None of the Above

"Toward the end of Membrane Lane, Charles Irvin’s faux conspiracy documentary on the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (an organization that champions people claiming to have been falsely accused of child sexual abuse), there’s a particularly startling non sequitur. In the midst of the relatively straightforward montage of appropriated news footage and sequences in which the camo fatigues–sporting narrator/artist explains his conspiratorial flow charts, there is a jump cut to a strangely familiar image, which takes a second to place — a shot of the “foaming brush” in one of those DIY car washes, leaning upright against the generic tile wall, oozing globs of white soap. Then, just as you realize the footage is reversed, and the brush is sucking the foam up from the gutter back into its infinite milky reservoir, the rebunking of the Satanic abuse debunkers continues, leaving you with that distinctive “Wait! What the fuck was that, and how did it get in here?” sensation.



This sort of conceptual embolism seems to be the curatorial premise of Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from L.A., the current museum omnibus exhibit where Irvin’s DayGlo-primitivist cartoon paintings — and video — can currently be experienced. Nine Lives is something of a curatorial coming-out party for Hammer adjunct curator Ali Subotnick, whose genealogy as co-founder/director of prank Chelsea nonspace Wrong Gallery and occasional high-end journal Charley (both in collaboration with fellow critic/curator Massimiliano Gioni and eminent Vaffanculist Maurizio Cattelan) should have pushed her to the front of the schedule of exhibitions a couple years ago.



Tellingly, Nine Lives is more reminiscent of one of these prior joint efforts than it is of the Hammer’s string of previous regional survey shows (Snapshot, Thing, East of Eden) with which it is publicly equated. The most recent Charley (No. 5) is a treasure chest of idiosyncratic visual genius (if not the corresponding data — none of the artworks is dated or identified, and most of the essays are cribbed from Wikipedia), compiling the work of diverse outsiders like Jess, Noah Purifoy, Ree Morton, Forrest Bess, Christopher Knowles and more than 100 other remarkable figures from the margins of the contemporary art-historical canon.



Nine Lives shifts the focus to living artists working in Los Angeles but keeps the quirk factor — and its attendant awkwardness in terms of art-world acceptability — cranked to 11. Foremost among these are two of L.A.’s elder statesmen of quirk: Llyn Foulkes and Jeffrey Vallance. Foulkes is a remarkable painter, whose half-century of work seamlessly integrates Abstract Expressionism, West Coast Assemblage and Pop alongside his darkly personal political ruminations and signature obsession with exaggerated pictorial relief effects, with his carved-out Disney figures and post-Apocalyptic landscapes verging on the dimensionality of dioramas. Great as it is to see such a stellar selection of his work in one place (particularly his epic The Last Frontier, last seen briefly in the back of Patty Faure’s gallery), one hopes it doesn’t function in lieu of the overdue full retrospective Foulkes and the L.A. art community deserve."



Read the rest of Peripheral Visions: Nine of L.A.’S Square Pegs Get Hammered here.

Images:
Lisa Anne Auerbach Never Forget (front) 2007
Victoria Reynolds Flight of the Reindeer 2003
Charles Irvin Untitled 2008
Llyn Foulkes Deliverance 2007 (This piece was supposed to be in Some Paintings, BTW)
Lisa Anne Auerbach Never Forget (back) 2007

It's Like a Bathtub in Here

I seem to remember taking some photos at Lee's screening, but I'm pretty sure this wasn't one of them. I'll get around to that later - I just wanted to direct your attention to this outstanding recent experimental graphic narrative on John Higham's blog. Not Obscure is always worth checking out for John's richly rewarding take on life on earth (particularly in a tiny Inuit village in Nunavut), but once in a while he drops one of his mind-bending art or literary gems in the mix, adding a whole other dimension. Case in point being The Adventures of Jack in Dreamland. "Enjoy"

Towards a Hier Good

"Click image to enlarge"

Thursday, March 26, 2009
6:00pm - 11:00pm
Screenings at 6, 7:30, & 9
Gayle & Ed Roski MFA Gallery
Graduate Fine Arts Building (IFT)
3001 S. Flower St.
Los Angeles, CA 90007
(Entrance on 30th St. between Flower St. and Figueroa St.)

Hi Good is Coming Down Fast

Thursday night marks the debut screenings of Lee Lynch's new film project (and one night only thesis exhibit for his MFA candidacy at USC) "Ned's Draw or the Murder of Hi Good" screening at 6, 7:30, and 9 PM at the USC Roski Graduate Fine Arts Gallery, 3001 South Flower (just east of Figueroa) LA 9007. Followers of this blog will be aware of my lengthy involvement with this project - in fact my very first posting relates to it. I was on the shoot in January, up near Chico, and got hundreds of documentary photos plus 12 hours of 'making of' video footage. Here's a handful. I'll try and post another selection over the next day or two.

I Was a Twentysomething Painting Pachyderm

Here's something from 1987 or so that I thought was lost in the mists of time (AKA the molds of the garden shed) but turned up during research for my forthcoming website www.dougharvey.la

I've always been fond of elephants, but I forgot how far back my interest in them as visual artists went. For the LA Weekly's 2003 List Issue I wrote:

"Sometime in the early '80s, a Syracuse zookeeper named David Gucwa gave a paintbrush to the African elephant Siri and a new branch of non-human art history was born. A few years later, Ruby, an elephant at the Phoenix zoo, became a media sensation with her prodigious output of vibrant works. Realizing the fund-raising potential, zoos across America began shelling out for art supplies. Russian artists Komar and Melamid were inspired to open a school for unemployed Thai elephants to learn painting — a story outlined in their 2000 book When Elephants Paint. These sarcastic foreigners have more than a little invested in ridiculing Modernism, but the good their patronage has done is undeniable — sanctuaries in Thailand, India and Bali now support themselves with work by dozens of elephant artists sold through online galleries at www.soarts.com and www.novica.com. The Balinese sanctuary has been suffering the tourist gap since those discos blew up, and may be assisted directly at baliadventuretours.com. Look for the link to the Have-a-Art Appeal."

Read the rest of Doug Harvey's Favorite Non-Human Artwork here. Those links may be obsolete, but a good place to start looking is www.elephantart.com

The Things in the Kitchen

Things have been pretty hectic what with the puppies and teaching a painting class and disposing of all my old art but I should plug this since I'm in it: L.A. collectors Sirje and Michael Gold have curated the art auction segment of the annual fundraising event WIDE ANGLE for the University Art Museum at Cal State Long Beach, pairing "thirty established artists with thirty artists whose works have been less accessible for Southern California audiences". I'm the latter, paired with Roger Herman. For my piece, I actually took Roger's woodcut kitchen image, flipped it horizontal, and then found all the entities hiding in his composition. There was a preview (and the silent auction of some paired works began) on March 12th at the SmogShoppe in Culver City, but the live auction itself is at the UAM (CSULB, 1250 Bellflower Boulevard, Long Beach, CA 90840-8401) on the 21st in conjunction with a Salle/Armitage shindig. The art will be viewable at the UAM from March 18th through the 20th from 12 to 5 PM. More info here. Above: Kitchen Below: Chien TK (Dog is Coming)

Bonus Art Tip: Chloe actually ate the buff titanium oilstick I used on my painting, and I called the ASPCA poison hotline, and they said that it was OK, and it was.

S'more Paintings

There's been a recent surge of shows by painters who were included in last January's Third Annual LA Weekly Biennial: Some Paintings, and I was hoping to write a roundup piece for the Weekly. Unfortunately, scheduling it was too much of a nightmare, so I'll just use this forum to alert the world to the following current, upcoming, and missed opportunities to catch up on the LA painting scene. Above, Chloe experiences a Dutcherific thought bubble embolism at LAVC's Intuitive Eye: The Diana Zlotnick Collection, which also includes this c. 1960 work by mysterious SP participant Michael Oledart, as well as pieces by Adrian de la Pena, Llyn Foulkes, and Michael Arata.

Mark Dutcher's work is also the subject of a typically spectacular solo show called Havilah at Steve Turner Gallery through March 21. Below: Total Eclipse, 2009


Brad Eberhard's solo debut As Different as Twins is up under the auspices of Thomas Solomon Gallery at Cottage Home through March 14th. Below: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 2009

Tomory Dodge's latest ACME show After Forever is also up through the 14th. Below: Stars, 2009 

Llyn Foulkes, Charles Irvin, and Victoria Reynolds are all featured in Ali Subotnick's Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from LA exhibit at the Hammer Museum, up through May 31. Foulkes: The Lost Frontier, 1997-2005; Irvin: Untitled, 2008; Reynolds: Flight of the Reindeer, 2003







There's also a bunch of shows that have come down, but can still be digi-seen online, including Esther Pearl Watson at Billy Shire, John Kilduff at Jancar, Lisa Adams at Lawrence Asher, Monique Prieto at ACME, Michael Arata at Woodbury University, Constance Mallinson at Angles, David Korty at Michael Kohn, and Kaz Oshiro at Rosamund Felsen. You can understand how I had a little trouble getting organazized! And I'm sure there's a couple I've forgotten - I thought I saw something about an Annie Lapin installation in Pasadena, but it ain't googlin'.

Oh well. Watson: Washing My Hair in the Tub, 2008; Kilduff, Internet TV Collaboration #5, 2008; Adams: After the Deluge, 2008; Prieto: Tomorrow Morning, 2008; Arata: Nigel negotiating Obstacle Course, 2008; Mallinson: Decaying Olympia, 2008; Korty: Untitled (Magazine Stand), 2008; Oshiro: Untitled corner Piece (Turquoise), 2008.

Deutschland Deutschland

"I wonder what Syd Barrett was doing on July 21, 1990, whilst his former Pink Floyd bandmate Roger Waters was cranking the bombast to 11 in Berlin by supersizing that already bloated paean to bilious self-pity known as The Wall and conflating it with the decommissioning — six months prior — of the “anti-Fascist protective rampart” that had divided the German capital and stood as a symbol of Yankee/Soviet stalemate for the previous quarter century. Probably painting.

After his death in 2006, it was revealed that Syd had spent much of his three-decade withdrawal from show business making art, which he sometimes photographed before painting over or destroying. The question that nags me is this: Which is the greater creative act, micromanaging a spectacular but rehashed postmodern Gesamtkunstwerk for half a million people (and millions more via live satellite TV — and all ostensibly for charity!), or daubing away in a Cambridge cellar on a canvas that will probably never see the light of day?

What brings this to mind is Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures, an ambitious and treasure-laden exhibit now happily displacing Damien Hirst (among others) from the second floor of LACMA’s BCAM building. It isn’t just the superficial Berlin Wall reference that summons the mighty Floyd, but the jostling polarities at play, that between hubristic historical importance and unrecorded humility as artistic motivators, and of the almost cosmic narrative of good and evil that drove Cold War politics — and tried to oblige Art into choosing a side.

Completing curator Stephanie Barron’s exceptional historical trilogy that began with 1991’s Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany and continued with ’97’s Exiles and Emigres: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, Two Germanys adheres to this übernarrative closely, albeit in a subtly nuanced and richly detailed way. Beginning with Richard Peter Sr.’s claustrophobic, horizonless documentary photographs of the charred rubble (and citizens) of Dresden, the exhibit winds in a chronological circuit through the schizophrenic era of reconstruction toward the conceptual terminus of reunification. Shell-shocked attempts to assimilate the recent carnage with the tools of Modernism provide the first of many painterly gems, with the luminous biomorphic abstractions of Willi Baumeister, who chose to remain in Third Reich Germany, working in secret after being classified as degenerate.

The bifurcating streams of Communist Party–sanctioned Socialist Realism and laissez faire expressions of the Westside “economic miracle” afford glimpses into summarily disparaged modes of narrative figuration and prescient op/kinetic gizmoism respectively, while the first stirrings of anticonsumerist skepticism that blossomed in the “Capitalist Realism” of Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke are traced to the 1950s typewriter and sewing-machine portraits of Konrad Klapheck. A tableful of Dresdenite Herman Glöckner’s constructivist models — assembled in secret from tiny bits of trash to evade the disapproving eye of the East German Socialist Unity Party — provides a hauntingly poetic riposte to both official programs of aesthetic progress, while looking eerily contemporary — like something from last month’s grad-school open studios."

Read the rest of Divided We Stand: Art of Two Germanys here

Images:
Roger (Syd) Barrett Untitled, 1963, Pencil and oil on board (not in the show, Dummkopf!)
Willi Baumeister Gravour Faust – Scherzo, 1952, Oil and pencil on cardboard (also not in the show, but one I particularly like)
Various models by Herman Glöckner, c. 1960
Sigmar Polke, Object Kartoffelhaus (Potato House Object), 1967

Give Me Equulibrium or Give Me Horse Tranquilizers

If anyone's in the vicinity of the City of Brea, or passing through, this is the last week to check out Out of School, a show that gathers together a disparate group of works created by people who teach in SoCal art schools - including myself, Caroline Clerc, Roger Herman, Linda Day, and many others. My piece is a combination of two previously exhibited horse head sculptures, both of which will be entering private collections after this show. L: Precious Nuggets: St. Sebastian Annie Edson Taylor Queen of the Night, 2007 R: St. Sebastian Ann Coulter Daniel Radcliffe Mandelbrot Set, 2008

The City of Brea Gallery is located in the Brea Civic & Cultural Center at 1 Civic Center Circle, Plaza Level. Gallery hours are Wednesday - Sunday, 12 to 5 p.m., closed Monday, Tuesday and holidays. Admission is $2 and Brea residents are free.

Zlotnickmania 2-Nite!

Tonight is the opening of Intuitive Eye - LA Valley College's show of works from Diana Zlotnick's collection, which includes some of my work. I'll also be participating in the panel discussion. LAVC is just at the intersection of the 110 and 134 freeways.

Dennis Reed writes "A nonlinear thinker, Diana does not progress logically in even steps from one thing to the next. Rather she leaps, propelled by her inventive intuition and instinct. They have served her well. She has built a unique and enviable collection that includes early works by important artists: Andy Warhol, George Herms, Wallace Berman, and Richard Pettibone, to name but a few.

Her engagement with art is passionate and engulfing. Although she buys art from galleries, she prefers a more direct link to artists. She focuses on those whose careers are just emerging. She often visits their studios and befriends them, being among the first to buy their work. I have heard artists comment, years later, that Diana provided badly needed money and encouragement to continue working when they most needed it.

When she brings home new art, it is not placed carefully over the couch - I don't think she even owns a couch! The rooms in her house, even the bathrooms, are small exhibition spaces with rotating shows. New purchases join older works, so that a newly made piece, the paint barely dry, might hang next to vintage works acquired long ago by now veteran artists such as Andy Warhol, Edward Kienholz, or Lynn Foukles. She has been collecting since 1954, after all, when one of her first acquisitions was a John Altoon painting purchased from Walter Hopps at the now legendary Ferus Gallery. The work in this exhibition is but a small sampling of her extensive holdings."

Reception & Discussion with the Collector
7 pm, Wednesday, February 18, 2009

February 18 - March 26, 2009
Monday through Thursday
11 am until 2 pm and 6 pm until 9 pm


Images: Above: Don Bachardy, Portrait of Diana, 1982, acrylic on paper; Below:Doug Harvey, Precious Nuggets: The Happy Place, 2007, Mixed Media on found foam (Photo by Josh White)

Puppy Excursions

At the moment, Chloe's enrolled in a class which requires submission of weekly photodocumentation of her ongoing integration into the larger human social world. Above we see her shopping in For Pets Only on Hilhurst, sporting her newly purchased ultra-attractive pink raincoat - just too short enough! Portfolio, whose testosterone levels continue to surge to new heights on a daily basis, prefers more rugged leisure activities, as evidenced by this snap of him on a recent whitewater rafting trip to Arizona. Next port: Westminster!

Splitting at the Seems

Tonight, Thursday Feb 12th, is the night for LA's monthly Downtown Art Walk which this time includes the closing reception for Larry Pearsall's Beneath the Seam at the Downtown Art Center Gallery from 6 - 9 PM.

"There’s an abandoned warehouse near the heart of Ice Dirt Town, where a bald, bearded and extremely tall pedophile named Bon lords over a harem of barely teenage boys — Lapito, Alex, Day Day, Billy, Ralph, Kevin; amputees Earl (left arm), Fakebein (right arm) and Marleytom (right leg), and about a dozen others. The boys don’t seem to realize they’re being abused. In fact, the few times we see them out of their ubiquitous denim overalls — being tickled or posing for a snapshot — they remain chastely clad in shorts and socks. But the cats see all. The Applebaycats, led by Blato, creep through the broken heating ducts of the abandoned warehouse: observing, commenting and envisioning a better time. A time beyond Bon.

This is the underlying scenario for one of the most compelling exhibits of narrative-based art in recent memory, a tour de force titled “Beneath the Seams,” currently on view at the recently opened DAC Gallery on Main Street at the edge of downtown’s gallery row. Artist Larry Pearsall is soft-spoken but happy to talk about his work and the avowedly fictional world it depicts. “The cats can’t do much. Except this one called the police on Bon. He was the last one to call the police, and that’s when the police came,” recounts the artist. “Bon goes to jail. Him and Molly and Brures. And they were after Balisha and her boyfriend, Reggie.” Balisha leads a contingent of slightly older, mostly African-American teens, who seem to sometimes provide the boys’ escape from Bon’s predations — and sometimes participate in them.

It’s hard to get a clear picture about the exact chain of events, or the specific roles each character plays, because Pearsall unfolds his story in discrete achronological fragments: single-frame tableaux rendered in a flat, jagged cartoon style as acrylic paintings on paper or canvas (as well as sculptures not included in this show) that jump discontinuously between settings, times and characters. Moreover, the almost 100 works included in “Beneath the Seams” are only a fraction of the completed chapters comprising a complex epic that shows no indication of reaching completion anytime soon. Which is probably why writer/director/producer Obie Scott Wade thinks Pearsall’s work is perfect for an Adult Swim–style animated series.

“I fell in love with the notion of animating Larry’s brilliant work because he paints as if God were holding a gun to his head and he cannot tell a lie,” asserts Wade, whose résumé includes Baby Looney Tunes and a transgender version of Shazam!, called Shezow. Citing Persepolis and Waltz With Bashir, Wade believes that “if handled properly, animation is the perfect medium to deal with hypersensitive subject matter. Larry is painting a singular universe populated with fully realized characters dealing with some very grimy issues.”

Read the rest of On the Seamy Side: Larry Pearsall's Avant-Garde Graphic Narrative here

Retroactive Puppy Cuteness Megadose

Sorry for the lack of posts, been too busy battening down the hatches (it's actually raining in LA) and getting rid of art. I'll try and knock out some quick mostly photo posts to catch y'all up on important developments hereabouts. First things first, for those with a Portfolio jones, here are two shots from the cover photo shoot for his forthcoming psychedelic solo LP "Is This Real Life? Why Is This Happening to Me? Is This Gonna Be Forever?" (I also just realized that Portfolio could be seen to be inside the blue cylinder in my recent Mad Gregs post. What does this mean?) plus an array of attractive combinations of Nigel, Chloe, Portfolio, and various soft pieces of furniture. But let's start with Chloe's courageous expedition to the bowels of Baller Hardware, and the strange creatures she encountered there...








Whippet Good!