DougH On The Go!

Storm Passing

2009-12-10T13:04:00.000-08:00

The founder of one of the coolest independent ethno/world music labels ever "Original Music" joined the heavenly gamelan a couple of weeks ago.

John Storm Roberts, World-Music Scholar, Dies at 73
By Margalit Fox, NYTImes
Published: December 10, 2009

John Storm Roberts, an English-born writer, record producer and independent scholar whose work explored the rich, varied and often surprising ways in which the popular music of Africa and Latin America informed that of the United States, died on Nov. 29 in Kingston, N.Y. He was 73 and lived in Kingston.

The cause was complications of a blood clot, his wife, Anne Needham, said.

Long before the term was bandied about, Mr. Roberts was listening to, seeking out and reporting on what is now called world music. He wrote several seminal books on the subject for a general readership, most notably “Black Music of Two Worlds” (Praeger, 1972) and “The Latin Tinge: The Impact of Latin American Music on the United States” (Oxford University, 1979).

“Black Music of Two Worlds” examines the cross-pollination — in both directions — between Africa and the Americas, from the influence of African music on jazz, blues, salsa and samba to the popularity in Nigeria and Zaire of American artists like James Brown and Jimi Hendrix.

John Anthony Storm Roberts was born in London on Feb. 24, 1936. His father, an accountant who often traveled abroad on business, brought him records that were then scarcely available in England: jazz and blues from the United States, Brazilian music by way of Portugal and much else. By the time he was in his early teens, John was irretrievably mesmerized by the sounds that leapt from his turntable.

A polyglot who came to speak more than half a dozen languages, including Swahili, Mr. Roberts received a bachelor’s degree in modern languages from Oxford University. In the mid-1960s he spent several years in Kenya as a reporter and editor on The East African Standard, a regional newspaper. Returning to London, he was a radio producer with the BBC World Service.

Mr. Roberts moved to the United States in 1970, becoming an editor on the periodical Africa Report. He was later a freelance journalist, contributing articles on world music to The Village Voice and other publications.

In the early 1980s, Mr. Roberts cofounded Original Music, a mail-order company that distributed world-music books and records. In those pre-Internet days, Americans outside big cities found these almost as hard to come by as young Mr. Roberts had in postwar England.

In business for nearly two decades, Original Music also released many well-received albums of its own. Among them are “The Sound of Kinshasa,” featuring Zairian guitar music; “Africa Dances,” an anthology of music from more than a dozen countries; and “Songs the Swahili Sing,” devoted to the music of Kenya, an aural kaleidoscope of African, Arab and Indian sounds.

In choosing what to release on the Original Music label, Mr. Roberts did not disdain modern, popular numbers: by his lights, a song simply had to be good. This distinguished him from musicological purists who, in ceaseless quest for the authentic, recorded only material seemingly untouched by modernity.

In an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 1987, Mr. Roberts illuminated his selection process.

“I don’t care how esoteric it is, but it’s got to be terrific,” he said. “Not this ‘you-can’t-hear-it-and-it’s-terribly-performed-but-it’s-really-very-interesting-because-it’s-the-only-winkle-gathering-song-to-come-out-of-southeastern-Sussex’ attitude.”

Read the complete NYTimes obit here.

Download the awesome OMCD Street Music of Java here. This was one of my earliest posts on this blog, which just turned 3.

Sister Aimee: The Art Show -- Opening Tonight!

2009-12-08T14:53:00.000-08:00

A collaborative painting project by the students of Doug Harvey's WLAC Painting Workshop

Participating artists include: Louis Caiazza, Imari Capers, Tifarrah Clarke-Waite, Ashley Cooley, Jean Copes, Shawn Doster, Ed Fahlsing, Doug Harvey, Josh Hoorfar, Natalie Hoorfar, David Huynh, Laurelyn Johnson, Tracy Jones, Philip Kung, George Lopez, Jasmine Lozano, Mika Ogawa, Bert Ramirez, Young Summers, Antje Thober-Gujardo, Jada Vernon, Aubrey Whitlock.

PLUS 'Sister Aimee: The Musical' - a new film by the Echo Park Film Center Youth Filmmaking Class

West Los Angeles College Art Gallery
4800 Freshman Dr.
(Just south of Overland & Jefferson)
Culver City, CA 90230

Opening Tuesday Dec 08. 6 - 10 PM
On view during gallery hours Dec 08 - 11 (and maybe longer)

Note: THIS EXHIBIT WILL BE REMOUNTED in the Glendale/Eagle Rock vicinity in the near future, so if you miss the WLAC event, keep an eye peeled for the do over.

Images: Sister Aimee Crosses Over into Pure Abstraction, Ed Fahlsing; The Foursquare Bridal Call Baby Blossom, Aubrey Whitlock & Tracy Jones

Dogs & Boy by Train to SF

2008-11-27T01:03:00.000-08:00

I think this was in Merced. AKA negative space heaven.

If You Can Call That an Anecdote

2009-12-02T12:39:00.000-08:00

Instead of cueing up in Netflix heaven to systematically explore the best in art house cinema and documentary film-making from across the history of the medium, I have been purchasing these ridiculously low-priced box-sets of highly compressed, poorly transferred "public domain" movies and working my way through them. I wish I could blog about every weird 70's made-for-TV family drug redemption drama or dubbed Italian Star Wars rip-off I come across, but there's just so many, and just so much time.

But this one generated an odd coincidental anecdote, so I'll tell it. The movie, contained on the Box Office Gold 50 Movie Pack (from Mill Creek Entertainment, no less), is called Eliza's Horoscope, and I had never heard of it. Included due to an early star turn by "Tom" Lee Jones, the movie is a bewildering late-hippie country-girl-meets-big-bad-world story, set in 1975 Montreal. Chock full of gratuitous Fellini-esque gewgaws and a puzzling sideplot concerning American Indian activists blowing up a bridge, the film's most interesting formal element was the use of occasional stuttering edits that mimicked certain recursive temporal structures with which I have some familiarity. With a very surprising guest spot by Richard Manuel of The Band, and credits that listed one man as the writer, director, producer, and editor, Eliza's Horoscope intrigued me enough that I stayed awake to do some internet research.

It turns out this was the only feature film made by Gordon Sheppard (the son of the president of IBM Canada) who had previously been married to the first Playboy playmate of the Year, and directed a half hour documentary on Hef. I found one site containing his reminiscences about the making of Eliza's Horoscope. And, though Sheppard recently died of prostate cancer, he still has his own extensive website featuring his photography, other writings, and excerpts and reviews of his last major project, a non-fiction novel about the suicide of Hubert Aquin, a famous Quebec separatist man of letters. The first odd coincidence is that the name of the novel is HA! which has been my signature/art brand logo for some 25 years now.

It turns out that Sheppard was quite unhappy with the pirate copies of his magnum opus floating around, particularly because of the "experimental" jump cut edits, which turned out to have been randomly generated glitches from a sloppy transfer! The other weird coincidence is that the score, by one Elmo Peeler, contains obvious homages to various modern composers -- I even commented to M.A. on the nice fake Satie. Then the next day, Transparency Records madman Michael Sheppard stopped by to drop off some promo materials for his latest enthusiasm -- Italian pianist/composer Alessandra Celletti, whose own work frequently mimics that of the same vexing amphibian. Sheppard/fake Satie:Sheppard/fake Satie. It's 11:11 all over again! Fearful Symmetry... of the Mind!

Anyway, Celletti does real Satie as well, and the piano music of Gurdjieff, her own ambient works and strange pop songs in English, and has been collaborating most recently with Hans-Joachim Roedelius of Cluster. This Saturday (Dec 5), the two are performing at Zipper Hall at 200 Grand Street in downtown LA, next to MOCA Tickets are $20 and available exclusively from Amoeba Records. If Elmo Peeler shows up to jam, melons will explode.

Have Mercy, O Color Wheel of Destruction!

2009-11-30T15:07:00.000-08:00

Here's a shot I took in last week's painting class. Heather, the model, is posed as early 20th century LA evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson - the class is doing a collaborative suite of paintings that will be presented as a gallery show alongside the Echo Park Film Center Young Filmmakers' new musical on the life of Sister Aimee -- one week at WLAC (opening Tues Dec 08) then a week at an Eastside gallery location whose address and name I don't know yet. Sister Aimee: The Musical! will premiere at The Downtown Independent Theater, 251 S. Main St, Los Angeles, CA 90012, on Saturday Dec 5th. Doors 3:30 pm, screening 4 pm, Q & A with filmmakers and reception to follow.

The most amazing thing about the session was that Heather (who is also a realtor and costume designer, and volunteered to do an Yves Klein Anthropometrie-style body paintings on the roll of bond paper I was priming) had just been baptized the previous Sunday in a Pentecostal church in the Valley, and her mother had had a dream the week before of her daughter standing in robes on a platform, preaching to a crowd. The Lord works in mysterious ways!

Monkey Do

2009-11-19T14:01:00.000-08:00

In Diana Zlotnick's bedroom, I was surprised to to find that the video of primate mating rituals on the TV was in fact an artwork by Rachel Mayeri, whom I knew from the MJT and Super Super 8 Festival. In Primate Cinema she restages a primatologist's field video of baboon behavior using upscale hipsters in a Chinatown bar. It is priceless, and perfect. For her Project Series #39 show at Pomona (Rebecca McGrew's long-standing outpost of curatorial awesomeness), I wrote a short essay touching on a number of my favorite topics, including Death, the monkey paintings of Desmond Morris protégé Congo, and Jackson Pollock's claim of "being" nature.

"As far back as ancient Egypt, art has been seen as an immortalizing agent – overseen by the priesthood, Egyptian craftsmen of the Pharaonic eras followed rigid iconographic formulae designed to maximize the possibility of a favorable judgment in the underworld, where the heart of the deceased is weighed against a feather. Chief interrogator and court reporter at this most consequential measurement was the God Thoth – usually depicted as an Ibis-headed man, but in this case taking the form of a Cynocephalus baboon.

The choice of an ape as avatar for the inventor of writing and measurement – in some accounts Thoth is even said to have given birth to himself by uttering his own name – is puzzling, in that one of the primary differences between our species and the less spectacularly dominant primates is the absence of symbolic language. Particularly relevant to the intersection of apes and art is the function that Count Korzybski – the independent scholar who developed the controversial theory of General Semantics – referred to as “time-binding” – the exponential accretion of knowledge and culture over successive generations of human society.

Even before Jean Jacques Rousseau and the advent of Romantic Primitivism, apes were depicted in art as analogous figures for humans before the Fall: unaware of Death, Time, History, or Causality. Now I’m no professional ethologist, but it seems to me that the ideas of those who study animal behavior – specifically primates in the field – had, by the late 1960s, arrived (after a long and circuitous route through the Deus-ex-machina experimental design models of white-coated laboratory-bound Skinnerians) at a similar lost-Eden archetype. This is the version of primatology – the early revelations about Jane Goodall’s playful, gentle tribe of chimpanzees – that captured and continues to dominate the public imagination, and is the fulcrum about which Rachel Mayeri’s incisive Primate Cinema videos and workshops hinge.

Of course this saccharine trope of the hot-tubbin’ free-lovin’ Bonobo is inaccurate..."

Read the rest of The Art of Biology: Rachel Mayeri’s Primate Cinema and the Legacy of Monkey Painting here, then order the catalog (with copious illustrations and additional essays) from the PCMoAMAC here.

Images: Anon. Thoth as Baboon, King Tut's sarcophagus; Congo painting; Chardin The Monkey Painter; not actually a frame from Mayeri's Primate Cinema: Baboon Friends

Rachel Mayeri's Primate Cinema Project Series exhibition is on view through december 20th, 2009.

Heavy Rotations

2008-11-17T10:23:00.000-08:00

"The first body of work presented in detail here actually takes a step back from the uncanny allegorical puppetry in favor of a cooler and more art historically–precise exploration of physicality. In his photodocumentation of various acts of tripping, falling, smacking, tossing and spinning — probably his best-known work — Kersels lays out an incremental, encyclopedic examination of the paradox of performance art’s cultural afterlife in the form of reproductions in magazines and books.

It is in this once-removed form that an aspiring performance artist comes to know the lineage of their chosen medium. Kersels’ decisive-moment framing of his staged traumas dovetails neatly with Performance’s wryly self-reflexive engagement with its own compromised evidence trail, particularly through his UCLA mentor Paul McCarthy’s 1968 action Leap, a re-creation of Leap into the Void (French trickster Yves Klein’s notorious 1960 purported self-defenestration whose documentation turned out to be a faked photograph which, at the time of his performance, McCarthy had never even seen.)

Added to this house of mirrors, Kersels’ cibachrome pratfalls ought to beg the question of authenticity. In truth, their sense of immediacy and spontaneity is belied by the lengthy photo sessions and elaborate editing involved — Kersels often selecting a couple of shots from scores taken by his wife, Mary Collins. And I have to admit that when I saw his black-and-white Falling photos in 1995 — the ones where you can’t see his feet — I suspected there might be some hidden structural support propping him up. But aside from those deliberate formal ambiguities, Kersels’ work manages to convey a sense of both high theatricality and militant authenticity.

It all comes down to the body. Gifted as he is in this area, Kersels has created work hinging on physical presence and/or absence since his days with XXXL 80s performance troupe Shrimps. What comes across most clearly in “Heavyweight Champion” is the progression from the doomy, goofy isolation of his early sculptural surrogates — works like Monkey Pod, MacArthur Park and the artist’s punching-bag clown as oceanless Buoy (1997–98) — to the more recent social work, like the handmade Foley art instruments for his Orchestra for Idiots (2005), which, if not exactly optimistic, leaves the possibility open for some kind of connection."

Read the rest of The Big Frame: The Other Martin K here.

These images have been modified for greater torqueleptic Angemessenheit. The middle image is not Paul McCarthy's 1968 Leap, which was apparently undocumented, but his 1972 work Face Painting-Floor, White Line.

"Heavyweight Champion" is on view at SMMOA through Dec 13.

Three Closed Art Shows and a CD

2009-11-18T09:11:00.000-08:00

If I were an on-the-ball sort of person I'd have gotten this posted in time so that my online readers might avail themselves of the 3 day window of opportunity between publication and the deinstallation of the shows. But I am not an on-the-ball sort of person. At least as far as getting things posted in time so that my online readers might avail themselves of 3 day windows of opportunity between publication and the deinstallation of shows is concerned. I suppose I'm on the ball in other ways. And you can still get the Pere Ubu CD.

"Roy Dowell’s timing is seriously out of wack. For more than three decades, as the art world has careened from poststudio praxis to neo-expressionist painting and back again, L.A.-based painter/collagist Dowell has been steadfastly mining a creative vein whose most conspicuous antecedents are the abstract-formalist vocabularies of early Modernism. A midcareer survey at Margo Leavin Gallery in 2006 demonstrated how much internal evolution had occurred within those parameters, absorbing and translating stylistic elements as universal as fragmented billboard advertising and as personal as the (reciprocal) influence of his longtime partner Lari Pittman. Chair of Otis’ graduate school for the past 20 years, Dowell is about as far inside the L.A. art world as you can get, and I have heard his elegant collages dismissed as “too safe” — the privileged, solipsistic exploration of an anachronistic aesthetic bubble, irrelevant no matter how gorgeous they might be...

The adjacent project room holds a group of works that verge even closer to outsider territory, while deploying an inventory of pictographic symbols that fuse the archetypal and anecdotal realms. Drawing on an extended sojourn in northern Sweden, mixed-media trickster Jeffrey Vallance has appropriated the shamanistic object-making traditions of the indigenous Saami people in the form of a reindeer-skin “Troll-drum” decorated with a complex system of stick figures and abstract patterns, and supplemented by five elaborate preliminary drawings and interpretive legends...

A similar finesse characterizes Brian Tucker’s curatorial pairing of two of 20th-century America’s most intriguing artistic eccentrics at Pasadena City College’sart gallery as part of the biannual citywide Art + Ideas Festival. This year’s theme is “Origins,” and both Polish-born sculptor Stanislaw Szukalski and Pennsylvania native (and extraterrestrial-research pioneer) Richard Shaver are abundantly qualified for inclusion...

Oppositional eccentricity as a creative strategy doesn’t seem to work in the art world anymore — Dowell’s sumptuous compositional exercises ruffle more insider feathers than whatever rehashed nonprovocations pass for novelty this week. Vallance and Tucker succeed on the basis of their ability to insinuate otherness without making overt threats. It’s been more than a century since Alfred Jarry was able to scandalize Bohemian Paris by opening his play Ubu Roi with the nonsense poop-word “Merdre!” It’s almost 35 years since namesake experimental garage band Pere Ubu set out to bring some dissemblance of Jarry’s absurdist science of ’pataphysics into the nascent mass medium of punk rock, and only now are they getting around to directly addressing the absinthe-addled dwarf’s literary legacy..."

Click here to read the rest of Outside In: Two crackpots, a couple of borderline cases and one regular sort of fellow.

The shows online: Vallance & Dowell; Shaver & Szukalski

Purchase or download Long Live Pere Ubu here.

Images: Dowell Untitled (#978); Vallance Lapp Magic Drum; Szukalski Plaster Binder Spines (detail); Shaver Rock Painting cover for 'The Hidden World'; Quay Brothers & Pere Ubu March of Greed

Swamp Godd Oracle

2009-11-03T10:39:00.001-08:00

"Charles Burchfield — an Ohio native who spent most of his career in Buffalo and environs — is best known for his midperiod landscape watercolors: nostalgic Depression-era views of dilapidated small-town architecture or already-crumbling industrial infrastructure in the style that came to be known as American Scene Painting or Regionalism. Its main proponents were Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, and it has generally (if unfairly) been regarded in retrospect as a reactionary retreat into academic realism after the initial impact of the European Modernists after the 1913 Armory show in New York. Fans of this phase of Burchfield’s artistic evolution won’t be disappointed in this show; there are a dozen strong examples, including several, such as the nearly-abstract monochrome Night (undated), in which the balance between his nervous vision and the prosaic naturalism of his chosen style tips waaay to the dark side.

If Burchfields’s career had ended there, it would have been one kind of story. Because in spite of his popular and critical success as an illustrative painter of scrap-metal yards and snowbound factory towns, he had started out painting loose, swooping, color-saturated mystical scenes of nature built largely from an abstract symbolic alphabet of his own device. At the tender age of 24 Burchfield concocted more than 200 of what he referred to as “Conventions for Abstract Thoughts”— simple, biomorphic abstract forms defined by the interplay of dark and light, each one representing a specific emotional state: “Aimless Brooding,” for example, or “Dangerous Brooding,” “Morbid Brooding,” or “Imbecility.” Smells like teen spirit!

This remarkable (and long-lost) pictographic lexicon amounts to a singular declaration of American Modernism, and it’s where guest curator Robert “Culvert-through-the-BVM” Gober chooses to begin exploring Burchfield’s oeuvre. Using his invented abstract vocabulary, Burchfield grappled with what appears to have been a tremendous angst load, transforming his units of brooding and melancholy into components of a seething, psychedelic landscape whose pervasive vitality overwhelmed any petty motivations of self-pity. Instead, Burchfield’s self-indulgence took a different turn. Between 1916 and 1918 he produced hundreds of watercolors — half his lifelong output — each one teeming with symbolic portent, decorative inventiveness and a dreamlike animism where the ominously anthropomorphic or blankly inert architecture of human civilization appears to be in a cosmic struggle with the wildly vibrating energies of the natural world. The Insect Chorus (1917), for example, affords only a background glimpse of the stylized gables of a house almost entirely engulfed in arabesque clouds of foliage, which, in turn, mutate indiscernibly into layered graphic patterns representing the songs of crickets, cicadas and katydids.

It’s not surprising that when arch-Modernist Alfred Barr chose Burchfield for the first solo exhibition at New York’s newly founded Museum of Modern Art in 1930, it wasn’t the contemporaneous work — moody Hopper-esque street scapes like Winter Twilight (1930) — that he included but rather a selection of 27 of these exuberant, intricately coded, synaesthesia-induced fever-dreams from more than a decade earlier. Yet in spite of this belated institutional endorsement, Burchfield continued to hew his path through the decidedly unmystical Regionalist swamp — as Gober details in drolly titled chronological galleries titled “Wallpaper and Marriage” (referring to Burchfield’s lengthy 1920s stint as a wallpaper designer), “Public Acclaim or The Great Depression” and “War and Doubt.” If Burchfield had died in 1942, we would be left with a narrative arc describing a troubled, gifted youth overcoming profound psychological demons and reining in the extravagances of his talent to become an accomplished, well-adjusted, contributing member of society (while coincidentally abandoning introspective European-style Modernism for a meticulously crafted, socially responsible, populist pictorialism.) But Burchfield didn’t die. Burchfield went a little crazy."

Read the rest of American Dreaming: Charles Burchfield’s Imagination; Bridled and Otherwise here

More info on the Heat Waves in a Swamp exhibition here.

Images: Sun and Rocks 1918-50; The Insect Chorus 1917; Glory of Spring (Radiant Spring) 1950 - all watercolors

Uncanny My Ass: Penetrating the Performative Object

2009-10-29T21:38:00.000-07:00

Just thought I should bump this up for them that are thinking "Friday night on Halloween weekend and nothing to do. What's happening in LA that's cool and "with it?" -- better check "DougH on the Go!"

Found and recovered video and cinema featuring ventriloquist dummies and related simulacra, featuring LIVE IN PERSON Marnie Weber and David Liebe Hart!!! Only $5!

Friday October 30, 2009, 8PM
The Echo Park Film Center
1200 N. Alvarado St
Los Angeles, CA 90026

Scroll down or click here for more details.
Image: Michael Redgrave and Hugo in Dead of Night

Outsider Holiday Music Again Again

2009-10-25T13:08:00.001-07:00

I received a request to re-upload these compilations of unusual seasonal recodings (songpoems, celebrities, novelty, developmentally different, amateur, etc) again but it turns out some of the links are still live so I'll just repost those here..

"You may order your pastels from Alaska,
Imported, as the Igloo, in review"
- Evelyn Christmas (songpoem, Vol 2 track 4)

Download Outsider XMAS Vol 1
Download Outsider XMAS Vol 2

Tracklists in Comments

Images from Silent Night Deadly Night 5: The Toymaker

I Love You You Big Dummy

2009-10-21T13:59:00.000-07:00

CCCP-SCC
The Coalition for Cinema Conservation and Preservation – Southern California Chapter

In conjunction with The Echo Park Film Center

Announces a one night only event – Friday October 30th 2009 at 8 PM

Uncanny My Ass: Penetrating the Performative Object

Join Hugo, Woody, Conky, Hugo, Chip, Marcy, and many others for a selection of found and recovered video and cinema featuring ventriloquist dummies, marionettes, sock-puppets, Resusci-Annie, crash test dummies, and anything else we can scare up.

Featuring special live IN PERSON appearances by Los Angeles artist, musician & filmmaker Marnie Weber (Party Boys, Spirit Girls) presenting her new short film “The Sea of Silence” and David Liebe Hart and His Puppet Friends (Junior Christian Science Bible Lesson Show; Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!) performing songs from a new original musical detailing the history of LA’s Pacific Electric Red Line!

The rest of the evening will be given over to a survey of ventriloquist dummies (and related simulacra) in popular culture, including excerpts from classic horror films “Dead of Night” and “Devil Doll” the “Conky” episode of Trailer Park Boys, and classic ventriloquist routines including a rare puppeteer-free video of Christian ventriloquy legend Little Marcy, and much more!

PLUS Legendary door prize raffles, Halloween refreshments, Surprise special guests and MORE!

The Echo Park Film Center
1200 N. Alvarado St
Los Angeles, CA 90026
(the blue building at the corner of Alvarado and Sunset)
phone 213 484-8846
www.echoparkfilmcenter.org

Friday October 30th 2009 at 8 PM

For Those with a Jonestown Jones

2009-10-18T17:04:00.000-07:00

No sooner had I put my audio sampler up on my under-construction website than I get an email from one Fielding M. McGehee III of The Jonestown Institute asking me about the track entitled Jonestown (white night/white noise mix) created primarily from electronically processed recordings of Rev Jim Jones. I had never heard of the Jonestown Institute, but tracked them down easily enough - it turns out "Mac" is the spouse of Rebecca Moore, whose two sisters - higher-ups in the Peoples Temple organization - died at Jonestown, and whose book Understanding Jonestown and Peoples Temple was published by Praeger in March.

Their website is a huge and remarkable resource of information about Jones, Jonestown, and Peoples Temple, and they were very involved with the excellent documentary "Jonestown - The Life & Death of Peoples Temple." So when Mac asked me to write a short blurb about the Jonestown (white night/white noise mix) track and for their annual online journal The Jonestown Report, I was flattered, and jumped at the chance. The piece was actually the soundtrack for a painting, as seen above, and one of many works that I've produced concerning the episode in Guyana. One of my early essays for Art issues. - entitled The Aesthetics of Paranoia - also dealt with the legacy of Jonestown, and conspiracy consciousness in general. The new edition of the Jonestown report is online now, and features an extensive section on the Peoples Temple LP He's Able. My short essay is here.

"Thought Styling" and "Thought Stylist" are Registered Trademarks of the Buck Burns Center for Temporary Issues

2009-10-15T12:02:00.000-07:00

"Even if you’ve heard of the Yes Men, “high profile” might seem a stretch for a pair of media hackers with a healthy Internet following and a moderately successful documentary to their names (or their pseudonyms). But just moments into their new film, The Yes Men Fix the World (previewing at the Hammer on October 21), you are jolted into a different perspective — as Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum nervously prepares to go live on BBC television in front of 300 million viewers, posing as a representative of Dow Chemicals, to announce long-overdue reparations to the victims of the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India, in 1984. Within a couple hours, Dow’s stock value had plunged $2 billion.

Fix the World documents several more of the group’s two-pronged subterfuge — taking exploitative commodification to logical extremes, grisly (Vivoleum — a new energy source) or ridiculous (the Halliburton Survivaball, an inflatable disaster-survival suit resembling a bloated tick); or using their mistaken identities to demonstrate the concrete possibility that corporations can “Dow the right thing.” Which is, of course, an impossibility. No matter what the Supreme Court says, corporations are not people, and they don’t have consciences. Recent findings indicate that corporations are, in fact, a malevolent, parasitical, conceptual organism from a nearby star system, bent on the destruction of the human body, mind and spirit. The hapless primates that organize themselves into corporate enclaves are helpless pawns — if only corporations didn’t dangle such shiny things just out of our reach!

Beneath the hilarity and satirical incisiveness of the Yes Men’s antics lurks an awareness of this reality. Audience reaction shots focus on bored lackies breaking out in relieved, conspiratorial grins. By the time New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin responds to the Yes-Men-as-HUD with a rambling allegory about “a well-dressed lie chasing the naked truth,” it seems like everyone’s in on the gag — they just don’t know how to get out. The best art is always about dislocation, whether it’s a picture of a bison on the wall of a cave or an upside-down urinal rejected by an avowedly unjuried art show."

Read the rest of True Lies II: The Yes Men fix the world here.

The Yes Men Fix the World opens locally at the Laemmle Sunset 5 and Playhouse 7 on November 6

"Thought Styling" and "Thought Stylist" are Registered Trademarks of the Buck Burns Center for Temporary Issues

25 Minutes of Jim Pyke's Life He'll Never Get Back

2009-10-14T14:25:00.000-07:00

I just ran across this flattering but inexplicable blog entry from last January, in which Jim Pyke of Ann Arbor reads my essay from the Gary Panter Picturebox book... aloud... in its entirety. The really unnerving thing is that this was Jim's last blog entry, after which pajkossy appears to have gone dormant. Welcome to the Mouth of Madness, Jim.

Bees in a Shop Vac

2009-10-06T15:56:00.001-07:00

Bees in a Shop Vac, Bees in a Shop Vac, Bees in a Shop Vac, Right On!

There's Always Time for Jar Jar Binks

2009-10-05T14:21:00.000-07:00

I should be writing, but you gotta prioritize and when its a question of sharing a poop-walk photo of a reflected shopping-cart dude as the aorta of Jar Jar Binks, I think we all know what goes on the back burner.

South from Arcata with Bears & Fabio

2009-10-03T08:29:00.000-07:00

Well, I thought I'd be blogging daily about the Stone Summer Theory Seminar, but there was no time, and then with the Viking wedding in Arcata and all and most of my pictures still on the laptop and back to teaching and art writing, you're all just going to have to wait to find out "What Do Artists Know?" In the meantime here are some shots from the roadtrip back from Arcata - about 14 hours straight.

Images: First five at Redcrest CA - Bear signage at Redcrest Redwood Gifts; Marnie Weber & Welcome Bear; Outside and inside the Eternal Tree House; Christian Cummings and Fabio, Apricot Tree Restaurant, Firebaugh CA

Windy City Headtrip

2009-09-20T19:19:00.000-07:00

So here I am in Chicago to participate as one of 15 "fellows" in the Stone Summer Theory Institute, an annual weeklong seminar led by Jim Elkins at the School of the Art Institute. Not my usual cup of fish, but this year's theme is "What Do Artists Know?" which more-or-less translates into "How can art be taught?" which has always been a thorn in my brain, but much more so since I started teaching intro studio painting at West LA College last year. Somehow I got stashed in the same SAIC condo where I stayed last time I visited - everyone else is in a hotel, so I figure its some kind of quarantine since I believe I'm the only non-career academic and self-identified artiste in the lot. That's the view from my 24th floor picture window, and this is my attempt to modify the early morning lighting situation. Eat your heart out Olafur Eliasson!

The actual wingding doesn't officially kick off until the morning (leaving me plenty of time to finish the 1500 pages of required readings!) but there was an introductory lecture and dinner. In between I bought some groceries, got caught in a rainstorm (Member those homies? No fear, El Nino's a-comin!) and wandered around the Art Institute taking pictures of artworks involving detached heads. My subconscious' way of gearing up for the colloquium I guess! More soon.

Images: Henri Leopold Lévy The Death of Orpheus c. 1870 (detail), Géricault Head of a Guillotined Man, 1818/19 Gustave Caillebotte Calf's Head and Ox Tongue c. 1882, Henry Fuseli Head of a Damned Soul from Dante's "Inferno" 1770/78, Guido Reni Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist c. 1639/42 (detail), Sky-Clad (Digambara) Jina Seated in Meditation (Dhyanamudra) India, Uttar Pradesh 10th/11th Century

It’s a Crumby World...

2009-08-23T19:59:00.000-07:00

The recent announcement that the Hammer Museum would be displaying the complete original pages of Robert Crumb's new adaptation of The Book of Genesis reminded me that I hadn't posted a link to this piece, which we rushed to press just in time for Comicon. Strangely, it's disappeared from the WEEKLY website, so I'll reprint it here in its entirety.

... But it Could Be Worse

Since 2005’s benchmark MOCA/Hammer “Masters of American Comics” exhibit, there has been a growing acceptance in the art world of graphic narrative as a legitimate medium – ranging from the industry-wide influx of young experimentalists from the Providence/Kramer’s Ergot axis to the belated recognition of neglected “masters” like Basil Wolverton, whose ultra-grotesque 50’s-era caricatures (among other, even stranger, works – like his hyper-rendered apocalyptic illustrations for Herbert W. Armstrong's Radio Church of God) are currently on view at NY’s prestigious Gladstone Gallery (Matthew Barney, Lari Pittman, Richard Prince) in an exhibit culled from the collection of local hardware magnate Glenn Bray by ex-pat LA artist Cameron Jamie.

Of course, Bray’s unparalleled collection was the basis for an earlier selection of Wolverton’s work exhibited in a slightly more off-Broadway venue – Santa Ana’s Grand Central Art Center to be exact. The GCAC’s 2007 “The Original Art of Basil Wolverton” (for which I wrote a catalog essay) was a typically idiosyncratic offering from this unique venue, whose 10-year exhibition history has blurred boundaries between high and lowbrow, insider and outsider, real and fake – with shows like Thomas Kinkade’s first ever museum survey (curated by Jeffrey Vallance) and “100 Artists See Satan.”

For their latest blur-job, the GCAC is hosting a traveling retrospective of an artist whom critic Robert Hughes has compared to Goya and designated “the Breugel of the 20th century.” Thanks to Terry Zwigoff’s 1995 documentary, Robert Crumb achieved a level of timeless mainstream branding that allowed him to transcend his association with Haight-Ashbury’s Summer of Love and become the default public stereotype for the “wacky underground comic artist” – though it’s hard to hold onto the claim to continued countercultural credibility when one’s deadpan adaptation of “The Book of Genesis” is heralded by a 12-page excerpt in The New Yorker (June 8).

Not that Crumb has anything left to prove – as the creator of the underground comics genre with his self-published Zap Comix (as well as his less celebrated 80’s zine Weirdo -- a crucial continuation of the underground tradition through the Reagan era) and with 17 volumes of collected work (plus 10 facsimile sketchbooks and innumerable anthologies, coffee-table tomes, collected letters, etc.) of his intricately rendered, old-timey-fetishism-meets-psychedelic-pornographic-class-rage narratives published by the amazing Seattle-based Fantagraphics, Crumb’s legacy is pretty much unassailable.

The question is, why would you go to a museum to see this work, when so much of it is so readily available in its intended mass-media format? Earlier incarnations of “R. Crumb's Underground” – organized by San Francisco’s Yerba Buena center for the Arts and curated by Todd Hignite (the man behind the sumptuous if sporadically available Comic Art Magazine) – sought to deflect this thorny question through the inclusion of giant blow-ups of Crumb characters, including the artist’s own “lifesize” sculptural rendition of his 80s erotic icon Devil Girl.

Although one of the most charming pieces in the GCAC’s reduced version of the show is sculptural – a collection of anthropomorphically doodled-upon wooden Spoolmen created in the last couple of years – Crumb’s world is fundamentally 2-dimensional, and the reasons for leaving the comfort of your armchair to visit it are also twofold. Firstly, there’s the lingering Benjamin-stylee aura of the handmade object, given additional layers of convolution through the lens of comic collector fetishism and the tremendous historical impact many of these drawings had when reproduced around the world.

Secondly – and most importantly – is the opportunity to make a close inspection of Crumb’s craft. The phenomenal fluency and graceful labor-intensity of his best work is unsurpassed in contemporary graphic arts, but this only becomes clear when you see the originals, and realize that this is actual ink put on actual paper – and there’s no Wite-out! Drawing almost entirely from a single collection, “R. Crumb's Underground” isn’t the quintessential museum show the artist deserves – maybe the Centre Georges Pompidou in Crumb’s adopted homeland will come through in that department – but it’s a strong representative sampling of his half-century oeuvre.

One anomalous oddity in the show is a video shot in the early 70s at one of the Zap comics collaborative drawing jams where most of the Zap comix crew (including a hot young Robert Williams), joined by Gilbert “Freak Brothers” Shelton are seen producing one of their stoner montages. About halfway through, they’re joined by a slightly older, relatively square-looking man who is greeted reverentially and invited into the mix. This is Harvey Kurtzman, probably the only person who could challenge Crumb’s claim as the father of underground comics.

While Zap was undeniably the first in a series of explosions that changed the world’s ideas about the possibilities of graphic narrative, the fuse had been lit a generation earlier, when Kurtzman – mastermind behind EC Comics’ now-legendary war titles Two Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat – pitched a satirical humor comic that became MAD. Under Kurtzman’s guidance between 1952 and 1956, MAD combined his own prodigious talents with those of Wally Wood, Will Elder, and Jack Davis to raise parody to a delirious new medium that generally surpassed the artfulness of its conventional mainstream targets.

MAD lit the fuse that reached critical mass with the underground comics phenomenon of the 60s and 70s (and can be reliably credited as the inspiration for Roger Ebert’s giddy postmodern scripts for Russ Meyer’s Up! and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, amond other non-comic cultural milestones), but by the time of his death in 1993, Kurtzman was virtually unknown outside the world of comic fandom – and aficionados of Playboy’s “Little Annie Fanny” on which he’d –ahem—lavished his talents for the previous twenty-five years. This obscurity has been gradually subsiding since then, and has reached a new plateau with two recent publications. Though most of his MAD work has been readily available in some form of reprint since its original publication (most recently in two “Mad Archives” anthologies from DC) it was only recently that his subsequent publishing venture Humbug saw the reprint light of day – thanks again to Fantagraphics.

Kurtzman left MAD in a tussle for artistic control, pursuing Trump a glossy, deep-pocket dream gig for Hugh Hefner that tanked after two issues. His next brilliant career move was to start a more expensive, poorly printed B&W variation on the MAD formula, funded and published by a collective of fellow artists. Surprisingly, it actually lasted for 11 issues. Literate and subtle, yet still retaining passages of the claustrophobic associative horror vacuii of Kurtzman & Elder’s gag-clogged MAD panelage, Humbug is one of the great lost treasures of American humor, miraculously reissued in a high quality format unimaginable in its original pulp incarnation.

After the collapse of Humbug, Kurtzman spent a couple of years in freelance limbo, producing some of his most distinctively loopy solo work – a gorgeous beat adaptation of The Grasshopper and the Ant for Esquire, the first all-original graphic novel (Harvey Kurtzman’s Jungle Book – a complete flop), an epic unfinished reimagining of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and much more. These, along with samples spanning Kurtzman’s entire oeuvre, are represented in “The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics” from Abrams.

This lavishly illustrated doorstop of a book -- compiled by underground artist/publisher Denis Kitchen and pop history prof Paul Buhle – covers several other lesser known periods of Kurtzman’s career, including his pre-EC comic work, and his final venture into magazines – the as-yet-unreprinted early 60s HELP!, cofounded by James “Famous Monsters of Filmland” Warren, and featuring the editorial talents of Gloria Steinem and Terry Gilliam, as well as featuring the first published work by several future underground comix stars – including R. Crumb, whom Kurtzman famously sent on a fact-finding mission to Bulgaria.

Sadly, the book’s subtitle is a bit of a misnomer, as Kurtzman’s career was largely defined by compromise in the interests of fiscal security, as epitomized by his lengthy tenure under Hef’s thumb churning out the slick, overdetermined “Fanny.” Kurtzman knew that his best work resulted from complete autonomy, but it was rarely an option. Maybe if he’d been born 10 years later and made the Zap scene as a player, things would have been different. Different, yeah – like there would have been no Zap scene, and there would have been no R. Crumb, and there would never have been a MAD Magazine – or a Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. That’s a world you don’t want to visit.

R. Crumb's Underground
closed Aug 16
Cal State Fullerton Grand Central Art Center
125 N. Broadway, Santa Ana, CA 92701-8237

The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics
Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhle Introduction by Harry Shearer
Abrams ComicArts
ISBN: 0-8109-7296-4

Humbug
Harvey Kurtzman et al
Fantagraphics
ISBN: 156097933X

The Groaning Metaphor

2009-09-14T20:47:00.000-07:00

"Swinging by the Pasadena Museum of California Art is often like grazing some kind of far-fetched fusion buffet — blithely mixing collectible vinyl action figures with early California Impressionist landscape painting, wrapped in a custom rainbow fumigation tent with a side order of spray-painted Kenny Scharf legume entities. The gestalt isn’t always successful, but the unexpected shifts can deliver the effect of cleansing the mental palate, piquing your appetite for the next new sensation.

The current menu is particularly appetizing, sandwiching a combination of smooth midcentury modernist design and funky, quirky postmodernisms between two slices of contemporary landscape experiments. And, appropriately enough, the largest of these shows is devoted to dinnerware. Edith Heath (1911-2005) was a Danish farm girl from Iowa, who reinvented herself as one of the central figures of midcentury West Coast Modernist design, founding Heath Ceramics in 1947 with a mission to produce sturdy, functional and affordable ceramic products — primarily dishware and tiles — in a minimal, Bauhaus-derived vocabulary of clear, simplified geometry and cool, subtle colors. The company still manufactures out of Sausalito and maintains a store on Beverly Boulevard...

The remainder of the large main gallery is taken up by a small survey of work from a peculiar California art-historical moment — when the hippest campus in the state wasn’t CalArts or UCLA or SFAI or CCAC but UC Davis, located just west of Sacramento in the Culture-forsaken Central Valley, and known primarily as an agriculture and veterinary university. Somehow, Davis wound up home to five of the more idiosyncratic representational American artists of the 1960s...

Of the two landscape projects bracketing the Heath and “You See” exhibits, architectural photographer Benny Chan’s is the more formally elegant and serene — surprising, considering that “TRAFFIC!” consists of huge, incredibly detailed aerial depictions of gridlocked L.A. freeways shot with a purpose-built 8-by-10 camera while dangling from the side of a helicopter. I’m not convinced of the ostensible consciousness-raising purpose of the work (“Heavens, you mean rush-hour traffic in L.A. sucks?”) but the built-in compositional framework and undeniable curvilinear beauty of the interchanges paired with Chan’s technical prowess make a persuasive argument for getting your own helicopter.

PMCA’s front project room is given over to the latest version of “a never-ending painting in three dimensions” by young landscape artist (and L.A. Weekly Annual Biennial alumnus) Annie Lapin. Over the past few years, Lapin’s lushly painted montage vistas have been subjected to increasing amounts of stress, from barely discernible discontinuities in slightly quirky pastoral scenes to furious torrents of barely cohesive planar fragments rendered in garishly saturated colors..."

Read the rest of Heath Bars, Lapin And Mash: Fusion Cuisine in Pasadena here.

And see the shows at The Pasadena Museum of California Art, 490 E. Union St., Pasadena, through September 20.

Images: Edith Heath, Roy De Forest Every Trapper Should Have an Indian Dog (1960), Benny Chan TRAFFIC! (2008), Annie Lapin Parallel Deliria (Kansas City iteration) (2008)

Le Deluge

2009-09-11T10:14:00.000-07:00

"September 11 is upon us, and we all know what that means — opening weekend for the new fall line of upscale home decorations! But, hey, given the profusion of cultural fanfare marking previous anniversaries of the whole chickens-coming-home-to-roost thing (and the brouhaha undoubtedly brewing in anticipation of the imminent 10-year milestone) it’s not surprising that the art world would want to back away from geopolitical topicalism in favor of a back-to-normal (a.k.a. “Daddy Obama will fix everything! Let’s go shopping!”) mode of discourse. Which is fine. Frankly, I would consider the most self-indulgently aesthetic self-expression more authentically political than most formulaic ideological illustrations. This weekend offers the gamut, in overwhelming abundance — here are a few of the highlights to help map out your gallery-hopping..."
Read the rest of Snips & Snails: Let the Fall Art Season Begin! here

[That originally read "Colored Daddy" - as opposed to (or rather, indistinguishable from) White Daddy or Girl Daddy - but saner minds prevailed.]

Images: Brian Bress A River; Doug Aitken migration; Constance Mallinson Couple; Daniel Hawkins Railroad; Charles Irvin Oannes

Less of a Chartres Vibe, More Like Feeding Frenzy

2009-09-07T22:10:00.000-07:00

Well, that went pretty much according to plan, except for the 4-hour installation (it would have been longer - probably impossible - without the help of renaissance dude Michael Gomez-Burton who also shot some of these photos) and the fact that the piece wasn't as space-filling as I thought, and kept tearing, and partially collapsed before I got to the opening/happening. But since I didn't actually have a plan, it's safe to say it went "like clockwork". Here's a self-explanatory series of photos depicting the installation/performance/cleanup. Thanks to everyone who came, especially the 41 people who purchased a slice of history.

"Carving Up (and Passing Round) the Ruins of Abstract Painting"

2009-09-02T22:56:00.000-07:00

St Sebastian Soylent Rainbow Labyrinth

For his third solo exhibition at POST (or P0ST), Doug Harvey will present a giant, two-sided interactive abstract painting on paper. Part of Harvey’s recent exploration of working with discarded, decaying, and purposely pre-rotted materials, the painting was executed using aged leftover paints, including latex mistints, curdled acrylics, oils gone wild, and mystery fluids found in unmarked cans and left to ferment for up to a decade. The paper is an entire roll of “seamless” photographic backdrop paper found on the street and left outside in the elements for the last 4 years.

Arranged in a clockwise spiral (in a balancing opposite rotation to the layout of his 1997 POST installation St. Sebastian Tom Sawyer Cathy Mishima Expo 67, the approximately 11 ½ X 64 ft St Sebastian Soylent Rainbow Labyrinth operates as a basic Chartres-like walk-through environment. Excised rectangular segments interrupt the stability of the visual continuum, and the excised portions are available for sale to the public at $5 per segment. In addition, visitors may excise any rectangular segment from the larger work for purchase. The artist will be present to sign any purchased segment. St Sebastian Soylent Rainbow Labyrinth was created specifically for this one-night exhibit, and any unsold portions will be destroyed at the end of the show.

One Night Only! Friday September 04, 2009 7 – 9 PM

Part of:
September Kamikaze Shows
Thirty Solo and Group Exhibits
Receptions: September 1 – 30, 7-9 PM, one each night

PØST
1904 East 7th Place
Los Angeles, CA 90021 USA
213 4881280
new@post-la.com
post-la.blogspot.com

Silent for Ever on the Grid Mass

2009-09-01T08:37:00.000-07:00

I stumbled across a website featuring some of the poetry of my Great Uncle Joe - a dirt-poor French-Canadian farmer who self-published his work out of Bodmin, Saskatchewan - and ran it through the google translator. Here's a sample:

"I have since long years there in a secretary,
Among my memories a black sealed envelope;
He was sent to me by a summer night --
Echo of a long sigh as I would have been silenced.

It is there. No one ever will know the mystery.
I fuck sometimes, vaguely troubled.
I listen, my heart beats! It seems to me tinkle
As tinkles in the mist of a monastery bell ...

And suddenly sad, as remorseful
I say: Why bother? - Since the beautiful sleeping
Silent for ever on the grid mass

Do not speak the posthumous letter
Let sleeping peacefully in their dark room
And the lover and the ice love letter!"

J'adore les outils linguistiques de Google! Photo of LA burning by M.A. Peers, returning from Santa Barbara dogshow Sunday afternoon.