Gerry Fialka on LARZ, followed by a Hiatus

This Sunday's guest on Doug Harvey's LESS ART RADIO ZINE is the incomparable Gerry Fialka, multimedia renaissance impresario behind the PXL THIS film festival (now nearing the quarter-century mark!) dedicated to work produced on the instantly obsolete PXL 2000 children's video system, which recorded lo-res B&W images on audio cassettes; the self-explanatory Marshall McLuhan-FINNEGANS WAKE Reading Club, which has been meeting regularly in Venice since the early 90's; the DIY experimental cinema venues 7 Dudley CInema and Documental; live Media Ecology Soul Sessions (interviews) and poetical funk at the Unurban Coffee Shop; a phenomenal array of workshops colliding such pertinent topics as art, advertising, experimental cinema, technology, fakery, culture jamming, hacking, social media, conspiracy theory, and the color blue; and many other virtuosic DIY/experimental syncretisms.

One of which is  Sunday evening's PSYBERNETIC DREAMING with RIA LIVE CINEMA (RIAPD) - a collaborative project with Will Erokan consisting of "post-hypnotic triggering and hyper-maximum multi-media live cinema event" which functions as a "media yoga session [that] enables participants to meta-analyze the dualities of form and content." We'll be asking Gerry what the hell he's talking about, and playing audio-collaged mashups of his experimental documentary soundtracks, or something. But don't wait to pencil it in at 7 PM Sun Aug 31 at Beyond Baroque 681 Venice Blvd, Venice, California 90291 - Free admission!

After this program, I'm going to have to put LARZ on hiatus, while we find a place to move to and move there -- no small undertaking after 15 years accumulating research materials in one location! So I'm going to be needing my Sundays. I swear to you, though, that LARZ will be back! If I feel like it...

Michael Uhlenkott & Damon Willick on L.A.R.Z.

ANOTHER Seagate external hard drive has crapped out, leaving me devoid of documentation -- this was after the brand new big one I got to back that shit up died while sitting on a shelf, unused for 3 months. So is it any wonder that I've not been blogging so much?

I will, however, break the silence to promote the upcoming episode of Less Art Radio Zine featuring Michael Uhlenkott and Damon Willick. Michael was a founding member of the 70s/80s L.A. art collective World Imitation (Products) and their auditory wing Monitor, one of the most beloved but misplaced post-punk bands of the era. Their single self-titled 1981 LP was finally reissued last year to not enough fanfare on the Superior Viaduct label.

Subsequently, Michael honed his songwriter chops leading the avant-cowpunk band The Romans through a couple of albums to near-glory, and has recently been devoting his energies to the preservation and perpetuation of Tiki culture -- the peculiar mid-century American translation of traditional Polynesian art, music, food, and lifestyle that captured the imaginations of many from the post-punk generation -- including frequent WImP collaborator Jeffrey Vallance.

So we have a lot of material to pick from to fill up the hour, and plenty of L.A. art and post-punk historical veins to mine. Tune in Sunday Aug 26th at 12 noon to www.kchungradio.org! And check back for archival links.

Jeffrey, Michael, and the other WImP operatives (most notably master collagist and Solid Eye member Steve Thomsen) are among the subjects -- along with Judith F. Baca, Hans Burkhardt, Karen Carson, John Divola, Scott Grieger, Channa Horwitz, Michael C. McMillen, C.R. Stecyk III, Rena Small, Benjamin Weissman, Robert and Suzanne Williams, and many others -- of Valley Vista: Art in the San Fernando Valley, ca. 1970-1990, a sort of San Fernando Valley riposte to the Getty's 2011/12 Pacific Standard Time extravaganza, curated by my other guest, art writer Damon Willick, Ph.D.

Valley Vista runs from Aug 25 – Oct 11, 2014 at the Cal State Northridge Art Galleries, 18111 Nordhoff Street, Northridge, CA, 91330-8299. It's open Mon-Sat 12-4pm, Thurs 12-8pm (closed Monday, Sept. 1) Public Reception: Sat, Sept 6, 4–7 pm; Gallery Talk: Mon, Sept 15 10 am; Panel Discussion: Sat, Sept 27 1pm. More info: http://www.csun.edu/artgalleries/

CC on LARZ Pt 01: Juvenilia Mix

This Sunday at Noon on Doug Harvey's Less Art Radio Zine, I'll be doing a live uninterrupted hour-long mix of cassette recordings made by Christian Cummings as a young self-taught experimental audio artist over a decade ago. These tapes miraculously escaped the devastating studio fire by being in my possession.

F for CHAOS!

So much going on with Perform Chinatown 2014: CHAOS REIGNS! that I'll just use this one image to stand in for all the documentation that is to come - F will play live on the Mainstage at 8:30, and Chaos will never be the same again!

Virtual Solo Show of Flash Fudd Fashions

Cutting edge online fashionista destination artfuck.com invited me to contribute tee-shirt designs to their rapidly expanding array of auteur couture. I obliged with blown up fragments from my collage comic sequence Flash Fudd, which I have been working on since I was 11 years old! Here are a few examples, but there's plenty more to see over at http://www.artfuck.com/doug-harvey. Cheap at half the price!

Firesign Theatre's Phil Proctor & Archivist Taylor Jessen on LARZ!

Doug Harvey's Less Art Radio Zine is honored to host one of the last of the great radio artists, Phil Proctor of Firesign Theatre along with workaholic FT Archivist Taylor Jessen this Sunday July 20th at 12 Noon on www.kchungradio.org. The Firesign Theatre -- in the tradition of Stan Freberg, Max Ferguson, The Goons, Bob & Ray, and Henry Jacobs -- approached radio as an open playing field and a quintessential but (happily/criminally) unsupervised Modernist artform.

Simultaneously avant-garde and populist, collective and idiosyncratic, intricately crafted and improvisational -- The Firesign Theatre's work as radio innovators was overshadowed by their enormous success as Columbia Records' "Beatles of Comedy." Their 1971 LP I Think We’re All Bozos On This Bus is the masterpiece of this period, and the subject of my newly-published chapbook from Insert Blanc Press, What’s Happening in The Firesign Theatre’s I Think We’re All Bozos On This Bus as Best as I Can Make Out.

With the recent release of Duke of Madness Motors -- Jessen's labor of love and a copiously illustrated account of the FT's radio career, including an 80-hour DVD of recently rediscovered audio transcriptions -- the FT's reputation as pioneers of postmodern radio art has been irrefutably solidified. All Hail Proctor and Jessen!

Let the CHAOS Begin! Ha ha ha ha!

The sixth edition of Perform Chinatown 2014, L.A.’s premier performance art gathering, will present over 40 performers, distributed across a host of Chinatown galleries and public spaces on the 26th of July between 12 Noon and 10 PM.

This year’s rendition pools the complementary curatorial talents of Doug Harvey, Lee Lynch, and Paige Wery.

Perform Chinatown 2014 : CHAOS REIGNS! stretches the boundaries of Performance Art to include live experimental music, historical reenactments, survivalist workshops, guided meditation rituals, chess tournaments, poetry, dance, video, and food – as well as the cutting edge New Genre happenings that define the field.

http://performchinatown.com/

Apparently Sisyphean Workout Pays Off!

It took 2 days to haul this 287 pound thrift-store treadmill up the concrete steps and down the narrow root-cracked walkway into the backyard (not to mention the months MA spent trolling craigslist and the trip to the depths of Huntington Park to retrieve it), but its worth it just to see the happy smiling whippet faces ready to start working off that flab!

White dust 'n' perished birds leaves its hex in the air?

Thanks to everyone who came out to the Insert Blanc Rabble celebration at Machine. My ritual slapstick sealing of the picture plane was preceded by various incantatory, satirical, and 'patacritical presentations by Alexandra Grant, Holly Myers, steve roden, and Tyler Stallings (with encouraging words from host Matthew Timmons). Special thanks to Daniel, Jenn, and Isabel, who sorted the inverted logistics and filled my pie-pans -- and to Jimmy Chertkow who did all that and took these photos. It was unexpectedly meaningful, as are the best things in life. Oh wait, that's "free." Oh well. Kudos to whoever inscribed that pie!

(PS: The performance consisted of me in a clown costume (Thanks Marnie!) backlit by blue video projection light, systematically pie-ing the front window of Machine Project from inside (audience on the street outside) until it was completely full, to the soundtrack of the climactic 6 minutes of the Firesign Theatre's I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus, which is the subject on my hot-off-the-presses Rabble pamphlet, entitled What’s Happening in The Firesign Theatre’s I Think We’re All Bozos On This Bus as Best as I Can Make Out.)

Rabble-Rousing Launch for Firesign Bozos Pamphlet!

Tonight's performance piece is an homage to the subject of my hot-off-the-presses pamphlet from Insert Blanc Press' Rabble imprint, What’s Happening in The Firesign Theatre’s I Think We’re All Bozos On This Bus as Best as I Can Make Out - available here.

Image- outtake from FT Bozos album cover shoot by John Rose.

Rabble at MPPSfP
(Machine Project Project Space for Projects)
Thursday July 10, 2014 at 8 p.m.
Insert Blanc Press imprint Rabble
co-edited/curated by Holly Myers & Mathew Timmons

Join us for the grievously belated but no less ardent, eager, and enthusiastic launch of Rabble, an imprint of Insert Blanc Press dedicated to the publication of innovative critical writing in pamphlet form. We aim to celebrate the writers whose very fine work we’ve published in the last two years, herald those who are slated soon to appear, and generally extoll our ongoing mission of bringing the excitement back into criticism. Rabble is co-edited by Holly Myers and Mathew Timmons.

The evening will include readings, performances, and other occasions of rabble rousing by Myers, Timmons, Alexandra Grant, Doug Harvey, Steve Roden, and Tyler Stallings.

Part of a selection of events curated by Amy Garofano. Blurring the line between performance and exhibition, this series of events uses the Machine Project Project Space for Projects as a container for both actions and the effects of those actions. Each artist in this series will create an event that doubles as an opening. During the event the work will be in flux. The aftermath of the event will remain in the space to operate as a monument, remnant, diary entry, time capsule, or trace. In the days following the event, visitors can experience the aftermath from the storefront window as a kind of forensic tableau.

Find out more at:
http://machineproject.com/machine-project-project-space-for-projects/

Gray Lake Scars Pie Whispers and Smiles

I have so much blogging to catch up on, and no time - several upcomings to plug too.... But first, I happened to see Michael Arata's monumental painting "Gray Lake Scars Pie Whispers and Smiles" installed in the West LA College gallery -- it had been shown down south somewheres, but he hadn't got a photo yet. It's 13 X 26 ft!

I was all like "You should leave it up and keep the gallery open so people can see it in the flesh" and he was all like "OK" and so we would like to announce Michael Arata's solo summer show "Gray Lake Scars Pie Whispers and Smiles" (also the name of the painting, detail above widescreen ATJ)

It will be on view Monday-Thursday 12-4 PM from June 30 to July 25 at West Los Angeles College Art Gallery, Fine Arts Complex, 9000 Overland Ave. Culver City, California 90230 Phone (310) 287-4200. Directions and parking: http://wlacgallery.org/directions-parking-contact/

ALHAMBRA on LARZ on KCHUNG

Due to the phenomenal number of inquiries regarding the mystery track we played during the recent Wounded Lion episode, we've asked two of the perpetrators of Special Girl - The ALHAMBRA Chinese-American Children's Choir's Jimmy Chertkow and Jaime Paul Lamb - to join us in the KCHUNG studios on Sunday July 6 at 12 Noon to share more material from their forthcoming debut, play some selections from their earlier solo and collaborative oeuvre, spin some fave platters, talk about their studio praxis, their microbrewery fantasies, and their most recent occult initiations.

www.kchungradio.org

Chloe-Pop in the LBC

Bitches gotta represent! Or it's game over man, game over! (paraphrase of I. Cutler & L. Hurst)

Brad and Raffi from Wounded Lion on LARZ!

Los Angeles painters Raffi Kalenderian - whose exquisite, highly personal figurative paintings are currently on view at Suzanne Vielmetter Projects - and Brad Eberhard, both members of the mighty WOUNDED LION collective, will be my guests on Less Art Radio Zine this Sunday, June 22nd at 12 Noon, KCHUNG radio 1680 AM or www.kchungradio.org

Raffi and Brad will probably talk about their latest paintings, spin some tunes - with a healthy dose of WL if I have any say, and debut new WL material live in the studio! It promises to be an action-packed hour, so be sure and tune in Sunday at noon! You might want to prep yourself by watching some of their awesome videos on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCA3_JkbkoZMk_UeCyjOE7Ag

After the Jump are a couple of the articles I've written about WL: 

Outsider DIY Cinema at its Most!

Celebrity can be problematic. In fact, celebrity is one of the most poisonous influences on individual and collective human psychology at work in contemporary society, undermining the concept of individual creative autonomy as it unilaterally erases millennia-old collectively authored cultural traditions in the blink of a botoxed eye. Scientists believe that global warming is directly linked to celebrity emissions. Fuck celebrity. I wasn’t even going to participate in this “Celebrity” themed issue. But then I heard about Giuseppe.

In the late ’80s, Giuseppe Andrews was living with his Dad in a van in a grocery store shopping lot in Malibu, when his Dad—former rhythm guitarist for the Bee Gees and Andy Gibb—got a $50 gig in a hair infomercial. And it turned out they needed a kid for one scene. One thing led to another and Giuseppe was soon appearing in major Hollywood productions like Independence Day, Pleasantville and American History X, culminating in a costar role in the 1999 Eddie Furlong coming-of-age at a KISS concert saga Detroit Rock City.

This is where things start to get interesting. Detroit Rock City tanked at the box office, but director Adam Rifkin kept in touch with Giuseppe, who—increasingly dissatisfied with Hollywood and its fussy micromanagerial production methodologies—put his acting career on the back burner in order to do what he really wanted, which was to direct. But rather than entrench himself further in the Industry, Giuseppe reinvented himself as the ultimate DIY auteur. By this time, he and his dad had settled in the Ramona Trailer Park in Ventura, and Giuseppe began writing, directing, shooting, editing, scoring and acting in absurdist fictions starring the elderly fringe-dwelling denizens of his compound, on budgets that only occasionally rose beyond three figures.

Seven years and 23 rough cinematic gems later, Rifkin took a camera to Ventura to document the making of #24—Garbanzo Gas, Giuseppe’s attempt to set a record by shooting a feature in two days for $1000. Giuseppe Makes a Movie—which has its U.S. debut at the Los Angeles Film Festival on June 14th—successfully boils down the outsider weirdness and outrageous scatological and sexual humor of Giuseppe’s oeuvre into an accurate, if necessarily superficial, précis.

Unexpectedly, it also unfolds as a moving meditation on creativity, community and the true purpose of art. And Giuseppe emerges as the improbable bastard grandchild of the most radical cinematic positions of the ’60s. “All that means anything in any kind of art form,” he proclaims early in the doc “is a vibe—if the vibe is important, if you’re digging the vibe of the whole thing—by which I mean the idea… then that’s all that matters. All that other little shit, it’s absolutely worthless.” Although he comes across as something of a gutter savant, Giuseppe’s influences are film-school impeccable. Garbanzo Gas, for example, was inspired by a graphic slaughterhouse scene in Rainer Fassbinder’s In a Year of 13 Moons—Giuseppe thought to himself, “If I just picked a random cow and I sent her on an adventure, what would that be? So I started writing this story about a cow that the slaughterhouse sends on an all-expense-paid vacation to a motel.”...

Read the rest of Giuseppe's Factory online at http://artillerymag.com/giuseppes-factory/ or in the forthcoming "Celebrity" issue

Giuseppe Andrews’ films, music, visual art and writings are available at www.giuseppeandrews.net

Giuseppe Makes a Movie
Directed by Adam Rifkin
giuseppemakesamovie.com
U.S. Premiere: LA Film Festival
Saturday, June 14 at 10 p.m.
Regal Cinemas 10;
Tickets & for more info: LAFF

Ott on LARZ as a Youtube video

So since the KCHUNG archive is continuing its torturous hejira to a new server, I figured I'd upload this corrected mp3 of the show in time to promote the premiere of Lake Los Angeles this Saturday at the Los Angeles Film Festival. (I know, I still have to get Elliott Hundley's show up somewhere, but it needs considerable editing to clarify Lindsey's triumph over Stevie).

I've never put up a video this long on youtube, but it seems to have gone alright. And I believe it demonstrates my mastery of the intricacies of that most intimidating of digital video editing platforms, iMovie. Check out those dropshadows, suckas!

OTT ON LARZ!

This week's guest on Less Art Radio Zine on KCHUNG will be local independent cinema auteur and micro-label mogul Mike Ott, whose new film Lake Los Angeles has its US premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival on Sat, Jun 14th (7:30pm at Regal Cinema, L.A. Live, Theater 10 if you must know but there's only rush seats left).

LLA is the final chapter in his Antelope Valley Trilogy, preceded by the award winning features LiTTLEROCK and Pearblossom Hwy -- who owe their success in no small part to the presence of hot indie star/model Cory Zacharia, whose casual, half-improvised dialog buoyed Ott's hypnotic realism.

We'll be asking Mike why Zachariah only appears in a single bar scene in the new movie; why the whole damn thing's in Spanish, and why he didn't take my soundtrack suggestion of "Oh Mickey (Spanish Language Version)" for one of the pivotal scenes.

We'll also hopefully be listening to some of the music from his films -- much of which derives from his involvement in the independent music community, most significantly via his label Sound Virus, which issued sides from Liars, !!!, Hello Fever, and A Trillion Barnacle Lapse.

Who the hell are those people?! I don't know. Perhaps we'll find out. Tune into Doug Harvey's Less Art Radio Zine at 12 Noon on Sunday June 8th, 2014, and join me as I learn the answers to these and many other questions on Doug Harvey's Less Art Radio Zine. Doug Harvey's Less Art Radio Zine! Doug Harvey's Less Art Radio Zine! Doug Harvey's Less Art Radio Zine! Thank you.

Must See Show in Irvine - One Week Only!

Daniel Hawkins and Jenn Berger are two of the most interesting artists among the current crop of LA grad students, and they are mounting their MFA thesis shows at UC Irvine (along with Jimena Sarno and Isabel Theselius, neither of whose work I know) this week, opening the afternoon of Saturday May 24th from 2 - 5 PM.

Daniel may be familiar as a recent addition to F, my noise band with Marnie Weber and Dani Tull, or from his Amplified Pepperoncini Jar performances from a couple of years ago, or his 2009 show at Las Cienegas Projects. These activities are just the tip of the Hawkins iceberg, though, which is chockfull of epic, ever-expanding Sisyphean Gesamtkunstwerks, including the production of a Val Kilmer mountain-climbing movie and the piecemeal construction of an actual-size replica of the Hoover Dam.

His thesis show, Desert Lighthouse Protocols, collects a portion of the documentation and preparatory works for the titular beacon for wanderers in the Mojave Desert, allegedly built, destroyed by vandals and currently under reconstruction. 

The show features a spectacular large-scale panoramic landscape painting, the completed housing cap for the Fresnel lens, a patchwork actual-size drawing of the lighthouse, a sample stock certificate for potential investors, and an array of other elements and ephemera in a sort of virtual rendition or mock-up visitor's center for the actual land art intervention. 

Hopefully a more centrally located gallerist will snap this show up and restage it, but in case they happen to be from central Manhattan or central Berlin, you should cross the Orange Curtain, just this once, and dig the construction.

Daniel introduced me to the work of fellow MFA candidate Jenn Berger, and if she followed my installation advice to the letter, her show should be just about as spectacular as Daniel's. Jenn's work also runs the gamut from painting and drawing to kinetic sculpture, video projections, photography, and various disciplinary hybrids.

Jenn's work pretty consistently explores dysfunctional -- or at very least decidedly non-vanilla -- family dynamics, as well as off-kilter examinations of the animal kingdom -- often in overlapping configurations as seen in this somewhat disturbing kangaroo love sketch.

This free-standing life-size digital photocollage places her still-living father in his coffin, more or less. And these giraffes appear to be in the midst of some kind of aesthetic vivisection. And don't get me started on her sister, niece, and Granny. Just haul ass and check it out "in the flesh".

UCI MFA Thesis Exhibition Part III

Daniel Hawkins (Font Gallery CAC)
Jimena Sarno (Back Gallery CAC)
Isabel Theselius (Room Gallery)
Jenn Berger (UAG Gallery)

May 22 - 30, 2014 | Reception 2 - 5 pm May 24 | Soft Opening 6 - 9 pm May 22

University Art Gallery | 712 Arts Plaza | Irvine, CA 92697-2775
For a map and directions: http://uag.arts.uci.edu/directions

Elliott Hundley on LARZ Sunday at 12

This Sunday, May 11th, 2014 at 12 Noon, painter/sculptor/collagist Elliott Hundley will be joining me on Less Art Radio Zine to decide once and for all who is the more genius: Lindsey Buckingham or Stevie Nicks? (The answer is it's Lindsey.) KCHUNG Radio 1630 AM or at www.kchunradio.org

Also, Elliott's current show of amazing new works - described by David Pagel in the LA Times as the most "muscular and skeletal ... since his first solo show in 2006" - are on view at Regen Projects  through next Saturday (May 17th). I also advise you to check out his recent work from last year's show at Andrea Rosen Gallery.

"...In truth, Hundley had been searching for a method to dislodge his praxis from the tyranny of glue, and—inspired by both the poetically formalist land art of Andy Goldsworthy and Öyvind Fahlström’s magnetic variable paintings—he hit on the humble solution of turning the picture plane into a pincushion. This single small shift had enormous repercussions within Hundley’s craft, allowing him to isolate individual pictographic elements literally and allegorically and to deploy them across a newly liberated topological landscape in a manner that suggested a roiling surface frozen in one of an effectively infinite set of possible configurations.

 In addition to these dimensional, compositional, and semiotic benefits, the pins incorporated a whole sphere of connotative content, with the domestic craft of sewing being the most immediately observable. From the outset, Hundley’s collage works have openly embraced the disparaged amateur side of their heritage, most fundamentally in his constant integration of original photographs of emotionally significant personal friends (the artist has likened his work to “the back pages of a high school yearbook”), but most conspicuously in his abundant use of beads, sequins, shells, costume jewelry, ribbons, upholstery, dollhouse furnishings, plastic flowers, peacock and ostrich feathers, and sundry items of the type reclaimed as fine art materials by the feminist artists associated with the pattern and decoration movements of the 1970s. His use of straight pins as both basic structure and (in the case of colored-plastic-headed and other specialty pins) content aligns his collages with the body-centered art of sewing (as well as the world of haute couture fashion) in an emphatically process-oriented manner; sewing pins are explicitly temporary placeholders, meant to be removed as soon as the garment is complete.

Of almost equal and somewhat creepier import are the pins’ connotations of entomological taxonomy: the passion of the insect collector, whose specimens, on retrieval from the killing jar, are mounted on specially coated beetle-juice-resistant display pins, usually with an accompanying didactic panel. This association summons a dark pop cultural archetype of erotic fetishism—à la John Knowles’s 1963 novel The Collector (in which a butterfly collector wins the lottery and repurposes his hobbycraft towards an art student with whom he’s smitten)—that adds considerable gravitas and humor to Hundley’s inventory of partial friends. But it also speaks to the less caricatured fetishism inherent to amateur keepsake collage: the identification of even the smallest ephemeral object as identical with (or a vessel for) a fond or meaningful memory and therefore deserving and in need of preservation.

It is difficult not to imagine these connotations spilling over to encompass the eventual acquisition of Hundley’s finished works by museums and private collectors—and the role of collecting in the history of art to which Hundley so often makes reference. The displays of natural history museums have been an important strain in recent art, from the Museum of Jurassic Technology (which includes several insect exhibits) to Damien Hirst, but Hundley’s approach is more allusive, his categorical impulse filtered through a nonverbal, nonhierarchical syntax, more akin perhaps to Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne-Atlas (1924–29), or the Internet.

Social stitching and phallic piercing aside, Hundley’s pinning bears several fruitful second-tier connotations, most notably as a form of mutated cartography, where coded pins are arranged to represent troop movements or consumer demographics, in constant flux, simultaneously a site for accounting and strategizing. This aerial topographic motif has emerged as a subtle but typically expansive formal device in Hundley’s art, with undulating contours articulated through variations in the height of the pins and the placement of the collage elements along their length. The results have been uniformly organic: a wall-mounted relief map of a forested landscape or ocean floor, or a giant model of some parasitical worm bristling with setae..."

by DH from "Cut Up or Shut Up: The Unspeakable Narratives of Elliott Hundley" in Elliott Hundley: The Bacchae , published by the Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University in 2012.

Your Ad Here

I don’t remember when I first ran across Ad Reinhardt’s dazzling, sarcastic collage comics—probably in the ’80s (around the same time I stumbled upon his brilliant “Art is Art. Everything else is everything else” screeds, but before I saw his equally but oppositely amazing non-monochromatic “black paintings” at MOCA in 1991). Reinhardt’s cartoons are timeless classics, at least as far as art magazines go—perennially relevant probes into Modernism and its discontents, rendered in camera-ready graphic design gold—what’s not to like? All art students and most art world denizens could learn a thing or three from ol' Ad.

What’s surprising is that—until now—their circulation in mass media formats has come in dribs and drabs, sometimes with years-long droughts between doses. Finally, in conjunction with last winter’s museum-worthy Reinhardt retrospective at David Zwirner gallery, these bitingly satirical yet earnestly didactic broadsides have been collected in a high quality hardcover book from the gallery and Hatje Cantz publishing.

Created mostly between 1946 and 1954, Reinhardt’s cartoons are remarkable in both their form and content—often elegantly intertwined, since the subject matter never strays far from the vicissitudes of pictorialism. Picture-making, according to Reinhardt, was the reactionary nemesis of “Pure Art”—a position he reiterates tirelessly with cut-and-paste fragments of popular, scientific and art historical line illustrations spanning the entire history of visual culture, augmented by his own cheerfully loopy penmanship.

Using pictures to undermine the authority of pictures is typical of Reinhardt’s wry ambiguities. A contentious contrarian, his ceaseless bullshit-calling leaves no stone unturned, no heel unwounded, and no tenable ethical position in sight. In addition to his profound disdain for pictures, Reinhardt expresses constant contempt for commerce and criticism, and mocks virtually every contemporary artistic persona—from the self-mythologizing romantic heroicism of many of his AbEx colleagues to the pernicious “Artist as Freelance Prick-of-Conscience Busy Bee.”...

Read the rest of Under the Radar: Looking at Ad Reinhardt in the May 2014 issue of Artillery Magazine, available in both physical and virtual reality.

Ad Reinhardt | How to Look: Art Comics | Text by Robert Storr | Hatje Cantz/David Zwirner 2013

Images ©2013 Estate of Ad Reinhardt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London.