Don't Take the Bad Information

I had a feeling we were going for the gold, and as it turns out today's high of 113 degrees Fahrenheit not only broke the 105 record for this day in 1963, but set an all-time record for high temperature ever in downtown LA! We're #1! USA! Due to in vivo brain boilage I haven't got around to finishing up any of my writing chores, but I painted a portrait of young bobby Fischer. Last night in my fevered, fitful sleep, I thought I heard the name of Mouldy Slide enthusiast and multimedia Svengali Mark Pilkington mentioned as a guest on Coast to Coast AM. As it turns out, Mark was indeed the 2nd-hour guest on George Knapp's show last night, discussing his overdue rationalist (in the true sense of the word) reassessment of UFO theories and evidence from the last several decades.

This Heat

For those outside of the metropolitan Los Angeles area, we've been having a wicked heat wave - supposed to go at least to 105 today, maybe hotter. On top of that I've had a bad flu with fever the last 3 days, so I've been having crazy dreams (most recently in the form of layered postmodernist - but pulp vintage - comic books by and about a female mad scientist... the details are drifting away....) I used to write all this stuff down, but it gets to be a full time job in itself, and I already have three of those...

Catching "Up" with steve roden

Things have been hectic - not least as regards Chloe's nether regions which have been in estrus, necessitating constant supervision -- and precipitating mental craziness in Portfolio. Nevertheless we did manage to load them all up and drive 99% of the way to Pomona for steve roden and Ginny Bishton's openings at the Pomona College Museum of Art before the left rear tire on the Accord shredded and we had to spend the evening at the Glendora Walmart Lube & Tire Express instead. So I had a few pieces in the recent LA Weekly Art Issue, the largest of which is a piece on none other than steve roden, and it goes a little something like this...

"Until I finally saw them standing next to each other at a barbecue a couple of years back, I always had a suspicion that Steve Roden and Tim Hawkinson might be the same person. This in spite of the fact that I've known both personally for a couple of decades, and they bear almost no physical resemblance to one another. I couldn't completely rule out the possibility that some alien with the hyperdimensional equivalent of a fun-house mirror was pulling a fast one. Come to think of it, he could have been using some doppelgänger beam at that barbecue. The theory may bear further scrutiny.


OK, here are the facts: Tim and Steve both live in Pasadena and have weird-ass record collections with frequent overlaps. I mean weird-ass like Vachel Lindsay reciting "The Mysterious Cat" in 1931, just before committing suicide — and it doesn't get much more weird-ass than that. Each one's work is a personal and idiosyncratic exploration of systems — systems of construction, of communication, of cognition. Both invent and build their own musical instruments. They have identical birthmarks on the left buttock in the shape of Léon Theremin's right profile. (That last item is unconfirmed.)

What's certain is that they are two of the most unschmoozy artists I've ever encountered. They're happy to talk about their work, but shun the spotlight in favor of long hours in the studio — hours that are fantastically productive in both their cases. In spite of this, they seem to be everywhere ... well, almost everywhere. For a long time, Hawkinson was the most egregious example of the L.A. museumscape's "prophet without honor in his own land" syndrome. The lightbulb should have gone off in 1996 when Jay Belloli — the recently retired director of Pasadena's Armory Center for the Arts — curated "Tim Hawkinson: Ali Ikmnostw," but it wasn't until almost 10 years later when the Whitney came sniffing around that Howard Fox was able to persuade LACMA to do the right thing (the 2005 retrospective "Tim Hawkinson").


Now Belloli's left the Armory, Fox is free of LACMA and Steve Roden — who has been perennially jamming out stellar solo shows of his gorgeous painterly puzzles for Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects since 2003, while gaining international acclaim for his experimental music and sound art installations — is a front-runner for the most-egregious-prophet award. (Don't get me started on Jim Shaw and Jeffrey Vallance!) So what's the upshot? Fox curating "Steve Roden: In Between, a 20-Year Survey" at Pasadena's Armory Center for the Arts! Mere coincidence?"

Read the rest of Unfinished Symphony: steve roden shifts into overdrive here.

See steve roden: in between, a 20 year survey at The Armory in Pasadena through january 9th

See steve roden: when words become forms at the Pomona College Museum of Art through december 19 (and Project Series 41: Ginny Bishton through October 17)

Images: transmission 11/60 (stellar regions) 2002; bowrain 2010, installation; fall after moons fall after... 2008

Note: I'm not sure if steve's actually caught "Up" but he should, and so should you.

A Better Stack

I lightened it up a little to see Dieter's head better.

RIP Dorr's Braveheart, NW1, 1998-2010

One of my best canine friends crossed the motherfuckin rainbow bridge last week, and everyone is very sad. Except Dieter (known to some as Spike), who is undoubtedly licking Reyna's butt in Puppy Heaven. Here's a selection of photos (and one typographical portrait) from the archives. I'll see if I can dig up more (including his senior nosework triumphs of the last couple of years) in the next week or so.













Read Kelly's eulogy over at Homegrown Evolution.

Troll 2 Baloney Moment Precipitates New Blog!

Thank God For Baloney! is the research archive of the Coalition for Cinematic Conservation and Preservation - Southern California Chapter (CCCP-SCC)'s ongoing Tribunal research project regarding allegedly "bad" cinema.

Ready for War

In one of the most perfect moments of revisionist creative discourse in recent memory, LA-based culture blog Frenchy But Chic has abandoned Art commentary and critique in favor of directing our attention to a different weekly youtube video of John Cale performing a song from his extensive oeuvre. It seems so obvious! Wish I'd thought of it first. The second-greatest genius to emerge from the Velvet Underground (after Moe Tucker of course), Cale is a brilliant songwriter and performer as well as being the missing link between the avant-garde minimalism of LaMonte Young and the vast array of non-academic noise and drone music produced globally today. Cale's performing at UCLA's Royce hall on September 30th. He is pictured in the lower left corner of the above image, as a student at Amman Valley Grammar School in Wales in 1959.

It's Pronounced Port-folly-o!

Today, this Sunday August 15th, 2010, Winway Portfolio of Sporting Fields became the third ever whippet to attain the NW1 level in Competitive Nosework, with a 4-P Pronounced Performance score in the judge's comments. 17 of the 48 competitors completed their NW1 title -- the caseload testifying to the exploding popularity of this new dog sport -- while only 1 NW2 title was achieved (and no-one completed the elusive NW3 "Snoutmaster" level) yesterday, the first day of trials at the prestigious Rolling Hills Preparatory School in San Pedro.


Portfolio got off to a shaky start, taking his time successfully navigating the box drill and vehicle searches, before placing in the top 10 of the the Interior and drawing gasps of astonishment and admiration by completing the Exterior in just under 17 seconds (out of an allotted 4 minutes) - second only to his beloved Briar-Rose (an Aussie handled by Mandolina Moon).



Images by DH: In Advance of the Box Drill; Moment of Triumph; The NW1 Whippet Hat Trick Completed

Dig It All, Long John

"What makes things meaningful? Is it the mere indication that something meaningful is, in fact, present? Is it the attention we then invest in it? Is it our capacity to subsequently rationalize that experiential phenomenon into a communicable verbal analog: to describe it in words? Is it in the act of communication? Such questions have been inherent to the act of artmaking since prehistory but began breaking surface in the 20th century, nowhere more elegantly than in the work of L.A. painter/photographer John Baldessari, whose retrospective exhibit "Pure Beauty" is up at LACMA through September 12. Having debuted at London's Tate Modern last year, it will movie to NYC's Metropolitan Museum later in the fall.


A perfect example of Baldessari's eloquence on these philosophically pointed matters is his series of Commissioned Paintings from 1969, a group of identically formatted canvases, each with a centered, more-or-less photorealistically rendered image of a finger indicating a feature in the environment — often a smudge or stain on a surface — with a caption below by a professional sign painter, reading "A Painting by Patrick X. Nidorf O.S.A." or "A Painting by Anita Storck." Mr. Nidorf and Ms. Storck were — along with a dozen or so other amateur painters — recruited from SoCal art fairs by Baldessari to faithfully reproduce photographic slides of one of his friends walking around and pointing at things that caught his attention.



These works overtly flip the bird to East Coast geometric painter Al Held's alleged contention that "Conceptual art is just pointing at things," but more subtly at the hard-line conceptualist position that an actual artifact — especially something as conventional as a representational painting — was an unworthy vessel for such rarified discourse. When people lob the phrase "conceptual painting" at me, my first response is puzzlement. What kind of painting is not conceptual? Elephant painting? I beg to differ.



Much of Baldessari's extensive oeuvre, in spite of the fact that he cremated the bulk of his early paintings in a 1970 action (complete with commemorative plaque and book-shaped urn), examines not only such epistemological conundra but the specific manner in which they may or may not be embodied in visual language. And the pointing finger was one of his primary and most effective pictorial widgets. In the early '70s Choosing series, in which "players" take turns indexically indicating their selection of one of three possible parallel linelike vegetables — carrots, beans, rhubarb, etc. — Baldessari simultaneously skewers game theory–based conceptualism and aesthetic taste; the core tenet of conceptualism's nemesis, all that corny formalism so beloved by the bourgeoisie. That's a hell of a fusion kebab.

At the same time, the Choosing offers stripped-to-the-bone testimony of the necessity of decision making, even in the form of apparently random, indifferent or uncontrollable choices, as the central engine of creative activity. In Line of Force (1973) Baldessari reduces the signified and signifier to a single, repeated indicative gesture (snapshots of a finger pointing offscreen) seething with exasperation at our species' seeming inability to just look but recalling the Zen admonition to recognize conceptual formulations as 'fingers pointing at the moon.'"

"it will movie to"?!!

Read the rest of Baldessari: Point Man here.

CSSSA to Exist

Interrupted the narrative arc of the tag-team intro painting "Upward Bound" extravaganza for a 6-day artist/filmmaker/critic/whatever residency at CalArts for the State's prestigious high school arts program in conjunction with Marnie Weber's more extensive tenure, which included filming of a new as-yet-untitled Super 8 Sunset Boulevard meets Bride of the Beast cinematic masterpiece. I had to skip the actual shoot for the Western Sighthound Combined Specialty in Lompoc -- where Portfolio kicked ass yet took no points -- but I did get to be a Spirit Girl (Crone Iteration) for their second-to-last public performance. Further Documentation forthcoming.



Images by DH: Marnie Mensroom Suite #002, Portfolio at WSCS2010 in Lompoc #001, both works 2010

Last Ditch Attempt to Save the Empire

For this exhibition of metaphysically functional art, I am resuscitating my 1994 six-painting suite Last Ditch Attempt to Save the Empire which has become part of my "Rotted" oeuvre through a collaborative transformational entropic process with the forces of nature. Devised as a mechanism for radical semiotic deprogramming, LDAtStE uses leftover Disney cel animation paint with the official designation "Smog" as its primary color vehicle to ensure its geographical specificity and therefore local psychic potency. Victims of the entertainment industry are encouraged to bask in its regenerative energies, but should be cautioned that, as of press time, the vibrating pocket pussy component of LDAtStE III is not operational. Also Chris Miles should stay away, since the last time this work was shown was in Meg Linton's "Bad Sonnets: Grand Metaphors" show at Brewery Projects, after which Chris stopped making art for a decade. Coincidence perhaps, but better safe than sorry!

Check out my website for an image gallery of these [destroyed as of 2012] paintings.

JANCAR GALLERY is pleased to announce a group exhibition - "SUPERNATURAL"
(curated by Maya Lujan and Tom Jancar)
Opening reception for the artists: Saturday, Aug. 6, from 6 - 9 PM
AUG. 6- AUG. 31, 2010

Supernatural is a group exhibition that focuses on objects produced to understand the larger world and control one's position within it, as well as one's fundamental scale within the universe. The work in the exhibition will critically investigate the natural power contained within art; embedded in corporeal painting, totemic sculpture, the phenomenon of photography and transience of video or body of performances that will also evoke ritualistic incantations and other events of the mind and the soul.

The exhibition includes the following artists:
John Baldessari - Andrea Bowers - Doug Harvey - Ilene Segalove - David Askevold - Micol Hebron - Dawn Kasper - Marcus Civin - Katia Santibanez - Dorit Cypis - Christian Cummings - Tyler Stallings - Danielle McCullough - Sarah Cromarty - Rowan Wood - Margo Victor - Nancy Evans - Elizabeth DiGiovanni.

Ya Ho Wa 13 or Thereabouts

Technically they were Fire Water Air apparently -- at least I think I heard Sunflower Aquarian say as much -- but the power trio that rocked the skeletal simulacrum of Burning Man at the West of Rome fundraiser Monday night was as close to the original lineup of the Source Family's hippie-era house band Ya Ho Wa 13 as you're likely to hear this side of the Immanentatization of the Eschaton (apart from the archival 13 CD boxset of original recordings). What was surprising was how totally awesome they were -- and I hadn't even partaken of the sacrament or put on the 3D glasses (though there were some diffraction grating dealies passed around at one point). And my threshold for self-indulgent hippie jam band shit is seriously low. But for real I was flashing on the Stooges. Maybe some Faust when it slowed down. Tight, telepathic improv, and cocky as hell. I buttonholed Sunflower afterwards and he was all like "We rehearsed yesterday, but before that we haven't played in four months." Somebody has to give these guys a cable access show! Maybe once the Source Family documentary, overseen by Jodi Willie (framed triangularly below) hits the big screen next year. Or maybe some of those Hollywood bigwigs who owe so much to the Family can step up and sponsor an arena tour. I'm talking to you Cort! Share some of those Ted & Venus residuals.

A Night of Growth and Discovery

Emi Fontana describes tonight's benefit for West of Rome Public Art as "an unforgettable night for art in Los Angeles... 20 artists involved in different capacities. It will be like a total artwork, a performance festival in a benefit disguise. It will be difficult for our guests to maintain a sense of reality; a lot of transformative sensorial experiences will take place." You should go to West of Rome for details but there is (among other TSE's) a scheduled performance by Ya Ho Wha 13, house band of the 70s LA cult The Source.

Here's an excerpt from my LA WEEKLY column about the Mike Kelley/Michael Smith installation A Voyage of Growth and Discovery that serves as the set for tonight's happening:

"Occupying a cavernous warehouse space in Eagle Rock — normally Kelley's art studio — Voyage is an immersive multimedia installation that includes six carefully synchronized video screens; a densely layered sound track of field recordings, appropriated sound, and a dizzy techno score composed and recorded by Kelley with frequent collaborator Scott Benzel; and eight or nine (depending on whether you count the row of locked Porta Potties) sculptural stations.


The sculptures are the most Kelleyesque element — most of them resemble (and may, in fact, be) the kind of skeletal geometrical playground structures assembled from modular industrial materials that proliferated across the American landscape in the 1970s, a trickle-down aesthetic from the utopian hippie architectonics of Buckminster Fuller, et al. These minimalist spatial determinants articulate the expansive void of Kelley's darkened workspace with elegance and economy, simultaneously referencing the artist's own work (DIY orgone accumulators, models of schools based on recovered memories, etc.) and the often-architectural artworks of Burning Man itself.


Further Kelleyisms are incorporated in the form of discarded clothing items, kitschy dolphin-themed quilts, a "You want it when?!" sleeping bag, and the artist's signature appropriated medium-used stuffed toy animals. Lining the base of a geodesic dome, strung kundalini-style up the spine of a rocketship, or covering a tatty easy-chair in a sinister, Kienholzian mini-installation in the back of a burned-out van, these markers of comfort and domestic stability are the first sign of a recurring theme: the inadequacy of culture to address baby's real needs..."

Read the rest of Baby Ain't Got Back (Yet) here

Bitter Achilles

"Arshile Gorky is a pivotal but enigmatic figure in the history of Modern Art — specifically in the alleged shifting of the narrative center of Capital-A Art from Paris to New York somewhere around World War II. Gorky was a quintessential example of American self-reinvention: a figurehead to the ab-ex pioneers in his spongelike eclecticism and existential heroicism, but at the same time a haunted European cast from the Old Master mold — with a psyche rooted in peasantry, Catholicism and genocide, and almost pathologically addicted to biographical fabrication.

When Gorky was working the Manhattan art world of the 1930s and '40s, nobody knew that he was a survivor of the Armenian genocide. Nobody knew he was born Vosdanig Adoian and was not, as he claimed, related to Russian writer Maxim Gorky (whose real name in any case was Aleksey Peshkov). Nobody knew that he had never received the professional training he claimed, and was, in fact, largely self-taught through study of reproductions in library books and visits to public museums.


The man they knew as Gorky was, arguably, Vosdanig Adoian's greatest artistic creation — an evolving pastiche of behaviors, narratives and props coalescing into something approximating the persona of The Great Artist — as envisioned by an untutored immigrant's imagination and molded by the inchoate expectations of the emerging East Coast cultural elite. He was a tall, brooding, handsome, mustachioed foreigner; a passionate advocate of modernist painting; a preternaturally gifted draftsman and aesthetic chameleon who created credible translations of Cézanne, Picasso, Léger, Miró and a raft of surrealists over the course of his career.

Ultimately, the power of this fiction overtook his life, and Gorky sealed his canonization by hanging himself at the age of 44, after a series of tragic setbacks, including bowel cancer, a paralyzing car crash, a disastrous studio fire, and his wife leaving him for his good friend (and last and most significant artistic role model) Roberto Matta.

It's the same martyrific formula that launched Jackson Pollock and the New York School into the stratosphere a decade later. Maybe Gorky's whole-cloth-cut persona was his most influential contribution to subsequent generations of artists; by the late '50s the public role-playing aspect of artistic practice had become so ingrained as to be invisible. To become players, artists since Warhol have had to erect hall-of-mirror identities — artistic personae constructed by their artistic personae constructed by ..."

Read the rest of Gorky's Debt here.

See the show at MOCA through Sept 20

Images: One Year the Milkweed 1944; Diary of a Seducer 1945

After the Deluge

Here's a few shots from "Mannlicher CarcanoPlex Mach 01" I got before the battery on my camera died...



Ross Rudel's extraordinary sculptural performance Wet Column (2010) -- it isn't very clear in this photo, but there is what appears to be a stream of urine running from the artist's groin down his leg and pooling around the stone at his feet. The head box is actually fixed to the wall.

Maya Lujan's THE FOUR, THE THREE, THE TWO AND THE ONE (squaring the circle) (2010) in motion, gashing the ankles of anyone brave enough to venture toward the restroom (see earlier post for unrotating version)

Maya Lujan and Tom Jancar in front of the wall of live on-the spot portraits created in collaboration by Pierre Picot, Francesco Siqueiros and Paul Bob.

Novelty eye ceiling sculpture by Rebecca Ripple that I don't have the title of yet, but hope to soon. We are expecting these to replace conventional surveillance cameras in mall and at the workplace by November 2012.


Lily Simonson IS Anne Frank in "Becoming Anne" Crime scene photo has been rotated 90 degrees for clarity. Detail of elaborate rationalization/shower curtain. More to come...

Before the Flood (Tonight Only!)

Plenty of recent art writing to post here, but MA and I started team-teaching painting to Upward Bound teens this week, and "curating" the following has been more work than I expected! Not to mention Portfolio's looming Ventura triumph. But first, I give you:


"Mannlicher CarcanoPlex Mach 01" (Click on Image for Larger View)

Mannlicher Carcano is a collaborative improvisational audiovisual collage group who have been performing since 1984, and have appeared weekly on live radio since 1998 with The Mannlicher Carcano Radio Hour. Under the curatorial hand of Doug Harvey, the band’s collage-based aesthetic principle will be expanded to 3 Dimensions with the one-night-only Mannlicher CarcanoPlex Mach 01, including sound, performance, didactic elements, food and drink, sexy projections, and all manner of art objects at PØST (1904 East 7th Place Los Angeles, CA 90021) on Friday July 9th from 7 – 9 PM . Improvised audiovisual collage, a rediscovered pre-Firesign Theatre absurdist detective film, a one-man rock & roll band, Anne Frank karaoke, gray-water cocktail-making, an enormous naked man, and so much more!


Participating artists include Mannlicher Carcano, China Adams, Suzanne Adelman, Michael Arata, Josh Aster & Kristin Calabrese, George Budd, Ryan Callis, Caroline Clerc, Christian Cummings, Adrian de la Pena, Walpa d’Mark, Georganne Deen, Joe Deutch, Mark X. Farina, Gerry Fialka, Eamon Fox, Jill Giegerich & Mischa Mandel-Giegerich, Phyllis Green, Daniel Hawkins, Homegrown Evolution, The Keith Walsh Experience, Maya Lujan, Bridget Marrin, Tina Marrin, Dr, Carl Nordstrom, M.D., Mary Anna Pomonis, Rebecca Ripple, Hector Romero, Michael Q. Schmidt. Lily Simonson, Brad Spence, Laurie Steelink, Jim Sullivan, Young Summers, Don Suggs, Greta Svalberg, Lee Tyler Thompson, Esther Pearl Watson, Aaron Wrinkle and many Others...




Images: Lee Thompson - Untitled
MCPlex Poster (featuring detail of Eamonn Fox - Party Ball Performance Structure)
James Chertkow - International Incident
China Adams - One Night Only Poet
Laurie Steelink - Totem
April Schwassa - Jar of Dill Pickles (Prisoners' Last Meals Series)