Nigel's Recent Press Roundup

M.A. & Nigel are the subject of one of the first in a projected series of spotlight profiles by J. Gerard Schwerdt on the K9 Nose Work web page.

"When you mention the breed name “Whippet”, what usually comes to mind is a slender, athletic racing dog running around a track at speeds up to forty miles per hour, chasing a fast-moving artificial prey object. That life may have suited Nigel, a five-year old Whippet owned and handled by M.A. Peers. But for now he is content to be unique among dogs of his breed. According to M.A., “I know and compare notes with a number of people who do competitive dog sports with Whippets and Greyhounds. So far, I haven’t managed to convince any other sight hound people that this [sport] is great for our dogs. So Nigel is the only Whippet doing nose work that I know of.” Nigel’s slow, deliberate movement while searching for odor belies the fact that he was bred for speed, and lots of it, at a moment’s notice."

Continue reading about Nigel's Nosework triumphs here or ATJ

General Monty's Campaign

MA's always complaining that I don't put up images of Portfolio in a correct show stack, so I finally got around to it. The trick is that is comes from the blog of one of Portfolio's colleagues, Monty (he's the other dog you can see through the metal whippet eye in the Lompoc entry below). You can visit his blog here to get a funny, finely documented account of the whippet campaign trail, the triumph of agony, etc. plus movies, more Portfolio (and nemesis Viggo!), Canine good Citizenship, and hand-knitted bamboo yarn baby kimonas! What are you waiting for?

Captain Eelbegone Serialized!

Just a heads up that my mid-90s superhero comic Captain Eelbegone in 'A Farewell to Eels' is now being serialized on the Blurred Books website.

North to Lompoc: No Pets/Yes Men

Fans of retired racing greyhound Al Gordon (RIP) will recall his Competition Obedience triumphs at the annual Combined Western Sighthound Specialties at Ryon Park in Lompoc, CA. This year we decided to run up the credit card so that Portfolio could kick some more Conformation butt, and so we could see 107 whippets in one place at the same time.


Portfolio was pulled out by the judge for a close comparison with his ongoing nemesis, the dreaded Viggo. It was clearly a difficult decision and, sadly, the judge went with conventional wisdom instead of deep intuition. Portfolio nevertheless got 2nd in his class of five dogs and won a delightful orange and lime-green horsey toy in addition to his ribbonage.


Its always an adventure visiting these off-the-beaten-path communities, but the weirdest moment came just after our arrival. We took a chance on visiting the show site around 10 PM - thinking the dogs could get a little run in after being cooped up in the rental SUV - and lucked out, finding we could set up our canopy, crates, etc, so we wouldn't have to do it in the morning. It must have been close to midnight when we finally got into the hotel room, and since our cable's been out for a few months, I figured I'd check out what was happening on Adult Swim.


Not much, as it turned out, but then I noticed the Lompoc City cable channel. I had heard about but never checked out the TV version of Democracy Now and the last place I expected to find it was on the civic booster station for a town where migrant workers pick flowers in the shadow of a Federal Penitentiary while prismatic rocket test trails spiral up from Vandenberg Air Force Base. But there it was. I flip the channel, and there are longtime Anti-Conformation activists The Yes Men, hawking their latest cinematic offering The Yes Men Fix the World. It was one of those moments that's so undigestibly WTF that it passes back into the foodchain intact and moves on. If I didn't have these pictures of Andy and Mike and Chloe and Portfolio I'd have thought I dreamed it.

Introducing the Gout Thong!

By popular demand, and developed from a concept by activist/flautist Erik Knutzen, DougH on the Go in conjunction with CafePress is proud to present The Gout Thong - a New American Classic. Don't say we never did anything for you.

Speak of the Devil!

Just after finishing the last post, the WEEKLY not only published my review of Feral house's Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment but bumped it up to 'Featured Story' status, which almost certainly means I'll be getting another check in the mail (joke). I don't know if I'll have time to compare and contrast versions, but I noticed one glitch in the official print & online version, where - in trying to parse one of my rambling convoluted sentences - some one upstairs misidentified the owner of "the point of view of an overworked acolyte" as Robert de Grimston (picture above) rather than author Timothy Wyllie. They also misplaced my hilarious "Process Cheese" title. So you're better off reading the version below, though please continue to patronize the call-girls, laser vaginal rejuvenators and compassionate dispensaries that are the WEEKLY's honored patrons. I know I will.

The Lost Chapter on the Process Church

This piece got bumped for space from the WEEKLY book issue, and is supposed to be printed any day in some form - it was online for a day, then vanished mysteriously! So in case it never surfaces, I present:

Process Cheese and How It Spread

Love Sex Fear Death
The Inside Story of The Process Church of the Final Judgment
by Timothy Wyllie
Edited by Adam Parfrey
304 pages • 7 x 10 • many color images • ISBN: 978-1932595376
Price: $24.95


"The Satanic Ritual Abuse (or SRA) conspiracy fad of the 1980s may have torn apart families, destroyed the lives of innumerable innocent people, and set the credibility of clinical psychology back at least 50 years -- but for fans of sleazy, poorly-researched exploitative true-crime books, it was a godsend. While cognoscenti hold a special place in their hearts for such early fabrications as Michelle Remembers and The Satan Seller, the piece de resistance of the genre was Maury Terry’s enthralling 640-page bestseller The Ultimate Evil, which attributed the Manson, Zodiac, and Son of Sam murders to a global satanic underground masterminded by a sinister cult known as The Process Church of the Final Judgment, led by the shadowy and charismatic Robert de Grimston, who had disappeared from public view in the early 70s.

The only problem was that, by the time Terry’s 1987 magnum opus briefly rekindled the flames of the dwindling SRA media frenzy, de Grimston had reverted to his birth name of Robert Moor and was working an office day job in Staten Island, while the Process Church itself – from which he’d long been excommunicated – had morphed into the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Kanab, Utah, the largest no-kill animal shelter in America. Somewhere between these mundane and sensationalist extremes lay the truth about the Process Church and its role in the cultural upheavals in the 60s, but reliable accounts were fragmentary and scattered.

Enter Adam Parfrey and Genesis P. Orridge. Originally teaming up to issue a facsimile collection of the Process’ strikingly designed apocalyptically-charged magazines (which remain highly sought-after collectors items), the Feral House publisher and Throbbing Gristle/Temple of Psychic Youth founder quickly realized that a number of Process insiders were prepared to go on the record about their years with the controversial sect. The result is Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment – titled after, and reproducing some pages from the group’s glossy underground zine – but dominated by 120 pages of autobiographical reminiscences by Timothy Wyllie AKA Father Micah AKA Mithra AKA Father Jesse, one of the original inner circle that founded the group in London in the early 60s.

Wyllie was friends with former public-school boy and British Army officer DeGrimston (then Moor) at architecture school but had lost contact for a couple of years when, in 1963, he got a call out of the blue. Robert and his new wife Mary Anne had decided to leave Scientology and develop their own program of psychological and spiritual development, based on the use of an e-meter and self-examination in an intensive interview scenario. In the course of his reminiscences, Wyllie reveals what has been rumored for some time – that Robert DeGrimston was more or less a dummy figurehead for the megalomaniacal schemings of Mary Anne.

Mary Anne MacLean had experienced a childhood defined by poverty and neglect in Glasgow before becoming a high-end prostitute in London, supposedly hooking up with Sugar Ray Robinson for a time, before recognizing that her particular talents could be put to more lucrative effect in other areas. As the DeGrimstons’ “Compulsions Analysis” sessions began attracting more and more disaffected proto-hippy types, the group began having remarkable spiritual experiences, and began suspecting that they were not only on the cutting edge of experiential psychological research, but were in fact a chosen spiritual elite ordained to herald the end times.

According to Terry and his ilk, what followed was a rapidly expanding, systematic program of ritual sacrifice and atonal music, designed to precipitate the apocalypse through the summoning of a Celtic death god named Samhain. Wyllie’s account is somewhat more prosaic and farcical, following the Process Church’s random global peregrinations, incoherent channeled theology (which gave equal billing to Satan, Lucifer, Christ and Jehovah) and increasingly totalitarian bureaucratic hierarchy from the point of view of an overworked acolyte who believed he was being guided along a path of spiritual evolution by an incarnate Goddess, or at least a secret Sufi master.

While there are plenty of juicy bits – your flagellation, your sex orgies, your celebrity cameos (yelled at by Klaus Kinski and Miles Davis! Who’da thunk?) – most of the anecdotes in Love Sex Fear Death (abetted by numerous shorter reminiscences and period documents) are sordid in a less titillating sense, as a gradual unraveling of a seemingly sincere moment of collective inspiration into all-too-familiar routines of coercion and greed, charting Wyllie’s inevitable disillusionment with and departure from the New Religion he had helped invent and define. It is a patently un-glamorous saga of indentured panhandling, dumpster-diving, child neglect, public-access proseletysing, and Heathers-level Machiavellianism – detailing the insidious banality of evil more convincingly than Process theology or Maury Terry ever could.

Robert DeGrimston was forced out by Mary Anne in 1974, and after unsuccessfully trying to start a Process revival, gave up and got a real job. Mary Anne kept revising and renaming the group, gradually removing all references to Satan and Lucifer before realizing that it was easier to persuade the rubes to part with their hard-earned jack for the protection of poor little defenseless animals than to facilitate the immanentization of the eschaton. Ultra-ironically, Wyllie recounts a rumor that her death in 2005 was the result of an attack by feral dogs who’d broken out of their “sanctuary.” Who says Jehovah doesn’t have a sense of humor?"

About the Gout

After regular periodic mentions on this blog, many readers sometimes ask: What is the Gout and what does it look like? I have included the above psychedelic landscape of the joint above my right big toe, taken in the third week of my recent attack (after it migrated from my left knee), and refer you otherwise to the Wikipedia article, which begins:

"Gout is a disease hallmarked by elevated levels of uric acid in the bloodstream. In this condition, crystals of monosodium urate (MSU) or uric acid are deposited on the articular cartilage of joints, tendons, and surrounding tissues. It is marked by transient painful attacks of acute arthritis initiated by crystallization of urates within and about the joints and eventually leads to chronic gouty arthritis and the deposition of masses of urates in joints and other sites, creating tophi. Gout results from a combination of prolonged elevation of uric acid and overall acidity in the bloodstream. In isolation, neither elevated uric acid nor acidity is sufficient to cause gout. Historically, it was known as the "The Disease of Kings" or "Rich man's disease".

The Wikipedia entry also reproduces this excellent 1799 etching by British caricaturist James Gillray who was afflicted by the condition and died in mental hospital after an unsuccessful suicide attempt:

Over Sideways Down Under Painting

"In Australia in 1971, a 30-year-old white Sydney schoolteacher named Geoff Bardon took a posting in the Aboriginal-relocation community of Papunya in the outback west of Alice Springs, teaching art to the children of the patchwork indigenous community. When he began to encourage them to paint the traditional patterns they habitually traced in the sand — instead of the westernized cowboy-and-Indian scenarios that were expected of them — he inadvertently triggered one of the most remarkable artistic events of the 20th century. The Western Desert Art Movement began as a sudden outpouring of traditional visual material by dirt-poor male Aboriginal elders in this unlikely remote location, and has basically continued unabated, while expanding into a successful multibillion-dollar niche of the international art market and a major source of economic support, cultural pride and political empowerment for the indigenous Australian people."


"Less than two years after arriving in Papunya, having broken under the pressure of racist individuals and institutions that wanted to stick to helping the natives with the tried-and-true strategies of incremental genocide, a.k.a. assimilation (and Johnny-on-the-spot carpetbaggers eager to cheat the artists out of even the relative pittances their canvases fetched in those early days), Bardon fled the settlement in the middle of the night, and unwittingly committed himself into the hands of notorious psychiatrist Harry Bailey, whose MK-ULTRA-style “treatments” consisted of lengthy induced barbiturate comas spiked with massive electroshocks — sometimes on a daily basis and often unauthorized. Twenty-six people died while under his care, and many others — Bardon included — were left permanently disabled. Continual pressure from dissatisfied customers, activists (including Scientology!) and journalists finally got Bailey’s “deep-sleep therapy” clinic shut down, and Bailey killed himself in 1985 in the face of a government investigation."


"This peculiar and tragic story of almost accidental inspiration and martyrdom lies uneasily at the center of the history of contemporary Australian Aboriginal painting, so it’s appropriate that a short documentary on Bardon’s Papunya experience — 2004’s Mr. Patterns, --directed by Catriona McKenzie — runs, like an anomalous apparition from another world, looped on a monitor in the middle of the UCLA Fowler Museum’s two concurrent exhibits of Western Desert Painting. Which is an interesting inversion, since the paintings themselves are, more or less, portals to another dimension."

Read the rest of Outback Renaissance here

Visit the official website for the Icons of the Desert exhibit here.

See Icons of the Desert and Innovations in Western Desert Painting 1972-1999 at the UCLA Fowler Museum through August 2

Images top to bottom: Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa, Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri Yam Spirit Dreaming, Mick Namararri Tjapaltjarri Big Cave Dreaming with Ceremonial Object, all works 1972, Collection of John and Barbara Wilkerson, Photos by Tony De Camillo

North, to Victorian Ferndale, and Partway Back

I've been weirdly crippled for the last 2 weeks from what I believe is a new left knee-centric manifestation of The Gout. In spite of this, we succeeded in making the journey north to the Humboldt County Fairgrounds in beautiful Victorian Ferndale for the Lost Coast Kennel Club's annual 2-day show. I managed to get a good deal on an SUV rental with Priceline, but when we got around to looking for shelter, we found ourselves looking at $120 plus $20 per dog (X3!) per night, until I discovered the peculiar world of KOA Kampgrounds -- a family-oriented franchise chain noted for its miniature golf facilities and standardized faux rustic Kamping Kabins. 

A weird thing happened on Thursday as we were driving to Burbank Airport to pick up the rental SUV -- we were stuck in unusually heavy traffic around noon on the I-5, listening to a mix CD I made and the demo version of the Jacksons' "Shake Your Body" came on and I said "Michael Jackson" and M.A. said "Michael Jackson's causing this traffic jam? What did he do?" That got me thinking what a sad weird life he had, then when we got home it turned out he had just died. Mere coincidence?


As we headed north, we kept using dog-travel resource fieldbooks to try to locate dog-friendly facilities where three whippets could cut loose with impunity, but kept getting lost. Finally we gave up, and would just bail off the freeway on the outskirts of Bakersfield or wherever, and within minutes were able to locate an empty fenced-off soccer field or playground. This may just testify to the relative plenitude of public space (particularly the un-padlocked variety) outside of LA, but the whole trip was sort of infused with an improvisational grace.

We drove straight through, something like 12 hours. The last part was really David Lynchian, winding through the redwoods with almost no traffic, brights on, sinuous lines of reflector traffic beads pulsing like a Bridget Riley animation, occasional giant trees jutting into the road, or a sudden panoramic array of brightly colored chainsaw-carved cartoon figures emerging from the void, only to be swallowed back again immediately. Good thing I only ate half that brownie! We arrived at the KOA Kampground at 3 or so, found our Kabin and let the dogs romp silently in the standard K-9 Kompound, all of which are equipped with dwarf agility equipment. Here is a detail of the sun-blasted bulletin board adjoining the men's restroom which I discovered in the morning after a few hours shut-eye:

We backtracked a few miles from Eureka to Ferndale and found the Fairgrounds where the dog show was happening. Portfolio did very well on Saturday, winning his first Best of Breed and thereby earning the first point toward his Championship. I got a chance to explore the Fairgrounds and take some pictures, then the whippets practiced their Nosework before they all got their first experience of lure coursing -- a sport where a plastic bag (or something) is dragged around a field in an elaborate pattern very quickly, simulating a bunny running away. Nigel tried a racetrack version a year or so back, and just didn't get it, but he was right on top of the motherfucker this time. Portfolio also did well, and Chloe delivered a breakout performance complete with head-over-heels tumble into the finish line. 

We crashed briefly back at the Kampground, then no-sleep addled, decided to check out the Samoan Peninsula. We didn't have the time to check out their famous Historic Samoa Cookhouse - the last surviving lumber camp-style cookhouse in the West, built in 1893 - but the dog guide lady guided us true in that the place is surrounded by amazing deserted beaches, and the dogs went crazy again. As the sun sank into the Pacific, Chloe posed for her upcoming solo acoustic torch song album cover, and they almost met a seal.

On Sunday Portfolio won 1st in his Class of one, but didn't receive any further accolades, but we had to stick around for the raffle as there was a heavy clear Lucite silhouette of a doberman - a used trophy in fact - up for grabs, and I wanted it for a friend. I didn't win it, but I did come away with a new waterproof overcoat for Chloe. We finally hit the road but realized another 12 hour marathon was out of the question, and since I had had to book the SUV through Monday, the only question was where to stop. We did take a detour to drive thru the Chandelier Drive-Thru Tree in Leggett - Chloe found her passage blocked in the nearby non-drive-thru (but taggable) tree. Also pictured, the sun-blasted KOA Eureka men's restroom bulletin board version of the attraction:

After a doggie break in Santa Rosa I had a brainwave and pulled over into a strip mall Starbucks to try and get online. The Starbucks was closed, but their wi-fi was up and I learned they have a proprietary deal with ATT, and wanted $3.99 to log on. Fuck that. Driving around the parking lot, I picked up another signal, and thanks to Safeway.com I was able to find and book a KOA Kabin in Petaluma, just north of San Francisco. An altogether more gentrified Kampground, where - strangely, for the most wired city in the world - I couldn't get online at all - probably due to all the regular American families managing their facebook accounts, playing WOW and DLing porn in the wilderness LOL.

In the morning we decided to take the #1 highway down past Big Sur - something we've wanted to do for 20 years and never got around to. We stopped by in Santa Cruz for a Falafel at the place by the Casino (!) and I took a picture of the back of this beat camper with some kind of pink petroglyph blankie in the window. Santa Cruz. We wound through the clouds on down the coast, stopping to capture images of the whippets mimicking the pose struck by a Hollywood shiksa seconds earlier (scrreee! Shoot me Daddy! click. VROOM!) Anyway, I realized that the reason I never got around to making the trip before was that I subconsciously realized if I ever did I would immediately want to give it all up and live naked in a treehouse on the grounds of the Esalen Institute. Which is where I am now. Thank god they have wi-fi!

Hi Good Free in Torrance Friday!

As part of the new programming at the Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles based artist/curator/critic Doug Harvey has selected Lee Lynch's film titled "Ned's Draw" -- a neo-revisionist True Crime Western -- as the inaugural installment of the TAM's new film series. The film will be supplemented with live acting and an installation. 
Doug has also selected a new short by Eric Wright & Cathy Ward titled "Passing" which is narrated by LM Kit Carson who wrote Paris, Texas.

Los Angeles artists Gustavo Herrera & Spencer Douglass will kick off the evening with their piece "Buffalo Mierda".

Friday, June 19, 2009
8:00pm
Torrance Art Museum
3320 Civic Center Dr.
Torrance, CA
90509

MAP

GLOW Girls à Go-Go in the OC!

"The impression most people have of the history and meaning of 20th-century abstract painting basically involves a bunch of can-do postwar East Coast American dudes systematically stripping away subjective frills such as “content” to arrive at the monochromatic squares and precise geometric diagrams of Minimalism and Conceptualism, which allegedly refer to nothing outside themselves.

I’m not sure if any of the actual artists in question would subscribe to this version of history, but it has nonetheless seeped into the surface levels of our collective cultural consciousness, effectively burying a deeper and more complex story — a story less about real men optimizing the efficiency of the decoration industry and more about a bunch of middle-aged ladies wandering the desert in search of transcendental light.

However glossed over in the interests of secular technophilia, this alternate account of the significance of capital-A Abstraction keeps bubbling up, most elegantly in 2005’s 3 x Abstraction: New Methods of Drawing by Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz and Agnes Martin (possibly the best show ever hosted by the Santa Monica Museum of Art) but perhaps most emphatically in LACMA’s 1986 exhibit (and exhaustive catalog) The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985. Aside from af Klint, one of my personal revelations from that show was local mystic Agnes Pelton, who spent her most productive years in Palm Springs–adjacent Cathedral City, painting luminous, symmetrical conflations of the natural and inner landscapes that teeter between geometric decoration and symbolic illustration; between sumptuous formal design and painting deployed as a tool for entering (and prompting) altered states of consciousness.

After experiencing the disproportionate presence manifested by Pelton’s Sandstorm (1932) in LACMA’s sprawling, cluttered millennial Made in California extravaganza — the modestly scaled but optically riveting oil painting actually caught and held my attention from across the vast museum lobby — I became a little obsessed. Pelton, born in 1881, had quintessentially beat-bohemian credentials. Though born into money, her maternal grandfather — journalist Theodore Tilton — had struck a major blow to American sexual Puritanism by suing his friend Congregationalist minister Henry Ward Beecher, an abolitionist but vocal opponent of the “Free Love” movement, for adultery with his wife. The resultant front-page trial did considerable damage to Beecher’s reputation (and the political credibility of overt sexual repression), and drove Tilton into exile in a Parisian boarding house, where he supported himself by writing poetry. That was the mother’s side. Pelton’s father, a globetrotting bipolar Louisiana sugar heir, OD’d on morphine when Agnes was 9."

Read the rest of Luminous Dames: Georgia, Agnes, Agnes, & Florence at OCMA here


See the show through Sept 6th at the Orange County Museum of Art.

Images all Agnes Pelton; top to bottom: White Fire (c. 1930), The Voice (1930), Light Center (1960-61), Sand Storm (1932)

A Sense of Entitlement

All Hail Sporting Fields' Nigel, NW1! Nigel is the first whippet to have earned the Nosework 1 title, though doubtless many will follow his lead. Always a trailblazer, Nigel was among the first group of pet dogs to pursue this new field of competitive canine sport, which evolved from drug and bomb sniffing training and involves locating arbitrarily scented cotton swabs hidden variously on a vehicle, in a room, in an exterior space, and in one of a series of boxes.You can learn more about Nosework classes and competitions at www.funnosework.com

Above: Nigel nails the exterior search. It was in the watering can.
Below: Nigel with his ribbon.

Precious Ruins

"Those familiar with Steve Canaday’s work from back around the turn of the millennium will recognize this move as a periodic return to the abstract roots from which his lurid imagery blossomed — a consolidation of the lessons gleaned from immersion in skanky figuration. And a rich, black volcanic compost it yields indeed. Consisting of a half-dozen medium-size shaped canvases embossed with coarse monochromatic black-on-black grids of rectangles in high relief, like buttons on a metastasizing cell phone, the tread of a shredded monster truck tire, or an aerial map of a charred cityscape — Canaday’s Black, Blacker, Blackest suite possesses a physicality and gravitas only hinted at in his earlier work.

Highlighted with satellite night vision–green patches and halos, constructed in vague resemblance to automotive fragments, and occasionally sprouting an antenna from a top stretcher bar, these cartoonishly postindustrial geometric abstractions flirt with figuration just enough to spoil their reading as doctrinaire Minimalism, while retaining their prerogative as remarkably decorative objects. Call it Late American Imperial — sumptuous and unique material commodities that seem to embody a stripped-down symbolic divination of their host culture’s impending demise — the last feeble flickering of the fluorescent-green ghost before it becomes all machine, the last sputtering transmission from VALIS to penetrate the Black Iron Prison.

But maybe I’m projecting. There’s a strong temptation to look for signs and portents of impending collapse in the artifacts of a doomed culture, even in the midst of seemingly perpetual supremacy. Of course, this works even better in hindsight, which accounts to some extent for the ongoing public fascination with the excavated detritus of the city of Pompeii. While undeniably constituting one of the most remarkable archeological treasure troves ever dug up, the flash-fried ruins of this first-century Neapolitan resort town have elicited a perverse and subjective fascination from the modern Western imagination since their rediscovery in the mid-18th century.

As a story, it’s pretty much got everything — sex, death, explosions, pathos and a surprising amount of humor. I get a sense that the city’s excavation created a McCluhanesque media shift in our perception and processing of (at least) antiquities — after all, Pompeii and its neighboring cities constitute a sort of holographic virtual-reality snapshot of a 2000-year-old culture — a century before photography began to condition our perceptual models to accommodate such frozen sensory data. This sudden holistic shift had a profound effect on archeology, art history and museology, but also sent shock waves through our species’ common cultural and sensory software."

Read the rest of Apocalypse Now & Then here.

Fuck the Bamboo Ceiling!

Yes! Congratulations to Shirley Tse, 2009 Guggenheim Fellow. Shirley's latest cluster of poly-everything sculptures can be seen at Barnsdall (4800 Hollywood Blvd 90027) in the 2009 COLA Prizes show, through July 12, 2009 -- for which I wrote the attached essay.

“Just one word: Plastics.” This pithy line, the straw that breaks Benjamin Braddock’s antidisestablishmentarian back in the enormously popular 1967 film The Graduate, encapsulates a remarkably pervasive archetypal association between synthetic polymers and a wide range of (mostly negative) social, political, and even spiritual conditions. Dating back at least to the beatnik era - and continuing as a current running through subsequent cultural moments right up to the present – plastic has been a word, an idea, and a material inextricably commingled with notions of inauthenticity, alienation, superficiality, disposability, waste – indeed, virtually all the perceived negative changes wrought upon our species’ 10,000 years of relative agrarian stability by the Industrial Revolution. Polyester doesn’t breathe!

One of the first things that struck me as remarkable about Shirley Tse’s sculptures – after their initial and persistent formal impact - was their function as indicators of a deeper and more complex understanding of this human/plastic relationship – encompassing and acknowledging plastic’s pop-humanist demonization as an important but reductivist aspect of a much larger, finely nuanced, multi-layered and multivalent narrative.

One aspect of this underlying narrative has been an engagement with the history of plastic in art, most conspicuous in Tse’s avoidance of the kinds of plausibly deniable irony that characterize Pop usages of this most modern of materials – as well as the mute fetishism of its Minimalist incarnations. But Tse has cast a much wider net. Before even leaving grad school she had identified the circulating global stream of cheap plastic consumer goods – in which both Los Angeles and the artist’s hometown of Hong Kong act as major hubs – as a central underlying motif in her work’s formal and conceptual gestation.

The geopolitical and systems theory implications arising from this specific template are extensive, yet only hint at the mycelium of interlaced ideational threads underlying the mandala of synthetic ‘shrooms that comprise Tse’s oeuvre. Through intentional research and reference as well as unusually lucid intuitive and associative connections, Tse has imbued work that reads at first glance as playful but enigmatic formalism - brightly colored inflatables, intricately incised slabs of foam, mutated beverage coolers - with the distinctive sense of elaborately interwoven symbolic sets lying just outside our comprehension, elaborately modeled entry points for a vast interdimensional metro system (if only public art looked half as good!)”

Read the catalog version of my essay for Shirley's COLA show here

Or the slightly longer original version in Comments.

Gristle for DeMille

"Throbbing Gristle’s ties to California are deep. The last time they played L.A. was May 1981 — their first-ever gig in the U.S. and their penultimate gig before dissolving the band for more than two decades. But they had, in fact, made quite a “splash” in the L.A. art community several years earlier. In fall 1976 Cosey and P-Orridge appeared as COUM at the experimentally minded artist-run space LAICA, just weeks after having caused a media frenzy in the U.K. tabloids with a state-sponsored gallery exhibit, including used tampons and framed porn-magazine spreads featuring Cosey — a feminist Situationist intervention and welcome source of income

Their L.A. performance of “Cease to Exist No. 4” (named after a Charles Manson composition recorded by roommate Dennis Wilson’s band, the Beach Boys) is local legend. As P-Orridge later recounted, the event was dripping with integrity — as in the sequence where he “takes a hypodermic and stabs it into a testicle, fills it with blood, picks a black egg off thee floor, stabs thee syringe into it ... injecting a total of seven black eggs with his own blood.” P-Orridge later “pisses into a large glass. As he squeezes out the last drop, he farts, and blood mingled with milk shoots out of his arse.”

From this unholy exchange of fluids (and we’re only scratching the surface here, people) were birthed the persona of Marilyn Manson and the cinema of David Lynch, among other important cultural treasures — not to mention electronica, acid house, Survivalist Chic, the Lounge Revival and about three-quarters of the inventory at Hot Topic. Thanks, Throbbing Gristle! Seriously, though, David Lynch rules. I often think of Lynch as an artist who has managed to deal convincingly and creatively with the exigencies of commercial success. Like TG."

Read the rest of Throbbing Gristle's 33rd Annual Report here.

I'm still a little bummed that I didn't get to catch them in the act - no way Coachella, and I was teaching the night they played the live ST to Derek Jarman's Shadow of the Sun at the Ricardo Montalban Theater. But hey, next time, right?

Satan is the Source, of Course of Course

I put this up on Facebook (please explain) for GG2 but it got crunched to unintelligible by some robot. So hopefully if you click on the above image you will be able to read, and learn, and avoid, and live, and move on, my dear friends. Leave comments if you want to learn more from (Doug Harvey's World of) Fascinating People.

On the Road to Westminster

Wow, I've been slackin' with the posts. Teaching, writing, car trouble, plumbing issues, and particularly Portfolio's burgeoning Conformation show career have been eating up the "spare" time. I also started reading novels again. More on that later, but first a couple of shots from the Rio Hondo Kennel Club All Breed Show at Cal Poly Pomona a couple of weekends ago. Above: Portfolio relaxing in the Zone before nailing #2 in a class of 2 (puppies 6 - 9 months). Below: (l-r) Portfolio & Chloe's littermates Phoebe Couture and Diesel, elder siblings Darren and Harmony, who are being handled by the inimitable Valerie Nunes-Atkinson. Throbbing Gristle and more soon!

All well and good, but where's Margaret Keane?

I have a Big-Eye painting in this crazy omnibus show at the Green Gallery in Milwaukee that Kristin Calabrese and Josh Aster put together - all the pieces had to be 11 X 11 or smaller. I realized mine was oversized so I sawed it down and folded it over, securing with monofilament. I forgot to take a picture but here is a surveillance style-rendering enhanced from the official group photo on Facebook. It's part of the Pre-rotted series, and called Processional Mecca. The show's called "Lovable Like Orphaned Kitties and Bastard Children" and opens May 9th.

Video Art Out of Africa

"A couple of weeks ago, the eminent journal Science announced the confirmation of the earliest known human footprints heretofore discovered. Preserved between layers of volcanic ash, the 1.5-million-year-old tracks were shown by laser-scanning analysis to have been made by truly upright citizens (not like those knuckle-dragging Australopitheci).

It should come as no surprise that the footprints were found in East Africa, in the country now known as Kenya; the same neck of the woods where Mitochondrial Eve — the original common female ancestor of every human alive today — is thought to have trod some 150,000 years back.

And it was just a little farther down the coast, in Blombos Cave on the Southern Cape coast of South Africa, that archaeologists in the early 1990s discovered two ochre engraved plaques that had been inscribed with abstract geometric designs approximately 75,000 years ago — predating the cave paintings at Lascaux by a healthy 60 millennia: arguably our species’ oldest objets d’art.

Now let’s look at the headlines ... hmmm ... “Kenyan Police Accused of Widespread Killings” ... “15,000 Flee Southern Darfur” ... “President of Guinea-Bissau Assassinated” ... “Zimbabwe Cholera Epidemic Worsening. ... ”

Seeded with land mines, depleted of natural resources, riddled with plague, political corruption, poverty and starvation; her social structures pulverized to a jittery, explosive subatomic mush, awash in imported toxic waste, homogenized global urban culture and IMF debt, Africa is as much our future as it is our past.



The curators at the Fowler Museum know this — at least it seems so, going by their track record, with shows like 2003’s “A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal,” which traced the proliferation and mutation of a single image of Sufi saint Amadou Bamba across almost every surface of Dakar, and last year’s “Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art” — far and away the most compelling recent L.A. exhibit on the relationship between language and art. Both epitomize the Fowler’s ongoing commitment to representing the artistic practices of the non-Anglo world, Africa in particular, in all their complex vitality: balanced between ancient local traditions, contemporary international Art World strategies, and coping mechanisms for the coming apocalypse.

Of course, in the short term, it is the middle ground that is of greatest interest to the artists, curators and other players engaged in the effort to shift some capital away from Damien Hirst, Richard Prince and (South African–born) Marlene Dumas and into the grass-roots art economies of Dakar, Johannesburg and Lagos — or at least generate some art stars to compete on Charles Saatchi’s playing field."

Images: Muxima Alfredo Jaar 2005

Read the rest of Digital Roots: Continental Rifts at Fowler Museum here

And here's the Fowler's webpage about the shows.

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