Hi Good Free in Torrance Friday!

As part of the new programming at the Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles based artist/curator/critic Doug Harvey has selected Lee Lynch's film titled "Ned's Draw" -- a neo-revisionist True Crime Western -- as the inaugural installment of the TAM's new film series. The film will be supplemented with live acting and an installation. 
Doug has also selected a new short by Eric Wright & Cathy Ward titled "Passing" which is narrated by LM Kit Carson who wrote Paris, Texas.

Los Angeles artists Gustavo Herrera & Spencer Douglass will kick off the evening with their piece "Buffalo Mierda".

Friday, June 19, 2009
8:00pm
Torrance Art Museum
3320 Civic Center Dr.
Torrance, CA
90509

MAP

GLOW Girls à Go-Go in the OC!

"The impression most people have of the history and meaning of 20th-century abstract painting basically involves a bunch of can-do postwar East Coast American dudes systematically stripping away subjective frills such as “content” to arrive at the monochromatic squares and precise geometric diagrams of Minimalism and Conceptualism, which allegedly refer to nothing outside themselves.

I’m not sure if any of the actual artists in question would subscribe to this version of history, but it has nonetheless seeped into the surface levels of our collective cultural consciousness, effectively burying a deeper and more complex story — a story less about real men optimizing the efficiency of the decoration industry and more about a bunch of middle-aged ladies wandering the desert in search of transcendental light.

However glossed over in the interests of secular technophilia, this alternate account of the significance of capital-A Abstraction keeps bubbling up, most elegantly in 2005’s 3 x Abstraction: New Methods of Drawing by Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz and Agnes Martin (possibly the best show ever hosted by the Santa Monica Museum of Art) but perhaps most emphatically in LACMA’s 1986 exhibit (and exhaustive catalog) The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985. Aside from af Klint, one of my personal revelations from that show was local mystic Agnes Pelton, who spent her most productive years in Palm Springs–adjacent Cathedral City, painting luminous, symmetrical conflations of the natural and inner landscapes that teeter between geometric decoration and symbolic illustration; between sumptuous formal design and painting deployed as a tool for entering (and prompting) altered states of consciousness.

After experiencing the disproportionate presence manifested by Pelton’s Sandstorm (1932) in LACMA’s sprawling, cluttered millennial Made in California extravaganza — the modestly scaled but optically riveting oil painting actually caught and held my attention from across the vast museum lobby — I became a little obsessed. Pelton, born in 1881, had quintessentially beat-bohemian credentials. Though born into money, her maternal grandfather — journalist Theodore Tilton — had struck a major blow to American sexual Puritanism by suing his friend Congregationalist minister Henry Ward Beecher, an abolitionist but vocal opponent of the “Free Love” movement, for adultery with his wife. The resultant front-page trial did considerable damage to Beecher’s reputation (and the political credibility of overt sexual repression), and drove Tilton into exile in a Parisian boarding house, where he supported himself by writing poetry. That was the mother’s side. Pelton’s father, a globetrotting bipolar Louisiana sugar heir, OD’d on morphine when Agnes was 9."

Read the rest of Luminous Dames: Georgia, Agnes, Agnes, & Florence at OCMA here


See the show through Sept 6th at the Orange County Museum of Art.

Images all Agnes Pelton; top to bottom: White Fire (c. 1930), The Voice (1930), Light Center (1960-61), Sand Storm (1932)

A Sense of Entitlement

All Hail Sporting Fields' Nigel, NW1! Nigel is the first whippet to have earned the Nosework 1 title, though doubtless many will follow his lead. Always a trailblazer, Nigel was among the first group of pet dogs to pursue this new field of competitive canine sport, which evolved from drug and bomb sniffing training and involves locating arbitrarily scented cotton swabs hidden variously on a vehicle, in a room, in an exterior space, and in one of a series of boxes.You can learn more about Nosework classes and competitions at www.funnosework.com

Above: Nigel nails the exterior search. It was in the watering can.
Below: Nigel with his ribbon.

Precious Ruins

"Those familiar with Steve Canaday’s work from back around the turn of the millennium will recognize this move as a periodic return to the abstract roots from which his lurid imagery blossomed — a consolidation of the lessons gleaned from immersion in skanky figuration. And a rich, black volcanic compost it yields indeed. Consisting of a half-dozen medium-size shaped canvases embossed with coarse monochromatic black-on-black grids of rectangles in high relief, like buttons on a metastasizing cell phone, the tread of a shredded monster truck tire, or an aerial map of a charred cityscape — Canaday’s Black, Blacker, Blackest suite possesses a physicality and gravitas only hinted at in his earlier work.

Highlighted with satellite night vision–green patches and halos, constructed in vague resemblance to automotive fragments, and occasionally sprouting an antenna from a top stretcher bar, these cartoonishly postindustrial geometric abstractions flirt with figuration just enough to spoil their reading as doctrinaire Minimalism, while retaining their prerogative as remarkably decorative objects. Call it Late American Imperial — sumptuous and unique material commodities that seem to embody a stripped-down symbolic divination of their host culture’s impending demise — the last feeble flickering of the fluorescent-green ghost before it becomes all machine, the last sputtering transmission from VALIS to penetrate the Black Iron Prison.

But maybe I’m projecting. There’s a strong temptation to look for signs and portents of impending collapse in the artifacts of a doomed culture, even in the midst of seemingly perpetual supremacy. Of course, this works even better in hindsight, which accounts to some extent for the ongoing public fascination with the excavated detritus of the city of Pompeii. While undeniably constituting one of the most remarkable archeological treasure troves ever dug up, the flash-fried ruins of this first-century Neapolitan resort town have elicited a perverse and subjective fascination from the modern Western imagination since their rediscovery in the mid-18th century.

As a story, it’s pretty much got everything — sex, death, explosions, pathos and a surprising amount of humor. I get a sense that the city’s excavation created a McCluhanesque media shift in our perception and processing of (at least) antiquities — after all, Pompeii and its neighboring cities constitute a sort of holographic virtual-reality snapshot of a 2000-year-old culture — a century before photography began to condition our perceptual models to accommodate such frozen sensory data. This sudden holistic shift had a profound effect on archeology, art history and museology, but also sent shock waves through our species’ common cultural and sensory software."

Read the rest of Apocalypse Now & Then here.

Fuck the Bamboo Ceiling!

Yes! Congratulations to Shirley Tse, 2009 Guggenheim Fellow. Shirley's latest cluster of poly-everything sculptures can be seen at Barnsdall (4800 Hollywood Blvd 90027) in the 2009 COLA Prizes show, through July 12, 2009 -- for which I wrote the attached essay.

“Just one word: Plastics.” This pithy line, the straw that breaks Benjamin Braddock’s antidisestablishmentarian back in the enormously popular 1967 film The Graduate, encapsulates a remarkably pervasive archetypal association between synthetic polymers and a wide range of (mostly negative) social, political, and even spiritual conditions.  Dating back at least to the beatnik era - and continuing as a current running through subsequent cultural moments right up to the present – plastic has been a word, an idea, and a material inextricably commingled with notions of inauthenticity, alienation, superficiality, disposability, waste – indeed, virtually all the perceived negative changes wrought upon our species’ 10,000 years of relative agrarian stability by the Industrial Revolution. Polyester doesn’t breathe!

One of the first things that struck me as remarkable about Shirley Tse’s sculptures – after their initial and persistent formal impact - was their function as indicators of a deeper and more complex understanding of this human/plastic relationship – encompassing and acknowledging plastic’s pop-humanist demonization as an important but reductivist aspect of a much larger, finely nuanced, multi-layered and multivalent narrative.

One aspect of this underlying narrative has been an engagement with the history of plastic in art, most conspicuous in Tse’s avoidance of the kinds of plausibly deniable irony that characterize Pop usages of this most modern of materials – as well as the mute fetishism of its Minimalist incarnations. But Tse has cast a much wider net. Before even leaving grad school she had identified the circulating global stream of cheap plastic consumer goods – in which both Los Angeles and the artist’s hometown of Hong Kong act as major hubs – as a central underlying motif in her work’s formal and conceptual gestation.

The geopolitical and systems theory implications arising from this specific template are extensive, yet only hint at the mycelium of interlaced ideational threads underlying the mandala of synthetic ‘shrooms that comprise Tse’s oeuvre. Through intentional research and reference as well as unusually lucid intuitive and associative connections, Tse has imbued work that reads at first glance as playful but enigmatic formalism  - brightly colored inflatables, intricately incised slabs of foam, mutated beverage coolers - with the distinctive sense of elaborately interwoven symbolic sets lying just outside our comprehension, elaborately modeled entry points for a vast interdimensional metro system (if only public art looked half as good!)”

Read the catalog version of here

Or the slightly longer original version in Comments.

Gristle for DeMille

"Throbbing Gristle’s ties to California are deep. The last time they played L.A. was May 1981 — their first-ever gig in the U.S. and their penultimate gig before dissolving the band for more than two decades. But they had, in fact, made quite a “splash” in the L.A. art community several years earlier. In fall 1976 Cosey and P-Orridge appeared as COUM at the experimentally minded artist-run space LAICA, just weeks after having caused a media frenzy in the U.K. tabloids with a state-sponsored gallery exhibit, including used tampons and framed porn-magazine spreads featuring Cosey — a feminist Situationist intervention and welcome source of income.

Their L.A. performance of “Cease to Exist No. 4” (named after a Charles Manson composition recorded by roommate Dennis Wilson’s band, the Beach Boys) is local legend. As P-Orridge later recounted, the event was dripping with integrity — as in the sequence where he “takes a hypodermic and stabs it into a testicle, fills it with blood, picks a black egg off thee floor, stabs thee syringe into it ... injecting a total of seven black eggs with his own blood.” P-Orridge later “pisses into a large glass. As he squeezes out the last drop, he farts, and blood mingled with milk shoots out of his arse.”

From this unholy exchange of fluids (and we’re only scratching the surface here, people) were birthed the persona of Marilyn Manson and the cinema of David Lynch, among other important cultural treasures — not to mention electronica, acid house, Survivalist Chic, the Lounge Revival and about three-quarters of the inventory at Hot Topic. Thanks, Throbbing Gristle! Seriously, though, David Lynch rules. I often think of Lynch as an artist who has managed to deal convincingly and creatively with the exigencies of commercial success. Like TG."

I'm still a little bummed that I didn't get to catch them in the act - no way Coachella, and I was teaching the night they played the live ST to Derek Jarman's Shadow of the Sun at the Ricardo Montalban Theater. But hey, next time, right?

Read the rest of Throbbing Gristle's 33rd Annual Report here.

Satan is the Source, of Course of Course

I put this up on Facebook (please explain) for GG2 but it got crunched to unintelligible by some robot. So hopefully if you click on the above image you will be able to read, and learn, and avoid, and live, and move on, my dear friends. Leave comments if you want to learn more from (Doug Harvey's World of) Fascinating People.

On the Road to Westminster

Wow, I've been slackin' with the posts. Teaching, writing, car trouble, plumbing issues, and particularly Portfolio's burgeoning Conformation show career have been eating up the "spare" time. I also started reading novels again. More on that later, but first a couple of shots from the Rio Hondo Kennel Club All Breed Show at Cal Poly Pomona a couple of weekends ago. Above: Portfolio relaxing in the Zone before nailing #2 in a class of 2 (puppies 6 - 9 months). Below: (l-r) Portfolio & Chloe's littermates Phoebe Couture and Diesel, elder siblings Darren and Harmony, who are being handled by the inimitable Valerie Nunes-Atkinson. Throbbing Gristle and more soon!

All well and good, but where's Margaret Keane?

I have a Big-Eye painting in this crazy omnibus show at the Green Gallery in Milwaukee that Kristin Calabrese and Josh Aster put together - all the pieces had to be 11 X 11 or smaller. I realized mine was oversized so I sawed it down and folded it over, securing with monofilament. I forgot to take a picture but here is a surveillance style-rendering enhanced from the official group photo on Facebook. It's part of the Pre-rotted series, and called Processional Mecca. The show's called "Lovable Like Orphaned Kitties and Bastard Children" and opens May 9th.

Video Art Out of Africa

"A couple of weeks ago, the eminent journal Science announced the confirmation of the earliest known human footprints heretofore discovered. Preserved between layers of volcanic ash, the 1.5-million-year-old tracks were shown by laser-scanning analysis to have been made by truly upright citizens (not like those knuckle-dragging Australopitheci).

It should come as no surprise that the footprints were found in East Africa, in the country now known as Kenya; the same neck of the woods where Mitochondrial Eve — the original common female ancestor of every human alive today — is thought to have trod some 150,000 years back.

And it was just a little farther down the coast, in Blombos Cave on the Southern Cape coast of South Africa, that archaeologists in the early 1990s discovered two ochre engraved plaques that had been inscribed with abstract geometric designs approximately 75,000 years ago — predating the cave paintings at Lascaux by a healthy 60 millennia: arguably our species’ oldest objets d’art.

Now let’s look at the headlines ... hmmm ... “Kenyan Police Accused of Widespread Killings” ... “15,000 Flee Southern Darfur” ... “President of Guinea-Bissau Assassinated” ... “Zimbabwe Cholera Epidemic Worsening. ... ”

Seeded with land mines, depleted of natural resources, riddled with plague, political corruption, poverty and starvation; her social structures pulverized to a jittery, explosive subatomic mush, awash in imported toxic waste, homogenized global urban culture and IMF debt, Africa is as much our future as it is our past.



The curators at the Fowler Museum know this — at least it seems so, going by their track record, with shows like 2003’s “A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal,” which traced the proliferation and mutation of a single image of Sufi saint Amadou Bamba across almost every surface of Dakar, and last year’s “Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art” — far and away the most compelling recent L.A. exhibit on the relationship between language and art. Both epitomize the Fowler’s ongoing commitment to representing the artistic practices of the non-Anglo world, Africa in particular, in all their complex vitality: balanced between ancient local traditions, contemporary international Art World strategies, and coping mechanisms for the coming apocalypse.

Of course, in the short term, it is the middle ground that is of greatest interest to the artists, curators and other players engaged in the effort to shift some capital away from Damien Hirst, Richard Prince and (South African–born) Marlene Dumas and into the grass-roots art economies of Dakar, Johannesburg and Lagos — or at least generate some art stars to compete on Charles Saatchi’s playing field."

Images: Muxima Alfredo Jaar 2005

Read the rest of Digital Roots: Continental Rifts at Fowler Museum here

And here's the Fowler's webpage about the shows.

None of the Above

"Toward the end of Membrane Lane, Charles Irvin’s faux conspiracy documentary on the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (an organization that champions people claiming to have been falsely accused of child sexual abuse), there’s a particularly startling non sequitur. In the midst of the relatively straightforward montage of appropriated news footage and sequences in which the camo fatigues–sporting narrator/artist explains his conspiratorial flow charts, there is a jump cut to a strangely familiar image, which takes a second to place — a shot of the “foaming brush” in one of those DIY car washes, leaning upright against the generic tile wall, oozing globs of white soap. Then, just as you realize the footage is reversed, and the brush is sucking the foam up from the gutter back into its infinite milky reservoir, the rebunking of the Satanic abuse debunkers continues, leaving you with that distinctive “Wait! What the fuck was that, and how did it get in here?” sensation.



This sort of conceptual embolism seems to be the curatorial premise of Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from L.A., the current museum omnibus exhibit where Irvin’s DayGlo-primitivist cartoon paintings — and video — can currently be experienced. Nine Lives is something of a curatorial coming-out party for Hammer adjunct curator Ali Subotnick, whose genealogy as co-founder/director of prank Chelsea nonspace Wrong Gallery and occasional high-end journal Charley (both in collaboration with fellow critic/curator Massimiliano Gioni and eminent Vaffanculist Maurizio Cattelan) should have pushed her to the front of the schedule of exhibitions a couple years ago.



Tellingly, Nine Lives is more reminiscent of one of these prior joint efforts than it is of the Hammer’s string of previous regional survey shows (Snapshot, Thing, East of Eden) with which it is publicly equated. The most recent Charley (No. 5) is a treasure chest of idiosyncratic visual genius (if not the corresponding data — none of the artworks is dated or identified, and most of the essays are cribbed from Wikipedia), compiling the work of diverse outsiders like Jess, Noah Purifoy, Ree Morton, Forrest Bess, Christopher Knowles and more than 100 other remarkable figures from the margins of the contemporary art-historical canon.



Nine Lives shifts the focus to living artists working in Los Angeles but keeps the quirk factor — and its attendant awkwardness in terms of art-world acceptability — cranked to 11. Foremost among these are two of L.A.’s elder statesmen of quirk: Llyn Foulkes and Jeffrey Vallance. Foulkes is a remarkable painter, whose half-century of work seamlessly integrates Abstract Expressionism, West Coast Assemblage and Pop alongside his darkly personal political ruminations and signature obsession with exaggerated pictorial relief effects, with his carved-out Disney figures and post-Apocalyptic landscapes verging on the dimensionality of dioramas. Great as it is to see such a stellar selection of his work in one place (particularly his epic The Last Frontier, last seen briefly in the back of Patty Faure’s gallery), one hopes it doesn’t function in lieu of the overdue full retrospective Foulkes and the L.A. art community deserve."



Read the rest of Peripheral Visions: Nine of L.A.’S Square Pegs Get Hammered here.

Images:
Lisa Anne Auerbach Never Forget (front) 2007
Victoria Reynolds Flight of the Reindeer 2003
Charles Irvin Untitled 2008
Llyn Foulkes Deliverance 2007 (This piece was supposed to be in Some Paintings, BTW)
Lisa Anne Auerbach Never Forget (back) 2007

It's Like a Bathtub in Here

I seem to remember taking some photos at Lee's screening, but I'm pretty sure this wasn't one of them. I'll get around to that later - I just wanted to direct your attention to this outstanding recent experimental graphic narrative on John Higham's blog. Not Obscure is always worth checking out for John's richly rewarding take on life on earth (particularly in a tiny Inuit village in Nunavut), but once in a while he drops one of his mind-bending art or literary gems in the mix, adding a whole other dimension. Case in point being The Adventures of Jack in Dreamland. "Enjoy"

Towards a Hier Good

"Click image to enlarge"

Thursday, March 26, 2009
6:00pm - 11:00pm
Screenings at 6, 7:30, & 9
Gayle & Ed Roski MFA Gallery
Graduate Fine Arts Building (IFT)
3001 S. Flower St.
Los Angeles, CA 90007
(Entrance on 30th St. between Flower St. and Figueroa St.)

Hi Good is Coming Down Fast

Thursday night marks the debut screenings of Lee Lynch's new film project (and one night only thesis exhibit for his MFA candidacy at USC) "Ned's Draw or the Murder of Hi Good" screening at 6, 7:30, and 9 PM at the USC Roski Graduate Fine Arts Gallery, 3001 South Flower (just east of Figueroa) LA 9007. Followers of this blog will be aware of my lengthy involvement with this project - in fact my very first posting relates to it. I was on the shoot in January, up near Chico, and got hundreds of documentary photos plus 12 hours of 'making of' video footage. Here's a handful. I'll try and post another selection over the next day or two.

I Was a Twentysomething Painting Pachyderm

Here's something from 1987 or so that I thought was lost in the mists of time (AKA the molds of the garden shed) but turned up during research for my forthcoming website www.dougharvey.la

I've always been fond of elephants, but I forgot how far back my interest in them as visual artists went. For the LA Weekly's 2003 List Issue I wrote:

"Sometime in the early '80s, a Syracuse zookeeper named David Gucwa gave a paintbrush to the African elephant Siri and a new branch of non-human art history was born. A few years later, Ruby, an elephant at the Phoenix zoo, became a media sensation with her prodigious output of vibrant works. Realizing the fund-raising potential, zoos across America began shelling out for art supplies. Russian artists Komar and Melamid were inspired to open a school for unemployed Thai elephants to learn painting — a story outlined in their 2000 book When Elephants Paint. These sarcastic foreigners have more than a little invested in ridiculing Modernism, but the good their patronage has done is undeniable — sanctuaries in Thailand, India and Bali now support themselves with work by dozens of elephant artists sold through online galleries at www.soarts.com and www.novica.com. The Balinese sanctuary has been suffering the tourist gap since those discos blew up, and may be assisted directly at baliadventuretours.com. Look for the link to the Have-a-Art Appeal."

Read the rest of Doug Harvey's Favorite Non-Human Artwork here. Those links may be obsolete, but a good place to start looking is www.elephantart.com

The Things in the Kitchen

Things have been pretty hectic what with the puppies and teaching a painting class and disposing of all my old art but I should plug this since I'm in it: L.A. collectors Sirje and Michael Gold have curated the art auction segment of the annual fundraising event WIDE ANGLE for the University Art Museum at Cal State Long Beach, pairing "thirty established artists with thirty artists whose works have been less accessible for Southern California audiences". I'm the latter, paired with Roger Herman. For my piece, I actually took Roger's woodcut kitchen image, flipped it horizontal, and then found all the entities hiding in his composition. There was a preview (and the silent auction of some paired works began) on March 12th at the SmogShoppe in Culver City, but the live auction itself is at the UAM (CSULB, 1250 Bellflower Boulevard, Long Beach, CA 90840-8401) on the 21st in conjunction with a Salle/Armitage shindig. The art will be viewable at the UAM from March 18th through the 20th from 12 to 5 PM. More info here. Above: Kitchen Below: Chien TK (Dog is Coming)

Bonus Art Tip: Chloe actually ate the buff titanium oilstick I used on my painting, and I called the ASPCA poison hotline, and they said that it was OK, and it was.

S'more Paintings

There's been a recent surge of shows by painters who were included in last January's Third Annual LA Weekly Biennial: Some Paintings, and I was hoping to write a roundup piece for the Weekly. Unfortunately, scheduling it was too much of a nightmare, so I'll just use this forum to alert the world to the following current, upcoming, and missed opportunities to catch up on the LA painting scene. Above, Chloe experiences a Dutcherific thought bubble embolism at LAVC's Intuitive Eye: The Diana Zlotnick Collection, which also includes this c. 1960 work by mysterious SP participant Michael Oledart, as well as pieces by Adrian de la Pena, Llyn Foulkes, and Michael Arata.

Mark Dutcher's work is also the subject of a typically spectacular solo show called Havilah at Steve Turner Gallery through March 21. Below: Total Eclipse, 2009


Brad Eberhard's solo debut As Different as Twins is up under the auspices of Thomas Solomon Gallery at Cottage Home through March 14th. Below: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 2009

Tomory Dodge's latest ACME show After Forever is also up through the 14th. Below: Stars, 2009 

Llyn Foulkes, Charles Irvin, and Victoria Reynolds are all featured in Ali Subotnick's Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from LA exhibit at the Hammer Museum, up through May 31. Foulkes: The Lost Frontier, 1997-2005; Irvin: Untitled, 2008; Reynolds: Flight of the Reindeer, 2003







There's also a bunch of shows that have come down, but can still be digi-seen online, including Esther Pearl Watson at Billy Shire, John Kilduff at Jancar, Lisa Adams at Lawrence Asher, Monique Prieto at ACME, Michael Arata at Woodbury University, Constance Mallinson at Angles, David Korty at Michael Kohn, and Kaz Oshiro at Rosamund Felsen. You can understand how I had a little trouble getting organazized! And I'm sure there's a couple I've forgotten - I thought I saw something about an Annie Lapin installation in Pasadena, but it ain't googlin'.

Oh well. Watson: Washing My Hair in the Tub, 2008; Kilduff, Internet TV Collaboration #5, 2008; Adams: After the Deluge, 2008; Prieto: Tomorrow Morning, 2008; Arata: Nigel negotiating Obstacle Course, 2008; Mallinson: Decaying Olympia, 2008; Korty: Untitled (Magazine Stand), 2008; Oshiro: Untitled corner Piece (Turquoise), 2008.

Deutschland Deutschland

"I wonder what Syd Barrett was doing on July 21, 1990, whilst his former Pink Floyd bandmate Roger Waters was cranking the bombast to 11 in Berlin by supersizing that already bloated paean to bilious self-pity known as The Wall and conflating it with the decommissioning — six months prior — of the “anti-Fascist protective rampart” that had divided the German capital and stood as a symbol of Yankee/Soviet stalemate for the previous quarter century. Probably painting.

After his death in 2006, it was revealed that Syd had spent much of his three-decade withdrawal from show business making art, which he sometimes photographed before painting over or destroying. The question that nags me is this: Which is the greater creative act, micromanaging a spectacular but rehashed postmodern Gesamtkunstwerk for half a million people (and millions more via live satellite TV — and all ostensibly for charity!), or daubing away in a Cambridge cellar on a canvas that will probably never see the light of day?

What brings this to mind is Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures, an ambitious and treasure-laden exhibit now happily displacing Damien Hirst (among others) from the second floor of LACMA’s BCAM building. It isn’t just the superficial Berlin Wall reference that summons the mighty Floyd, but the jostling polarities at play, that between hubristic historical importance and unrecorded humility as artistic motivators, and of the almost cosmic narrative of good and evil that drove Cold War politics — and tried to oblige Art into choosing a side.

Completing curator Stephanie Barron’s exceptional historical trilogy that began with 1991’s Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany and continued with ’97’s Exiles and Emigres: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, Two Germanys adheres to this übernarrative closely, albeit in a subtly nuanced and richly detailed way. Beginning with Richard Peter Sr.’s claustrophobic, horizonless documentary photographs of the charred rubble (and citizens) of Dresden, the exhibit winds in a chronological circuit through the schizophrenic era of reconstruction toward the conceptual terminus of reunification. Shell-shocked attempts to assimilate the recent carnage with the tools of Modernism provide the first of many painterly gems, with the luminous biomorphic abstractions of Willi Baumeister, who chose to remain in Third Reich Germany, working in secret after being classified as degenerate.

The bifurcating streams of Communist Party–sanctioned Socialist Realism and laissez faire expressions of the Westside “economic miracle” afford glimpses into summarily disparaged modes of narrative figuration and prescient op/kinetic gizmoism respectively, while the first stirrings of anticonsumerist skepticism that blossomed in the “Capitalist Realism” of Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke are traced to the 1950s typewriter and sewing-machine portraits of Konrad Klapheck. A tableful of Dresdenite Herman Glöckner’s constructivist models — assembled in secret from tiny bits of trash to evade the disapproving eye of the East German Socialist Unity Party — provides a hauntingly poetic riposte to both official programs of aesthetic progress, while looking eerily contemporary — like something from last month’s grad-school open studios."

Read the rest of Divided We Stand: Art of Two Germanys here

Images:
Roger (Syd) Barrett Untitled, 1963, Pencil and oil on board (not in the show, Dummkopf!)
Willi Baumeister Gravour Faust – Scherzo, 1952, Oil and pencil on cardboard (also not in the show, but one I particularly like)
Various models by Herman Glöckner, c. 1960
Sigmar Polke, Object Kartoffelhaus (Potato House Object), 1967

Give Me Equulibrium or Give Me Horse Tranquilizers

If anyone's in the vicinity of the City of Brea, or passing through, this is the last week to check out Out of School, a show that gathers together a disparate group of works created by people who teach in SoCal art schools - including myself, Caroline Clerc, Roger Herman, Linda Day, and many others. My piece is a combination of two previously exhibited horse head sculptures, both of which will be entering private collections after this show. L: Precious Nuggets: St. Sebastian Annie Edson Taylor Queen of the Night, 2007 R: St. Sebastian Ann Coulter Daniel Radcliffe Mandelbrot Set, 2008

The City of Brea Gallery is located in the Brea Civic & Cultural Center at 1 Civic Center Circle, Plaza Level. Gallery hours are Wednesday - Sunday, 12 to 5 p.m., closed Monday, Tuesday and holidays. Admission is $2 and Brea residents are free.

Zlotnickmania 2-Nite!

Tonight is the opening of Intuitive Eye - LA Valley College's show of works from Diana Zlotnick's collection, which includes some of my work. I'll also be participating in the panel discussion. LAVC is just at the intersection of the 110 and 134 freeways.

Dennis Reed writes "A nonlinear thinker, Diana does not progress logically in even steps from one thing to the next. Rather she leaps, propelled by her inventive intuition and instinct. They have served her well. She has built a unique and enviable collection that includes early works by important artists: Andy Warhol, George Herms, Wallace Berman, and Richard Pettibone, to name but a few.

Her engagement with art is passionate and engulfing. Although she buys art from galleries, she prefers a more direct link to artists. She focuses on those whose careers are just emerging. She often visits their studios and befriends them, being among the first to buy their work. I have heard artists comment, years later, that Diana provided badly needed money and encouragement to continue working when they most needed it.

When she brings home new art, it is not placed carefully over the couch - I don't think she even owns a couch! The rooms in her house, even the bathrooms, are small exhibition spaces with rotating shows. New purchases join older works, so that a newly made piece, the paint barely dry, might hang next to vintage works acquired long ago by now veteran artists such as Andy Warhol, Edward Kienholz, or Lynn Foukles. She has been collecting since 1954, after all, when one of her first acquisitions was a John Altoon painting purchased from Walter Hopps at the now legendary Ferus Gallery. The work in this exhibition is but a small sampling of her extensive holdings."

Reception & Discussion with the Collector
7 pm, Wednesday, February 18, 2009

February 18 - March 26, 2009
Monday through Thursday
11 am until 2 pm and 6 pm until 9 pm


Images: Above: Don Bachardy, Portrait of Diana, 1982, acrylic on paper; Below:Doug Harvey, Precious Nuggets: The Happy Place, 2007, Mixed Media on found foam (Photo by Josh White)

Puppy Excursions

At the moment, Chloe's enrolled in a class which requires submission of weekly photodocumentation of her ongoing integration into the larger human social world. Above we see her shopping in For Pets Only on Hilhurst, sporting her newly purchased ultra-attractive pink raincoat - just too short enough! Portfolio, whose testosterone levels continue to surge to new heights on a daily basis, prefers more rugged leisure activities, as evidenced by this snap of him on a recent whitewater rafting trip to Arizona. Next port: Westminster!

Splitting at the Seems

Tonight, Thursday Feb 12th, is the night for LA's monthly Downtown Art Walk which this time includes the closing reception for Larry Pearsall's Beneath the Seam at the Downtown Art Center Gallery from 6 - 9 PM.

"There’s an abandoned warehouse near the heart of Ice Dirt Town, where a bald, bearded and extremely tall pedophile named Bon lords over a harem of barely teenage boys — Lapito, Alex, Day Day, Billy, Ralph, Kevin; amputees Earl (left arm), Fakebein (right arm) and Marleytom (right leg), and about a dozen others. The boys don’t seem to realize they’re being abused. In fact, the few times we see them out of their ubiquitous denim overalls — being tickled or posing for a snapshot — they remain chastely clad in shorts and socks. But the cats see all. The Applebaycats, led by Blato, creep through the broken heating ducts of the abandoned warehouse: observing, commenting and envisioning a better time. A time beyond Bon.

This is the underlying scenario for one of the most compelling exhibits of narrative-based art in recent memory, a tour de force titled “Beneath the Seams,” currently on view at the recently opened DAC Gallery on Main Street at the edge of downtown’s gallery row. Artist Larry Pearsall is soft-spoken but happy to talk about his work and the avowedly fictional world it depicts. “The cats can’t do much. Except this one called the police on Bon. He was the last one to call the police, and that’s when the police came,” recounts the artist. “Bon goes to jail. Him and Molly and Brures. And they were after Balisha and her boyfriend, Reggie.” Balisha leads a contingent of slightly older, mostly African-American teens, who seem to sometimes provide the boys’ escape from Bon’s predations — and sometimes participate in them.

It’s hard to get a clear picture about the exact chain of events, or the specific roles each character plays, because Pearsall unfolds his story in discrete achronological fragments: single-frame tableaux rendered in a flat, jagged cartoon style as acrylic paintings on paper or canvas (as well as sculptures not included in this show) that jump discontinuously between settings, times and characters. Moreover, the almost 100 works included in “Beneath the Seams” are only a fraction of the completed chapters comprising a complex epic that shows no indication of reaching completion anytime soon. Which is probably why writer/director/producer Obie Scott Wade thinks Pearsall’s work is perfect for an Adult Swim–style animated series.

“I fell in love with the notion of animating Larry’s brilliant work because he paints as if God were holding a gun to his head and he cannot tell a lie,” asserts Wade, whose résumé includes Baby Looney Tunes and a transgender version of Shazam!, called Shezow. Citing Persepolis and Waltz With Bashir, Wade believes that “if handled properly, animation is the perfect medium to deal with hypersensitive subject matter. Larry is painting a singular universe populated with fully realized characters dealing with some very grimy issues.”

Read the rest of On the Seamy Side: Larry Pearsall's Avant-Garde Graphic Narrative here

Retroactive Puppy Cuteness Megadose

Sorry for the lack of posts, been too busy battening down the hatches (it's actually raining in LA) and getting rid of art. I'll try and knock out some quick mostly photo posts to catch y'all up on important developments hereabouts. First things first, for those with a Portfolio jones, here are two shots from the cover photo shoot for his forthcoming psychedelic solo LP "Is This Real Life? Why Is This Happening to Me? Is This Gonna Be Forever?" (I also just realized that Portfolio could be seen to be inside the blue cylinder in my recent Mad Gregs post. What does this mean?) plus an array of attractive combinations of Nigel, Chloe, Portfolio, and various soft pieces of furniture. But let's start with Chloe's courageous expedition to the bowels of Baller Hardware, and the strange creatures she encountered there...








Whippet Good!

Have a Hangover

Actually the flu, and also swamped with puppies, fingerprinting, collapsing sheds, economies, and civilizations, and other distractions. Its all documented and coming here soon, but in the meantime here's my most recent LA Weekly column, on the Brewery Project wrap party...

"It’s hard to imagine this late in the game, but only a few years ago, it was possible for an enterprising and ambitious member of the art-world cognoscenti to open these storefront showrooms — known as “galleries” — to which middle-to-upper-class consumers would come and acquire decorative artifacts with their “disposable income.” Since those halcyon days, the art market has pretty much retracted into its shell, leaving only a slimy residue to mark its decade of giddy self-congratulations, and a vacuum of both qualitative (ka-ching!) criteria and exhibition opportunities.


But culture abhors a vacuum, and despite the fact that this may well be the end of The Art World as we know it, it behooves us to consider the legacy of an artist-run project space that sprang up the last time the beaux arts economy tanked. The At the Brewery Project (or AtBP) ran more or less continuously from 1997 to 2007 in the titular Lincoln Heights art colony (formerly the Pabst plant), shepherded by artist/organizer John O’Brien. Technically speaking, that specific decade coincided with the recent boom years, but the roots of AtBP lie in several of O’Brien’s earlier collaborative exhibition series created in direct response to the bottomed-out art economy of the early ’90s.

As much as the art community bemoans these periodic downturns and disparages the “myth” linking creativity and poverty, it’s an undeniable fact that when commercial enterprises and bureaucracies drop out of the picture, artists have to become more inventive and improvisational if they want to share their work with the world. L.A.’s underdocumented history of artist-run spaces didn’t begin in the ’90s, but that period saw an enormous proliferation of such venues, ranging from garages in Echo Park and Pasadena bungalows to commandeered suites of motel rooms and guerrilla shows in abandoned industrial spaces.

AtBP, which mounted more than 50 artist-curated shows in the course of its existence, is in many ways an exemplary model for such grass-roots enterprises, and “At the Brewery Project, 1993-2007: The Finale” — the sprawling, piecemeal self-homage currently occupying most of Pasadena’s Armory Center for the Arts — wisely forgoes an encyclopedic historical overview (although the accompanying catalog and Web site, www.atthebreweryproject.com, provide considerable chronological detail) in favor of a grand extravaganza in the spirit of the original premise."

Read the rest of Last Round: At The Brewery Project: The Finale here.

Pictured above: Rebecca Ripple's me please me (2008)

Too Much Viagra

Purse Launch's orgone seems to be all backed up in this still from the highly good new video for Safe in Sound, everybody's favorite song off the Mad Gregs' debut album Big Nun. Happily the Reichian therapist in the adjacent seat seems to be preparing to help alleviate PL's discomfort, ensuring a harmonic climax of whirlies in the end.

Art Go Boom! Ominous, Ominous.

Goddammit! My book shed has started collapsing. I guess it was only a matter of time. But my God, there's catalogs everywhere! Maybe its a suggestion that I significantly accelerate my de-cluttering agenda. Don't know how much blogging I'll get around to doing in the next few days, but hold tight - I have some wicked cute puppy pictures, a new piece in the Weekly, and a wealth of images and anecdotes from the recent Hi Good shoot - coming soon to this URL.

Dirty Dirty Ho Ho Ho

"The old elf has surfaced often in McCarthy's oeuvre, from the outrageous fecal-smearing bacchanalia of the mid-'90s Tokyo Santa (1996) and Santa Chocolate Shop (1997), to an entire series of recent sculptural works based on a Santa figure holding aloft a tree-like butt plug. This latter series culminated in Chocolate Santa (2007), McCarthy's warped take on entrepreneurship in the form of a fully functioning "Chocolate Santa with Butt Plug" factory, churning out $100 gift boxes at a rate of 1,000 a day in New York's Maccarone Gallery.

"I did the whole thing in two months," recalls McCarthy with disbelief. After refitting the gallery so that it passed the Board of Health, he made the mold, found a chocolatier, set up a company, and found people who "knew how to make this stuff." Then, he says, "I hired an ad agency and put ads in Vanity Fair and other magazines." McCarthy laughs. "It looked like success, but I always thought it would be a company that would fail financially — and it did. There was this thing in Artforum about how much money I was going to make and how I had sold out. They calculated that I was going to sell 30,000." He ended up selling around 1,600. "I have about 12,000 in storage, packed in shredded Artforums."

Around the same time, McCarthy turned his venture-capital attention to an even larger yuletide commercial failure. "Last year I tried to buy a Santa's Village by Lake Arrowhead," he says. The dilapidated village — part of a '50s-era franchise of Santa theme parks in California and Chicago — opened in the mountains just outside LA in 1955, six weeks before nearby Disneyland opened its doors. "I was planning on just treating it as a sculpture," McCarthy says. "I had plans for making films there, then operating parts of it." Although he did sneak in to take photographs, the project was never realized."



Read the rest of Santa's Little Helper (I just realized MP had put it online!) here.

Just got back from a week up near Chico on the Hi Good shoot. More to follow!

Give the Pouple What They Want

Recent polling efforts suggest that people prefer cute puppy pictures to bitter addled art criticism, so in the interests of capitulating to the lowest common denominator, I herewith proffer these two photographs: Above: first shot of Portfolio, flanked by Diesel and Phoebe Couture. Below, Portfolio attempts the Whippet Power salute in mid-gallop. Behind him, L-R are Chloe, harbinger of Death (note the scythe-like ear, and the "go into the light" effect), Diesel and Phoebe Couture. These photos were taken at Dr. Suzy's Whippet Emporium on Nov 4th.

Most Whatever of Whenever

"I have to start this listmaking thing by putting aside a few categories. First, the favorite things I’ve already written about this year for L.A. Weekly – The Center for Land Use Interpretation’s “A Trip to the Dump” bus tour; Martin Kersels’ “Heavyweight Champion” at Santa Monica Museum; Amanda Ross-Ho’s “Half of What I Say Is Meaningless” at Cherry and Martin; China Adams’ “Flights of Fancy” at Steve Turner; Peter Saul’s OCMA retrospective; Kippenberger’s “Problem Perspective” and “Allen Kaprow” at MOCA; “California Video” at the Getty, and so on (at this point I don’t want to look at art, let alone write about it, unless it rocks my world).

There’s also the favorite things I can’t write about – M.A. Peers at Rosamund Felsen Gallery because I’m hitched to the artist; the Third Annual LA Weekly Biennial “Some Paintings” at Track 16 and “Aspects of Mel’s Hole: Artists Respond to a Paranormal Land Event Occurring in Radiospace” at Grand Central Art Center because I curated them; Scotty Vera’s “Eat This” at Track 16 because I hooked it up; “Untidy: The Worlds of Doug Harvey” at Los Angeles Valley College because I was the subject – just being honest here; one as aesthetically evolved as myself must operate from a place beyond both false modesty and false pride alike, and anyone who says they aren’t more interested in their own work than that of others is either feeble-minded or unfit for their job.

What’s left is a mishmash of shows I’d like to have written about, books and other pop media artifacts, and other remarkable stuff that fell through the cracks.


Jeffrey Vallance’s awe-inspiring Track 16 installation honoring the 30th anniversary of the interment of grocery store–bought Blinky the Friendly Hen at the Los Angeles Pet Cemetery. The “life-size” Blinky Chapel contained dozens of artifacts from a replica fryer lying in state to elaborate reliquaries featuring bone fragments from the 1988 exhumation and forensic analysis of Blinky’s remains. Even a bad joke becomes transcendent if you keep telling it long enough, and Blinky was no bad joke. Snag the limited-edition catalog reprint, bumper sticker and Frisbee — a sound investment in these spiritually shaky times."

Read the rest of Mixed Media 2008 (except for that second paragraph) here.

Pictured: David McDonald's UN 2008; Scottie Vera's Autobody Experience 2007; Jeffrey Vallance's Blinky Trifecta 2008

Shawsaulbrown Sausage

"Curating isn’t always as easy as it looks. It’s rare to find a group of concurrent solo projects that genuinely complement one another — just because two artists happen to use images of trees or refer to cartography or have Photoshop doesn’t necessarily mean their work will have anything more than a superficial verbal resemblance. Museums regularly stumble over this sort of literalism in spite of their long-term scheduling and art-historical resources, and commercial gallerists — with their relatively fast turnover and propensity for attention-grabbing sound bites — are particularly prone.


Which is why, when a triple whammy like the current lineup at Patrick Painter crops up, it’s worth looking a little deeper. On the surface, Jim Shaw, Peter Saul and Glenn Brown seem like an almost arbitrary selection from the gallery’s stable — artists from three distinct generations, two of whom work at opposite ends of the U.S., while the third hails from another continent altogether. L.A.-based Shaw works promiscuously across the media spectrum, from highly rendered figuration to abstract video, while recently ensconced Manhattanite Saul is strictly a painter’s painter. Londoner Brown is also an old-school painter as far as materials go, but his near-obsessive appropriationism (which landed him in legal hot water with one of the science-fiction illustrators from whom he cribbed) lies at the opposite pole from Saul’s seething pop expressionism.


Maybe appropriation is the key? “That’s not really a factor with Peter,” says Shaw, whose own works are frequently chock-a-block with obscure pop-culture references, “and I’m not exactly an appropriator in the way that Jeff Koons or Glenn are. I do occasionally utilize something that somebody else did. But not in a direct way where the appropriation is important to it. For example, I’m thinking of taking pictures of children similar to the ones in these Christian calendars — often I’ll set up a photograph that looks similar to the preexisting things that inspire me, which is a somewhat different action from Glenn.”

Read the rest of Agree to Dis here.

Images: Untitled Scribble (Magician); Wooden Heart; Real Estate Agent Going Crazy - all works 2008

See the shows at Patrick Painter through Jan 10.

A Sudden Flurry of Whippets

Apart from disassembling my show and keeping up with writing chores and waterproofing my outdoor stashes of raw Flash Fudd materials, things have been extra hectic due to the recent addition of two 12-week-old whippet puppies to our household. The whole litter turned out to be fluish and unable to keep food down, so we had to spend Monday night at Dr Suzy's nursing them back to health. Pictured are Portfolio's star turn at the All-whippet Mini-Westminster; Chloe with a biscuit (or piece of a tree or something); Nigel and Portfolio in a tableau of now-unlikely intimacy; Chloe - and then Portfolio and Chloe - this afternoon checking out the Mayberry schoolyard. Chloe's a chick with one disqualifying blue eye, Portfolio's a dude who likes to wear Chloe's pink sweater, and we support him in his lifestyle decision.

A New Spin on an Old Chestnut

I had to buy a memory card reader to finally get my video of Nic Waterman's l'il gig at the Echo Curio off my Canon Powershot, onto the computer, and finally up on youtube. But given the seasonal nature of this song -- his creepy detournee of 'My Favorite Things' performed in October at Echo Curio (partly in response to seeing 'St. Sebastian Doubting Thomas Singing Nun' - my own creepy detournee of 'My Favorite Things' included in my retrospective at LAVC- video TK), it had to be done.

Outsider Holiday Music Again

I had a request elsewhere to re-upload these compilations of unusual seasonal recodings (songpoems, celebrities, novelty, developmentally different, amateur, etc) so I thought I'd offer them here as well.

"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

As my invitation to the LA WEEKLY 30th anniversary festivities on Saturday night seems to have been lost in the mail, I wound up attending the much more exclusive Dr. Suzy All-Whippet Mini-Westminster in Agoura Hills (pictures to follow) with MA & Nige. Stopping by Echo Park on the way home, we ran across the above (from across the lake) and below (creeping up on them) depicted cluster of ragged Cacophonic Santas, the dregs of what I understand to have been a jolly debauch. Ah, 90's nostalgia. One angry, pink mohawked S'antirchrist took offense to me taking their picture, demanding "Who are you with?!" "It's OK," I said. "I'm with Nigel."

Dogs & Boy by Train to SF

I think this was in Merced.

Weird Hours and Moldy Slides

My solo retrospective, Untidy: The Worlds of Doug Harvey, closes next Wednesday, Nov 26th, just in time for Thanksgiving! However, many who have sought to amplify their imminent feelings of gratitude with an actual physical encounter with my parallel oeuvres have been frustrated by their assumption that the LAVC gallery operates on a typical gallery schedule. It does not. For starters it is NOT open Saturdays. Or Fridays. And Monday through Thursday they have the unusual schedule of being open between 11 AM and 2 PM, then closing until 6 PM, then reopening until 9 PM. So that's Monday - Thursday 11-2 & 6 - 9.


In related news, we've finally managed to book the LAVC art history lecture room for a screening of moldy slides, examples of which are included above and below. I've been showing a selection of these around for a few years, but I recently began working on Rhizomatic Transmission - a completely new show, which was debuted at the Museum of Jurassic Technology with a live soundtrack by Mannlicher Carcano. I recorded the improvised soundtrack and borrowed the MJT's remarkable Bell & Howell Tandem-Matic slide projector, and now that we have the room booked we're good to go!

The slides were recovered about 5 years ago from a dumpster-bound pile outside the house of our local crazy hoarder dude who had apparently suffered an intervention of some sort, as bin after bin of moldering bric-a-brac kept finding its way to the curb over a period of months. I was able to resist the broken lamps and deflated soccer balls, but when several cardboard boxes filled with 35mm vacation slides (apparently originally acquired somewhere else - crazy hoarder dude wasn't actually in any of the pictures) I ceased to resist.

After discovering the remarkable visual properties of the disintegrating emulsion, I sorted the plain from the fungal, then washed and dried about 1000 mold-altered images, and began organizing them by relative fabulousness and pictorial intelligibility (notice the car in the lower right corner of the top image? My favorite.) The result was very satisfying - a stochastically linked collaboration between the original vacation photographer, crazy hoarder dude, the mold, and me - plus the found and improvised soundtrack elements.


Rhizomatic Transmission will be projected on Tuesday November 25th at 8 PM in Room 103 of the Art Building at Los Angeles Valley College, located near the corner of Fulton Ave and Oxnard Rd, at the NW corner of the LAVC campus. The gallery will be open between 6 and 9.

Heavy Rotations

"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.

Day Breaks

"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.

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.

Oddly enough, this interpretive shift was triggered by a reduction in the compositional complexity of the Pulse project, from the information superhighway boogie-woogie of the original 2004-2005 paintings to the striated freeze-frames of the recent Flesh and Between/Beyond series. The effect is similar to the cinematic special effect known as “Bullet Time” where a flurry of action is suddenly slowed down drastically, or frozen entirely, but the viewer’s perspective – as mediated by the camera of course – continues to move through the virtual pictorial space, allowing for careful detailed examination of events and processes that were previously only a heady blur.

Of course the key phrase there would be “as mediated by the camera,” which puts the finger on the point where these technologies of visualization diverge: at the exact juncture where the creative participation of the viewer becomes a possibility. For whatever special effects are being offered up by a painting – optical, pictorial, spatial, kinaesthetic, spiritual, what have you – depends enormously of the volition of the viewer to establish and maintain contact between the artifact in question and their own perceptual systems.


Much of Linda Day’s work is directed toward the activation of this co-creative feedback loop, and her aesthetic decisions can be traced in part to the gradual tweaking of the parameters of this relationship. The shift from the streaming grid of the first Pulse series (via passage through the architectonic Chime and Corona series) involved the disappearance of the hovering, interwoven vertical rectangular tab shapes which – while articulating the complex and ambiguous spatial characteristics of the horizontally striped “ground” – also suggested a horizontal (though not necessarily left-to-right) reading.

Although this quasi-informational signal pattern added a further layer of dimensional complexity to the already intricate and subtle effects created by the bands of luminous saturated color along which it was arrayed, it also triggered the narrative centers of the viewer’s mind as well. Hardwired (and continually conditioned) as we are to surrender ourselves to the most linear and teleological of entertainments, the prodding awake of our brain’s storytelling subroutine often has the effect of derailing less privileged and more contemplation-dependent modes of perception, persuading us that we have had a physical experience that we have not."

Read the rest of Kicking Away the Crutches in Bullet Time: Day’s Long Journey into Now in the catalog (and on the poster) available in conjunction with Day's solo exhibition at Jancar Gallery opening tonight, Sat Nov 8, 6-9 PM in Chinatown.

Pate 'n' Place

I've been doing more studio visits than I used to - sometimes for writing I want to do, and sometimes for the hell of it. A couple of months ago I visited Chris Pate's studio for the first time. Chris, whose work I included in Some Paintings, is one of the most underrated contemporary painters in LA.


Chris' subtly modulated 70's design-referencing abstractions have recently started incorporating more and more pictographic information ranging from his appropriated tourist souvenir scarves and vintage roadmaps to quotations from recent art history for example John Baldessari. Flyover -- Pate's current show at Chinatown-adjacent Jail Gallery -- includes Los Angeles pictured here, but the red Texas number above (my picture from the studio visit) didn't make the cut (Note: Chris has subsequently informed me that the Texas piece was in"State Line," his two-person show last year at Jail with Bill Kleiman.) Chris Pate's fusion of cartographic content and formalism grounds the transcendentalism of modernist abstraction in a net of local and historical specificities. But speaking of time and space, Saturday Nov 8th is the last day to see the show, so git on down.


"All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up."

What's This Mess?!

Since the shredded but resuscitated Joe's Temper #26 seems to be the most popular piece in Untidy: The Worlds of Doug Harvey I figured my first actual post (!) concerning the show should be about it, and the Joe's Temper phenomenon in general. The Joe’s Temper series is based on a 1939 comic-strip style advertisement for Soft-Weve Waldorf brand toilet paper found in a romance magazine. This saga of spousal abuse and dysfunctional relationship healed through brand preference was first the basis of a series of improvised vocal compositions by the text-sound group Rainbow Chug Bandits, which eventually evolved into Mannlicher Carcano. Discrepancies between the textual content of the original and some of the language-based works are attributable to the fact that the earliest derivations were based on an off-register memory of the narrative and dialogue, which I had wandered around muttering to myself during the autumn of my first marriage.


A large number of JT works followed, including collages, prints, performances (including a collaborative chamber music piece with the group Gnu Music), a mail art campaign, the curation of a JT themed group show, and numerous paintings, including Joe’s Temper #26 and the modular, infinitely self-replenishing installation painting Joe’s Temper #31.

But what does it MEAN?

I had one of those incredibly elaborate cinematic dreams last night, some sort of Asian revenge/action movie with this really complex structure. It started with me as this aging musician helping this blind sculptor finish this big public artwork he had left unfinished years before, and there was a younger artist (who had his own story, pretty involved, that I don't remember) who didn't understand the background, so there's this flashback to when the sculptor wasn't blind, and he and I are attending some cultural conference at an enormous 70s style convention center, which is virtually empty but also seems to double as a poorly guarded armory for the military. The not-blind sculptor had to interrupt his work on the big unfinished sculpture to attend, and was already in a bad mood, but the bureaucratic niggling pushes him over the edge and he starts killing off the conference attendees. At first he does it surreptitiously, leaving a little monogram in blood - it's like an E or W - then he finds a cache of weapons and starts picking us off with a high-power rifle. I manage to avoid him and sneak up just as he's setting up some kind of futuristic laser weapon. I knock it over and the laser cuts across his eyes, blinding him. By then there are all these cops and military around, but in the chaos I manage to sneak him out. The funny thing is that I woke up at this point and my brain sort of compelled itself to shut down again so it could finish the story, circling back to the opening scene, the finished sculpture, and me playing the haunting theme music on some pan pipes made out of animal horns.

That's Zatoichi, the blind swordsman, pictured above.

One Kippenberger with everything, for here

It's been a pretty hectic week what with the amazing Mel's Hole panel discussion, taking Nigel to the chiropractor and happening upon the nextdoor offices of the speech therapist who arranged for us to get him in the first place, trying to see Martin Kersels' show at ACME on Tuesday, booking Mannlicher Carcano's Gala 20th Anniversary West Coast Mini-Tour 2008, and assembling and installing my solo retrospective Untidy: The Worlds of Doug Harvey. More on that shortly, but now this:

"A sleazy trickster version of German multidisciplinary “social sculptor” Joseph Beuys, Martin Kippenberger seems to have been always on, treating all areas of his life as opportunities for creative disturbance — including everything from barroom brawls to, well, graphic design. When painters are annoyed by the deliberately confrontational awkwardness of Kippenberger’s oil paintings, I point out the formal elegance and spontaneity of his design — a formal elegance that underlies all of his work, no matter how superficially repugnant.

This is probably due to graphic design’s relative lack of academic baggage and vastly lower threshold for visual osmosis when compared to the Fine Arts of painting, drawing, sculpture and printmaking — to whose conventions Kippenberger regularly administered vigorous corrective debasement. Recent papal bulls concerning Fred the Frog notwithstanding (in early September, Pope Benedict reportedly condemned Kippenberger’s 1990 statue Feet First, which depicts the artist’s totem amphibian crucified but clinging to his mug of beer, and which is currently on display in the Italian city of Bolzano), it seems unlikely that any young folk are going to see anything more outrageous in the artist’s provocations than a catalog of the dominant experimental strategies of the last decade.


It may be less a question of influence than of prescience — Kippenberger’s relentless skepticism, globetrotting career, impatient and idiosyncratic social/political engagement, and refusal to disavow poetics and beauty (however stripped down or wonky) were all a few years ahead of the curve, but his reputation as a boozy, ridiculously macho troublemaker made him a difficult role model in the go-go ’90s. Many stylistic facets of his all-encompassing Euro-slackerism have since found their way piecemeal into the mainstream of contemporary art in the hands of more compartmentalized (and socially presentable) practitioners. But encountered as a totality, the singular stylistic innovations of his work become secondary to their unifying underlying identity as outbursts of creative insurgency — an example much harder to follow than, say, making funky furniture out of weird shit and calling it art."


Top to bottom: 1995 Track 16 Gallery Exhibition Silkscreen Print; 1990's Feet First (not in MOCA show);1987's 1st Prize painting.

Read the rest of Enter the K-Hole here.

The Update

Here

"The Hole Truth and Nothing But"

Aspects of Mel's Hole Panel Discussion

Curator Doug Harvey leads an informal discussion (and catalog signing) with artists and writers Jeffrey Vallance (whose Melwork is pictured above), Christian Cummings, Brian Tucker, Victoria Reynolds, and Judy Spence on the strangely inspiring bottomless hole in rural Washington that is the subject of the current exhibit at GCAC. Free and open to all

Saturday, October 4, 2008
7:30pm - 8:30pm
Grand Central Art Center Theater
125 N. Broadway
Santa Ana, CA
92701

Let Your Kato Light Shine

I remembered that Bridget Marrin had acquired this shaved-funfur portrait of Kato Kaelin from the Skipping Formalities collection, so I got her to dig it out for my upcoming retrospective Untidy. Unfortunately the side bars of the stretcher had busted off so it's currently hanging curtain-stylee over our side window, with the sun shining through. And this is what it looks like.

Compulsory Figure Drawings

I had this idea that the gap between the openings of Mel's Hole and my solo retrospective would be like the eye of a hurricane, strangely calm. Wrong again! Just went and laid out most of Untidy today with Diana Zlotnick and Dennis Reed, and finished a review of the Kippenberger show at MOCA. Now this:

"As the philosopher Jack Handy once advised, “If you ever discover that what you’re seeing is a play within a play, just slow down, take a deep breath and hold on for the ride of your life.” Amanda Ross-Ho’s combination of conceptual depth and virtuosic formal instincts — albeit using deliberately trashy post-slacker materials, and with the referential reverb turned up to 11 — has fueled a meteoric art-world ascent that has kept her in the state she luckily seems to find most productive: breathlessness.

This may be attributed, at least in part, to the figure skating. Born in Chicago to a Chinese-American painter dad and Italian-American photographer mom (now a conservation ecologist), Ross-Ho was a disciplined “ice ballet” competitor from age 5 to 17 — rising daily at 5 a.m. to explore the boundary between formal mathematical precision and physical self-expression, compulsory figures and free skating.

“I think that’s where the idea of a practice literally developed in my brain, because it was six-days-a-week training, before and after school. And it’s not as goal-oriented as it seems. We skated in shows and in competitions, but really it was about working every day at this thing. And I think that really sunk into my brain.”

Read the rest of Free Skating: Amanda Ross-Ho's Fourth-Dimensional Axel Jump here. Above: the artist's studio. Below: the artist in her studio.

Mel's Blowhole?

The Inter-Tribal Medicine Man Red Elk was on Coast to Coast with George Noory last night speaking about, among other things, Mel's Hole! I fell asleep before they got to that part of the show, and although I recorded it, I had to erase it to make more room on my dictaphone as I was getting the story of Paul McCarthy's failed attempt to purchase Santa's Village.

The Coast to Coast website offers this summation of the pertinent segment: "He spoke of his visit to Mel's Hole across the Yakima River, many years ago. Taken there by his father, he described the hole as around 9 ft. around and somewhere between 24–28 miles deep. It's a blowhole for Mount Rainier, he added."

I did manage to catch something about Mount Rainier blowing up, which seems to be part of Red Elk's prophecy: "NO YEAR WAS GIVEN: Mount Rainier blows - fall time frame. Just under 1/4 of top shoots straight up - flips over - slams back into the crater, plugging it. This causes compressed air to blow holes in Kitticas County etc., well over 100 miles away. Holes from only an inch to over six feet. This occurs just prior to or early in Elk (gun hunting season) season."

Anyone with more info or a subscription to the podcasts, please feel free to expand on this is the comments section.

Pictured above: Kenneth Arnold, responsible for the first widely reported UFO sighting in the United States near Mount Rainier, WA on June 24, 1947. Below: The View from the Monorail, Santa's Village, Skyforest CA (detail).

Browbeaten: High, Low, Uni, No

"Even among art that aims to be free of traditional categories and definitions, there is an ever-present danger of calcification and rampant commercialization," warns a recent dispatch from Atwater Village gallery Black Maria promoting its upcoming "No Brow" exhibit. "These dangers threaten to turn even the most unorthodox of movements into an exercise in mainstream banality. The very success of the Lowbrow movement may curb those features that once distinguished it from 'Highbrow' art, with its rules and value judgments." I've actually been hearing this line of critique for a few years now — particularly since 2006 with the sudden departure of longtime Juxtapoz editor Jamie O'Shea and equally untimely demise of the Lowbrow journal of record's publisher Fausto Vitello.


Juxtapoz, which claims to be the most widely read art magazine in the world, was completely synonymous with "Lowbrow" for a time. But the once-hermetic underground comics/hot-rod/tattoo/graffiti scene has exploded more than anyone could have imagined, with a bigger tent that includes digital artists, sneaker designers, collector's-doll manufacturers and several generations of commercial illustrators — and an increasing number of gifted young artists from the Highbrow art world. Many of the past decade's art-world stars were exploring the same mass-media-savvy sex-'n'-surrealism-tinged figuration that is Lowbrow's bread and butter — and I'm talking everything from John Currin's oily Russ Meyerisms to Matthew Barney's self-lubricating architectural symbol orgies. With borders dissolving all around it, and lucrative cross-marketing with such Hot Topic–promoted lifestyle brands as "Goth," "Skateboard," "Punk Rock" and "Outsider Art," the Lowbrow movement may have expanded beyond any identity distinguishable from the hipness-saturated mainstream. It's just so hard to get a handle on the big picture."


Read the rest of Juxtapalooza: The Lowbrow sickness continues to spread, from Burbank to Laguna here, and be sure to click the "Show Comments" button at the bottom of the page to check out the lengthy comments on the whole Stu Mead/Hyaena Gallery controversy.


Top to bottom: Robert William's In the Land of Retinal Delights; Geoff McFetridge's Oneify campaign for Pepsi; Disneyland Enchanted Tiki Room poster; Stu Mead's At the Factory

The Opening of the Hole

Thanks to everyone who made it out to the Aspects of Mel's Hole opening. I'll be posting some photos of the show later, but in the meantime James Rojsirivat of the OC artblog has posted a sampling, also viewable on his flickr page. Those who didn't make it may have heard that the Rev. Acres, having been run off that ol' Amarillo Highway by the ghost of Dave Hickey, exhausted himself into the emergency room piecing together his shattered Satan's-butthole coin funnel donation receptacle for wombat restoration (sketch above; James' photo below) and could not deliver his Sermon on the Hole. Rest assured that every effort is being made to arrange for an audition of this most important thought-styling, possibly at the end of the Aspects of Mel's Hole exhibition run in October. Check here for updates.

More Dogstars at the Museum

Thanks to young sleuth/art terrorist Daniel Hawkins for pointing out another celebrity/M.A. Peers-space-dog-painting conflation, in the recent BBC interview with everyone's favourite German -- oops! Bavarian! cinematic auteur Werner Herzog. In this case the muttnik in question is Ugolyok, the last of the canine cosmonauts, who set the record of 22 days in orbit in 1966. As a bonus, Werner takes a spin through the Athanasius Kircher exhibit, where the camera catches a glimpse of our late greyhounds Albert and Reyna as hunting dogs accompanying your humble narrator in a stereoscopic optical tableaux depicting the conversion of St. Eustace, first century C.E. Roman general who saw a miraculous vision of the crucified Christ between the antlers of a stag.

Are You Washed in the Blood of the Hole?

...or is that just grape Kool-Aid? Tonight, as part of the opening celebrations for the Aspects of Mel's Hole exhibit at the GCAC in Santa Ana, Rev. Ethan Acres, direct from his retreat in Alabama, will give his first LA-area performance in 4 years, The Sermon on the Hole. If you've never caught the Rev's powerful and funny discourses, make the effort. Above, the Rev performing his sermon Tinky Winky at Le Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France in April 2003.

Once you've absorbed your moral medicine, you are free to partake of the roots country stylings of local hootenanny terrors Triple Chicken Foot

...not to mention the amazingly designed installation (courtesy GCAC's Andrea Harris and Dennis Cubbage) of works by 40 international artists, including a new cinematic tableaux by Marnie Weber, a stained-glass sculpture by the Rev, a site-specific installation by Jeffrey Vallance, and new works by Elliott Hundley, Nate Lowman, Georganne Deen, Steve Roden, Craig Stecyk, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Brenna Youngblood, and more!

Cromatic Mess Syndrome

The latest addition to my lengthy "St. Sebastian" series recently made the trip to Burning Man as part of the Sarah Cromarty-curated It's a Celebration %?(#&$! . The mixed media sculpture is entitled St. Sebastian Ann Coulter Daniel Radcliffe Mandelbrot Set and is accompanied by the following didactic panel:


When this oedipal directive is followed, the viewer activates the embedded torso of a talking Ann Coulter doll which says things like "Even Islamic terrorists don't hate America like Liberals do - they don't have the energy. If they had that much energy they'd have indoor plumbing by now."



The piece is on display at Circus Gallery alongside the rest of the Burning Man veterans in conjunction with Sarah's latest solo exhibit, opening tonight, Friday Sept 5 from 7 - 9. Sarah, one of the GLALAWBs (Gorgeous Lady Alumnus of LA Weekly Biennials), just keeps getting better - I visited her studio a couple of weeks ago and took a few snapshots of the new work.


The funniest thing about Sarah's oeuvre is that she is openly indebted to Peter Doig (to whom the above piece is a direct homage) and Daniel Richter, both considerably overrated painters as far as I'm concerned -- and neither as interesting as Sarah. 

A more compelling referent is Paul Thek, whose seminal Death of a Hippie installation is the subject of another of Cromarty's homages - an update/self-portrait entitled Death of a Raver which will be installed in a closet and lit with 200 glow sticks.

Some Validation at Last!

Thanks to Lex at Coast to Coast AM, who has posted a feature story on the Aspects of Mel's Hole exhibit on their official website. It is indeed an honor to receive this recognition from the Ground Zero (or Ground One, I guess - the Hole itself would have to be Ground Zero - but it ain't acknowledgin nothin) of the Mel's Hole phenomenon.

Conceiving the Void

Apparently Swiss physicists are planning the end of the world in conjunction with the Aspects of Mel's Hole exhibit! Participating artist Avigail Moss sent us a link to this NYTimes story about the impending (9/10) startup of the Large Hadron Collider at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or Cern, outside Geneva, with the potential for generating a black hole that will devour the Earth! Kudos to author Dennis Overbye for opening with a quote from one of my favorite post-apocalyptic novels, Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins.

Above: Title card from Gordon McKimson's 1955 Looney Tunes anomoly The Hole Idea in which well-intentioned inventor Calvin Q. Calculus nearly immanentizes the Eschaton via his invention of the portable hole.

If you have trouble logging on to their site, see comments for NYTimes text.

Imminent Laffoley Sighting

In a late-breaking development it has been revealed unto me that visionary artist Paul Laffoley will be in attendance for the opening of the Aspects of Mel's Hole exhibit this Saturday night. If you are unfamiliar with his work, avail yourself thereof at his extensive website, where you can purchase a poster of his classic alien contact artifact Thanaton III, pictured below. Above: Mel's Hole, 2008, 51.5" x 51.5", oil and acrylic paint, india ink, vinyl letters, sand, surface constructions, magic mirror effect (built into the canvas) on linen.

From the Aspects of Mel's Hole catalog:
Visionary artist and architect Paul Laffoley was born into an Irish Catholic family in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1940. He spoke his first word, "Constantinople," at six months, then remained silent until the age of four (having been diagnosed as slightly autistic), when he began to draw and paint. In 1968 he moved into an 18 X 30-foot utility room to found a one-man "think tank" and creative unit called the Boston Visionary Cell where he continues to work on multimedia renderings of his visions of alternative futures and complex realities. Laffoley has an alien nanotechnological laboratory implant in the occipital lobe of his brain, near the pineal gland, and a prosthetic lion foot.

Compost-Modernism

"Titled A Trip to the Dump, this was perhaps the shortest excursion ever organized by CLUI – 20 miles east on the freeway to Puente Hills in Whittier, site of the largest active landfill in America. Passengers who had braced themselves for an olfactory-challenging immersion were not disappointed by a brief side visit to the Central L.A. Recycling and Transfer Facility — a somewhat decrepit way station just southeast of downtown, where a constant almond-scented misting did little to inhibit the reek of garbage as it was dumped and plowed and dumped again.

Puente Hills itself is another story. "People say, 'Solid waste management is a dirty business,'" proclaims the County Sanitation District Disposal Site's glossy brochure. "We say, 'Rubbish!'" Carefully designed to be invisible and unsmellable to the neighboring communities, Puente Hills carefully choreographs the constant stream of trucks to sort your asphalt from your appliances, then crushes each day's worth of bona fide trash (13,200 tons to be precise) into football-field-sized "cells" using the 120,000-pound steel-wheeled Bomag compactor. Seven regulatory agencies engage in elaborate monitoring for radiation, ground water safety and habitat protection. The facility uses methane gas leached from the fermenting trash to fuel its fleet of vehicles, and processes recovered wastewater for dust control and maintaining the landfill's indigenous flora camouflage and oak tree nursery. Though we saw numerous breathtaking industrial vistas, we garbage-tourists probably saw more actual trash at the downtown Transfer Facility than in Puente Hills' 400 acres. Until we got inside the Materials Recovery Facility (MRF).

Immaculate and efficient as it is, the landfill will be chock-full by 2013, which is when the trash train to Mesquite kicks in. Central to this vision of the future of solid-waste management is the MRF (pronounced "Murph"), a hangar-sized building where small mountains of refuse are gradually broken down into smaller mountains of desert-bound landfill and recyclable materials. The mixed recyclables are loaded onto conveyor belts to be picked over and sorted by mostly female, nonunion, minimum-wage laborers. This was the hypnotic money shot of CLUI's Trip to the Dump: the layered, ethically queasy view from the elevated spectator's gallery as thousands of white plastic bags or brown cardboard boxes were continuously plucked from their industrial routing mechanism, cascading to the floor into improbably gorgeous sculptural forms. I kept half-expecting Matthew Barney to pop out and do a tap routine; the DIA Foundation definitely needs to get in on this action. If Earthworks has a future, this is it."

Read the rest of 'Wading in The Waste Stream with The Center for Land Use Interpretation' here.

Above, my photo of the mound of white plastic at Puente Hills' Materials Recovery Facility. I also just uploaded my first youtube video of the same pile. Did you know that the hole's only natural enemy is the pile?

Olfactory Olympics

I was recently fortunate enough to attend the Inaugural Fun Nose Work Competition held at spcaLA in Long Beach. Fun Nose Work is "the next urban sport for dogs" and builds on the same techniques used to train bomb and narcotic sniffing canines, using progressively more complex searches for Q-tips scented with birch or anise oil (at least so far). It's amazing to observe another consciousness negotiating an entire sensory realm about which our species has only the faintest inkling. Above, Dieter (AKA Spike) nails the vehicle search.

This is a brand new recreational dog activity that has sprung up in the LA area under the auspices of Fun Nose Work, founded by former K9 police dog trainer Ron Gaunt, spcaLA Director of Behavior and Training Jill Marie O'Brien, and and independent trainer Amy Herot. Above, Ron marvels at Nigel's near-record of 13 seconds in the box search.


All was not fun and games though, as a ravenous chupacabra slunk along the facility perimeter as dusk fell. There were no incidents, however. Nigel finished on the 1st place team and Dieter was on the 2nd. The complete results and more pictures are available on the Fun Nose Work website.

Hole on the Horizon

Here's a more legible version of the poster/bookjacket for the Mel's Hole show, with information on the opening and the location of GCAC. Just click on the image to see a larger version.The artists-in-residence Cathy Ward and Eric Wright, have arrived and started accumulating material for their Hole work.


Cathy Ward & Eric Wright "Nevada 1846" 2005 oil on canvas.

888 Fireworks 888

Fireworks performed another impressively extemporaneous set this last Friday at High Energy Constructs, ably supported by The Bushes, Falcon Eddy, and Wounded Lion. A digital recording was made, but the device was set for the lowest-quality "dictation" mode, and the results are reminiscent of a poor-quality cassette bootleg from the 70s. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing - Wounded Lion comes through particularly well. We'll look into sharing the roughest version of "Carol Cloud" ever. In the meantime, here's Firework's radical new arrangement of their classic "Grammar School Teacher" made even more abstract by the unplanned lo-tech processing.

Not in Ellensburg Anymore

Here's the first glimpse of the catalog for my upcoming curatorial extravaganza 'Aspects of Mel's Hole: Artists Respond to a Paranormal Land Event Occurring in Radiospace' opening Sept 6th at the Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana. It's an elaborate folding dustjacket for the hardcover tome, and doubles as the poster for the show. It was designed by Wendy Peng.

Those needing a refresher as regards the Big Story should listen to this.

Review Catchup 2: Peter Saul Not at MOCA or MOMA

"Saul’s penchant for the blasphemous, sexually explicit, ultraviolent needling of authority figures pretty much accounts for why this is only his third solo survey show in America. Over the past couple of decades, he has vented a good portion of his spleen on art-world icons: a self-portrait taking a shit in Duchamp’s iconic urinal, innumerable piss-takes on 19th-century history paintings, and — most ill-advisedly — a series of uncommissioned portraits of prominent art critics. These began with Minimalism cheerleader Barbara Rose in 1963 and culminated with the transgendered, self-penetrating (with a paintbrush!) Clemunteena Gweenburg (1971) — though the artist continues to poke occasional cruel fun at this most misunderstood, embattled and unappreciated segment of the art world (Oh! Do me! Do me!).


No examples from this particular series of broadsides made it into the current retrospective at the Fashion Island–adjacent OC Museum of Art, though there are always plenty of digs at art stars like De Kooning and Picasso — Saul even takes on Francis Bacon and Duchamp in a single painting. Ironically, it was these kinds of satirical half-homages that initiated Saul’s rehabilitation in the mid-’80s, and they are the works for which he remains best known.


Which is the single most melon-twisting aspect of this act of institutional redemption, since Saul has always been, for me, one of the two or three best painters of the original group of artists labeled Pop in the very early 1960s, when his work (with its jumble of consumer goods rendered in exquisite but skeptical recovered naiveté) looked like a mash-up of De Kooning, Dubuffet and Richard Hamilton. While Warhol was arguably more economical in charting the trajectory of painting’s eventual (if not ultimate) disappearance up its own arsehole, in the end he was better at drawing lines than he was painting. Lichtenstein and Rosenquist? Fuggedaboudit. Good painters with great shticks ... and timing. Saul’s painterly peers in the early Pop era were crackpot Europeans like Öyvind Fahlström, Sigmar Polke (pronounced pokey) and Gerhard Richter (pronounced Gumby), and L.A. transplants Hockney and Kitaj. All of whom went on to blue-chip currency. Except for Fahlström, who shared Saul’s inability to refrain from direct commentary on America’s habit of global imperialism. Mere coincidence? Perhaps ..."

Read the rest of 'Th-th-that's Saul, Folks!: Peter Saul's Painterly Cartoon Armageddon' here and see the show at OCMA through Sept 21



Peter Saul (descending a blogspace): "Bush at Abu Ghraib" (2006); "Art Critics' Suicide" (1996) [not included in exhibit]; "Vietnam" (1966); "Icebox Number 7" (1963)

Review Catchup 1: Rauschenberg Not at the Huntington

Above: Leroy Grannis, Hermosa Beach Strand (1967)

"I’ve been thinking a lot about Rauschenberg lately. But I’ve always thought a lot about Rauschenberg. For my money (I wish!), he was and remains the unsurpassed master of visual language in the modern era; his seemingly effortless improvisational command of semiotics was exceeded only by the richness, intricacy and originality of his formalist skills. Treating information as material, he translated Dadaist collage into the idiom of painting; painting into sculpture; then flattened the whole menagerie into a dense and simultaneous info-pancake of silk-screened magazine clippings that stripped pictorialism and narrative linearity down to their bare wires.

If that weren’t enough, he was a dyslexic homosexual drunkard —all top-shelf people in my chest of drawers. Rauschenberg was Ernie to Jasper Johns’ Bert — expansive, self-indulgent, mischievous and visionary. And while Johns’ academy-friendly visual vocabulary is more finely tuned, Rauschenberg was in a state of continuous eruption, spewing forth a torrent of picto-glossolalia that offered a new way to look at the world. Looking at the world was, in fact, Rauschenberg’s specialty. The first artworks he sold to a public collection were a pair of photographs Edward Steichen bought for MOMA in 1952 — years before Rauschenberg’s paintings were taken seriously. He always took brilliant photographs, and his own self-appropriated snapshots came to dominate his image morgue.

Rauschenberg’s photography was central to his practice though not particularly lauded within the field. Nevertheless, lately, it’s seemed to me that his pop-alchemical formalist legacy is more evident in the work of contemporary documentary photographers than among painters (or performance artists, for that matter — printmakers and designers more so). Maybe it’s just my personal fixation on Rauschenberg’s epiphany, but he seems to me to be the absent hub at the center of the Huntington’s This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in Los Angeles Photographs — a surprising outburst of world-class curatorial practice from an institution whose arcane tweediness has always been one of its main attractions."

Read the rest of 'Polterzeitgeist: Bob Rauschenberg Haunts The Huntington' here.

Meet the Beatless

Guess I'll be pounding the skins or something. Only drummer left in the city who won't be at the tarpits. More posts shortly.

Waterloo/Sunset's Fine (Art)

As promised, I have dug out the backup camera to document the most interesting painting I've seen in a while, certainly the best street art I've seen in ages. And, as you can see from this supplementary photo, it's got wheels, for the au go-go lifestyle of the new homeless middle class! And you can't beat the price. Now that I've made it famous, it can be collected from the corner of Waterloo and Sunset, where the Higher Path burned down.

The Final Belch Ignited

Today is the last day for The Black Dragon Society, the gallery that jump-started LA's Chinatown art scene 10 years ago. Founding artists Roger Herman and Hubert Schmalix (with "silent partner" Chris Sievernich - producer of Wim Wenders' 'Paris, Texas' and John Houston's 'The Dead') oversaw BDS' transformation from a funky and intermittently open DIY party space to a jet-set hub in the international artworld youthquake of the 00s, enabled by gallery director Parker Jones (who is opening his own eponymous space with a reshuffled BDS stable). For some reason, Roger invited me to put something in the show, so I included the above Pre-Rotted ® "painting" entitled 'Hanky Code.' The wake is scheduled for the gallery's normal 11 - 6 but I'd be surprised if it didn't run a little overtime.

Believe Me Baloney

I don't think I've ever watched an entire episode of the X-Files, but Gillian Anderson was great in 'The Last King of Scotland' and you gotta love Duchovny as the tranny FBI agent in 'Twin Peaks' and as the serial killer hipster fetishist who learns his lesson but good in 'Kalifornia.' Rounding out this admirable CV, the pair recently posed together in front of the missus' portrait of Soviet muttnik Strelka while offering their pithy insights into the mysteries of the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Truly these are the End Times.

Blocked by Blogger's Spam Protection Robots No More!

Whew! Merely quoting the spam below triggered the overzealous spambots of my host organism, preventing me from posting. Apparently they have some kind of prejudice against "irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text." Also, my digital camera stopped working just as I was about to photograph an amazing spray-painted ottoman on Sunset Blvd. In lieu of that (I'll try and get an image of it over the weekend) here is my entry in the National Portrait Gallery's Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition: It is entitled Erik Knutzen: Thought Stylist.

I had to see how this looked...

And share this urgent message from the FBI Foreign Remittance Telegraphic Dept regarding a large bank transfer in my name from C.B.N Bank Nigeria District:

Secret Diplomatic Payments Are Not Made Unless The Funds Are Related To Terrorist Activities Why Must Your Payment Be Made In Secret
Transfer, If Your Transaction Is Legitimate, If You Are Not A Terrorist, Then Why Did You Not Receive The Money Directly Into Your Account, This Is A Pure
Coded ,Means Of Payment?

If this thing works out, I may not be writing any more art criticism for a while!

Addendum: Well, that large bank transfer should be coming through at any moment, but in the meantime the recent discovery of orientation irregularities in the Roden portion of this visual complex (see addendum to previous blog entry below) compels me to reconfigure it - here is a new version, edited to show the overlapping areas only (can anyone say "LP cover!"?):

displaced lowercase solar invocation

From a GLOW press release: Late Saturday afternoon, the Glow team got a first indication that attendance might be greater than anticipated when response time on the City of Santa Monica's website slowed down to about 15 minutes - undoubtedly due to the huge internet response. The unanticipated, tremendous draw resulted in a few mid-course adjustments early Sunday morning. When a new wave of Glow seekers arrived after 2:00 am, the Santa Monica Pier finally reached capacity. Public safety officials then limited access to the Pier for a period of time, the music stage was closed, and the popular work by Usman Haque north of the Pier was briefly shut down.

The "music stage" was curated by dublab and SASSAS and steve roden was the pre-empted headliner, scheduled to play the sun up with his loopy steel guitar. He went home and did it in his garage, and posted an mp3 of the sweet, haunting recording (along with his account of the melee) on his blog.

Above: Pulp paperback (under plastic) from the collection of Jim Shaw

PS: steve's typically spectacular show of paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures, and film/video/audio/plastercaster installations is up at Suzanne Vielmetter in Culver City through August 2. Along with the quantum leap in scale, the most remarkable new development is a series of humumental works on paper including "quartet 1":



Addendum: I should have noticed this, but the Vielmetter webmeister got the orientation of this piece wrong, so here is the correct rotation:

Eelin' with the Feelin'

Can it really be more than a decade since my humble self-published comic book inflicted the questionably heroic Captain Eel-Begone upon an unsuspecting world? For those who missed the very limited run of the above-pictured rarity, the main story has just been reprinted in 'Blurred Vision 4,' a yearly anthology out of NYC that showcases comics by people from the fine art and literary worlds. Just in time to cleanse the Dark Knight-saturated palates of the Comicon set. Available wherever quirky comics are sold or at the Blurred Books website.

PS: Please note the trademarked character of Quagmire appearing a full 7 years before that of Seth "spared by 9/11 to continue his important work for mankind" MacFarlane.

China Syndrome II: The Unravelling

I probably should have posted this while the show was still up, but you can get an idea at the Steve Turner Contemporary website and get a fuller picture of China's oeuvre over at ACE.

“It started with this idea that I had when I was in debt from all this health stuff [a bout with anemia], and just always scrounging for money, and never getting out of this small space. And then this thought I’ve always had about advertising: how so much of what people buy is an idea about what is going to happen when, like, ‘If I get the right gown and if I ever go to Cancun, this’ll look fabulous!’ And I wondered, could I create this whole thing all from right here? I do the pictures here, do the whole composites here, I print it here, the clothes are all made here. So it’s like this complete imagined exotic journey that all takes place in my apartment.”


This ad absurdum DIY philosophy will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Adams’ oeuvre. At 30-something, she boasts an unusually long string of solo exhibits — due to the fact that her first was at age 23, while she was still attending UCLA as an undergraduate. Her pivotal work was a classic in what might be called stripped-down performative design — the kind of event that derives a wealth of conceptual significance and emotional impact from a slight shift of the spatial relationship between 2- or 3-D objects. (Think Chris Burden’s arm and a copper-jacket .22 long-rifle bullet or Jeffrey Vallance’s relocation of Blinky the Friendly Hen from supermarket display to pet cemetery.)


In Adams’ Official Cannibal Status (1993), the object in question was a tiny chunk of human flesh donated by a fellow student, which Adams — a vegetarian since childhood — displaced into her digestive tract in front of witnesses, then documented with a framed, notarized affidavit, triggering one of our species’ deepest taboos with a clinical and bureaucratic dispassion bridling with Kafkaesque irony. The elegant formal economy of Adams’ gesture notwithstanding, it was the work’s unrepentant theatricality, outrageous humor and narrative conceit that made it remarkable in the dry context of conceptualist-art practice. It doesn’t get much juicier than raw meat...

Read the rest here.

Above:
Flights of Fancy, 2008, Installation Shot (Steve Turner Contemporary)
Ms. American Woman: The Winners Circle, 1998, Photograph, Pumps, Vitrine & Notarized Certificate (ACE Gallery)
Official Cannibal Status, 1993 (Detail), Ink on Paper (ACE Gallery)

Moe Diddley

Sorry for the no posts, the last thing I want to do in my spare time is sit at the computer. I've been sorting out my art archives, scraping off the rat shit and putting everything in strict chronological order. Pictures to follow. In the meantime, Bo Diddley died. Velvets drummer Moe Tucker recorded his signature tune several times, including this version from her OOP solo debut DIY masterpiece Playin Possum. "I saw him live for the first time in '63 when he was with Jerome and all those guys," recalled Moe in a PSF interview "In person, it was just stunning. One of my things was that I vowed to record "Bo Diddley" every time I went to the studio. Then Kostek reared his ugly head and said 'when you record for a label, part of the contract is that you won't record those songs for X years.' So, I couldn't really record that again for the next one and that really pissed me off. I really wanted to do that one on EVERY record. And if I ever got it right, I'd stop. (laughs)"


Another great interview I found, while sniffing around the web as regards Eduardo Paolozzi is this three-way - on the occasion of his disastrous 1971 Tate retrospective - between Eduardo, J.G. Ballard and Frank Whitford (author of The Ultimate 3-D Pop-up Art Book and a swell LAT rant about Derrida as well as Paolozzi's Guardian obit, the catalog for his disastrous 1971 Tate retrospective, and an extensive if raggedly transcribed online interview.) Ballard, in high CRASH mode, observes "Although our central nervous systems have been handed to us on a plate by millions of years of evolution, have been trained to respond to violence at the level of finger-tip and nerve-ending, in fact now our only experience of violence is in the head, in terms of our imagination, the last place where we were designed to deal with violence. We have absolutely no biological training to deal with violence in imaginative terms. And our whole inherited expertise for dealing with violence, our central nervous systems, our musculature, our senses, our ability to run fast or to react quickly, our reflexes, all that inherited expertise is never used." Ballard goes on to describe his legendary April 1970 exhibit of crashed cars at the New Arts Lab in London. The above photo shows Paolozzi (on the occasion of his disastrous 1971 Tate retrospective) and Ballard immediately above the arm of Euphoria Bliss.


All of which is my roundabout way of suggesting you check out Brian Bress' new video for Wounded Lion's Pony People on youtube, then, if you're in the neighborhood, go to their FREE live performance at the Echo on Monday (July 7). They go on around 10:30 is what I heard.

Peers Bears Disappear

Found Yuppie in Bear

Saturday's your last chance to see mi esposa MA's show at Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Santa Monica. If you need a fix of preparatory space dog oil sketches, uncommisioned corporate portraiture, giant generic purebred dogs rendered on found upholstery, yuppies "dressed in bobtailed-bear-cub plushy suits, climbing stairs into something resembling the aurora borealis as painted by Helen Frankenthaler," or the likeness of Ahmed Chalabi's cousin captured with a single line of ink, get on down!


Salem Chalabi, Co–founder Iraqi international Law Group


Lost Yuppie
All works by M.A. Peers 2008

Mother Load Tonight

Tonight (Saturday May 31) Lee Lynch of the Coalition for Cinematic Conservation and Preservation - Southern California Chapter will be presenting the feature length opera film "The Mother Load" with the filmmaker Peter Yates. This is a surreally beautiful and funny lo-fi cinema treasure, with a haunting musical score. Yates is best known as half of the avant-garde Elgart-Yates Guitar Duo and has previously composed an opera based on the lives and works of folk artists Simon Rodia and "Grandma" Tressa Prisbrey.

Lee says: The story is based on historical events of a hard-rock mining town in Nevada City and told through the manipulation of various black and white xeroxed historical photo collage puppets, I quote the artist verbatim: "Part of a series of works using new media to empower the individual artist, it follows to the nth degree a do-it-yourself, low-budget aesthetic, with text, music, voices, instrumental performances, recording, sets, puppetry, masks, camera, and editing done almost entirely by the lonely filmmaker. Simple arithmetic dictates that, compared with this $2,000 work, a 100-million-dollar Hollywood film will provide 50,000 times as much life-changing content and aesthetic satisfaction."

8pm, 5 bucks at the Echo Park Film Center, 1200 North. Alvarado st (at Sunset Blvd)

Kaprow! Kaprow! Buddhabuddhabuddha!

Above: Happeners in the Mist: Steve Roden and his intrepid troupe recreate Kaprow's '18 Happenings in 6 Parts' at LACE in late April. Photo by Sari Roden (I think).

"Forging a unified field theory out of his seemingly disparate Hans Hoffman apprenticeship, American Povera assemblages and participation in the formative social nexus of the Fluxus movement — John Cage’s legendary late-’50s class in music composition at the New School for Social Research — Allen Kaprow operated as the postmodern missing link, personifying the historically bowdlerized continuity between Abstract Expressionist painting and the farthest reaches of the subsequent avant-garde, leaving behind not only recognizable imagery but the very notion of a tangible art object.

Taking to its logical extremes critic Harold Rosenberg’s seminal “painting as an arena of action” concept (where the term Action Painting came from), Kaprow systematically expanded and refined the “arena” to include virtually all intimate human social phenomena, while recognizing the subjective experiences of the actual physical participants — mere memories — as the most meaningful leftovers of the creative process.

Along the path, though, Kaprow left behind a wealth of more-substantial and potential-soaked evidence — including paintings, assemblages, environments, photo/video/audio records of performances, scripts for his trademark Happenings and later relational art, as well as correspondence and a goodly amount of incisive critical writing. Otherwise he would never have been able to have a museum retrospective such as the German-initiated “Allan Kaprow: Art as Life” tribute now on view at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary."

Read the rest of '"This is really happening: The Branding of Allan Kaprow: Anti-Warhol, Anti-Star' in the Weekly, and go see the show, up thru Jun 30


"Oh yeah, beatnick ladies lick that jam off the hood of my car! That's CONCEPTUAL, Baby!" - A. Kaprow (attributed)

TV or Not TV

Above: Brian Bress wearing Hundley-flage ® homages Munch's Skrik in 'Undercover'

"The high humor quotient is the key. Taking their cue from Bruce Nauman’s absurdist exercise videos (his 1968 'Walk With Contrapposto', an hourlong art-historical sashay back and forth in a narrow plywood corridor, is among the earliest works in the show), California artists as diverse as Chris Burden, John Baldessari, Paul McCarthy, Eleanor Antin, The Kipper Kids and Tony Oursler permitted themselves to risk appearing foolish, embedding their often-profound philosophical observations in documentations of comedy-tinged performances.

This legacy continues today, with works like Martin Kersels’ genderific slapstick remake of Fred Astaire’s dancing-on-the-ceiling routine, 'Pink Constellation' (2001) and 'Undercover', L.A. Weekly Annual Biennial alum Brian Bress’ heady 2007 conflation of painting, collage, performance and the vernaculars of cable access and infomercials. To my knowledge, Bress is the only artist in the show who shares his oeuvre via YouTube (as well as his own Web site, www.brianbress.com), which brings us back to our clotted-irony elephant, which has put on a couple of tons in the light of the digital frontier.

If the underlying point of video art was to create a more democratic, nonhierarchical, parallel model for the production and dissemination of information in the form of moving images, well, digital camcorders, Final Cut and the interweb done whupped video art’s ass. (Also conspicuous in its absence, especially considering the inclusion of such nonartsy material like the S.F. punk archives of Target Video, is the wealth of material generated over the past quarter century via the soon-to-be-shit-canned public-access cable stations. Where the hell is Francine Dancer?) We are right now in the midst of a radical renegotiation of the nature of authorship and the very concept of “intellectual property,” on which most professional artists stake their livelihood. But you wouldn’t know it from this show..."

Read the rest in the LA Weekly, and see the Getty's California Video show in person (thru Jun 8) or online.

By the way, Nigel's fine...

His biopsy was negative, his stitches are out. His nosework prowess is progressing in leaps and bounds. Here he is at that Huntington dog beach, shaking the seawater out of his ears. Mark Dutcher and David Ross' waterlogged "Miniature Australian Shepherd" Arbus & an unidentified other dog in background.

Weird Scenes Inside the Moonlight Rollerway Jubilee

While braver souls were wandering the 110 degree wilderness of Santa Fe Springs or Norwalk or wherever the hell REN, a new performance by Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler, was unfolding, I was obliged to honor a previous commitment by attending the air-conditioned nightmare known as the Moonlight Rollerway Jubilee. Did I say nightmare? Wet dream is more like it, with lamé clad master of ceremonies Charles Phoenix doing his William-Conrad-frying-the-Turing-Test showbiz glossolalia to an audience that seemed to be 90% roller community regulars - a community as insular as dog show competitors and comic book geeks.


Phoenix's informative and entertaining "slide" presentation was surreally compelling, with a couple hundred audience members seated in a grid of folding chairs on the rink floor hypnotized by vintage images of roller derby queens and weddings on wheels as our host intoned his concentrated camp commentary to a warm but slightly puzzled reception.


The following hour and a half was a revelation, though. The heck with Matthew Barney. The heck with "Day is Done." Today's cutting edge performance art is being created by the Junior and Senior "In Sync" crews and their Gold Skate Classic champion cohorts. Their knowing vernacular references - a tribute to "Roller Boogie", "Xanadu", and Sir Andrew Lloyd Weber's "Starlight Express" closed the night with a BANG! - were sincere, and informed with a deep kinaesthetic authority.


We were actually bumped from the floor by overbooking roller rink jubilee profiteers, but wound up with prime box seats in the concession area - toward which much of the choreography seemed directed, and through which the performers had to come and go between the green room and the arena. All in all a spectacular Pop-mythological triumph. One-word hint though: Solarbabies. Nuff said.

Exhibit A: Boo-boo; Tootsie Roll

It's Nigel's butt! Ha ha ha! As if we needed more stress, while we were installing M.A.'s show last Weds, Nigel sprouted a thumb-sized lump on his upper chest. By Thursday it was as big as an egg, so we called Doc Martin and Nige was in and out of surgery 4 hours later, one mystery lump (biopsy pending) lighter.


The incision is healing nicely into a macho scar, but is slightly garish in the meantime, so we dug out Reyna's old bandana and Nigel got a new nickname.

The Dark Past of Glenn Bray

Bray has several peculiar claims to pop-culture fame — his rediscovery and patronage of Basil Wolverton in the early ’70s initiated a revival of interest in the artist’s work and a flurry of high-profile gigs. Bray brought forth into the world the entirely new genre of Wrestling Music by recording and releasing Fred Blassie’s 1976 Pencil Neck Geek single, which became one of the iconic records of Outsider Music after Dr. Demento put it into heavy rotation. Bray also sought out Carl Barks, the then-still-anonymous Uncle Scrooge comics auteur, and convinced him to get Disney’s permission to create an oil painting based on one of his classic cover illustrations. One painting, 'A Tall Ship and a Star To Steer Her By' (1971), begat hundreds — and a welcome income stream in Bark’s later years.

Read the rest in the PEOPLE issue of LA WEEKLY

Above: Barks painting 'A Tall Ship and a Star To Steer Her By'

The Dark Past of Josh White

The son of Willie Nelson’s longtime road manager Vernon, White’s first job at the tender age of 12 was as a guitar roadie and substance gopher to Kris Kristofferson’s tour band. Over the next four years, he traveled across America and Europe on Kris’ bus, hanging with heavyweights like Nelson, Kurt Vonnegut, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and Miles Davis. “It didn’t faze me,” recalls the spry, ex–punk rocker. “I was into Black Flag.”
Read the rest in the PEOPLE issue of LA WEEKLY

Panter Era

"As time goes by, Panter still makes occasional conscious displays of virtuoso near-abstraction. His recent tablecloth color grid grounds, for example, wipe the floor with most of the current crop of Mary Heilmann-esque wonky geometric abstractionists. The year 1988 was probably the high point (so far) of this conspicuous incorporation of high-art vocabulary in works like Bon Bon [above], Mini Fishing, and Garden, all of which deploy black-line renderings of cartoon figurative imagery and commercial design over bravura abstract grounds that only occasionally correspond with the conventionally “readable” surface content.

For the most part, though, Panter has embedded his painterly chops in the camouflage of commercial printing vernacular – bright, saturated, off-register colors floating under repeated stock graphic signifiers, including an encyclopedic array of borrowed, mutated and invented cartoon figures, props, landscape elements, textural patterns, scientific diagrams, text fragments (in English, Spanish, Japanese, etc.), and occasional events.

I locate the narrative singularity of Panter’s work largely within this relationship between these discrete narrative layers of abstract composition and figurative cartoon scenarios, whose oscillating degree of correspondence is a tertiary narrative system in itself - deriving, moiré-like (or Third Mind-like) from the superimposition of related but disconnected patterns of information. The story is even further complicated by the fact that Panter’s polyglot visual vocabulary also encompasses the semiotic resonance of his pictographic content (and of his high art references, many of which are quotations of established stylistic motifs).


This semiotic resonance includes all the individual symbolic associations emphasized by the relative absence of sequential contexts in the paintings – scenes are either lifted whole from a sequential context (as in Rage For Men 1995 [above]) or cobbled together from a variety of narrative tableaux that don’t quite jibe (Workings 2003) or entirely isolated entities, landscape elements, and props distributed more-or-less randomly across a visual field (Plastic Hopes 2006). Where in a coherent encompassing linear narrative the image of a girl with a machine gun or a dinosaur collapses to its role in the story (and its function to propel the forward motion of that story), the same image stripped of its linearity shifts its significance to an entire spectrum of more immediately comprehensible, metaphorical, and often verbally unmediated associations."


Read the rest of 'Pictures from the Psychedelic Swamp: Gary Panter, Narrative, and the Politics of Idiosyncrasy' in Picturebox's amazing new 2-volume extravaganza entitled, strangely enough, Gary Panter

Partner and Co-Founder, Peers-Harvey Biscuit Company

M. A. Peers
May 10 — June 7

Rosamund Felsen Gallery
Bergamot Station
2525 Michigan Ave B-4
Santa Monica 90404

Reception: May 10th, 5-7pm

Rosamund Felsen Gallery is pleased to present a new solo show of paintings and works on paper by M.A. Peers. Just as Peers’ outsized dog portraits on scavenged upholstery were derived from the kind of generic idealized breed profiles found on dog food bags, the artist’s ongoing series of uncommissioned corporate and political portraits (this time including members of the Chalabi family and former Enron exective Lou Pai) and her recent hallucinatory “found yuppie” series are studies in failed translation and taxonomy. These new works reflect her increasing engagement with painterly concerns, stretching from current international trends to 18th century portraiture and genre paintings, while continuing to draw from overlooked aspects of the contemporary visual environment, with influences ranging from motivational business posters and trickle-down modernist design to cable access television and Skymall catalogs, and a desire to explore and expose invisible templates of masculinity in modern American society.

Please join us for the artist’s reception on Saturday, May 10, 2008 from 5 – 7 pm.
Gallery hours are 10-5:30, Tuesday-Saturday.
For more information please contact Lucrecia Roa at 310.828.8488



Top: 'Valentina' 1996 Oil on found vinyl upholstery fabric, foam stuffing, 123 x 74"
Bottom: 'Found Yuppie #1' 2008 Oil & acrylic on found masonite 48 x 48"

Colorado in Review

Two posts in April, that's the least ever. But I'll try and compensate. Mi esposa's solo show vernisages next Saturday, so I'll plug that shortly, but first a few more shots from my Colorado expedition: Above is a metal Disney-themed picnic table covered in snow - I probably hadn't touched snow in 5 years, so it was pretty exciting. The rest are from Casa Bonita - the Menudo air freshener or whatever it is from a bleak little fake market stall that hasn't been dusted since the 80s; a television monitor above the waiting shute asks and answers the question on everyone's mind; the view from behind the cliff-divers' waterfall. More soon!

All Aboard for Casalogical Studies

I have returned from my fact-finding mission to the Denver area and will be filing a fuller report shortly. In the meantime, behold your humble scribe getting all Patacritical on the Casa Bonita bus' ass. Yes, that Casa Bonita!

Who Moderates the Moderators?

LAST DAY OF JEFFREY VALLANCE'S GALLIMAUFRY AT
TRACK 16 GALLERY, INCLUDING PANEL DISCUSSION
WITH ALL SIX ARTISTS MODERATED BY DOUG HARVEY

Saturday, April 5, at 7:00 P.M.

Been crazy busy, going to do my time at Casa Bonita next week, gotta finish the Mel's Hole catalog. More on all that soon, but first this:

Closing Reception and Panel Discussion for:

Jeffrey Vallance: Blinky the Friendly Hen 30th Anniversary Exhibition
James Goodwin: Nostalgic Subterfuge
Laurie Hassold: Supernature
Marjan Hormozi: Vice Squad
Dave Shulman: Exhibit Dave
Scotty Vera: Eat This

Panelists include: Jeffrey Vallance, James Goodwin, Laurie Hassold,
Marjan Hormozi, Dave Shulman, and Scotty Vera.

Moderated by Doug Harvey.

Admission free

Refreshments will be served
7:00 to 7:30: Coffee and donuts
After panel discussion: Champagne and beer until 9:00

Above: 'Lobster Dom Rescuing Anne Frank from the Gestapo' by Scotty Vera; Photo by Miss Clover

The Gallery That Came In from the Cold

That was my working title for this piece on the Jancar Gallery and Marie Thibeault's show, which is down now. This weekend saw the opening of two geometric abstractionists' excellent solo shows - Gina Borg's luminous spiritual-in-abstract-artisms (Green on Pink, 2007 above) and Katy Crowe's rickety geodesics (untitled, 2008 below)
The show's up through April 5th.

Taste the Hate!

Most of the (rare) negative commentary regarding 'Some Paintings' has been alternately predictable - as in too much, too crowded, wrong painters, and no overriding curatorial theme (duh) - and baffling - as in "Has this person actually seen the show or ever read my writing?" - and so not really worth plowing through. But I was googling myself online for an ancient piece I wrote on Jeffrey Vallance's work (still looking - anyone who has a digital copy of Lateral Drawing, my email's in the thing there) and I came across this completely-over-the-top harangue attributed to one of my personal heroes, Caligula:

"On the other hand, there is hate, which you shouldn't mimic, because it should never be coupled with reason, and writing is always more reasonable than blood. The critic's show was Hell, of which I also know much. Harvey hung too many bodies in a too strong tree. This shouldn't be permitted – it's something a Senator would do, whenever it's time to punish the Senate in just that way. Harvey put the worst thing he could find by a beautiful artist next to an artwork that makes the ones around it ugly, again and again, seventy times in all, each murder in turn diagnosed and autopsied by the critic, in the manner of biography of the artist so impaled. Fantastically hateful work... I always appreciate when the System elevates someone who hates his fate to the public stage to celebrate failure or to hide worse ones or to oppress the Good Better or Best Choice from the weakened mob. I appreciate this tactic most, of course, because it was my greatest gift and skill."

Sounds like they've been putting the Brown Acid in the water over at Claremont's business schools - which I guess helps explain Stephen Cambone, but bodes ominous weird for the future of Arts & Cultural Management.

Sizzling Lobster Chicken Fiesta!

Sorry for the infrequent postings; I've been swamped, and it seems will continue to be. One project I recently helped coordinate (and DJ'ed at with Jimmy Chertkow) was the solo debut of the artist Scotty Vera (in conjunction with Jeffrey Vallance's 30th Anniversary Chapel to Blinky the Friendly Hen - Blinky's grave pictured above). Scotty's work is incredibly diverse, although it is mostly painting and always contains an image of a lobster and Dom DeLuise. The LA WEEKLY ran this image of the artist in front of his titular canvas as part of its online slideshow of the combined openings. The shows are both up through April 5 at Track 16.

Prodigal Fudds

Flash Fudd "God's Smug" (1999) [sorry for the lousy Pshop border]

I've been doing these comic strip collages since I was 11 years old, and a couple of years back I lost track of the portfolio case full of (for me) fussily crafted artworks I'd been lugging around for decades It was weird, because if I were to pack one carload of stuff to take with me when the shit hits the fan, they would be in it - but their disappearance barely registered. Makes me wonder what else and how much I could do without. Then on Thursday in the course of fixing the water heater and preparing for a studio visit, I finally recovered my stash - albeit soaked with a couple of years rain and sprouting the black mold - from an old suitcase on the side deck. I love collaborating with decay - as I excavate the moldier examples, maybe I'll scan and post a couple. (A selection of Flash Fudd strips exhibited at LA's Wayward Gallery in Oct 2001.)


Flash Fudd "Love Out" (1998)

A Glimpse of Holes to Come

Lee Lynch, Jennifer West, and Marnie Weber with Christian Cummings as Mel

Just a taste of the goings-on that will culminate in my next large curatorial project - 'Aspects of Mel's Hole: Artists Respond to a Paranormal Land Event Occurring in Radiospace' which will open at Cal State Fullerton's Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana in September. Marnie Weber is working on a site-specific Super 8/video installation, and I had the chance to hang out at a recent shoot in Newhall.


Tito stands guard while Thorbyorg Jonsdottir helps Lee Lynch prepare for his role as the "fetal seal with human-looking eyes."


So maybe the dog wasn't 'dead' after all. And the whole resurrection thing, his weird behavior. He was 'dead' drunk and then wickedly hung over! Just like Jesus!

You Don't Tell the Bees - the Bees Tell You.

Apart from the flu and dark dealings with the Insurance Industry over my beleagured 91 Honda Accord Wagon, I've been keeping busy with a number of unusual projects. One of these is the class in 'patacritical Interrogation Techniques I'm teaching for the Critical Studies Department at Cal Arts. 'Patacriticism, for those who don't know, is to criticism as 'pataphysics is to physics. This seems to be working out to be around the place where paranoid conspiracy theory and experimental poetry trade identities - near to J.G. Ballard's 'The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered As A Downhill Motor Race' but back and to the left, and with lots more words. And moving pictures. And we're not just talking Zapruder here.


I remember hearing about 'Wax, or The Discovery of Television Among the Bees' - the first straight-to-internet streaming feature - when it was first released, but didn't have access to the webosphere at the time. But I tracked down a rare VHS copy for the P.I.T. class, and during my research found out that it's still available for viewing online 15 years later!


It's embedded in a complex tangle of hypertextual elaborations, but I suggest working "straight" through the narrative first - the layers of science, myth, fantasy, humor, and paranormal and patacritical implications that make up this ultra low-budget treasure are more than enough to chew on. It's like Matthew Barney with 1000 times more words and 1000 times less money. I'm a Barney Booster, but this works just as good for me.



Briefly, 'Wax' is the story of a weapons guidance system software designer in Alamogordo, NM whose hobby is beekeeping. But once the bees drill a hole in his head and install bee television, watch out! Consensus reality reconfigures into a prismatic hive mind that collapses time and erases the boundaries between individual personalities and autonomous dimensions, culminating - I kid you not - with a sacrificial military strike in Iraq.

SPPR: 'Some Paintings' Press Roundup

Friday saw a flurry of journalistic activity concerning 'Some Paintings: The Third (2007) Annual LA Weekly Biennial' with Christopher Knight's lead review in the Los Angeles Times leading the pack. (The print version had a better headline owing to an apparent Larry Cohen reference - "It's Alive! With wit, diversity")

'Interiority' by Brian Cooper

Simultaneously, Emma Gray's L.A. CONFIDENTIAL column for Artnet's online magazine provided an ethusiastic overview of the show and opening.

'Smear Campaign' by Victoria Reynolds

Earlier in the month, Emma also named the 'SP' the #1 show in LA in her column on the Saatchi website

'Wellness' by Brad Spence

I was surprised and impressed at the unconventional choice of pieces singled out by Chris and Emma. For example, they both gave props to Esther Pearl Watson's faux-outsider UFO-scape.


Another early entry came from artblogging LA/sixspace multitasker Caryn Coleman in her debut online column for ArtReview's new online edition.
'Tekel Upharsin (He weighed, now they divide)' by Gustavo Herrera

Illin

Wow. That was some opening. 3000+?! I've been deathly ill with that new long-duration flu that's going around - it'll have lasted a full week as of tonight. Had to miss my first Patacritical Interrogation Techniques seminar and everything. There was a pretty good LA Weekly online slideshow of the event as well as a photo spread and write-up in the current print issue, but I can't seem to find it on the site. In the meantime, check out John Geary's photo album, from which the above shot of the inimitable Michael Q. Schmidt is excerpted. My thanks again to everyone who made it happen, especially the bands and performers! If you haven't seen the show, make sure you do - it's only up for a little over a month.

Accordian, Aerial, Africa, Aircraft, Airstream, Alain Delon, etc...

In my capacity as Secretary of the CCCP-SCC, and in conjunction with the artist's imminent speaking engagement through UCLA at the Hammer Museum, I would like to direct your attention to a remarkable work of Mongo Video by Canadian photographer Roy Arden, consisting of 28,144 images gleaned from the interweb and arranged in alphabetical order to a jaunty organ loop, like a DIY Koyaanisqatsi directed by Bernd and Hilla Becher. It's called The World as Will and Representation - Archive 2007 and is located on Arden's website.

What I did on my Winter Vacation

“SOME PAINTINGS”
THE THIRD (2007) LA WEEKLY ANNUAL BIENNIAL
CURATED BY DOUG HARVEY
JANUARY 12–FEBRUARY 16, 2008

Opening reception on Saturday, January 12 from 7 P.M. to 11 P.M. with refreshments and performances by The Spirit Girls, Wounded Lion, John Kilduff of Let’s Paint TV, and others.
Here's who's in it and why.*

TRACK 16 GALLERY & SMART ART PRESS
2525 MICHIGAN AVE. BLDG. C1
SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA 90404
P 310.264.4678 F 310.264.4682
reception@track16.com
www.track16.com

*except Wendell Gladstone, whose hot-off-the-easel 'Drawn Out' is reproduced above. His missing profile reads as follows:

Wendell Gladstone’s seething, super-saturated neo-mythological allegories have oscillated between sculpture and painting in a way that opens new paths in both media while shedding light on their disparity in tolerance levels for fantastic, opulently decorative experimental storytelling.

Yo, Citizens of New Hampshire!

This is the one Bonzo Dog song I could never find, but just did and it is very timely. It's a reunion single called "No Matter Who You Vote For, The Government Always Gets In (Heigh Ho)" recorded for the 1987 British General Election but unreleased until 1992.

Pump It Up

If, like myself, you were disappointed by the "mysterious" interruption of the live broadcast feed from TimeWarner cable during Saturday's episode of "Let's Paint TV," you will be glad to know that the unadulterated, un-cut-off version of the show is now up on Youtube in three parts:

Let's Paint the Tinman & Perform Open Heart Surgery Part 1
Let's Paint the Tinman & Perform Open Heart Surgery Part 2
Let's Paint the Tinman & Perform Open Heart Surgery Part 3

I think we may have witnessed the pinnacle of Western Civilization here, people.

But just in case, swing by the opening of the Third Annual (2007) LA Weekly Biennial: Some Paintings next Saturday, January 12th, from 7 - 11, during which Mr. Kilduff will perform a live painting demonstration.

Healing Green Energy

A riotous crowd of 16 turned out for the Shishimai Lion Dance & Taiko performance at the Mitsuwa grocery store in downtown LA's Little Tokyo district, including the crazy homeless man at bottom right, whose agitated outbursts ceased briefly under the magical spell of the benevolent harvest spirit.

Mick Wakes Up

O Lucky Man (Warner Home Video)
Speaking of Candide... The middle installment of Lindsay Anderson's Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) trilogy is a sprawling Bildungsroman for the blown minds and crushed blossoms of 1973, featuring a great, brilliantly integrated soundtrack by Alan Price and a remarkable balance of dreamlike mythic recursivity and incisive (and sadly still relevant) political satire. Sometimes self-indulgence is just the ticket. Finally out on bargain-priced double DVD!

Accidentally left off the published version of my list of the 'Best Cultural Artifacts of 2007 that I Can Remember' - it goes right after the entry on the Jimbo doll.

Seasoning Unto You

"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

A Washington Post Two

While I'm linking to youtube, I've been meaning to follow up my post regarding my cinematic foray to Long Beach last April by linking to the completed short film Mimesis. I wish they'd used the part where George is doing the frug, but you can't talk to these people. I also noticed that the enhance your calm link was leading to the wrong material, so I fixed it. Next project Dr. Shantibugs? George W and John Spartan have much in common!

Let's Paint Mannlicher Carcano's Portrait

Mannlicher Carcano's appearance on John Kilduff's public access instructional painting program 'Let's Paint TV' on Youtube. The band in this incarnation includes (L to R) Christ's Cumming II, Herr Schurdt, Really Happening, & Gogo Godot.

I hate how these embedded videos slow down the page loading, so I'll just provide a screen shot and links, OK?

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Can't Get There from Here

"What is the point of making art? I worked at a Montessori daycare one summer, and there was this one kid who — when other entertainments weren’t forthcoming — would endlessly recite a schizophrenic Zen vaudeville routine of his own precocious concoction, to wit: “Why did the chicken cross the road? I don’t know Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Why did the chicken cross the road? I don’t know Ha ha...” The Art World has yet to arrive at this level of sublime denial, but it’s mostly due to the enormous quantity of multiple personalities duking it out — or more often avoiding the issue. In a fashion culture driven by planned obsolescence and amnesia, there’s no place for consensus — except maybe the one that suggests nobody push the question too far, at the risk of queering a good thing for everybody. It’s sort of a microcosm thing."


Continued, eventually getting around to Linda Stark's Potion Paintings, here.

Shortage of Fats Imperils Nation at War! Do Your Bit!

If the lure of XMAS salvage (now including guest sub-curator Jodi Wille of Process Media presenting previously unscreened video of local glam evangelist Miss Velma and the SOURCE Family’s Hawaiian Christmas special!!!) is not enough to get you to Echo Park this Saturday night, consider the synergistic possibilities of this:

Fry-B-Q 3, Wrath of Fry-B-Q
Saturday Dec 15, 7:00pm-10:00pm
Free Admission/$5 all you can fry

Machine Project
1200 D North Alvarado
Los Angeles, CA, 90026
213-483-8761

Here’s what you do…

1) Arrive between 7 - 10 pm Saturday Dec 15th.

2) Bring something edible to fry. Machine's trained fryolater technicians will be standing by, eager to batter and fatify your soon to be delicious snacks. Machine's extensive testing suggests that almost any item will bring great fried satisfaction - potatoes, fish, vegetables, onions, twinkies, etc. Just in case Machine bought extra fire extinguishers.

3) Bring checks small and large and become a friend of Machine Project. Your donation helps Machine keep doing what Machine does, and is fully tax deductible. Details on Machine's support page

The secret bar (accessible through a stabilized rift in the time/space continuum) will be open.

Southland Skintasia

I'm a little late promoting this year's 'Skin' themed Pasadena Art & Ideas Festival, but many of the related shows are still up, and you can still get the catalog containing the rest of this essay.


From it’s origins in Otzi the Iceman’s elegant geometric inkage and the Paleolithic inverse spray-paint hand-prints of Chauvet Cave (not to mention the Venus of Willendorf - if only for square footage! Va-va-Voom!) art has been inextricably intermingled with the 5 layers of the upper integument. Underlying this seemingly fundamental use of epidermis as canvas is a radical semiotic event: skin inversely branded onto symbol, what “thought-stylist” R. Gros-Tumore has referred to as “OOTAT culture.” “The decision to deliberately mark the body,” claims Gros-Tumore “is the very Genesis-spot of Art, the point where abstraction of and alienation from the totally physiomatic Self is first materially recorded, to the best of our knowledge. It is, in fact, the opposite of branding; it is the ground zero of individuation.”

Whether or not the very origins of artmaking are to be found in this prehistoric moment of self-objectification, skin -- as a subject, metaphor, and even medium – has undeniably been a major recurring theme throughout art history. Along with three-point linear perspective and anatomical verisimilitude, the convincing depiction of skin was (and remains) one of the holy grails of pictorial illusionism, the dominant criterion of significant and successful art until the Modern era. Nor would this be a concern were it not for the peculiar exception granted the Fine Arts from various codes of prudery over the centuries, resulting both in countless Renaissance Classicist and Neoclassical depictions of nude Greek goddesses and equally abundant early 20th century mail-order pulp booklets of “Nude artist’s model” photography.

Solutions to You

More posts soon I swear to god. In the meantime, take comfort in the inspirational thought-stylings of Dethklok leader Nathan Explosion:



Update: First my nephews never get their talking Towelly dolls and now this? Screw you Cartoon Network! So 20th century. Here's a transcription:

Nathan: [reading the scripted commencement speech] Harvard... solutions... solutions to you...
Ofdensen: [whispers] Salutations!
Nathan: [tossing the speech aside] I don't need this stupid speech! (looking out at the graduates) You think you're smart huh? Think you can come up here and take a piece of this? Huh? Any of you? You? You? Listen, Harvard. I'm a billionaire. And most of you are gonna graduate and move back in with your parents! I'm gonna tell you somethin', though. We have something in common: we're all gonna die. No matter whatcha' do. No matter whatcha' do with your lives, you're dead! You're dead! You're dying. You're gonna die. All of you. Dead. You, dead. You, dead. All of you. You, lady? Your tits will be eaten by maggots. In just a few short years. So here's my message. My message to you. A very simple message: Go forth. Go forth, and DIIIIIE!

Thrift Store Movies XMAS

Just a heads up on one upcoming curatorial project:

The Coalition for Cinematic Conservation and Preservation – Southern California Chapter and the Echo Park Film Center are proud to present
A Thrift Store Movie Xmas
Inoculate yourself for the holiday season with a burst of vernacular surrealism from the CCCP-SCC. Drawing from found films, thrift store discoveries, ephemeral oddities, and oddball cult classics, the CCCP-SCC has assembled a spectacular mosaic of cartoons, television specials, musical numbers, and feature film excerpts that explore the weird side of Yuletide. Highlights include “Santa Claus” a dubbed Mexican kiddie film from 1960 in which Santa battles the Devil, the infamous “lost” Star Wars Holiday special, local glam evangelist Miss Velma, cable access musical performances, and Christmas adventures from Benji, the Mirthworms, HeMan & SheRa, and Garfield, and much more. As always, special refreshments and amazing door prizes will abound. Join the festivities!

Saturday December 15th at 8 PM at the Echo Park Film Center
1200 N. Alvarado Street (@ Sunset Blvd)
Los Angeles, CA 90026

Somehow It All Makes Sense

I have a lot of catching up to do here, and stuff to promote. Recent writing, Thrift Store Movies Xmas, the upcoming 3rd LA Weekly Annual Biennial. I should start with my review of Lari Pittman's recent show at Regen Projects Dos.

The first time I saw the work of Lari Pittman was at the multiple-careers-making “Helter Skelter” show at MOCA in 1992, and I didn’t care for it. This was the era of his menacing sexualized owls, meticulously built-up psychedelic reliefs of dripping white candles, and circus-font repetitions of the number 69. In spite of their obvious craftsmanship and manifest fluency with a wide swath of the history of visual culture, the paintings’ sense of contained (if provocative) energies — not to mention the unironic deployment of such a conventional medium as acrylic and enamel on rectangular mahogany panels — made them seem out of step with such eruptive gestures as Paul McCarthy’s tree-fucking robot and Nancy Rubins’ roof-high mushroom-cloud tangle of trailers and hot-water heaters. Pittman’s work seemed a quirky vestige of the previous decade’s Reaganomic love affair with “New Image” painting, not the shape of things to come. Continued Here.

Dogstar Dogstar (Laikalaikalaika)

In a full-page full-color story the Sunday New York Times outed my spouse M.A. Peers as the artist responsible for the space dog paintings at the Museum of Jurassic Technology. You can access the story online here or check the comments. M.A.'s first show of new work in a few years is scheduled for May at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery. Top photo by Tull, bottom by Bastian.

Bike Pathologies Tonight

In a CCCP-SCC peripheral curation, treasurer Erik Knutzen has put together a stellar program of vintage educational films for tonight!

Head on down to the Echo Park Film Center on Sunday November 4th for an evening of vintage bicycle safety films from the 50s, 60s and 70s in this special benefit screening for the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition. Watch as little Jane and Johnny take to the streets for the first time to learn the rules of the road. But bring your motoring friends as well, since we’ll also serve up a selection of classic driver’s safety films. We’ll round out the evening with a few bicycle related shorts and oddities from the world of educational films.

The Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition (LACBC) is a membership based advocacy organization working to improve the bicycling environment and quality of life in Los Angeles County through advocacy and education. The LACBC envisions a Los Angeles County that is a great place for everyday, year-round cycling with bicycles accepted as an integral part of our transportation system, culture, and communities.

Admission is $10 with all proceeds going to support the LACBC.

Sunday November 4th
Two screenings: 7:30 pm and 9:30 pm
The Echo Park Film Center is located at 1200 North Alvarado Street @ Sunset Blvd.

Licorice Allsorts... of the Mind!

"The elegant Portal paintings seem to offer a bittersweet passage to a less cluttered realm. Details are sketchy – the bullseye of the spiral’s center is an unknowable threshold of zero dimensions, but it’s clear that all baggage has to be discarded on this side of the equation. What a surprise to find all your familiar acquaintances waiting for you on the other side! Ay, there’s the rub. The deliverance offered in bridging the event horizon of a black hole is as likely to be the inescapable psychodrama of Solaris as it is to be the high amniotic indifference of 2001. Or perhaps it’s a Cabaret, old chum.

Mark Dutcher’s 2007 suite of Black Paintings seem to offer a speculative simulation of this very Far Side of our sensual and phenomenological constraints. Suddenly we confront De Selby’s ultimate accumulation of “black air,” a torrent of matériel noir that inverts our figure/ground understanding in an equally binary optical value reversal. In a variety of tableaux that recall freeze-frames of various vintage Big Reveals – particularly the withdrawal of curtains to expose the theatrical stage or cinematic screen – Dutcher delivers a best guess at second sight. Will there be a new way of seeing in the Kingdom of Heaven? Or is this it? Through a glass darkly, or infinity in a grain of sand? Or the contents of a gumball machine dumped in a cauldron of squid ink at full boil?"

from my catalog essay "Sugar in the Dark: Mark Dutcher’s Black Paintings"
published in conjunction with "Curtains", his exhibit at

High Energy Constructs
990 N. Hill Street, Suite 180
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Opening tonight, October 20 2007 from 6 - 9
On view through December 01 2007

Mark also has a spectacular survey show running concurrently at the Huntington Beach Art Center

Mark Dutcher's Shelf Life
538 Main St.
Huntington Beach Art Center
Huntington Beach, CA 92648
On view through December 16 2007

Above 'Cinema'
Below 'A Year in the Theater'

Let's Paint Fireworks for Spoiled Children

Art Garage Rock band Fireworks will be doing their thing with John Kilduff of cable access' Let's Paint TV fame at 8 PM on Thursday Oct 18th at the USC Grad Art Gallery at 3001 South Flower Street, LA, 90007 - just off the 110 freeway.

Oh Canaday!

"A case in point is his recent body of Noir hot rod paintings, a sort-of darkly macho Thanatos corollary to his longer-running pageant of full-frontal suburban Willendorfian Veneres (which themselves allude to often-Eros-tinted 70s airbrush figuration à la Alan Aldridge and Peter Saul). Employing the same backdrop of abstracted industrial domination -- Canaday hails from Detroit, site of some of the bleakest post-globalization urban landscapes in America -- as found in earlier studies of the female figure in the landscape such as Fudge Rammers in Their Pajamers (2005), the similarities end there – Canaday’s car paintings are utterly devoid of overt sexual content.


Instead, these remarkable works propose an equivalency between Ad Reinhart and “Big Daddy” Roth – between the chromatically minimal tail end of the existentialism-tinged Abstract Expressionist school and the more truly subversive eruption of the Grotesque which was occurring throughout American popular culture over the same period. The geometric complexity in a piece like Burnin’ (2007) is almost as compelling as the outlaw imagery it encodes. Drawing substantively from the automotive outsiders of Roth Studios (including Roth himself, Robert Williams - whose comic-book advertisements for Rat Fink tee-shirts bear a resemblance in wit and graphic complexity to Reinhart’s How to Look collage strips - and Dave Mann, later of Easyriders fame), Canaday’s painterly hot rods posit a plausible integration of the transcendental geometry and improvisational materiality of the church of Abex with the post-Jungian pop mythology of EC horror comics."

- from my catalog essay 'Motor City Badness: Steve Canaday’s American Graffiti'

published in conjunction with Canaday's shows at Black Dragon Society (closing October 20th) and Baronian-Francey in Brussels (opening in November). The book should be available at Black Dragon any day now. The Black Dragon show only includes one of the car paintings, but they may be still up in the auxillary space, and there'll be a chance to see at least one more before the new year.



Dough on the Go! reader Jacques de Beaufort put in his two cents in an insightful essay on his own blog and documented the openingto boot.

Now, set the doom machine against the imperial space station itself!

Writing is a lonely calling, so it is especially gratifying when one learns that not one but two of one's blog readers have taken the plunge and rented STARCRASH solely on the basis of one's blog entry recommendation. One such was Steve Roden who may have been stunned into permanent silence, though reliable intelligence says he may be reworking the haunting theme music for his October 23rd gig at the Hammer. The other is Daniel Mendel-Black, who immediately folded the complex STARCRASH cosmology into his own ongoing sci-fi political allegory at his Kulturedrome blog. Let's try and keep this going, people!

Hot Diggity Smog

We did not allow our automotive woes to interfere with our attendance of Bill Calahan's appearance in the Echoplex grotto last night. Accompanied by fiddle, bass, and percussion, he drew heavily from his most recent album "Woke on a Whale Heart"- the first issued under his real name instead of as "Smog"



The album is awesome and has a great cover by one of the best artists from the Providence scene, Joe Grillo (of the dearraindrop consortium)



I've seen Smog a few times, and while he always had a mesmerizing stage presence, he usually just sat there - but this Bill guy seems to have brought some slinky body consciousness along with him, as he kept busting mutant Elvis moves and breaking out the old softshoe.



The opening act was virtuosic Sun City Girls alum Sir Richard Bishop. I didn't get any good shots of him, though, so here's one more of Mr. Bill.

The Ironing is Delicious

Some one caused some deep wrinklage to our "new" car (the '91 Accord) at 2 AM this morning. According to a coupon left by the police, it was the work of one "Neva Grout." Now, assuming this was not the principal of a Catholic school in British Columbia, my google search turned up this improbable gem. Neva is signator #116. Stay tuned for insurance horror stories.