably. I mean, it'll make the overall load heavier, but it'll lighten the load for me. And that's what I'm talkin about when I talk about America!

Visit Rebecca Uchill's Random Exhibition Title Generator here to have your life's work glibly summarized and dismissed by a logarithm.

A Fair for All and No Fare for Anyone (with press credentials)

2011-02-02T19:52:00.000-08:00

"Art fairs aren't fair," criminally underrated Los Angeles painter Karen Carson quipped to me last Saturday, halfway through the city's annualesque descent into art-world multitasking known as Art Los Angeles Contemporary. Her remark, made in the midst — of all places — of a new show of Chuck Arnoldi's unrepentant 1980s abstractions at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, begged the obvious question, "But are they art?" As someone who tends to avoid even regular openings because of the kinesthetic and pheremonal interference generated by herds of desperate careerists, I was surprised to survive the weekend with a firm answer: Maybe.

With exponentially frantic circles of activity expanding around last weekend's fair to cap off the official "L.A. Arts Month," the horror vacuii of art events — extravaganza displays, special gallery programming across a dozen or so art scenes, unique performance events, fundraising auctions, video screenings, cocktail parties, and anti-censorship protests — takes on an almost transcendental sublimity, like surrendering to the overwhelming intricacy of a Persian rug or Bach cantata. Almost.

Read the rest of Can an L.A. Art Fair Be Loved? -- my debut LA Dispatch on artinfo -- here.

Busy Bee! Busy Bee!

2011-01-24T18:33:00.000-08:00

Things have been extra-hectic and fragmentary lately, for me anyway. Thursday morning I went to hear Smithsonian head honcho Wayne Clough at the Biltmore defend his recent removal of the David Wojnarowicz video from the National Portrait Gallery's gay art show, or -- more accurately -- to check out the protest out front by the paramilitary cell that came together to protest the whitewashing of Italian Street artist Blu's mural at MOCA's Geffen contemporary.

Afterwards, Christian Cummings and Marie Johnston picked me up to teach a workshop on Altered States of Consciousness to CC's Theater class, wherein I advocated the breaking of no laws and had a reading of a comic I wrote while altered by a 104 degree fever.

Friday we hauled whippets to Ventura, where Portfolio took the purp (I gave him the ol' "Don't look at the fat ass losers or freaks, look at ME!!!") and they all got to frolic among the slick oceanside cobblestones, then home to gnaw upon celebratory dessicated bull peni... I mean Bully Stix!

Saturday I went to drop a new Pre-Rotted (TM) piece off at Jancar's in Chinatown, where Christian Cummings and Roger Herman have concurrent solo shows --

-- and finally got to meet and hang out with painter Henry Taylor, whom I had tried unsuccessfully to track down for the 'Some Paintings' show a couple of years ago. Grabbed a sack o' Banh Mi at VIA, did some koi dog pondering, then headed out west for Phyllis Green's survey show at OTIS.

Sunday to the Farmer's Market with Don Suggs followed by a SASSAS listening party with Annie Philbin (romantic singer-songwriter), Brad Eberhard (eclectic garage), and Lisa Anne Auerbach (thrash metal?! But she seems like such a nice young lady!) spinning tunes...
All while finishing up my first piece for The Nation, about the Smithsonian/Wojnarowicz and MOCA/Blu incidents... we're captives on the Carousel of Time. Or something. Where have you gone, Journal of Ride Theory?

1 IMAGE 1 MINUTE X 50 this Friday

2011-01-24T17:38:00.000-08:00

The Lost Eggleston Review

2011-01-12T14:25:00.000-08:00

This is the piece the WEEKLY didn't want - thought I should get it out there before the exhibit closes this weekend:

The Egg Shall Rise Again!
William Eggleston and resurgence of the here-and-now

It’s hard to imagine, but William Eggleston’s art was considered quite revolutionary in its time. Of course that probably says more about the times – the 1970’s – and his chosen medium – photography – than it does about William Eggleston – or “Egg” as his good friends call him. In many ways, photography was the seed of much of the tumult that encompassed the world in the 60s – certainly it’s emergence in the mid-19th century sent representational painting into a tailspin from which it can never hope to recover.

And, alongside so many other cultural currents, photography’s discontents came to a head just when the hippies were hitting the fan. But paradoxically, as one of the most technically fussy and commercially exploitable new media, photography was simultaneously the bête noire of traditional artmaking and the beleaguered stronghold of the kind of huffy authoritarian craftsmanship capital-A Art had come to represent. Weird times.

Weirder still because by the 1970s photography had just barely managed to edge itself into the hallowed climes of The Fine Arts. From the get-go, photography’s representational immediacy and infinite reproducibility posed such a threat to the traditional order of things that an entire sub-industry of theory and criticism sprang up to explain how photography was not Art.

And, inevitably, entire sub-industries of explainers and craftspersons emerged, whose position was that photography could be Art, as long as it agreed to follow certain rules. This took some weird-ass turns involving babes dressed in togas acting out morally uplifting narratives, or technically miraculous in-focus renderings of entire fields of gravel. But first and foremost, it had to be black and white.

Maybe it was because the color technology took quite awhile to catch up, or because many of photography’s advocates approached it through from a “graphic” or even “textual” frame of reference, but as late as 1976 no color photographer had been allowed a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art – the de facto institutional arbiter of all visual cultural endeavors of import.

Enter the Egg, pigments a-blazin! That year, MOMA’s “Photographs by William Eggleston” and the accompanying publication “William Eggleston’s Guide” threw the art photography world for a loop, flooding what had ostensibly been the exclusive either/or domain of austere arrays of silver halide molecules with a supersaturated gush of sensory nuance – a whole spectrum of phenomena that could not be reduced to a binary language.

And the color wasn’t the only thing – Egg’s pictures are almost pathologically inclusive. A scrap of lumber, a vacuum hose, an empty lot, a freezer crammed with tater tots – each is as compelling to Eggleston’s regard as a nude man attempting a lotus position underneath his living room gun rack. The content isn’t exactly irrelevant, but each pictorial element is accorded equal weight, an equal voice, an equal potentiality of meaning. The door had been cracked open to let in a little color, but Egg went and gave the keys to every John Doe in creation. And the wad of gum on the shoe of the horse he rode in on.

It is this quality of Eggleston’s work that gave name to “Democratic Camera: Photographs and Video, 1961 -2008” -- the locally unballyhooed Egg-rospective organized by the Whitney Museum and currently on view in its last tour stop at LACMA. It is a quality in sharp contrast to the strict and nuanced social protocols of Egglestons’s upper-class southern upbringing. When asked what he thought about Western Civilization, Gandhi once quipped “I think it would be a very good idea.” The same holds true for the idea of democracy, which really hasn’t been given a fair shake in the real world. That’s what’s so great about art. You can try these things out and see how it goes.

And for Eggleston, it went pretty good. His microcosmic experiment in democracy proved to be one of the most influential moments in contemporary visual culture, and, yes, a revolutionary turning point in the history of photography. Many of his images have become iconic – the single white lightbulb on the red ceiling, the pissed-off secretary sitting on the yellow curb, the vertiginous snapshot of a gilded Elvis portrait in situ at Graceland. Without Eggleston’s influence, we would never have had the cinema of David Byrne and Harmony Korine, or those remarkable American Apparel billboards – not to mention the Fine Photography oeuvres of Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tillmans. Thanks Egg!

All kidding aside (I actually love the cinema of Harmony Korine), any assessment of Eggleston’s artistic legacy has to finesse this very specific cultural history to get to the meat of the matter. What about all the color commercial photography and photojournalism that came before Eggleston’s so-called breakthrough? What about the undigestible mass of vernacular photography that is said to have “informed” Eggleston’s vision? Where’s their friggin’ retrospective? How is this democracy thing supposed to work again?

Compounding all this is the fact that Egg’s influence is now so pervasive as to be almost invisible. The frisson of transgression that made his work newsworthy back in the day has long been rendered obsolete by exponential indulgences both in the jaded academic and museum worlds and – a million times over – in pop culture. So the question arises: is their any reason to be looking at William Eggleston’s photographs now, or should I just renew my subscription to VICE?

To answer this, it helps to remember that Eggleston’s approach didn’t materialize out of the blue, but was part of a tradition of improvisational documentarian photography that included Lee Friedlander, Robert Frank, Helen Levitt, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose concept (and eponymous book) of “the decisive moment” was one of the foundational concepts of 20th century photography.

One of the central struggles of modern art has been the attempt to reconcile the creation of relatively permanent artifacts with the impermanent flux of phenomena that contemporary science, philosophy, and human experience insist on. In many ways, the intuitively composed street photo, snapped before any conscious analytical process has time to kick in, is the epitome of this conundrum: an image that hinges between subjective and objective views of the world, freezing a wafer-thin sample of the artist’s consciousness engaging with the chaotic stream of sensory information that makes up reality. This is “the decisive moment,” and it stands alongside Free Jazz and Abstract Expressionism as a touchstone of modern cultural exploration of the nature of time and human creativity.

Considered in this light, Eggleston’s work become part of a movement away from contingencies and negotiations of historical time, and towards a comprehension of the immediate moment – his immaculately printed photographs and pristine museological surveys mere shadows of his moment-to-moment engagement with the down-and-dirty world. As such, Egg’s art remains masterful in its capacity to awaken us to the world – to the inexhaustible sweetness of Magic Hour light, to the infinitely subtle vocabularies of vernacular signage and architecture, to the supersaturated beauty of a piece of crap in the gutter. I’ve never met William Eggleston, but I consider him a good friend for all the moments of pleasure his work – and his way of looking at the world -- has given me. Thanks, Egg. There may still be a little revolution left in you after all!

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera—Photographs and Video, 1961–2008
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
5905 Wilshire Blvd. Los Angeles 90036
Thru January 16 2011

Images: Untitled (Memphis), 2000; Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973; Greenwood, Mississippi, c.1972; Memphis, c.1971; Near the River at Greenville, Mississippi, c.1983-86; Untitled, n.d.; Untitled, 1978

Haven't I Suffered Enough?

2011-01-11T13:10:00.000-08:00

SFTLOP! I have a lot to catch up on, but have just been stricken with a recurrence of the heel gout that ate up most of December! Why does God hate me? Maybe its for defending that Wojnarowicz guy in my upcoming The Nation debut. Which I have to go finish before I do more blogging. But check out this screen shot from the video in question. Pretty funny.

A Portfolio and Friends Xmas!

2010-12-25T20:34:00.000-08:00

Future hall-of-famer Winway's Portfolio of Sporting Field NW1 poses for his upcoming paper tole portrait by Hans Bellmer in the stately gardens of the Ross-Dutcher estate on this cool Los Angeles yule. Having no seasonal obligations, we wound up spending Christmas Day commingling our respective whippet (P, Nigel & Chloe) and miniature aussie (Guston & Arbus) herds, which - in combination with a flurry of neighborhood squirrels - made for a festive and energetic afternoon.

If Hans bellmer had taken up paper tole...

2010-12-24T23:20:00.000-08:00

My last night on the town before this recent gout attack (and subsequent meteorological and vocational annoyances) was the UCLA Warner Grad Studios open house, which I haven't been to in awhile. The vibe sure has changed since back in the day, and even since the last time I made it out.

In spite of the whole LA Art World supposedly being in Miami, there were hundreds of obvious grown-up types wandering the labyrinthine warrens. And strangely, not much in the way of festivities -- no BBQ, no spectacular performance art or loud music, and only discreet bottles of wine and whiskey -- most of which I managed to sample over the course of the evening (which may have triggered the gout attack, come to think of it).

As usual there were a handful of standouts -- the extended single-shot street videography of former Jeff Wall assistant Owen Kydd, the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink abstract paintings on paper by the other Mike Kelly, and particularly the two new large scale scroll-saw photo collages by Sarah Cromarty, who was a featured artist in State of Emergence: Unsuspected Cracks in the Art World Infrastructure (The First Annual L.A. Weekly Biennial). Sarah says these works aren't finished (that's her holding up the sign that says "Not Done"), but I'd be thrilled to see something like this in any gallery or museum. Sorry for the crappy photos and lack of titles. Also that's a "Not Done" sign on the face of the top dude on the tree in the big square piece below.

Canned Hack

2010-12-23T18:08:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the sudden dearth of postage -- you'd think being completely immobilized for two weeks from a gout attack in the left heel would prompt an outpouring of bloggity blah-blah but this has not been the case. I've been writing a bit, but mostly dealing with my abrupt discharge as lead art critic for the LA Weekly. I can't say I was too surprised -- between the general collapse of print media, the specific culture-wide assault on arts journalism, and the Village Voice Media's vendetta against pinko egghead hippies among its rank and file, I was surprised I lasted this long. Still, it could have been handled a little more professionally. If you haven't got the skinny, check out Jori Finkel's mop-up at the LA Times culturemonster blog. And I'll try and get back in the swing over the holidays.

"Project 42: M.A. Peers" Closes Sunday

2010-12-17T14:11:00.000-08:00

"A generic purebred Black Labrador with a fluorescent orange “training dummy” in its mouth, blown up to three or four times lifesize, depicted on a meticulously constructed patchwork of stained and shredded floral-patterned upholstery scavenged from abandoned curbside sofas. An uncommissioned portrait of an arbitrary corporate cultural figure – say, Bill Taylor, the Co-Founding Editor of the dot-com futurist business magazine Fast Company – rendered in a style that references the language of contemporary international painting, the aesthetics of annual report graphic design, and the paranormal investigations chronicled on the Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell radio talk show. An enormous mosaic grid of hand painted monochrome square tiles which resolves – from about 25 feet away – into a 1950’s cookbook image of a red, heart-shaped cheesecake. A virstuosic knot of painterly abstraction that modulates into a hazy landscape, equating a mythical bottomless pit in rural Washington with the Forestay waterfall in Chexbres, Switzerland.

It would be hard to conjure a more disparate array of cultural signifiers, but these are just a cross-sample of the quixotic mash-ups that constitute the two decades-worth of painting that make up the singular oeuvre of LA-based painter M.A. Peers. It is an ironic testimony to Peers’ restless, constantly mutating signature that the most widespread notice her work has received (in spite of ongoing interest and support from west coat art critical community) has been for a group of paintings created through a provisional fictional persona and originally intended to be anonymous – her heroic, elaborately framed Soviet Realism - meets - Gainsborough portraits of five Russian space dogs commissioned in the early ‘00s by the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

Nevertheless, this very un-pin-down-ability has made Peers’ work continually surprising over the course of her career – sometimes deflecting attention from the deeper congruencies of formalist and conceptual experimentation – as well as idiosyncratic personal political engagements -- that permeate her work. To untangle these, it is illuminating to consider the work the artist was doing prior to her early-90’s attendance of UCLA’s grad program, as part of the legendary Student Bolshevik artist collective in Winnipeg, Canada.

Immediate precursors to the better-known Royal Art Lodge, Student Bolsheviks were a wild and wooly group of mostly-painters responding in an energetic but ambivalent fashion to the 80’s painting boom – though their activities also encompassed performance, sculpture and installation, experimental music, video, zines, and (particularly) guerilla exhibition. During this heady period Peers produced a series of large-scale abstract painting/collages (as well as a couple of sculptures and installations) made from domestic detritus like linoleum flooring, lampshades, upholstery, housepaint, tilework, carpeting, fur coats, shattered wine bottles, polyurethane, and assorted knick-knacks -- as well as the occasional application of traditional oil paint.

These little-known works (the subject of Peers’ first solo exhibit Recent Excavations), while formally indebted to earlier collagists like Rauschenberg and Schwitters, toyed equally with the joyous, ridiculous materiality of Schnabel’s plate paintings and the literal yet arbitrary sumptuousness of the Boyle Family’s painted fiberglass casts of random rectangles of the earth’s surface. Their most pronounced conceit, however, was the deliberate inversion of the conventional relationship between decoration and surface: often submerging fragments of flocked art-nouveau revival wallpaper (or whatever) under pools of liquid plastic while flirting shamelessly with potential feminist and anti-consumerist interpretations.

The ambiguities of narrative symbolism – and the negative space between real and official stories – are fundamental templates through all of Peers’ art. Yet as spatially, narratively and compositionally intricate as these early abstractions were, once relocated to LA Peers found herself needing to exaggerate the inherent schisms in picture-making, and undermine the facility at which she had arrived. Her next inversion rendered all these concerns the compressed ground to a surprising figure from her past – the American Kennel Club standardized purebred dog. “When [LA painter] Linda Day said I should paint the most embarrassing thing I could think of,” says Peers, “I thought of an Irish Setter.”

Read the rest of Guys & Dogs: M.A. Peers' Taxonomies of Aesthetic Power in "Project Series 42: M.A. Peers" published by the Pomona College Museum of Art, ISBN 978-0-9818955-8-1

Project 42 is on view through Sunday, Dec 19, 2010 and includes four previously unexhibited works, including three paintings on paper from the new conformation competition whippet portrait series.

Pomona College Museum of Art
333 N College Way
Claremont CA 91711

www.pomona.edu/museum

Images: Labrador with Dummy 1995; Bill Taylor, Co-Founding Editor Fast Company Magazine 2001-2001; Cheesecake 1994; Given: Mel's Hole 2008; Soviet space dog portraits (2005) installed at the V. Gloushka Space and Rocket Engineering Museum, Peter and Paul Fortress, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2009; Untitled 1990; Untitled 1991; Big Red 1992; Project 42: M.A. Peers catalog designed by Kimberly Varella/Dept of Graphic Sciences, 2010

Outsider Xmas Vols 1 & 2 again and again and again

2010-12-01T11:33:00.001-08:00

I was just thinking I should re-upload these two mixes of Outsider, novelty, celebrity Xmas weirdness when McNulty asked after them and lo and behold, after 3 years they're still up at Megaupload! Talk about your miracles. Makes me think about finishing Volume 3...

Download Outsider Xmas 1

Download Outsider Xmas 2

Tracklist in comments.

Pitywood Natividad

2010-12-01T00:15:00.000-08:00

Walt Nordstrom at his uncle's birthday party, enjoying the hypnotic power of the decontextualized glowing pacifieresque faux candles of Taix. (Photo by Ms. Pity)

"What Does Being Born Mean?"

2010-11-29T12:22:00.000-08:00

New for-listening-to-only soundcloud single assembled from bits of the new 2-CD set This is Really Happening Volume 2 is up at Pleonasm Music.

Chloe in Pomonie

2010-11-28T13:54:00.000-08:00

Chloe strikes a pose in front of one of M.A.'s new whippet paintings during installation at the Pomona College Museum of Art. The exhibit continues through Dec 19th. Check out Lily Simonson's insightful appraisal on the art21 blog.

BiennialBiennialBiennialBiennial... Duffy

2010-11-26T11:55:00.000-08:00

The California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art is a tradition dating back to 1984, when the venue was known as the Newport Harbor Art Museum and its chief curator was Paul Schimmel, now at L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art. The Orange County museum was renamed OCMA in the mid-'90s, and the venue's importance to the L.A. art scene has waxed and waned over the intervening decades, but the series of biennials in the new millennium — unrivaled except for L.A. Weekly's Annual Biennial — have afforded it a new centrality, at least for a few months every couple of years.

The art boom of the last decade was reflected in the increasing ambitions of the Cali Bi, culminating in 2008's extravaganza, which featured more than 50 artists and multiple venues including outposts in Tijuana and Northern California, guest-curated by LAXART founder and director Lauri Firstenberg. Well, the boom's gone bust and Firstenberg is scheming with Annie Philbin at the Hammer Museum to steal OCMA's thunder with the Hammer's recently announced 2012 Los Angeles Biennial.

In the meantime, OCMA has scaled back its Biennial (I'm really starting to hate that word) to a more manageable 45 artists selected by in-house curator Sarah Bancroft. The show returns the focus to lesser-known up-and-comers, while retaining the expansive regionalism that allows for substantial contributions from Bay Area and San Diego art communities. As with any of these omnibus extravaganzas, the work on view is a hit-and-miss grab-bag, and the surprise quotient is crucial. Thus the most impressive paintings in the show — one-half of Alexandra Grant's expansive, seething six-part "Portal" series of her trademark backward word clusters on enormous sheets of paper — lose considerable punch for having been exhibited at her L.A. gallery two years ago. In contrast, John Zurier — a Berkeley-based midcareer monochromatic abstract painter — materializes out of left field with a series of luminous pale-blue oils on linen that quietly steal the show...

...Although retaining a foot at all times in the pop-cultural swamp, Sean Duffy's work has steadily grown more formally and conceptually challenging since then, while simultaneously becoming more autobiographical and tinged with social commentary. Searcher extends and amplifies the artist's recent multivalent explorations of automotive culture, pop ephemera and domestic furnishing design while collecting several important earlier pieces that haven't been seen locally before.

Most prominent among these prodigal artifacts is Car 23 (2008-2010), Duffy's re-creation of his father's customized, zebra-striped 1964 Toyota Land Cruiser, which sits incongruously abandoned in the LAM lobby. Two of a 2008 series of silk-screened "paintings" on stained drop cloths — their lower thirds cluttered with a landscape of superimposed automotive logos — team with a new pair of his better-known modular grids of silk-screened plywood units (these ones depicting variations of contemporary outdoor sport magazines instead of vintage LP covers) that reiterate Duffy's almost incidental position as one of the most interesting and challenging painters currently working in L.A.

Read the rest of Orange you glad I didn't say Biennial? here

Images: Alexandra Grant First Portal (mind) 2008; John Zurier Muuratsalo 3 2009; Sean Duffy Die Hard (detail) 2008; untitled (yellow) (detail) 2010; dark wood lights (detail) 2010; Duffy in studio with untitled (red) 2010 - Duffy photos by DH.

Coming Soon! Hide! Hide!

2010-11-23T12:39:00.000-08:00

Details not available at this time.

Chinatown Swastika Rehab!

2010-11-20T15:41:00.001-08:00

As it's my birthday I am taking the day off, but I urge all who are concerned with the destigmatization of one of the oldest and most spiritually potent iconographic symbols of our species to visit two events today in LA's Chinatown district: Painter, Mothman Kindred spirit, and Beck FANatic Lily Simonson in collaboration with Independent Researcher Yong Ha Jeong presents Session 2 of their course in Practicing Shamanism: Korean and Siberian Shamanism at The Public School at TELIC (951 Chung King Road, 4 PM, continues through Dec 21).

Just down the walk-only sidestreet, USC grad and recent Jancar Galley (961 Chung King Road, 6 -9 PM) co-conspirator Maya Lujan's recent multi-media abstractions headline that venue's new trifecta of typically consummate offerings which also includes "Some Paintings" alumnus Tyler Stallings' Deinstalled Paintings and Alice Clements "In the Basement." See if you can score a copy of the catalog from Lujan's 2008 MFA Thesis documenting one of the most interesting painting-based installations in recent memory. Continues through Dec 18.

Images: Some olde swastika; Maya Lujan's Untitled (Mimosa) 2010; Tyler Stalling's (unidentified painting) 2010?

I'm ready for my closeup, Mr. Lynch!

2010-11-19T18:52:00.000-08:00

As in David, not Lee. Though Portfolio would be happy to do a cameo in L. Lynch's next feature. His people should call Portfolio's people. Thanks to Mr. Homegrown for dramatic lighting concept. Shot in Claremont after last night's panel discussion. More to come.

M.A. Peers in Pomona Thursday Night

2010-11-15T13:36:00.000-08:00

Opening Reception for Pomona College Museum of Art's
Project Series 42: M.A. Peers
Thursday Nov 18 from 7 PM - 10 PM
Panel Discussion featuring M.A. Peers and Steve Roden with Doug Harvey moderating 7 PM - 8 PM

For close to two decades, M.A. Peers has created paintings and drawings that passionately engage issues surrounding painting, the history of painting, popular culture, and formalist strategies of portraiture. Combining delicately rendered figures and forms, within an enigmatic, but brilliantly colored field, Peers selects subject matter that ranges from portraits of generic dogs, to portraits of the 1950s Soviet space dogs, to portraits of corporate and political figures. In her most recent work, the grounds have gradually engulfed the figures, crossing into pure abstraction. For Project Series 42, M.A. Peers will present new paintings.

The Project Series is the Museum’s program of focused exhibitions of work by Southern California artists. Its purpose is to bring to the Pomona College community art that is experimental and that introduces new forms, techniques, and concepts. Organized by Rebecca McGrew, this series is supported in part by the Pasadena Art Alliance. A catalogue accompanies each exhibition.

Pomona College Museum of Art
333 N. College Way
Claremont, CA
91711

Museum hours: Tuesday through Friday 12-5 p.m.
Thursdays Art After Hours 5-11 p.m.
Saturday, Sunday 1-5 p.m.
Closed Monday

For more info including directions, visit http://www.pomona.edu/museum

Who's Really to Blame for 'Avatar'?

2010-11-10T19:50:00.000-08:00

"The very idea of Experimental Cinema in Los Angeles is almost an oxymoron. In the heart of Hollywood, why would anyone with any marketable moviemaking chops bother with such celluloid navel-gazing — and who would ever see it? The truth is that although other cities have more high-profile avant-garde film ghettos, L.A.'s hothouse moviemaking environment and access to technical resources have supported a thriving underground almost from the birth of the industry. As for seeing it? For better or worse, the very structure and visual language of contemporary mainstream moviemaking — special effects–riddled, CGI-saturated, 3-D gee-whiz-addicted eye-candy store that it is — can arguably be traced to the wide-scale absorption of L.A.-based abstract animators by the Industry, particularly George Lucas, in the 1970s. There is a direct line from the visual music of expatriate German abstract geometric painter Oskar Fischinger's 1947 Motion Painting No. 1 to the immersive, uncanny virtual reality of James Cameron's Avatar.

This secret history is one of many to be explored as part of "Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles 1945-1980," a three-day symposium, film festival and exhibition presented by Los Angeles Filmforum this weekend at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. The Industrial Light & Magical gutting of L.A.'s finest psychedelic optical-printing noodlers is specifically addressed in "Not Just a Day Job: Experimental Filmmakers and the Special Effects Industry in the 1970s," a paper presented by media scholar Julie Turnock on Saturday at 4 p.m. as part of the panel titled "Blurred Boundaries: Outsider/Insider Filmmaking and Group Identities." And that's just one of 17 presentations, scheduled over four Saturday and Sunday panel discussions, disparate in topic (ranging from "International Identities and Local Influence: The Development of Visual Communications" to "Taylor Mead, a Faggot in Venice Beach in 1961") but uniformly shedding light on some of the more obscure byways of local film history..."

Read the rest of Hollywood's Soft Psychedelic Underbelly here

ALTERNATIVE PROJECTIONS: EXPERIMENTAL FILM IN LOS ANGELES 1945-1980 | Nov. 12-14 | USC School of Cinematic Arts | Free with online registration; more info here

Image: Still from the Single Wing Turquoise Bird Lightshow Reunion, 2009

Meta-Unsustainability

2010-11-09T10:30:00.000-08:00

This is the last week of Unsustainable, my solo show at Jancar Gallery in Chinatown - Weds through Saturday Nov 13, 12 Noon - 5 PM, then it's so long Unsustainability!

Jancar Gallery
961 Chung King Rd (in Chinatown)
Los Angeles, CA 90012
213.625.2522

Image: The Eye of Horus 2010, Acrylic and dirt from the grave of Bobby Fischer on found home video projection screen.

Was ist Fäuxmish?

2010-11-06T11:26:00.000-07:00

!2 Cutting Edge Cinema Premieres! 2!

2010-11-04T22:58:00.000-07:00

"Cinema is a strangely autistic medium, often offering aid and encouragement to obviously pathological misanthropes, which isn't really a problem when that translates primarily into the form and content of their work — look at Stan Brakhage. Unfortunately, what you get when it translates further — into the very socioeconomic infrastructure for the creation of filmic artworks itself — is that poisonously hierarchical, anticreative cesspool known as Hollywood. And I've never even written a screenplay!

There are exceptions, of course: Robert Altman and John Cassavetes were both legendary for their willingness to destabilize the pyramidal protocols of the Tinseltown factory and locate the creative heart of their cinematic art in the resultant chaos. But as often as not, their work wound up as meditations on the desperate impossibility of bridging the communication gap between humans; even the most egalitarian of team players ultimately are defeated by the inherent hermeticism of the medium.

Whether through avant-garde eliminations of plot, character, the camera, authorial decision-making or intelligible pictorial content; or conversely through Imax, 3-D, Scratch 'n' Sniff and similar William Castle-type attempts at virtuality, the filmmaker's efforts to reach out and establish contact with an audience comes up against a raised drawbridge that is as narrow as the 1/48-second gap between projected frames and as vast as the gulf between you and your ex.

An awareness of this structural and philosophical disconnect permeates LiTTLEROCK, a bittersweet, low-key but mesmerizing indie feature that's been picking up steam on the festival circuit over the last few months, and will have its L.A. premiere Nov. 8 as part of the "Young Americans" section of AFI Fest 2010.

The Young Americans category is devoted to contemporary regionalism — a good fit for LiTTLEROCK, which is set in the titular Palmdale-adjacent small town ("The Fruit Basket of the Antelope Valley"). Directed by newcomer Mike Ott, who grew up in Newhall, the film features a star-making, semi-autobiographical performance by locally grown (and current Palmdale resident) Cory Zacharia, and was realized by Small Form Films, a tight-knit gaggle of cinephiles who coalesced around Thom "Los Angeles Plays Itself" Andersen's classes at CalArts...

Curiously enough, Misters , Zacharia, Ott, Lynch (Lee, see below) and Thornton (Frederick Fulton Henry Thornton, fourth official member and only non-auteur in the S.F. company) appear in the credits of The Eternal Heart alongside LA visual artist/filmmaker Marnie Weber's usual company of collaborators — a result of her artist-in-residency gig at this year's California State Summer School for the Arts filmmaking program for high school students, where Small Form folk make up most of the faculty.

Weber's anarchist-tinged production strategies have much in common with the multiple auteurs of Small Form. "Meeting Marnie this summer was really inspiring for me," says Ott, "and I'm taking her advice and approach for my next project: If you have an idea, start on it, don't wait, start and see where it goes. If you want to be in a band, just pick up an instrument and play, teach yourself. ... If you want to show your film and no one will screen it, have a screening yourself in a backyard, or on the side of a building."

The debut of The Eternal Heart takes this philosophy to the next level: With the help of Emi Fontana's West of Rome Public Art, Weber will premiere the half-hour gothic melodrama as part of Eternity Forever, a multimedia extravaganza at one of the film's locations, Altadena's historic Mountain View Cemetery and Mausoleum. There will be interactive cemetery tours led by monsters from the film, the Spirit Girls will perform a live score as what is billed as the band's final performance, and the mausoleum's gallery will host a vernissage for Weber's latest collages."

Read the rest of Across the Great Divide here.

Purchase $12 tickets to Marnie Weber's Eternity Forever here.

Click here to try and get free tickets for the Los Angeles AFI premiere screening of LiTTLEROCK Monday, Nov 8th.

Fleanette, Our New Hybrid Musical Hero

2010-11-04T21:11:00.000-07:00

Ornette Coleman with Flea at Royce Hall. Ha ha ha! He held his own though; we're proud of you Flea. You too Ornette. Unfortunately I forgot to bring my audio thingy for the bootlegging. Can anyone help a brother out? I already have the cover.

Chlogel, Our New Hybrid Pet

2010-11-03T09:10:00.000-07:00

How is Chloe's ear poking out through Nigel's thigh? It's like in The Fly where Jeff Goldblum accidentally teleports himself with a fly and gets jumbled up. Only cuter. But still pretty effin' creepy.