What's This Mess?!

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


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

But what does it MEAN?

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

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

One Kippenberger with everything, for here

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

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

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


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


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

Read the rest of Enter the K-Hole here.

The Update

Here

"The Hole Truth and Nothing But"

Aspects of Mel's Hole Panel Discussion

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

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

Let Your Kato Light Shine

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

Compulsory Figure Drawings

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

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

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

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

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

Mel's Blowhole?

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

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

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

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

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

Browbeaten: High, Low, Uni, No

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


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


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


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

The Opening of the Hole

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

More Dogstars at the Museum

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

Are You Washed in the Blood of the Hole?

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

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

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

Cromatic Mess Syndrome

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


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



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


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

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

Some Validation at Last!

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

Conceiving the Void

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

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

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

Imminent Laffoley Sighting

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

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

Compost-Modernism

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

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

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

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

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

Olfactory Olympics

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

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


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

Hole on the Horizon

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


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

888 Fireworks 888

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

Not in Ellensburg Anymore

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

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

Review Catchup 2: Peter Saul Not at MOCA or MOMA

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


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


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

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



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

Review Catchup 1: Rauschenberg Not at the Huntington

Above: Leroy Grannis, Hermosa Beach Strand (1967)

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

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

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

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

Meet the Beatless

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

Waterloo/Sunset's Fine (Art)

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

The Final Belch Ignited

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