Revised Janson Part 11

Like the Great Pyramids, do you find yourself at a loss as pertaining to the question of doing something tonight, and if so what? Fret no more, as the answer involves instead of a boring art discussion, a mock game show, and instead of awkward silence a performance by the celebrated purveyors of hillbilly composition, Triple Chicken Foot. I am referring of course to the opening of No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College, including works by myself, Michael Arata, Pierre Picot, Walter Askin, Erika Rothenberg, Merwin Belin, Ilene Segalove, Stephen Berkman, Mahara Sinclaire, Jim Eller, Dave Smith, Walter Gabrielson, Masami Teraoka, Jeffrey Vallance, Richard Pettibone, & William Wegman.
Los Angeles Valley College Art Gallery
5800 Fulton Avenue
Art Building
Valley Glen, CA 91401

Band is on at 7, game show at 8, winding down at 10 - see you there!

Revised Janson Part 10

Continued from An exile returns: Traveling exhibition re-introduces Germany to émigré art historian H.W. Janson August 10, 2004 by Liam Otten for the "WUSL Newsroom"
Over the next year, Janson used those monies to acquire some 40 major works of European and American modernism, putting special emphasis on cubism, constructivism and surrealism. He worked primarily with exile dealers, including Paul Rosenberg, Karl Nierendorf and especially Curt Valentin, as well as the former expatriate American Peggy Guggenheim. Ernst's The Eye of Silence (1943-44) was bought from Julien Levy, the artist's longtime dealer, while Tanguy's La Tour Marine (1944) came from Pierre Matisse (son of Henri).

Janson left campus in 1948, but subsequent curators such as Frederick Hartt and William N. Eisendrath Jr. — working with prominent local collectors — continued to build on his curatorial architecture. Major acquisitions of the period include Matisse's Still Life With Oranges (II) (1899); Miró's Painting (1925); Gorky's Golden Brown (1943-44); Klee's Fragt Sich (1934) and Picasso's Women of Algiers, Variation 'N' (1955)."

[H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service.]

Revised Janson Part 9

Continued from An exile returns: Traveling exhibition re-introduces Germany to émigré art historian H.W. Janson August 10, 2004 by Liam Otten for the "WUSL Newsroom"
Born in 1913 in St. Petersburg, Russia, Janson was raised in Hamburg, where his family settled after fleeing the October Revolution of 1917. He began his university education in Munich in 1932 but transferred the following year to Hamburg University, studying with Erwin Panofsky until the influential professor's firing by National Socialists. Though himself gentile, Janson left Germany shortly thereafter and completed his training at Harvard. In the 1930s and 40s, he emerged as a staunch defender of modern artists, writing pieces on Beckmann, Guston, Klee, Picasso and George Grosz while taking a critical scalpel to American Regionalists like Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood.

Janson arrived at Washington University in 1941 as an assistant professor of art history. At the time, public awareness of the University collection was almost non-existent. Though established in 1881, the collection lacked on-campus facilities and was held in storage at the City Art Museum (now the Saint Louis Art Museum). Janson only discovered the collection, then mostly19th-century American and European painting and applied arts, through a close reading of CAM's wall labels.

Janson was named curator of the university collection in 1944 and immediately organized a makeshift gallery in the School of Architecture. His boldest stroke came the following year, when he raised about $40,000 by de-accessioning 120 paintings and more than 500 additional objects — then almost one-sixth of university holdings. Ironically, more than half the funds, about $23,000, came from the controversial sale of Frederic Remington's Dash for Timber, a scene of the American West...


[H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service.]

Revised Janson Part 8

Continued from An exile returns: Traveling exhibition re-introduces Germany to émigré art historian H.W. Janson August 10, 2004 by Liam Otten for the "WUSL Newsroom"
"Janson's story is not known in Germany; he is a rediscovery," said Sabine Eckmann, Ph.D., curator of the Kemper Art Museum and a German native. However, "there is a lot of German interest in exile, in all of these artists and all of these artworks that were lost. It's part of Germany's art history.

"Exile and Modernism demonstrates what one exile art historian was able to do in the United States at a time when modern art was banned as degenerate in Germany," continued Eckmann, a specialist in exile art. "It also offers a chance to rethink the meanings of concepts like 'exile' and 'modernism' and their connection to one another. We typically see exile as an experience of loss or isolation, but Janson shows that exile can produce creative energies. There's an interesting dialog between his experience of Nazi culture, which caused him to react to certain strains of modern art, and his new orientation in America"...

[H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service.]

Revised Janson Part 7

From An exile returns: Traveling exhibition re-introduces Germany to émigré art historian H.W. Janson August 10, 2004 by Liam Otten for the "WUSL Newsroom"
Janson, who emigrated to the U.S. from Germany in the mid-1930s to protest Nazi cultural policies, remains little known in his former country. That's about to change, thanks to Exile and Modernism: H.W. Janson and the Collection of Washington University in St. Louis, a touring exhibition organized by the university's Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.

Over the next two years, Exile and Modernism — which builds on a similar show the university presented in 2002 at the Salander O'Reilly Galleries in New York — will travel to four German museums and one in the United States. The exhibition documents how Janson, as curator at Washington University in the mid-1940s, employed prescient vision, a modest acquisitions budget and contacts amongst the exile art community to build what he proudly called "the finest collection of contemporary art assembled on any American campus"...

[H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service.]

Revised Janson Part 6

Lee Sorensen's Dictionary of Art Historians adds: In 1962, Janson and his wife, Dora, published their History of Art. It grew over the years to be the best-selling textbook of any subject in the United States and, known simply as "Janson," was for years the standard text. Because Janson's appointment at NYU was primarily at the undergraduate level, he had fewer Ph.D. students than others of his profile. His students (at Washington University) included Irving Lavin and Marilyn Aronberg Lavin.

Janson's work, especially his Ape lore book, show the influence of the Hamburg school/Warburg influence. The book focuses on the history of art or styles as much as it does mythological phenomenon and its manifestation in material culture. Janson's 1962 History of Art was an instant best seller, contrasting it from the other predominant art-history text, Art Through the Ages by Helen Gardner, which by its numerous posthumous revisions treated art as a history of styles. Janson's book came under criticism in later years for its lack of inclusion of women artists. Subsequent editions written by his son, Anthony Janson (b. 1943), changed this.

[H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service.]

Revised Janson Part 5

[H.W. Janson Wikipedia entry continued]
He wrote about Renaissance art and nineteenth-century sculpture, and authored two prize-winning books, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (1952) and Sculpture of Donatello (1957). In his later years he was concerned with East–West dialogue in the arts. Over his career, Janson consulted on the Time–Life Library of Art; was president of the College Art Association, editor of the Art Bulletin, and founding member and President of the Renaissance Society of America. He also wrote books on art for young people, some in collaboration with his wife.

[H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service.]

Revised Janson Part 4

[H.W. Janson Wikipedia entry continued]
He taught at Washington University in St. Louis from 1941 to 1949, in which year he joined the faculty of New York University, where he built the undergraduate arts department and taught at the graduate Institute of Fine Arts. He was recognized with an honorary degree in 1981 and died on a train between Zurich and Milan in 1982 at the age of 68...

[H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service.]

Revised Janson Part 3

[H.W. Janson Wikipedia entry continued]
In 1935, at the suggestion of Panofsky, who had emigrated to the United States, Alfred Barr sponsored Janson as an immigrant, and he completed a PhD at Harvard University in 1942 (his dissertation was on Michelozzo). He taught at the Worcester Art Museum (1936–38) and the University of Iowa (1938–41) while pursuing his degree. In 1941 he married Dora Jane Heineberg (1916–2002), an art history student at Radcliffe College, and he became a citizen in 1943...

[H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service.]

Revised Janson Part 2

According to Wikipedia, Horst Waldemar Janson (October 4, 1913 – September 30, 1982), who published as H. W. Janson, was an American scholar of art history best known for his History of Art, which was first published in 1962 and has sold more than two million copies in fifteen languages.

Janson was born in St. Petersburg in 1913 to Friedrich Janson (1875–1927) and Helene Porsch (Janson) (1879–1974).[2] After the October Revolution, the family moved to Finland and then Hamburg, where Janson attended the Wilhelms Gymnasium (graduated 1932). He studied at the University of Munich and then at the art history program at the University of Hamburg, where he was a student of Erwin Panofsky...

[H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service.]

Revised Janson Part 1

H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service. Happy Valentine's Day!

Rainbow Matter Custard

[I didn't get around to quoting this remarkable bit of didactic text in my review of the Mercedes Matter retrospective at the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University but this is the perfect place to make up for the omission.]

"Some people have it rough. Born into the East Coast cultural aristocracy in 1913, Mercedes Matter began life as a beloved and privileged artistic prodigy. Her father was Arthur B. Carles, a pioneer American abstract painter who studied with Matisse, showed at Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery and exhibited work in the legendary Armory Show. He was also an unrepentant bohemian: long-haired and bearded, a lifelong alcoholic and womanizer. Her mother, Mercedes de Cordoba, was a Parisian correspondent for Vogue and a favorite model of photographer Edward Steichen. Her uncle Pedro was a star of Broadway and early Hollywood, and her aunt Sara was a famous fashion photographer and illustrator. Her father started her painting at the age of 6, and she spent her early teens touring the art capitals of Europe. After attending the progressive girls' school Bennett College in Millbrook, New York, she moved to Manhattan and began studying with Hans Hofmann at the Art Students' League.


Matter (then going by the name Jeanne Carles) and Hofmann (33 years her senior) became close friends — briefly lovers — and maintained a close relationship until Hofmann's death, in 1966. Matter is said to have lured Hofmann back to painting after a two-decade hiatus, and casually instigated the summer painting retreat that evolved into Hofmann's Provincetown school. She became the lover of another student of Hofmann's, painter Wilfrid Zogbaum. Fudging paperwork, Matter qualified for the WPA dole and became an assistant, translator and lover to Fernand Leger, who was in America designing WPA murals along the Hudson River. In 1936 Matter was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists Association, became the lover of Arshile Gorky, and was arrested at a WPA demonstration and thrown in jail. There, she met Lee Krasner, who became another close — though not lifelong — friend, joining Hofmann's painting class and modeling jewelry for Matter's close friend Alexander Calder.


Through Leger, Matter met and began working for Swiss graphic designer and photographer Herbert Matter, who, as an artist for Condé Nast publications, was largely responsible for translating the photomontage innovations of the dadaists into the visual vocabulary of the cultural mainstream. They, too, soon became lovers. In 1941 they married, but by some condition of Herbert's Swiss citizenship, they were forced to move to Santa Monica and work for Charles and Ray Eames for the duration of World War II. Upon returning to Manhattan, they found themselves at the center of the burgeoning New York school — Krasner was now married to Jackson Pollock, and both Hofmann and Gorky were seminal figures in the emerging language of abstract expressionism. The Matters were among the Pollocks' closest friends, and Mercedes was part of the inner circle at the Cedar Bar and the first woman member of the Artists Club, forming close friendships with Philip Guston, Bill and Elaine de Kooning, Franz Kline, critic Harold Rosenberg, and composers Morton Feldman and John Cage, among others. Herbert joined the Yale fine-art faculty, and Mercedes went on to found the Studio School, a small but influential atelier-style institution in the original home of the Whitney Museum.


All this biography is a roundabout buildup to the big question: "Mercedes who?"


Read the rest of Matter's Most here.

Images: Didactic panel; Woman with Red Hair circa 1922; Tabletop Still Life circa 1936; Untitled (number 11) 1933; Tabletop Still Life 1936

Beans, Fish and Meta-mutational Gumbo

"Ginny Bishton is an artist who defies expectations. Or rather, completely dismantles them, leaving their components arranged in neat rows. One of her UCLA grad-school works consisted of a wall full of hand-copied bread recipes with the instructions left out — inventories of ingredients with the mixing, kneading, fermenting and baking aspects surgically excised — no narrative arc, no money shot. Since then she has steered a willful, idiosyncratic course that has seen her gallery work abruptly morph, often in the space between consecutive solo shows, from gnarly op/minimalist drawings into psychedelic/serialist photo-collages, defying expectations that an artist — particularly a two-dimensional one — needs to stake out a signature visual style and milk it for the rest of his or her life. I'm speaking to you in hell, Roy Lichtenstein...


Another L.A. artist whose oeuvre has been characterized by sudden stylistic about-faces is painter Tim Ebner, who rose to renown in the late '80s with minimalist geometric neo–Finish-Fetish assemblages produced in a surfboard factory. In the early '90s, he abandoned this successful marketing niche for a series of awkwardly rendered clown portraits and anthropomorphic animals crashing through the surf. Into the '00s these pictorial scenarios underwent only incremental change, but Ebner's painterly technique grew in leaps and bounds — a fact that became evident when in 2007 he suddenly began producing a flurry of loose, colorful abstract paintings and atmospheric minimalist landscapes. It seemed that Ebner had come full circle, returning to "serious" painting and a nonfigurative visual vocabulary that might easily take another decade to work through...


Mark Todd, a former student of Ebner's, offers a less clear-cut version of appropriation and collage in "Juggernaut," the next-to-last show at Billy Shire's Culver City digs before the operation folds back into a renovated La Luz de Jesus space on Hollywood Boulevard. Todd's work has evolved quickly and confidently over the past few years, successfully taking on the scale and materials of contemporary painting that have proven too daunting for many accomplished small-scale collagists — of particular significance in Todd's case because his subject matter/source material, comic book covers, particularly those of Jack Kirby dating from the '60s and early '70s, has an explicit size, loaded with formal and psychological baggage...."


Read the rest of The Bish, the Fish, and the Fantastic Four here.

Visit the shows before Feb 6th at Billy Shire Fine Arts, Rosamund Felsen Gallery, and at Richard Telles Gallery until the 13th.

Images: Ginny Bishton, De nada (red, pink, blue), Photo collage on paper, 2009; Tim Ebner Installation view, Acrylic on canvas mounted on plywood, feather, mounted on found, modified metal wall brackets, 2010; Mark Todd, Wrath Warrior, Mixed media on panel, 2009

Pushing the Envelope in Sherman Oaks

Once in a while I get a press release that, although I may not be able to promote in my capacity as an art critic, I feel compelled to share with the world. Here, and continuing in the comments is one such press release.

“HAUTE DATE” MAKING ART TOGETHER THIS VALENTINE’S DAY

DEPARTURE SITE OF JAMES DEAN’S LAST RIDE BECOMES ART REBEL

The Sherman Oaks Art Venue Offers Romantic Valentine’s Day Special
for Creative-Minded Couples Who Can Take Home Their Personal Work of Art

(Sherman Oaks, Ca. February 1, 2010) From the location of where the last photograph of James Dean was taken before for his final ride, Dean’s spirit remains in the sports car garage now converted into the venue known as Art Rebel, an art gallery, studio and event space in Sherman Oaks. For the entire month of February, the art studio turns into a floral paradise, complete with “love coves” for a one-of-kind Valentine's event entitled the “Love Art” experience. This new "haute date" is designed for couples to spend quality time, reconnecting through art. The two-hour session includes creative areas for two with a rose petal covered floor, canvas, paints, brushes, two heart-shaped boxes to be hand painted with love notes, chocolates, candies, and two long-stemmed roses. Call Art Rebel for reservations and prices, 818-907-5883, www.artrebel.net...

continued in the Comments

Letrasetism in Contemporary Composition

My 10-year-old graphic score "The Mysterious Stranger Pt. A:a—The 2012 ovtr" (along with a brief excerpt from my unfinished electroacoustic rendition thereof) just got published in the Sound Art section of the new edition of Drunken Boat, an online literary journal of the arts.

Bitch, You'll Be a Woman Soon

Chloe is a woman now. We picked up some 'Bitch Britches' to contain the seepage while P-Fool was KA&TN out in Indio over the weekend, but they were way too big, so we've opted for the high-waisted Donna Karan number pictured here, but even they had to be taken in! Talk about your supermodel looks! Strangely enough, it's Nigel and Portfolio that have been binging and purging.

The mood around here has been distinctly altered by the pheromones - weird trance states, political upheaval, and sudden mood swings. The other night Chloe - who sleeps at the head of the bed - suddenly woke up at like 3 AM and chomped me on the bicep -- and it fuckin hurt! Never happened before, either. Nogonna happen again, as I'm building her one of those 'menstruation huts' out on the back 40, where she can hook her tentacle up to the Gaia Hypothesis Shrub and save the noble blue-skinned aborigines by commanding the purple dragons to clog the intakes of the invading hover-jets. Or whatever it is chicks do at "that time of the month." Long as I don't get any more distinguishing scars.

SavX @ SA Salon

UK correspondent Cathryn Ward sent along this snapshot of Edwin Pouncey AKA Savage Pencil (UK scraggy line cartoonist, rock critic, and compiler of the awesome Moondog set on Honest Jon's) standing in front of my mouldy slide prints at the Strange Attractor Salon.

Atmospheric Phenomena, Indio CA 10_01_08

Mould Fixation

Fans of my moldy slide presentations will be either disappointed or horrified to learn that I have agreed to exhibit the images as digital photo prints instead of projections of the original format rhizomatic kodachromes. This is because the request came from Mark Pilkington of the extraordinary journal Strange Attractor, which previously reprinted a small portfolio of the fungal transparencies. The new selection - mostly previously unseen images from my moldy archives - will be included as part of this show, opening tomorrow in London (UK). I will be present in astral form.

The first Strange Attractor Salon will be held at Viktor Wynd Fine Art (incorporating The Little Shoppe of Horrors), 11 Mare Street, London, UK, E8 4RP, between 7 and 31 January 2010.
The exhibition will gather together, for the first time, a selection of art and illustration from Strange Attractor’s contributors, friends, allies and inspirations.
Like our books and events the Salon will incorporate a wide range of media (painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, sound and video) from both trained and untrained artists. The assembled exhibitors all share Strange Attractor’s fascinations with inner space, craft, science (natural and unnatural) and the fantastic.


Confirmed contributing artists are:
Phil Baker, Joel Biroco, Richard Brown, Ossian Brown, John Coulthart, Rod Dickinson, Disinformation, English Heretic, Tessa Farmer, Blue Firth, Alison Gill, Doug Harvey, Josephine Harvatt, Ken Hollings, Stewart Home, Julian House, Ali Hutchinson, Alyssa Joye, Maud Larsson, Gary Lachman, Xtina Lamb, John Lundberg, Man From Uranus, Eleanor Morgan, Frances Morgan, Drew Mulholland, Bridget Nicholls, Oscillatorial Binnage, Katie Owens, Edwin Pouncey, Arik Roper, Gavin Semple, Martin Sexton, USURP, Robert Wallis, Catharyne Ward, Eric Wright.

Celebrating unpopular culture since 2001, Strange Attractor has been an open channel for high strangeness in all its forms: publishing books and curating talks, performances, screenings and events at venues all over London. Drawing on a deep seam of knowledge contained within historians, anthropologists, sorcerers, artists, authors, musicians, obscurists and enthusiasts, Strange Attractor declares war on mediocrity and a pox on the footsoldiers of stupidity. Join us!


And many happy returns, Syd, wherever you are!

"Or Maybe Two for Flinching."

That's the missing final line that came to me in the middle of the night after the deadline for my summation of the last decade of art. So if you read it, just tag that onto the end there, OK?

"Was that really a decade that just sputtered by? Granted, everyone was numbed to the teeth for a couple of years after 9/11, but aren’t decades supposed to be demarcated by some sort of discernible content, like techno music, the civil rights movement or cocaine abuse? What can the Zeros claim? The Jonas Brothers? Avatar? Devendra Banhart? The emergence of graphic novels as a viable literary genre? Good TV? Gay marriage?

These are all more or less wonderful things, but uniformly retro, cobbled together from surefire crowd-pleasers and reconfigured for today’s a-go-go cyber lifestyle. Where’s the surprise, the indication that something new is afoot — something that might signal a sea change in our culture’s disastrous path of self-destructive materialism, or at least save us from drowning in reassuring pabulum? When I see “The ’00s,” I think “the ooze” — and wonder how to scrape it off.

In many ways, the art produced since 9/11 has been a sort of collective cultural shudder, as figure and ground have flipped, and artifacts that were supposed to embody the pinnacle of Western society’s enlightened evolution have been revealed as flimsy props in the most elaborate theater of denial in history.

When German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen notoriously (and career-endingly) described the attack on the World Trade Center as “the greatest work of art there has ever been,” he was putting his finger not only on a truth about transdimensional mythological entities manifesting in “so-called” reality but also on the sore spot — rubbed raw by the fundamental incompatibility of its cohabitants — where Art and Politics tussle. It’s an open, unmentionable wound in our collective self-image, the bullet hole in Chris Burden’s arm, where art history vanished, never to be heard from again.

Burden’s signature 1971 piece, Shoot, where he had a friend puncture his arm with a .22 shot from a rifle 13 feet away (not to mention just more than a year later, when Burden fired a pistol at an airliner taking off from LAX) quite literally embodies the question of how much responsibility an artist must take for the destruction and violence inherent in creativity.

Put another way, when modernism erased the boundary between art and life, it also erased the boundary between art and death, and death has been the elephant in the room ever since. Or to put it yet another way, how the hell do you top that? Kill yourself? Shoot someone else? Better to pretend it never happened and keep rotating the merchandise..."

Read the rest of There Go the Zeros here.

Image: View of the last functioning oil well tapping the LA City oil field, Alvarado St, CLUI Bus Tour of the Urban Oilscape of Los Angeles, Dec 18 2009

Up Came Oil! Part 1: Beverly Hills High

I almost didn't make the most recent Center for Land Use Interpretation bus tour, as I forgot to get a ticket (and they sold out in 7 minutes!) -- which would have been ominous, as I am the only person (other than CLUI operatives) to have participated in every one of these remarkable public land art whatever the hell they are. Luckily, my WEEKLY editor Tom couldn't use his ticket, and I slipped in under the wire. As usual I took scores of pictures and recorded hours of audio. Unfortunately, my digital voice recorder fell into the toilet at the MJT while I was vodkafying with Mistah D, and it seems to have drowned. But I still have the pictures; Behold!

Castings from the Wormhole

I do so much shit I never blog about. I'm just going to look through my photos from the last year and see what turns up. Okay, this is hardly breaking news like Brittany Courtney's tranquilizer overdose, but here we do see evidence of some kind of interdimensional interspecies striped-on-striped sexual contact occurring as our then-brand new whippet puppy Chloe appears to be anally probing a prison troll from some bad DMT parallel universe. "Escape from Terrence McKenna Regional Correctional Facility!"

Some post-climactic melancholia or sophomore slump appears to have set in at this point. Could our ambassadors of transdimensional congress have faltered in their negotiations?

Butt like Billy Joel says "Don't forget that Second Wind" - And it looks like it's breaking now! Round Three signals a return to form - Greco-Roman fundamentals!

A jilted forest spirit looks on as our besotted diplomatic packet-badgers revel in the peace that surpasseth all understanding, lulling in the waves and Morpheus goofin on their eyebrows.

The morning after: What was I thinking? Never again! Until that wormhole to the Universe Next Door starts itchin' once more!

Photo shoot in January 2009 at Elysian Park before the coyotes took it over!

The Once and Future Sister Aimee

Here are a few images of the works included in Sister Aimee: The Art Show, bracketed by an image of the first installation (at WLAC, above) and the collaborative process at work in the creation of one of the large collages of paintings from the live model. Oh, and the Foursquare flag was sewn by Lisa Marr for the EPFC musical.







The second image is Jean Copes' solo work, while the following three are collaborative pieces whose primary contributors are Shawn Doster, Louis Caiazza,and Young Summers respectively.