Who's That Get?

Portfolio made his debut at the American Whippet Club's 24th annual National Specialty last Wednesday at the beat but accommodating Hotel Tucson City Center Innsuites - though we were required to supply our own bedspread (but then you know what they say about hotel bedspreads - talkin bout an ultraviolet lightshow, y'all dig?)

It was a fun - if exhausting - expedition, driving straight there and back in a rented minivan to participate in one out of the seven intensely scheduled days of competition.


This was P's first appearance in the 'Open Dog' class, having left puppyhood behind at his 19-month birthday earlier in April. Apparently he failed to rock the judge's world - though admittedly the competition was worthy in this instance. P comported himself commendably, but was not ranked ribbon-quality.


However, around noon on Thursday, just as we were getting ready to hit the road, Debbie Butt of Sporting Fields Kennel - whom we hadn't ever really met before - found us and asked if Portfolio could stick around to participate as part of his sire Trent's 'Stud Dog Unit' -- the competitive team in an event where a male dog and two of its offspring - his "get" - are judged as a group.


Somebody hadn't shown up and Portfolio was the only one of Trent's get there. Trent won the whippet group at Westminster in 2008, and the other get was Nigel's pa Hot Topic (AKA Sully) so it was an honor to be asked, and a chance to finally meet the stud that begat our personal whippet adventure. So - once we arranged for the Urban Homesteaders to save our real vehicles from an Asphalt Slurry Seal Protection mandated towage - we agreed.


The line-up was a little confusing, because Hot Topic himself was entered with a stud unit of his own, so in the pictures you are seeing - left to right - Trent (Sporting Fields Rock On) with Debbie Butt, Portfolio with M.A., Sully (SF Hot Topic) with... handler - I'm sorry I'm not sure of any other names but I'm going to guess that Sully's l'il bitches are Broadstrider’s Cheers Me Dears (who went onto win Winners Bitch & Best of Winners on Saturday) and 2009's American Whippet Club National Best in Show winner Snow Hill Calliope -- correct me if I'm wrong, whippet community. OK it looks like it was Tattershall Ticket to Fly and Calli. I probably just made some unforgivable faux pas. The politics of the art world are nothing to those of breed conformation.


This was apparent in the buzz that Portfolio's (and MA's) presence evoked ringside, where I was shooting these blurry photos. I stood in three separate locations, and I overheard three separate conversations trying to figure out "Who is that magnificent white dog with Trent?"and "Isn't that owner/handler fine artist M.A. Peers, who did those space dog paintings for the Museum of Jurassic Technology?" as well as similar queries.


Thanks to his newfound experience, Portfolio showed enthusiastically but gave an impression of inner centeredness, suggesting Westminster triumphs to come. But not yet... not yet. In a genetic wormhole melon-twister, Nigel's Pa (and P's half-brother) Sully took the Stud Unit blue ribbon, and Trent came third. Debbie let Porlilfoo keep the green ribbon and horsehair-fired commemorative plate with the whippets in the sombrero, for going the extra furlong. And she can spare it - since her SF Bahama Sands (Tawny) got Best in Show! Congrats Debbie & Tawny! Can another Westminster triumph be far behind?

Those middle images are close-up shots of the backs of trucks on the I-10 as the sun was going down.

Down with Up!

"For me, Rachel Whiteread has always been the most problematic member of the YBAs (the world-beating Young British Artists group led by Damien "Shark in a Vitrine" Hirst and sponsored by Charles Saatchi), if only because she is the most formally gifted of the lot, and the most openly and unironically indebted to modernist antecedents like minimalism, conceptualism and Arte Povera. I always found her work pleasant to look at, which is certainly more than I can say about Hirst, Tracey Emin and the rest of the faux-Duchampian blue-chip hacks of Albion. She does, however, share their notable lack of originality — which, due to indifference, amnesia and the marketing muscle power of Mr. Saatchi, proved no impediment to marketplace saturation and global critical accolades...."


"One artist who manages a remarkable tightrope balance with many levels of negativity — while always managing to surprise — is painter Karen Carson, whose work has ranged from minimalist geometric fabric "paintings" (with zippers allowing reconfiguration) to baroque, mirror-studded, cobbled-together architectonic abstract explosions; shaped-canvas cubist bouquets of decorative-clock flowers or stealth-bomber/vulture hybrids; vinyl banners combining Las Vegas gaming design with stripped-down Buddhist aphorisms; and backlit bar-style light boxes depicting raging forest fires. Her latest body of work continues her recent exploration of strategies like rectangular surfaces covered entirely with paint, constituting an image of a landscape. For Carson, that's pretty far out."

Read the rest of The Power of Negative Thinking here.

Rachel Whiteread Drawing for Water Tower VI 1997
Karen Carson Night to Day 2009

Hyperwonkism

Check it out - I'm a movement! Part of one, anyway:

"One of the most exciting things about hauntology, I think, is that it’s possibly one of the first aesthetic movements in quite a while to see some very specific equivalence in technique between sonic and visual art. I’d been looking long and hard for a visual counterpart to the music of The Caretaker, William Basinski and lately Indignant Senility – I knew one definitely existed, it was just a matter of finding it – when I suddenly found a postcard of an image from one Doug Harvey yesterday."

Learn what Adam Harper learned here. Then keep reading.

Image: Fresh Kill mouldy slide 2009

In & Out of Commission

Greetings everyone. Apologies for lack of posts but I've been swamped with various projects ranging from curating the Tubular! show at the Pacific Design Center to a lengthy (double what I thought when I finished it the first time) essay on the films of Marnie Weber, some forthcoming LA WEEKLY columns, editing an anthology of Patacritical Interrogation Techniques for AC Institute, remastering The Charles Ray Experience's Hooked on Dialectics for release on Pleonasm Music, a Mannlicher Carcano/Flugeldar! gig at the Echo Curio supporting John Kilduff, and a visit from my sister and niece. Mostly though I've been knocked flat with a wicked upper respiratory flu: rattling with pneumonia, hawkin' up the fluorescent green quarter-pounders, and hallucinating with fever. How did you spend your Spring Break?

I hope to post on all the above topics shortly, but in the meantime, here are a couple of Tubular! images. Above is a view through the front window during the opening performance -- Eamonn Fox and Patrick Ballard inside a giant gold paper-mâché ball, gradually drinking a case of beer, punching holes in the ball from inside, then stripping off their clothes to plug the holes. When they were completely naked, they smashed out of the gold egg and wandered off into the history books. I actually missed the hatching because I was at an adjacent opening, witnessing Roger Herman giving the Hitlergruß and yelling "Sieg Heil!" at the PDC security guards. Twas a night to remember. If anyone got stills or video of either performance, please contact me. Below, Fox's Burlington Coat Factory painting.



Tubular! continues through May 7 in Suite B239 at Pacific Design Center, 8687 Melrose Ave. in West Hollywood. NOTE: The PDC is only open M-F 9-5!

New Frontiers in Ethology

The Onion: Scientists Successfully Teach Gorilla It Will Die Someday

Panter Era Begins Now

Pasadena City College is renowned for its lengthy tenure as one of the best community colleges in California, spawning ground for Dennis Cooper and Van Halen (as well as artists Betye Saar and Liz McGrath) and home to the mother of all swap meets. It also boasts a remarkably strong art department, whose faculty includes L.A. Weekly Annual Biennial "Some Paintings" alumni Robin Mitchell, Lynne Berman and Rebecca Morris, short-listers Brian Fahlstrom and Nick Taggert, 2009 COLA awardee David Dimichele, and Brian Tucker, PCC gallery director and curator of last fall's exhibit "Mantong and Protong," by dueling crackpots Richard Shaver and Stanislaw Szukalski.

Tucker's gallery is also the flash point for PCC's highly regarded but little-known Artist in Residence program — an annual weeklong intensive on-campus orgy of art-making, master classes and public lectures now in its 24th year. Previous honored guests include William Wegman, Faith Ringgold, Wayne Thiebaud, Alexis Smith and many other illustrious names from the pantheon of West Coast blue-chip cultural production.

This year's model has a slightly more complex pedigree, encompassing not only gallery and museum exhibitions, but award-winning TV set designs, genre-redefining comic books, commercial illustration (including album covers for Frank Zappa, Ralph Records, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bongwater and Silver Daggers), the revival of psychedelic light shows, and a decades-long trail of lo-fi, weird-ass experimental rock music including collaborations with Bay Area cult proto–post-punkers the Residents.

Whom could I be referring to but Gary Brad Panter, thrice Emmy-encrusted acid-punk Southern gentleman with perhaps the most restlessly inventive graphic line since Paul Klee. Panter was conspicuously absent from the recent Pee-wee Herman reunion tour ("I didn't end up working on the Pee-wee stage show. I wish Paul great success with the show. I've seen photos and the set will be close enough to make fans happy"), but conspicuously conspicuous as a recent featured speaker at the Hammer Museum in conjunction with Crumb's Book of Genesis show, where — in addition to his personal take on the history of 20th-century art — he doled out the best "advice to young artists" I've ever heard: "Smoke pot. Make art. Live long. Make friends. Eat some Mexican food. Listen to Dick El Demasiado's record. Then you'll be OK."


Read the rest of Residents Artist in Residence: Gary Panter Can't Stay Away from LA here

TONIGHT Monday March 15th 7 PM!!!

Public lecture by 2010 PCC Artist in Residence Gary Panter at the Pasadena City College Vosloh Forum
followed by
Reception for the artist: Monday, March 15, 8:30 – 9:30 PM at the Pasadena City College Art Gallery

... for at least two minutes...

Print media still has some usefulness! [from the 1951 comic If an A-Bomb Falls, online along with many other helpful educational graphic narratives at Ethan Persoff's website] Not to mention the Color Wheel of Destruction!

Satanic Beatniks in Space

"There seems to be a rising tide of regionalism in the L.A. art scene, or at least a renewed interest in examining the city's cultural history, maybe because — as recent funding threats to the Department of Cultural Affairs suggest — the past is more promising than the future. While proprietary nostalgia for the Ferus Gallery era seems to have reached an epidemic level (Go, McKenna!), institutional historicizing almost inevitably excises the spirit of the original milieu it's trying to document — especially so in the case of the anti-establishment insurrections of the Beats, Hippies and Punks.

It's rarer still to come across a documentary presentation that is not only faithful to the spirit of such subcultural topics, but incorporates and expands on the formal and conceptual underpinnings of the tradition in question. One such rarity is Mock Up on Mu, the recent feature-length experimental film by Bay Area archivist and auteur Craig Baldwin, which screened recently at the Echo Park Film Center, and which has just been released on DVD.

Mock Up on Mu recounts (and embellishes) one of the juiciest and most unlikely bits of Angeleno mythology: Scientology honcho L. Ron Hubbard's collusion (as an undercover agent for Naval Intelligence, we are assured by both church spokespersons and Baldwin) with Jack Parsons — inventor of solid rocket fuel, founder of the Jet Propulsion Lab and Aerojet, and disciple of English occultist Aleister Crowley — to impregnate future Beat icon Marjorie Cameron with the antichrist ... or something. The original story is garbled enough, with Hubbard eventually fucking off with Parsons' girlfriend, yacht and bankroll, and Parsons subsequently marrying Cameron and blowing himself to smithereens while experimenting in his garage laboratory at his family's Pasadena mansion.

Or perhaps not. In Baldwin's hands, the future ain't what it used to be. The year is 2019 and both Hubbard and Parsons ("Though he looks 39, he's really 105 years old!") appear to have faked their own deaths, while Cameron has had her memory erased on Hubbard's moon base and is being prepped to go undercover and seduce key members of the American defense industry — including Parsons. And that's just the beginning! Baldwin tells the story with a combination of low-budget overdubbed live-action sequences and his signature barrage (as in 1991's conspiracy-theory overload Tribulation 99) of found and appropriated clips of movies, television and advertising, with a further layer of collaged dialogue and music.

The narrative architecture is a similar pastiche, incorporating philosophical and spiritual rants; science, history and philosophy lessons; flights of absurdism and fantasy; and numerous biographical sidebars pertaining to the principals — including Cameron's appearances in Kenneth Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and her seminal role as the artist whose drawing precipitated the obscenity bust of Wallace Berman's 1957 show at the Ferus Gallery.

Which, as we all know, triggered Berman's move to San Francisco and his hooking up with Bruce Conner, who taught Baldwin how to make dazzling, poetic cinematic collages out of found footage. Mere coincidence?..."

Read the rest of Locals Only: Changing the System From Within here

And read The Marvel: A Biography of Jack Parsons by Richard Carbonneau & Robin Simon (detail above) here.

Revised Janson Part 11

Like the Great Pyramids, do you find yourself at a loss as pertaining to the question of doing something tonight, and if so what? Fret no more, as the answer involves instead of a boring art discussion, a mock game show, and instead of awkward silence a performance by the celebrated purveyors of hillbilly composition, Triple Chicken Foot. I am referring of course to the opening of No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College, including works by myself, Michael Arata, Pierre Picot, Walter Askin, Erika Rothenberg, Merwin Belin, Ilene Segalove, Stephen Berkman, Mahara Sinclaire, Jim Eller, Dave Smith, Walter Gabrielson, Masami Teraoka, Jeffrey Vallance, Richard Pettibone, & William Wegman.
Los Angeles Valley College Art Gallery
5800 Fulton Avenue
Art Building
Valley Glen, CA 91401

Band is on at 7, game show at 8, winding down at 10 - see you there!

Revised Janson Part 10

Continued from An exile returns: Traveling exhibition re-introduces Germany to émigré art historian H.W. Janson August 10, 2004 by Liam Otten for the "WUSL Newsroom"
Over the next year, Janson used those monies to acquire some 40 major works of European and American modernism, putting special emphasis on cubism, constructivism and surrealism. He worked primarily with exile dealers, including Paul Rosenberg, Karl Nierendorf and especially Curt Valentin, as well as the former expatriate American Peggy Guggenheim. Ernst's The Eye of Silence (1943-44) was bought from Julien Levy, the artist's longtime dealer, while Tanguy's La Tour Marine (1944) came from Pierre Matisse (son of Henri).

Janson left campus in 1948, but subsequent curators such as Frederick Hartt and William N. Eisendrath Jr. — working with prominent local collectors — continued to build on his curatorial architecture. Major acquisitions of the period include Matisse's Still Life With Oranges (II) (1899); Miró's Painting (1925); Gorky's Golden Brown (1943-44); Klee's Fragt Sich (1934) and Picasso's Women of Algiers, Variation 'N' (1955)."

[H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service.]

Revised Janson Part 9

Continued from An exile returns: Traveling exhibition re-introduces Germany to émigré art historian H.W. Janson August 10, 2004 by Liam Otten for the "WUSL Newsroom"
Born in 1913 in St. Petersburg, Russia, Janson was raised in Hamburg, where his family settled after fleeing the October Revolution of 1917. He began his university education in Munich in 1932 but transferred the following year to Hamburg University, studying with Erwin Panofsky until the influential professor's firing by National Socialists. Though himself gentile, Janson left Germany shortly thereafter and completed his training at Harvard. In the 1930s and 40s, he emerged as a staunch defender of modern artists, writing pieces on Beckmann, Guston, Klee, Picasso and George Grosz while taking a critical scalpel to American Regionalists like Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood.

Janson arrived at Washington University in 1941 as an assistant professor of art history. At the time, public awareness of the University collection was almost non-existent. Though established in 1881, the collection lacked on-campus facilities and was held in storage at the City Art Museum (now the Saint Louis Art Museum). Janson only discovered the collection, then mostly19th-century American and European painting and applied arts, through a close reading of CAM's wall labels.

Janson was named curator of the university collection in 1944 and immediately organized a makeshift gallery in the School of Architecture. His boldest stroke came the following year, when he raised about $40,000 by de-accessioning 120 paintings and more than 500 additional objects — then almost one-sixth of university holdings. Ironically, more than half the funds, about $23,000, came from the controversial sale of Frederic Remington's Dash for Timber, a scene of the American West...


[H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service.]

Revised Janson Part 8

Continued from An exile returns: Traveling exhibition re-introduces Germany to émigré art historian H.W. Janson August 10, 2004 by Liam Otten for the "WUSL Newsroom"
"Janson's story is not known in Germany; he is a rediscovery," said Sabine Eckmann, Ph.D., curator of the Kemper Art Museum and a German native. However, "there is a lot of German interest in exile, in all of these artists and all of these artworks that were lost. It's part of Germany's art history.

"Exile and Modernism demonstrates what one exile art historian was able to do in the United States at a time when modern art was banned as degenerate in Germany," continued Eckmann, a specialist in exile art. "It also offers a chance to rethink the meanings of concepts like 'exile' and 'modernism' and their connection to one another. We typically see exile as an experience of loss or isolation, but Janson shows that exile can produce creative energies. There's an interesting dialog between his experience of Nazi culture, which caused him to react to certain strains of modern art, and his new orientation in America"...

[H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service.]

Revised Janson Part 7

From An exile returns: Traveling exhibition re-introduces Germany to émigré art historian H.W. Janson August 10, 2004 by Liam Otten for the "WUSL Newsroom"
Janson, who emigrated to the U.S. from Germany in the mid-1930s to protest Nazi cultural policies, remains little known in his former country. That's about to change, thanks to Exile and Modernism: H.W. Janson and the Collection of Washington University in St. Louis, a touring exhibition organized by the university's Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.

Over the next two years, Exile and Modernism — which builds on a similar show the university presented in 2002 at the Salander O'Reilly Galleries in New York — will travel to four German museums and one in the United States. The exhibition documents how Janson, as curator at Washington University in the mid-1940s, employed prescient vision, a modest acquisitions budget and contacts amongst the exile art community to build what he proudly called "the finest collection of contemporary art assembled on any American campus"...

[H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service.]

Revised Janson Part 6

Lee Sorensen's Dictionary of Art Historians adds: In 1962, Janson and his wife, Dora, published their History of Art. It grew over the years to be the best-selling textbook of any subject in the United States and, known simply as "Janson," was for years the standard text. Because Janson's appointment at NYU was primarily at the undergraduate level, he had fewer Ph.D. students than others of his profile. His students (at Washington University) included Irving Lavin and Marilyn Aronberg Lavin.

Janson's work, especially his Ape lore book, show the influence of the Hamburg school/Warburg influence. The book focuses on the history of art or styles as much as it does mythological phenomenon and its manifestation in material culture. Janson's 1962 History of Art was an instant best seller, contrasting it from the other predominant art-history text, Art Through the Ages by Helen Gardner, which by its numerous posthumous revisions treated art as a history of styles. Janson's book came under criticism in later years for its lack of inclusion of women artists. Subsequent editions written by his son, Anthony Janson (b. 1943), changed this.

[H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service.]

Revised Janson Part 5

[H.W. Janson Wikipedia entry continued]
He wrote about Renaissance art and nineteenth-century sculpture, and authored two prize-winning books, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (1952) and Sculpture of Donatello (1957). In his later years he was concerned with East–West dialogue in the arts. Over his career, Janson consulted on the Time–Life Library of Art; was president of the College Art Association, editor of the Art Bulletin, and founding member and President of the Renaissance Society of America. He also wrote books on art for young people, some in collaboration with his wife.

[H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service.]

Revised Janson Part 4

[H.W. Janson Wikipedia entry continued]
He taught at Washington University in St. Louis from 1941 to 1949, in which year he joined the faculty of New York University, where he built the undergraduate arts department and taught at the graduate Institute of Fine Arts. He was recognized with an honorary degree in 1981 and died on a train between Zurich and Milan in 1982 at the age of 68...

[H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service.]

Revised Janson Part 3

[H.W. Janson Wikipedia entry continued]
In 1935, at the suggestion of Panofsky, who had emigrated to the United States, Alfred Barr sponsored Janson as an immigrant, and he completed a PhD at Harvard University in 1942 (his dissertation was on Michelozzo). He taught at the Worcester Art Museum (1936–38) and the University of Iowa (1938–41) while pursuing his degree. In 1941 he married Dora Jane Heineberg (1916–2002), an art history student at Radcliffe College, and he became a citizen in 1943...

[H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service.]

Revised Janson Part 2

According to Wikipedia, Horst Waldemar Janson (October 4, 1913 – September 30, 1982), who published as H. W. Janson, was an American scholar of art history best known for his History of Art, which was first published in 1962 and has sold more than two million copies in fifteen languages.

Janson was born in St. Petersburg in 1913 to Friedrich Janson (1875–1927) and Helene Porsch (Janson) (1879–1974).[2] After the October Revolution, the family moved to Finland and then Hamburg, where Janson attended the Wilhelms Gymnasium (graduated 1932). He studied at the University of Munich and then at the art history program at the University of Hamburg, where he was a student of Erwin Panofsky...

[H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service.]

Revised Janson Part 1

H.W. Janson's History of Art is one of the most-used art history texts in the Anglo world, and was assigned for the first intro art history survey course I took in the mid-80s. Art History survey courses being what they are, I had to keep my mind alive somehow, and I took it upon myself to make necessary alterations, some of which are featured in the forthcoming group show No Laughing Matter: Art and Humor in Southern California (a Modest Sampling) at LA Valley College. I will try to post the rest of them here as a public service. Happy Valentine's Day!

Rainbow Matter Custard

[I didn't get around to quoting this remarkable bit of didactic text in my review of the Mercedes Matter retrospective at the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University but this is the perfect place to make up for the omission.]

"Some people have it rough. Born into the East Coast cultural aristocracy in 1913, Mercedes Matter began life as a beloved and privileged artistic prodigy. Her father was Arthur B. Carles, a pioneer American abstract painter who studied with Matisse, showed at Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery and exhibited work in the legendary Armory Show. He was also an unrepentant bohemian: long-haired and bearded, a lifelong alcoholic and womanizer. Her mother, Mercedes de Cordoba, was a Parisian correspondent for Vogue and a favorite model of photographer Edward Steichen. Her uncle Pedro was a star of Broadway and early Hollywood, and her aunt Sara was a famous fashion photographer and illustrator. Her father started her painting at the age of 6, and she spent her early teens touring the art capitals of Europe. After attending the progressive girls' school Bennett College in Millbrook, New York, she moved to Manhattan and began studying with Hans Hofmann at the Art Students' League.


Matter (then going by the name Jeanne Carles) and Hofmann (33 years her senior) became close friends — briefly lovers — and maintained a close relationship until Hofmann's death, in 1966. Matter is said to have lured Hofmann back to painting after a two-decade hiatus, and casually instigated the summer painting retreat that evolved into Hofmann's Provincetown school. She became the lover of another student of Hofmann's, painter Wilfrid Zogbaum. Fudging paperwork, Matter qualified for the WPA dole and became an assistant, translator and lover to Fernand Leger, who was in America designing WPA murals along the Hudson River. In 1936 Matter was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists Association, became the lover of Arshile Gorky, and was arrested at a WPA demonstration and thrown in jail. There, she met Lee Krasner, who became another close — though not lifelong — friend, joining Hofmann's painting class and modeling jewelry for Matter's close friend Alexander Calder.


Through Leger, Matter met and began working for Swiss graphic designer and photographer Herbert Matter, who, as an artist for Condé Nast publications, was largely responsible for translating the photomontage innovations of the dadaists into the visual vocabulary of the cultural mainstream. They, too, soon became lovers. In 1941 they married, but by some condition of Herbert's Swiss citizenship, they were forced to move to Santa Monica and work for Charles and Ray Eames for the duration of World War II. Upon returning to Manhattan, they found themselves at the center of the burgeoning New York school — Krasner was now married to Jackson Pollock, and both Hofmann and Gorky were seminal figures in the emerging language of abstract expressionism. The Matters were among the Pollocks' closest friends, and Mercedes was part of the inner circle at the Cedar Bar and the first woman member of the Artists Club, forming close friendships with Philip Guston, Bill and Elaine de Kooning, Franz Kline, critic Harold Rosenberg, and composers Morton Feldman and John Cage, among others. Herbert joined the Yale fine-art faculty, and Mercedes went on to found the Studio School, a small but influential atelier-style institution in the original home of the Whitney Museum.


All this biography is a roundabout buildup to the big question: "Mercedes who?"


Read the rest of Matter's Most here.

Images: Didactic panel; Woman with Red Hair circa 1922; Tabletop Still Life circa 1936; Untitled (number 11) 1933; Tabletop Still Life 1936

Beans, Fish and Meta-mutational Gumbo

"Ginny Bishton is an artist who defies expectations. Or rather, completely dismantles them, leaving their components arranged in neat rows. One of her UCLA grad-school works consisted of a wall full of hand-copied bread recipes with the instructions left out — inventories of ingredients with the mixing, kneading, fermenting and baking aspects surgically excised — no narrative arc, no money shot. Since then she has steered a willful, idiosyncratic course that has seen her gallery work abruptly morph, often in the space between consecutive solo shows, from gnarly op/minimalist drawings into psychedelic/serialist photo-collages, defying expectations that an artist — particularly a two-dimensional one — needs to stake out a signature visual style and milk it for the rest of his or her life. I'm speaking to you in hell, Roy Lichtenstein...


Another L.A. artist whose oeuvre has been characterized by sudden stylistic about-faces is painter Tim Ebner, who rose to renown in the late '80s with minimalist geometric neo–Finish-Fetish assemblages produced in a surfboard factory. In the early '90s, he abandoned this successful marketing niche for a series of awkwardly rendered clown portraits and anthropomorphic animals crashing through the surf. Into the '00s these pictorial scenarios underwent only incremental change, but Ebner's painterly technique grew in leaps and bounds — a fact that became evident when in 2007 he suddenly began producing a flurry of loose, colorful abstract paintings and atmospheric minimalist landscapes. It seemed that Ebner had come full circle, returning to "serious" painting and a nonfigurative visual vocabulary that might easily take another decade to work through...


Mark Todd, a former student of Ebner's, offers a less clear-cut version of appropriation and collage in "Juggernaut," the next-to-last show at Billy Shire's Culver City digs before the operation folds back into a renovated La Luz de Jesus space on Hollywood Boulevard. Todd's work has evolved quickly and confidently over the past few years, successfully taking on the scale and materials of contemporary painting that have proven too daunting for many accomplished small-scale collagists — of particular significance in Todd's case because his subject matter/source material, comic book covers, particularly those of Jack Kirby dating from the '60s and early '70s, has an explicit size, loaded with formal and psychological baggage...."


Read the rest of The Bish, the Fish, and the Fantastic Four here.

Visit the shows before Feb 6th at Billy Shire Fine Arts, Rosamund Felsen Gallery, and at Richard Telles Gallery until the 13th.

Images: Ginny Bishton, De nada (red, pink, blue), Photo collage on paper, 2009; Tim Ebner Installation view, Acrylic on canvas mounted on plywood, feather, mounted on found, modified metal wall brackets, 2010; Mark Todd, Wrath Warrior, Mixed media on panel, 2009

Pushing the Envelope in Sherman Oaks

Once in a while I get a press release that, although I may not be able to promote in my capacity as an art critic, I feel compelled to share with the world. Here, and continuing in the comments is one such press release.

“HAUTE DATE” MAKING ART TOGETHER THIS VALENTINE’S DAY

DEPARTURE SITE OF JAMES DEAN’S LAST RIDE BECOMES ART REBEL

The Sherman Oaks Art Venue Offers Romantic Valentine’s Day Special
for Creative-Minded Couples Who Can Take Home Their Personal Work of Art

(Sherman Oaks, Ca. February 1, 2010) From the location of where the last photograph of James Dean was taken before for his final ride, Dean’s spirit remains in the sports car garage now converted into the venue known as Art Rebel, an art gallery, studio and event space in Sherman Oaks. For the entire month of February, the art studio turns into a floral paradise, complete with “love coves” for a one-of-kind Valentine's event entitled the “Love Art” experience. This new "haute date" is designed for couples to spend quality time, reconnecting through art. The two-hour session includes creative areas for two with a rose petal covered floor, canvas, paints, brushes, two heart-shaped boxes to be hand painted with love notes, chocolates, candies, and two long-stemmed roses. Call Art Rebel for reservations and prices, 818-907-5883, www.artrebel.net...

continued in the Comments

Letrasetism in Contemporary Composition

My 10-year-old graphic score "The Mysterious Stranger Pt. A:a—The 2012 ovtr" (along with a brief excerpt from my unfinished electroacoustic rendition thereof) just got published in the Sound Art section of the new edition of Drunken Boat, an online literary journal of the arts.

Bitch, You'll Be a Woman Soon

Chloe is a woman now. We picked up some 'Bitch Britches' to contain the seepage while P-Fool was KA&TN out in Indio over the weekend, but they were way too big, so we've opted for the high-waisted Donna Karan number pictured here, but even they had to be taken in! Talk about your supermodel looks! Strangely enough, it's Nigel and Portfolio that have been binging and purging.

The mood around here has been distinctly altered by the pheromones - weird trance states, political upheaval, and sudden mood swings. The other night Chloe - who sleeps at the head of the bed - suddenly woke up at like 3 AM and chomped me on the bicep -- and it fuckin hurt! Never happened before, either. Nogonna happen again, as I'm building her one of those 'menstruation huts' out on the back 40, where she can hook her tentacle up to the Gaia Hypothesis Shrub and save the noble blue-skinned aborigines by commanding the purple dragons to clog the intakes of the invading hover-jets. Or whatever it is chicks do at "that time of the month." Long as I don't get any more distinguishing scars.

SavX @ SA Salon

UK correspondent Cathryn Ward sent along this snapshot of Edwin Pouncey AKA Savage Pencil (UK scraggy line cartoonist, rock critic, and compiler of the awesome Moondog set on Honest Jon's) standing in front of my mouldy slide prints at the Strange Attractor Salon.

Atmospheric Phenomena, Indio CA 10_01_08