R.O.G. (Rectilinear Occlusion Gear) 01

I made a new piece for this show and I haven't seen it myself, though both Carl Berg (who curated) and Chris Miles (who's also in it) said it looks good. I made it to collapse and fit into Carl's car, and the process was such that I never saw it unfolded. It includes some bits left over from Chain Letter, some unauthorized appropriations of other artists work, and some found and thrift store art. And the stretcher bars were previously used by both Pamela Fraser and M.A. Peers.

I'll post an image when I get one. But check out that line-up. Boy howdy, group shows don't come much better than this: Bob Gunderman, your humble blogger, Micol Hebron, Roger Herman, David McDonald, Christopher Miles, Paul Paiement, Christopher Pate, Max Presneill, Tyler Stallings, Laurie Steelink, Inmo Yuon and HK Zamani. The basic idea is that we all curate, but what a powerhouse team of just plain artistes!

Role Reversal
Opening Sunday, Sept 11, 3-5pm

MAP, DIRECTIONS & MORE INFO at: www.msmc.la.edu/gallery

SHOW DATES: September 6 – October 18, 2011

GALLERY HOURS: Tues - Sat 12 - 5 PM
Closed Oct 13 - 14

Panel Discussion with artists - Saturday 24th, 3-4pm

The Lincoln Enigma

Just found this awesome bit of documentary footage by Jimmy Chertkow of the Mannlichercarcanoplex 01 from July 2010 -- what is particularly mysterious is the fact that Michael Q. Schmidt is singing the "I could be another Lincoln" bit from The Wizard of Oz's "If I Only Had a Brain" to Lee Lynch as Tin Man, while the former sculpture prof of USC sculpts a bust of Lincoln from clay in a vintage 16mm projection behind them. Some one here is a genius!

Hi Good Opening Tonight!

Here's a handful of my production photos from the first Hi Good shoot, details to follow.

Lee Lynch
The Murder of Hi Good

Steve Turner Contemporary
6026 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90036 (across from BCAM at LACMA)

September 10 - October 8, 2011
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 10, 6 - 9PM
Gallery hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 11-6

Steve Turner Contemporary is pleased to present The Murder of Hi Good, a single channel video installation by Lee Lynch. The centerpiece of the installation is Lynch's sixty-minute dramatic, revisionist western that relates to the murder of California's most infamous Indian hunter who lived in Tehama County in the 1870s. Lynch has been working on this project since 2007 and it will be making its world premiere.

Born in Redding, California in 1980, Lee Lynch earned a BFA in film from California Institute of the Arts (2005) and an MFA in Fine Art from the University of Southern California (2009). This is his first exhibition with the gallery.

Painting as Time Machine

"I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea of paintings as mechanisms. I recently met the eccentric visionary artist Paul Laffoley, who insists that many of his two-dimensional mixed media works are, in fact, interactive devices capable of distorting local space-time – with a variety of effects including time travel, group telepathy, and contact with alien consciousness. Form follows function.

Of course, this way on thinking isn’t entirely alien to contemporary discourse about more mainstream art – albeit couched in somewhat less specific and more academically respectable terms. Mark Rothko’s signature abstractions are said to “function” properly only under certain lighting conditions, viewed from a particular distance. Ad Reinhardt, Bridget Riley, Robert Irwin, and many others have been identified as technicians exploring and manipulating the relationship between an artifact and the viewer’s consciousness. In fact, any artist statement or review referencing phenomenology is basically pointing at the same territory.

But why stop there? It isn’t really a stretch to imagine the cave paintings of Lascaux as DIY virtual reality simulation rides, to see medieval icons as self-hypnosis eye-fixation objects, or to consider the Renaissance obsession with perfecting perspectival trompe l’oeil as the quest for a better retinal mousetrap? Tibetan, Australian Aboriginal, Navajo, and other non-Western traditions are open about the sequential, psychologically operative processes encoded in and triggered by their visual art traditions.

What really got me thinking along these lines are the recent paintings of Linda Day, whose elaborately composed 2003 digital glitchscape Pulse series I characterized at the time as “intricate stripe paintings saturated with the spectrum and perceptual idiosyncrasies of the Southern California landscape.” While these works still bear up to that reading as analogous representations of a localized sensorium, in retrospect they seem less illustrative, and more like – well, mechanisms. .."

Read the rest of Kicking Away the Crutches in Bullet Time: Day’s Long Journey into Now in the catalog for Linda Day's 2008 HORIZONS show at Jancar, which is still available at BLURB: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/437665

Linda's final exhibit OU-BOUM has been reinstalled at ANOTHER YEAR IN LA through Sept 9th, when there will be a small memorial happening.

Anna Siqueiros: Chicken Artist

After much delay, I have uploaded this remarkable performance to youtube in honor of Anna Siqueiros' birthday.

My Top Ten Faüxmish Collage Covers

My favorite 10% of the 100 collage jackets Marnie Weber, Dani Tull and I created for the limited edition red vinyl debut LP by Faüxmish.

Blurbage for the Zacharia Juggernaut

Check it out! Pull quote! That's my second, after the DVD jacket for Matthew Barney's The Order: From Cremaster 3. Watch out Peter Travers! Now how do I collect my royalties on this?

LiTTLEROCK opens at the Laemmle Sunset 5 tomorrow night! Tickets are available online. The cast and crew will be in attendance for the 8 pm screenings on Friday the 2nd and Saturday the 3rd for a Q and A afterwards.

Thanks to Mr. Jimmy for the heads-up!

Faüxmish LP Cover Collages in Progress

And there's 94 more where they come from!

Faüxmish LP Release Party and Debut Public Performance!

Friday, September 2 · 8:00pm - 11:00pm

Human Resources
410 Cottage Home St in Chinatown, 90012
Los Angeles, CA

Please join Faüxmish to celebrate the release of their debut LP & CD ‘F for Ache’ and to witness the band's debut public performance. This will also be the ONLY OPPORTUNITY to view the entire run of the limited edition of 100 collaborative collage LP covers created by the band members! The LPs, limited CD version, and other merchandise will be available for purchase.

$5 donation at the door

Faüxmish is an experimental power trio featuring Marnie Weber, Dani Tull, & Doug Harvey.

Faüxmish is a Los Angeles art-rock supergroup that came together over a shared engagement with American spiritual sects who remove themselves from established social norms and create their own culture as outsiders.

Taking as their motto “Simplicity Through Noise,” Faüxmish have developed a practice rooted in improvisational ensemble playing using electric guitars (played with rubber mallets and other extended as well as traditional techniques) and vintage synthesizers, in various combinations of three.

Initially conceived as a ‘wall of sound,’ the group’s music rapidly developed a complex and idiosyncratic audio vocabulary drawing on the members’ widely divergent individual musical backgrounds, which range from noise to prog, post-punk to film scores, and 90s alt-rock to improvisational audio collage. The results range from dreamy ambient soundscapes to theatrical rock songs.

Redacted Records is proud to announce ‘F for Ache’ -- the debut release by Faüxmish. The album is being released in two different limited edition configurations
– a 12” vinyl LP in a numbered edition of 100, with a hand-silkscreened cover and a unique collaborative collage on each back cover, created by the three band members. The LP also contains one track unavailable on the CD version.
– a limited CD edition of 500, with covers individually personalized by the band members, and featuring a wealth of integrated bonus tracks.

They Should've Tackled Jacob Two-two

Now there's a songfest waiting to happen! I actually met Jerry Lieber once, at what was perhaps the nadir of his career -- the 1983 premiere of his and Stoller's musical adaptation of Mordecai Richler's 'The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz' at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton. I was a mere usher, and drunk to boot -- but I had been a little obsessed with these guys' songcraft, and had been mixing their stuff in with John Cage and Suicide on my Saturday night radio show at CJSR. I told them, and they were gracious, but plainly very anxious with the production at hand -- which in fact turned out to be disastrous, and one of the most legendary fiascos in Canadian theatre history. I think it was even called 'Duddy!'

Above Mordecai Richler

Chain Slaw Skip Diving

Whew! Just finished marathon three-day deinstall of Chain Letter. Many stories and interesting photos to come, possibly in print-on-demand book form. My favorite moment came on on the second day. The scruffy but amiable gent pictured here is noted LA performance artist Skip Arnold, whose contribution -- after standing in line for a couple of hours -- was to remove and leave his Austrian cowboy boots. He arrived in his socks to retrieve them, but they had been in the F1 space, which had been deinstalled the day before -- like many, Skip hadn't got the email with the revised deinstallation times.

We searched through the stuff Christian and I had rescued, and looked through the scraps left in F1 to no avail. Skip wasn't too distraught, but wanted to check the dumpster. We thought the dumpster had been emptied, but in fact the art had just been buried by black bags full of oozing restaurant garbage. Hooray! And there, very close to the top, were Skip's boots. He shook them off, slipped them on, and strode off into the west. God bless you, Mr. Skippy! And thanks for contributing to the magic that was Chain Letter!

Photo by Christian Cummings

Olfactory Consolation Prizes

Spent the day in San Pedro at the National Association of Canine Scent Work (NACSW) sanctioned NW2 K9 Nose Work® Trial in hopes that Chloe would become the first whippet to achieve that level of olfactory sophistication. Alas, it was not to be. After a sensational performance on the first element -- the container search -- she dawdled distractedly over the vehicle search, looking around at the audience before finally getting down to the task at hand after two and half minutes. Close call! Then the interior room searches, which apparently went well, though there was no room for spectators.

After an inordinately long break, the trial resumed with the exterior search. The chips were stacked against her, as Chloe can't detect odors around blue picnic tables-- and I'm pretty sure some of the judges were wearing undergarments after we expressly indicated that she has issues in this area, so it can't really be said to have been a "fair" trial. This is undoubtedly why she timed out, wandering around the prep school lunchyard like an extra in a zombie movie -- ruining her shot at the title. Happily, when it came time for the "debriefing" (too little too late!) it turned out she had placed 3rd in interior and 2nd in container out of 30ish dogs! So even though "Pleats Please" can not at this time add any more initials after her name, she did get these lovely rosettes. Next time we'll make them paint the picnic tables chartreuse, and ace the motherfucker!

PS: I had to take this photo with 'Photobooth' because I lost my camera. Has anyone seen my camera?

Cory's Hi Good ADR Session on youtube

Spent the afternoon at a Burbank recording studio for the ADR session for Hi Good, shot some footage for the "Making of..." doc -- but since Cory's getting all this press for LiTTLEROCK right now, I figured now's the time. Check it out on Youtube.

LACE-UP

A few shots from the Unfinished Paintings panel discussion at LACE on Sunday afternoon (11/08/07) -- in keeping with the concept, the discussion was vigorous but left a lot of questions unanswered. Mine in particular. Here we see me trying to use the "explainin' hand" technique to compell the other participants (Lily Simonson, Brad Eberhard, moi, exhibition curators Josh Aster and Kristin Calabrese) to submit to my searching interrogatives.

Despondent over my lack of success, I decide to levitate my sippy cup of vodka to demonstrate my connection to higher vibrational contexts. Kristin saw it. She told me later. Jimmy Hayward, far right, is plainly skeptical, claiming to have seen Art Pepper levitate across the bandstand at the Surf Club in 1952. Embrace Failare tee shirt by Kilduff of Van Nuys.

Defeated, I replace my protective goggles ("They're all around us and we never knew it - you can only see them with these special glasses!") as Carol Cheh (far left) hums the closing theme, Jackson Browne's Boulevard. Cuz nobody gets it like they want it to be. Next time I email my questions in advance. And I'd better get answers this time. Next time.

Photos by James Chertkow.

SASSAS Listening Party Playlist

I've had a couple of inquiries as regards my playlist for last weekend's SASSAS Listening Party, so here, as best as I can remember, it is:

Audience Induction by Damon – Teegarden & Van Winkle - Experimental Groundwork
Boogieman - Dolphin Explosion - Boogie Man
Pony People - Wounded Lion - Wounded Lion
Noon Balloon To Rangoon - Nervous Norvus - Stone Age Woo: The Zorch Sounds of...
John of the Sword - Animals & Men
Take Me Home Country Roads - Arthur Nakane & His One Man Band (I've listened to this early late 70s? self-released LP for years, and just found out the dude still plays in Little Tokyo and on the SM Pier!)
Songs Hurt Me - Marnie - Songs Hurt Me
Grassy Grass Grass - Woody Guthrie - Songs to Grow on for Mother and Child (1947)
Renaissance of Smut - Mrs. Miller - Does Her Thing (as far as I know, the only commercially released single to begin with the word "Kienholz")
Vain World Adieu - Alabama Sacred Harp Singers - Sacred Harp Singing
The Song of Mr. Phonograph - Tom Recchion - (single 78 played at 33)
Hocus Pocus – Focus - Moving Waves
All is Loneliness – Moondog - The Story of Moondog
Audience Dehypnotization by Damon – Teegarden & Van Winkle - Experimental Groundwork

Photo by Marlene Picard, Original collage LP cover by Marnie

Chain Letter Part Two Part One

Man, this whole Chain Letter thing has blown up like crazy! I have a bunch of other stuff to catch up on here, but I figure the people might want to see these photos. This is actually the second batch, as the first -- from the install -- are on another computer. These are from the opening, which was awesome.

There must have been a dozen unscheduled performance artists or more (not including the Round of Applause Parade that circulated through the entire parking lot, picking up participants as it went along, crusade style). Word in the parking lot was that this was a father and son team, rocking a minimal papier mache euro-puppet look to great effect -- here they are unmasked, digging the Keith Walsh Experience.

Many kind souls contributed additional victual provisions including a bonus beer keg (on top of the six that crippled Wayne Blank) and this inventive erotic red velvet wanker cake, which was devoured and/or demolished in rapid order.

Is it possible to take a bad picture of this show? I can't match many of these works to their artists -- we'll just have to wait for the catalog...

Last of the Evening

Blessed be the Biscuitmakers. That guy made off with Micol Hebron's birthday cake!

All Roads Lead to Faüxmish

Faüxmish's debut LP "F for Ache" is still at the pressing plant, but its artisan-tooled jacket is touring Italy as part of Michael Arata's "One Night Stand -- Italian Style" traveling exhibit. Here it is installed on the wall of the Coliseum. "I did not know men could build such things" -- Juba the Gladiator could have been speaking of the finely crafted, hand-flocked beauty of this exquisite collector's item!

Last Chance for Cut & Paste Extravaganza!

If you haven't seen Elliott Hundley's amazing new collages (and sculptures and paintings) at Regen Projects II at 9016 Santa Monica Blvd, today's the last day. They're open until 6 PM, so no excuses! I'd say more, but I just finished a 5000 word essay on the work, and figured I should get the work out fast. These are some detail shots I took. Free prize to the first person who can identify the works from which they are extracted! Leave guesses in Comments.

ARATALAND! Review in Whitehot Magazine

Shana Nys Dambrot has written an excellent review of the ARATALAND! exhibit for whitehotmagazine.com, based on the idea that Henry Miller dreamed it all early last century. As art theory goes, it's more plausible than most. Thanks Hank. Thanks Shana!

"Innocenceland is the most diverse concentration, with samples from a dozen series laid out in a labyrinth of smaller rooms and corridors radiating off the building’s loading dock. The psychological purgatory of the periods and series collected in this grouping is exacerbated by sense of decentralized wandering that the layout necessitates. There’s a map but it doesn’t really help. You get separated from your group, you find yourself alone, you become anxious, and room after room is full of objects most people don’t care to be left alone with. “In the next room, which is the parlor, all the relatives are assembled. They sit in a semicircle, waiting for me to enter. They sit stiff and rigid, upholstered like the chairs. Instead of warts and wens, there is horsehair sprouting from their chins.” (HM) A small number of sculptures from 1991-93, the Little Virgins feature flickering electric candles and spokes of soiled, black and white saddle shoes, filled with wax and acquired by trading the girls for donuts, one donut per pair. They are old shoes, outgrown -- it’s not like he was waiting outside some Catholic school in a van with a box of them. He asked their parents. But he’s fine playing the role of apocryphal pervert, and the creepy ritualized religious overtones and vague menace triggered by the mere sight of little lost children’s shoes are a major clue that the entire amusement park may have been deadly serious all along. Little Virgin Dress (1993) is a child-size wall sculpture of a white lace churchgoing dress with an under-skirt blossoming of sexy plastic flowers, and doesn’t help his case in that regard. It also rewards viewers for bending slightly to look up a little girl’s dress, making them complicit in the perversion. Nervous laughter and a slight hint of alarm is a common reaction..."

Read the rest of Arataland! at Beacon Arts Building, Los Angeles here.