Dumpster Score of the Century (thus far)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posture Lessons for Young Ladies

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

— M. Ciccone

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

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

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

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

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

Buy Poseurs on amazon.

Spacefolio

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

Whoah!

Mid-Wilshire Madness!

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

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

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

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

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

Hi Good Screening with Lynch & Weber

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

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


Conversation with Lee Lynch & Marnie Weber
Thursday, October 6

Screening at 7:30

Conversation at 8:30

Doors open at 7

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

Mel's Hole Catalogs Available!

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


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


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

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

Hot Tub Wake

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

Afternoon Delights

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

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

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

Saxondale Streaming

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

What Dreams May Come Again?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Release Party & Recerd Tordimint!

Oops! Wrong Picture!

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

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

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

FREE T-SHIRT with first 20 books signed



Images stolen from Christine Siemens and Sean Duffy

Faüxmish Debut Coverage

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

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

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

Recent Work of a Revelatory Nature, and Otherwise

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

Pop Daddy Gone

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

Pop Goes the Easel
August 10, 2001

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

Richard Hamilton, The Heaven Free of Stars (1998)

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

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

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