"What Does Being Born Mean?"

New for-listening-to-only soundcloud single assembled from bits of the new 2-CD set This is Really Happening Volume 2 is up at Pleonasm Music.

Chloe in Pomonie

Chloe strikes a pose in front of one of M.A.'s new whippet paintings during installation at the Pomona College Museum of Art. The exhibit continues through Dec 19th. Check out Lily Simonson's insightful appraisal on the art21 blog.

BiennialBiennialBiennialBiennial... Duffy

The California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art is a tradition dating back to 1984, when the venue was known as the Newport Harbor Art Museum and its chief curator was Paul Schimmel, now at L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art. The Orange County museum was renamed OCMA in the mid-'90s, and the venue's importance to the L.A. art scene has waxed and waned over the intervening decades, but the series of biennials in the new millennium — unrivaled except for L.A. Weekly's Annual Biennial — have afforded it a new centrality, at least for a few months every couple of years.



The art boom of the last decade was reflected in the increasing ambitions of the Cali Bi, culminating in 2008's extravaganza, which featured more than 50 artists and multiple venues including outposts in Tijuana and Northern California, guest-curated by LAXART founder and director Lauri Firstenberg. Well, the boom's gone bust and Firstenberg is scheming with Annie Philbin at the Hammer Museum to steal OCMA's thunder with the Hammer's recently announced 2012 Los Angeles Biennial.


In the meantime, OCMA has scaled back its Biennial (I'm really starting to hate that word) to a more manageable 45 artists selected by in-house curator Sarah Bancroft. The show returns the focus to lesser-known up-and-comers, while retaining the expansive regionalism that allows for substantial contributions from Bay Area and San Diego art communities. As with any of these omnibus extravaganzas, the work on view is a hit-and-miss grab-bag, and the surprise quotient is crucial. Thus the most impressive paintings in the show — one-half of Alexandra Grant's expansive, seething six-part "Portal" series of her trademark backward word clusters on enormous sheets of paper — lose considerable punch for having been exhibited at her L.A. gallery two years ago. In contrast, John Zurier — a Berkeley-based midcareer monochromatic abstract painter — materializes out of left field with a series of luminous pale-blue oils on linen that quietly steal the show...


...Although retaining a foot at all times in the pop-cultural swamp, Sean Duffy's work has steadily grown more formally and conceptually challenging since then, while simultaneously becoming more autobiographical and tinged with social commentary. Searcher extends and amplifies the artist's recent multivalent explorations of automotive culture, pop ephemera and domestic furnishing design while collecting several important earlier pieces that haven't been seen locally before.


Most prominent among these prodigal artifacts is Car 23 (2008-2010), Duffy's re-creation of his father's customized, zebra-striped 1964 Toyota Land Cruiser, which sits incongruously abandoned in the LAM lobby. Two of a 2008 series of silk-screened "paintings" on stained drop cloths — their lower thirds cluttered with a landscape of superimposed automotive logos — team with a new pair of his better-known modular grids of silk-screened plywood units (these ones depicting variations of contemporary outdoor sport magazines instead of vintage LP covers) that reiterate Duffy's almost incidental position as one of the most interesting and challenging painters currently working in L.A.


Read the rest of Orange you glad I didn't say Biennial? here

Images: Alexandra Grant First Portal (mind) 2008; John Zurier Muuratsalo 3 2009; Sean Duffy Die Hard (detail) 2008; untitled (yellow) (detail) 2010; dark wood lights (detail) 2010; Duffy in studio with untitled (red) 2010 - Duffy photos by DH.

Coming Soon! Hide! Hide!

Details not available at this time.

Chinatown Swastika Rehab!

As it's my birthday I am taking the day off, but I urge all who are concerned with the destigmatization of one of the oldest and most spiritually potent iconographic symbols of our species to visit two events today in LA's Chinatown district: Painter, Mothman Kindred spirit, and Beck FANatic Lily Simonson in collaboration with Independent Researcher Yong Ha Jeong presents Session 2 of their course in Practicing Shamanism: Korean and Siberian Shamanism at The Public School at TELIC (951 Chung King Road, 4 PM, continues through Dec 21).

Just down the walk-only sidestreet, USC grad and recent Jancar Galley (961 Chung King Road, 6 -9 PM) co-conspirator Maya Lujan's recent multi-media abstractions headline that venue's new trifecta of typically consummate offerings which also includes "Some Paintings" alumnus Tyler Stallings' Deinstalled Paintings and Alice Clements "In the Basement." See if you can score a copy of the catalog from Lujan's 2008 MFA Thesis documenting one of the most interesting painting-based installations in recent memory. Continues through Dec 18.


Images: Some olde swastika; Maya Lujan's Untitled (Mimosa) 2010; Tyler Stalling's (unidentified painting) 2010?

I'm ready for my closeup, Mr. Lynch!

As in David, not Lee. Though Portfolio would be happy to do a cameo in L. Lynch's next feature. His people should call Portfolio's people. Thanks to Mr. Homegrown for dramatic lighting concept. Shot in Claremont after last night's panel discussion. More to come.

M.A. Peers in Pomona Thursday Night

Opening Reception for Pomona College Museum of Art's
Project Series 42: M.A. Peers
Thursday Nov 18 from 7 PM - 10 PM
Panel Discussion featuring M.A. Peers and Steve Roden with Doug Harvey moderating 7 PM - 8 PM

For close to two decades, M.A. Peers has created paintings and drawings that passionately engage issues surrounding painting, the history of painting, popular culture, and formalist strategies of portraiture. Combining delicately rendered figures and forms, within an enigmatic, but brilliantly colored field, Peers selects subject matter that ranges from portraits of generic dogs, to portraits of the 1950s Soviet space dogs, to portraits of corporate and political figures. In her most recent work, the grounds have gradually engulfed the figures, crossing into pure abstraction. For Project Series 42, M.A. Peers will present new paintings.

The Project Series is the Museum’s program of focused exhibitions of work by Southern California artists. Its purpose is to bring to the Pomona College community art that is experimental and that introduces new forms, techniques, and concepts. Organized by Rebecca McGrew, this series is supported in part by the Pasadena Art Alliance. A catalogue accompanies each exhibition.

Pomona College Museum of Art
333 N. College Way
Claremont, CA
91711

Museum hours: Tuesday through Friday 12-5 p.m.
Thursdays Art After Hours 5-11 p.m.
Saturday, Sunday 1-5 p.m.
Closed Monday

For more info including directions, visit http://www.pomona.edu/museum

Who's Really to Blame for 'Avatar'?

"The very idea of Experimental Cinema in Los Angeles is almost an oxymoron. In the heart of Hollywood, why would anyone with any marketable moviemaking chops bother with such celluloid navel-gazing — and who would ever see it? The truth is that although other cities have more high-profile avant-garde film ghettos, L.A.'s hothouse moviemaking environment and access to technical resources have supported a thriving underground almost from the birth of the industry. As for seeing it? For better or worse, the very structure and visual language of contemporary mainstream moviemaking — special effects–riddled, CGI-saturated, 3-D gee-whiz-addicted eye-candy store that it is — can arguably be traced to the wide-scale absorption of L.A.-based abstract animators by the Industry, particularly George Lucas, in the 1970s. There is a direct line from the visual music of expatriate German abstract geometric painter Oskar Fischinger's 1947 Motion Painting No. 1 to the immersive, uncanny virtual reality of James Cameron's Avatar.

This secret history is one of many to be explored as part of "Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles 1945-1980," a three-day symposium, film festival and exhibition presented by Los Angeles Filmforum this weekend at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. The Industrial Light & Magical gutting of L.A.'s finest psychedelic optical-printing noodlers is specifically addressed in "Not Just a Day Job: Experimental Filmmakers and the Special Effects Industry in the 1970s," a paper presented by media scholar Julie Turnock on Saturday at 4 p.m. as part of the panel titled "Blurred Boundaries: Outsider/Insider Filmmaking and Group Identities." And that's just one of 17 presentations, scheduled over four Saturday and Sunday panel discussions, disparate in topic (ranging from "International Identities and Local Influence: The Development of Visual Communications" to "Taylor Mead, a Faggot in Venice Beach in 1961") but uniformly shedding light on some of the more obscure byways of local film history..."

Read the rest of Hollywood's Soft Psychedelic Underbelly here

ALTERNATIVE PROJECTIONS: EXPERIMENTAL FILM IN LOS ANGELES 1945-1980 | Nov. 12-14 | USC School of Cinematic Arts | Free with online registration; more info here

Image: Still from the Single Wing Turquoise Bird Lightshow Reunion, 2009

Meta-Unsustainability

This is the last week of Unsustainable, my solo show at Jancar Gallery in Chinatown - Weds through Saturday Nov 13, 12 Noon - 5 PM, then it's so long Unsustainability!

Jancar Gallery
961 Chung King Rd (in Chinatown)
Los Angeles, CA 90012
213.625.2522

Image: The Eye of Horus 2010, Acrylic and dirt from the grave of Bobby Fischer on found home video projection screen.

Was ist Fäuxmish?

!2 Cutting Edge Cinema Premieres! 2!

"Cinema is a strangely autistic medium, often offering aid and encouragement to obviously pathological misanthropes, which isn't really a problem when that translates primarily into the form and content of their work — look at Stan Brakhage. Unfortunately, what you get when it translates further — into the very socioeconomic infrastructure for the creation of filmic artworks itself — is that poisonously hierarchical, anticreative cesspool known as Hollywood. And I've never even written a screenplay!

There are exceptions, of course: Robert Altman and John Cassavetes were both legendary for their willingness to destabilize the pyramidal protocols of the Tinseltown factory and locate the creative heart of their cinematic art in the resultant chaos. But as often as not, their work wound up as meditations on the desperate impossibility of bridging the communication gap between humans; even the most egalitarian of team players ultimately are defeated by the inherent hermeticism of the medium.

Whether through avant-garde eliminations of plot, character, the camera, authorial decision-making or intelligible pictorial content; or conversely through Imax, 3-D, Scratch 'n' Sniff and similar William Castle-type attempts at virtuality, the filmmaker's efforts to reach out and establish contact with an audience comes up against a raised drawbridge that is as narrow as the 1/48-second gap between projected frames and as vast as the gulf between you and your ex.

An awareness of this structural and philosophical disconnect permeates LiTTLEROCK, a bittersweet, low-key but mesmerizing indie feature that's been picking up steam on the festival circuit over the last few months, and will have its L.A. premiere Nov. 8 as part of the "Young Americans" section of AFI Fest 2010.

The Young Americans category is devoted to contemporary regionalism — a good fit for LiTTLEROCK, which is set in the titular Palmdale-adjacent small town ("The Fruit Basket of the Antelope Valley"). Directed by newcomer Mike Ott, who grew up in Newhall, the film features a star-making, semi-autobiographical performance by locally grown (and current Palmdale resident) Cory Zacharia, and was realized by Small Form Films, a tight-knit gaggle of cinephiles who coalesced around Thom "Los Angeles Plays Itself" Andersen's classes at CalArts...


Curiously enough, Misters , Zacharia, Ott, Lynch (Lee, see below) and Thornton (Frederick Fulton Henry Thornton, fourth official member and only non-auteur in the S.F. company) appear in the credits of The Eternal Heart alongside LA visual artist/filmmaker Marnie Weber's usual company of collaborators — a result of her artist-in-residency gig at this year's California State Summer School for the Arts filmmaking program for high school students, where Small Form folk make up most of the faculty.

Weber's anarchist-tinged production strategies have much in common with the multiple auteurs of Small Form. "Meeting Marnie this summer was really inspiring for me," says Ott, "and I'm taking her advice and approach for my next project: If you have an idea, start on it, don't wait, start and see where it goes. If you want to be in a band, just pick up an instrument and play, teach yourself. ... If you want to show your film and no one will screen it, have a screening yourself in a backyard, or on the side of a building."

The debut of The Eternal Heart takes this philosophy to the next level: With the help of Emi Fontana's West of Rome Public Art, Weber will premiere the half-hour gothic melodrama as part of Eternity Forever, a multimedia extravaganza at one of the film's locations, Altadena's historic Mountain View Cemetery and Mausoleum. There will be interactive cemetery tours led by monsters from the film, the Spirit Girls will perform a live score as what is billed as the band's final performance, and the mausoleum's gallery will host a vernissage for Weber's latest collages."

Read the rest of Across the Great Divide here.

Purchase $12 tickets to Marnie Weber's Eternity Forever here.

Click here to try and get free tickets for the Los Angeles AFI premiere screening of LiTTLEROCK Monday, Nov 8th.

Fleanette, Our New Hybrid Musical Hero

Ornette Coleman with Flea at Royce Hall. Ha ha ha! He held his own though; we're proud of you Flea. You too Ornette. Unfortunately I forgot to bring my audio thingy for the bootlegging. Can anyone help a brother out? I already have the cover.

Chlogel, Our New Hybrid Pet

How is Chloe's ear poking out through Nigel's thigh? It's like in The Fly where Jeff Goldblum accidentally teleports himself with a fly and gets jumbled up. Only cuter. But still pretty effin' creepy.

Alberto Y Los Pieles Paranoide

"For most of us, one of the fundamental appeals of art is its exemplary capacity in the struggle against entropy — a cultural artifact is valued according to the degree of order it embodies — and the strength of its resistance to the ravages of time. The more intricately woven the tapestry or solidly constructed the pyramid, the more reassured we are that perhaps Kansas got it wrong with regard to all we are being dust in the wind.

Of course, this being the case, modernist and postmodernist artists have made it their business to challenge this preconception on a number of fronts — by ostentatiously reintegrating the already discarded detritus of culture into new arrangements, as in the collages of Kurt Schwitters and the Combines of Robert Rauschenberg; by emphasizing the spontaneous improvisational gesture in order to destabilize the balance between order and chaos, as in the abstract expressionist drip paintings of Jackson Pollock; by creating deliberately ephemeral performances, happenings and installations whose only record is whatever documentation or relics happen to be left over, as in Chris Burden's often life-endangering actions of the early 1970s, whose collectible evidence consists of snapshots, Super-8 film, audiocassettes and a handful of used bullets.



One of the pivotal figures in the development of this broad-spectrum aesthetic of decay was Alberto Burri (1915-1995), an Italian painter who first gained attention with his abstract compositions stitched together from scraps of surplus burlap sacks, then proceeded to explore the surface possibilities of shredded and burned plastic, welded plates of scrap metal, eroded acoustic tile and other quotidian industrial materials. An innovative central protagonist in Tachism and Art Informel — the European equivalents of abstract expressionism — Burri prefigured and influenced later movements such as Arte Povera, pop, certain strains of minimalism, Land Art Conceptualists like the Boyle Family, and the whole Destruction in Art branch of Fluxus led by Gustav Metzger.


Although he remained largely devoted to the traditional painting convention of rectangular compositional framing, Burri was capable of much more unorthodox modes of expression: During the 1980s he encased the earthquake-shattered ruins of an entire Sicilian village in concrete slabs, creating a walk-through environmental enlargement of one of his later Cretti series, mimicking the craquelure of old frescoes and the parched crust of the desert in an elegiac archaeological theme park–cum–land art installation.


Like many of the European postwar avant-garde, Burri has been given short shrift in Manhattocentric accounts of contemporary art history, but his American legacy is unique in a number of ways. Trained as a surgeon, he actually began painting during World War II in a prisoner-of-war camp in Texas. He had an early and enthusiastic reception by the U.S. art community, with 72 solo and group shows between 1953 and 1963, including three at New York's Museum of Modern Art and four at the Guggenheim. And from 1963 until 1991, Burri spent his winters in near-anonymity at his house in the Hollywood Hills. The artworks created during these annual L.A. sojourns form the basis of "Combustione: Alberto Burri and America," at the Santa Monica Museum of Art through December 18."

Read the rest of "Burri My Art in the Hollywood Hills" here.

Images: Bianco Cretto C1 1973, Acrylic and glue on fiberboard; Martedì Grasso (Fat Tuesday) 1956, Collage, paint, and rags on canvas; Grande Bianco Plastica 1962, Plastic and combustion on aluminum frame; Google satellite image of Cretto mid-80's, built on the ruins of the Sicilian town of Gibellina

Soviet Space Whippet Costume

OK, I normally don't endorse this sort of thing, but given the unlikely confluence of the Soviet Space Dog Program and whippets, I felt I had to jump on the bandwagon. Thanks for the tip, Mrs. HGE!

TONIGHT! Another Opening! Hooray!

Ramirez Family at WLAC Art Gallery
9000 Overland Avenue, Culver City CA 90230
Opening Tonight Oct 28, 7 - 9 PM

Show continues through Dec 9th
M-TH 10 AM - 4 PM

Oops, forgot about this invitation for tonight's opening...

"The sun is out and the Freak's net a-chillin, git on down to Chinatown in about an hour and forty minutes."
- Jean-François Lyotard

Image: Detail from As-is Is As As-Is Does (completed 2010) Acrylic, enamel, aquarium gravel, collage, and appropriated photograph on canvas dropcloth. (Unauthorized collaboration with Erik Knutzen)

'Doug Harvey: Unsustainable' opening Friday Oct 22, 6 – 9

Doug Harvey Unsustainable

Jancar Gallery
961 Chung King Rd (in Chinatown)
Los Angeles, CA 90012
213.625.2522

Oct 22 – Nov 13
Wednesdays – Saturdays (12 noon–5 PM)

Expanding on the body of Rotted and Pre-rotted works exhibited as part of the Untidy Retrospective (LA Valley College 2008) - which consisted of paintings that had been left to molder and rot outdoors for more than a decade, then sometimes altered, and further decayed – the works in Unsustainable follow the arc of this chance-based collaboration with the forces of entropy further into the realms of the indefensible by incorporating or building on the deliberately and/or accidentally weathered artworks of others.

These Unauthorized Collaborations include Eusanathia 1, a post-apocalyptic icon painting of St Eustace’s visionary encounter; St Vincent on Arrakis, which reimagines the 17th century French patron of leprosy and thrift stores in an alien landscape of aquarium gravel; and the epic As-is Is As As-Is Does, which also utilizes aquarium gravel, and may be misread as an allegory on the role of popular culture in the fall of the Soviet Union.

Other works in the show include The Eye of Horus, a minimalist geometric composition painted on an obsolete found home video projection screen with dirt from the grave of Bobby Fischer; Clear the Grid II, a collaborative painting with 18 other artists which depicts the teenage chess champion in action; and The Dignity of Labor, an interspecies collaborative interrogation of insect architecture.

Unsustainable opens simultaneously with solo shows at Jancar Gallery by Nancy Baker and Cyril Kuhn.

The opening reception is Friday, Oct 22nd from 6 – 9 and features a live solo electrified pepperocini jar performance by Daniel Hawkins and the turntable stylings of DJ Scotty Lazr.


Image: Dream House (completed 2010). Acrylic, latex, enamel, spray foam, collage, aquarium gravel, and appropriated foam-core architectural model. (Unauthorized collaboration with unknown architect)

Todd Schorr and Gustavo Hererra through ... Aw forget it...

Todd Schorr at Ben Maltz Gallery; Gustavo Herrera at Human Resources

If you've been out of town for the summer, or just hibernating, you may have missed a couple of shows that close after this weekend [ie: Sept 11], but shouldn't be missed. At Otis' Ben Maltz Gallery, lowbrow/pop-surrealist/whatever painter Todd Schorr is the subject of a last-decade survey featuring more than 50 paintings, drawings and sculptures from Schorr's pop culture–saturated fever-dream imagination, rendered with a meticulous technique that blends his illustration training with a passion for the Old Masters, and a horror vacuii compositional frenzy that is equal parts Will Elder (early MAD magazine) and Hieronymus Bosch (early ergot poisoning).

Inspired and encouraged by lowbrow sensei Robert Williams, Schorr ditched a lucrative commercial-illustration career in the mid-'80s to become one of the first artists to define the underground movement of populist imagism that became a worldwide grassroots phenomenon in the following decade. Fan favorites like The Anguish of Carl Akeley (2008), The Spectre of Monster Appeal (2000, collection of L. DiCaprio – eeeeeeeek!) and Ape Worship (2007), the showstopper from Laguna Museum's 2007 "Juxtapoz" show (and an in-person must-see if only for its ornate Schorr-designed frame) vie with lesser-known works to give a solid glimpse of the kind of obsessional visionary craftsmanship that guarantees this frequently scorned subculture isn't going to go away.

Across town at the dead end of Chinatown — and at the far end of the meticulousness spectrum from Schorr — Gustavo Herrera has resurfaced with a roomful of his dark, funny, formally virtuosic but slapdash constructions. Herrera — whose similar installation is pretty much the only thing I remember about the first "All-MFA Supersonic" exhibit in that wind tunnel in 2004 — had a couple of crazy-ass shows at Black Dragon, including the one with his former collaborative posse 10lb Ape, where they boarded themselves inside a multimedia assemblage cube and blew pot smoke out at bewildered viewers.

Then Herrera dropped off the radar for a while, only to pop up here, at Human Resources — a new collective-project gallery in the former Parker Jones/David Kordansky space at the end of Bernard Street. "The Birth of Satan" is a multimedia interactive art installation including paintings, sculpture, assemblage, a hilarious video installation, a table of satanic zines and other literature, and a series of performances. There are cardboard and macaroni masks, abstract sculptures named for famous friends of Satan (e.g., Kenneth Anger), a Duchampian reclining-nude installation and a cutout silhouette of the USA collaged with horrific celebrity photos of Paul McCartney, Prince Harry, etc. — all amended with a little Hitler mustache. Everything is deceptively slackerish: Spend any time with the work and you'll be bowled over by Herrera's scathing wit, philosophical and art-historical sophistication, and seemingly offhand aesthetic virtuosity

Brad Eberhard through last week, oops. Sorry Brad.

Brad Eberhard at Tom Solomon Gallery

Brad Eberhard is equally proficient as an abstract painter and collage artist — not to mention rock & roll, as the hulking leader of local post-garage idols Wounded Lion (who just concluded a successful West Coast blitzkrieg and are playing UC Irvine and the Smell next week). In his two previous shows with Tom Solomon (one each of the paintings and collages, and both last year!), Eberhard seemed on the brink of merging the two traditions, melding his meticulous abstract-formalist modulations with the wit and narrative evidenced by the cut-and-paste work.

In new works like Whaler (2010), he seems to have made the leap, carefully recreating the improvisational patchwork geometry of a torn-paper collage in oils, and passing the threshold into deliberate pictorialism — in this case the titular sailing vessel. Other works pull back from easy legibility, with fragments of landscapes and figures flickering among the layers of luminous blobs, inserting a bit of grit in the Kandinskian idealism of his purely abstract concoctions, which at times seem to come too easily to him. Sometimes it's beneficial to allow the outside world to intrude a little.
Image: Whaler 2010, Oil on canvas over panel

See more of Brad's work online here.

Michael C. McMillen through a week next Saturday!

Michael C. McMillen at L.A. Louver

L.A. native Michael C. McMillen's 1981 installation Central Meridian (The Garage) remains one of the most subtle, poetic and experiential critiques of the institutional art environment ever devised. A longtime cornerstone of LACMA's old, shabby Anderson Building (now the Art of the Americas Building), The Garage provided a sudden bubble of mystery-and-nostalgia-laden privacy in the midst of the white-cube panopticon ride of big-museum design and management. Enormously popular with the public, the work has been "not on public view" since "Transformation: The LACMA Campaign" bumped the Modern Art west to the Ahmanson. Supreme bummer.

The good news is that in early 2011 McMillen is going to be the subject of a museum retrospective including a cavalcade of classic installations like The Pavilion of Rain (1989) and The Red Trailer Motel (2003). The bad news that its at Oakland’s Museum of California (unless you live in Oakland, in which case its probably the best news you’ve had all year – Ha ha) – with no plans to travel it to the artist’s hometown. The good news is that McMillen’s first solo gallery show in almost seven years opens on Wednesday, September 15 at LA Louver, and promises to be another triumph of the kind of installation-as-theater we have come to expect from the former Blade Runner model maker.

Lighthouse will consist of two chambers nested within the reduced white-cube panopticon ride of LA Louver – one displaying a series of illuminated oil paintings and bronze sculptures cast from found materials; the inner containing the titular installation showing a raggedy-ass building stuck in a tar-pit, with a whited-out billboard acting as drive-in screen for McMillen’s flickering dream-within-a-dream projections. One of McMillen’s earliest mentors was a neighbor who made the Tesla coils for James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931). Michael C. McMillen’s installation are a kind of avant-garde walk-through cinematic experience with one foot there – in pre-digital Hollywood effects culture – and the other in the criminally uncharted post-modern legacy of west coast assemblage and installation. The scary thing is... It’s Alive!

Michael C. McMillen: Lighthouse
L.A. Louver, 45 North
Venice Boulevard, Venice, CA
Sept 15 through Oct 30

Image: No Dancing (detail), 2002, sign painters enamel on wood

Dani Tull through the day before yesterday - oops!

Dani Tull at Mark Moore

Dani Tull's work over the last decade has frequently referenced psychedelia, as with the peyote cacti and tie-dye sky framing Tull's depiction of our scavenging prehistoric ancestors in (Study for) Unfolding the Stone (the painting that graced the cover of the Weekly for its 2008 "Some Paintings" art issue), or the heavy-lidded stereotypical stoner cartoon on the faux cover of his hypothetical hippie zine, My Fluorescent Beatitude (2005).

His latest body of work will be previewed as part of Mark Moore Gallery's "Ultrasonic V: It's Only Natural" opening on September 11. Titled "Golden Eagle," the new work is a radical departure from his earlier work, and not only for its obvious abandonment of cartoonish representation for elaborately carved, reflective encaustic abstractions — kaleidoscopic mandalas of golden, featherlike striations that shift dramatically depending on the viewer's point of view.

The new works still deal with psychedelics, but rather than filtering the topic through the plausible deniability of pop culture–mediated irony, they derive from the artist's recent commitment to the exploration of mystical states of consciousness through the shamanistic use of plant entheogens, and are intended to act as "technological objects that charge and release transcendent energy." Now that's what I call functional art!

Image: Golden Eagle 2010, encaustic wax, oil and acrylic on stretched burlap Check out more of Dani's work online here.

Wally Hedrick through Saturday!

Wally Hedrick at the Box

Wally Hedrick (1928–2003) was one of the seminal figures of the West Coast Beat-era artistic renaissance. It was Hedrick, in fact, who approached Allen Ginsberg in 1955 to do a poetry reading at the Six Gallery, resulting in the famous ground-zero happening of the Beat phenomenon, including the first public reading of Ginsberg's "Howl." Hedrick was a founding member of Bruce Conner's Rat Bastard Protective Association, introduced Jerry Garcia to the blues, and supported his wife — painter Jay DeFeo — as she labored on her 2,300-pound masterpiece, The Rose, for eight years. He was a beloved and influential teacher in the Bay Area for decades.

So why is his upcoming solo show at the Box in Chinatown only his third in Los Angeles? Granted, that S.F. assemblage crowd was pretty disdainful of L.A. — especially after Wallace Berman was hounded out of town — and Hedrick was notoriously uninterested in the social dimension of Art World stardom. But the fact that Hedrick was using his art practice to actively denounce America's presence in Vietnam as early as 1959 might have had something to do with it as well.

Although Hedrick created stellar artworks that anticipated assemblage, kinetic art, pop, neo-expressionism and so on, his habit of not-very-carefully concealing messages like "Fuck the FBI" in his paintings (Bury-Berry, 1964) pretty much guaranteed his status as an artist's artist. His two previous L.A. shows — both posthumous — were almost polar opposites: Michael Kohn Gallery's 2007 "Estate Sale" featured mostly Hedrick's late, deadpan appropriation paintings of antique advertising engravings. The Box's previous outing re-created 1967's War Room, an architectural environment originally built from early works Hedrick had overpainted in black monochrome. The new exhibition — opening September 17 — will land somewhere in between, focusing on his sometimes garish political paintings from the '80s, but ranging from 1962 to 2000. —Doug Harvey

THE BOX | 977 Chung King Road, L.A. | (213) 625-1747 | Sept. 17-Oct. 23 | Reception Fri., Sept. 17, 6-9 p.m.

Wally Hedrick, Danae, 1980, Oil on Canvas,

Solo Collage Exhibitionette Wrapup

Awesome thanks to y'all who turned out for the thing at the place and special shout out to Trois Frere (martyr division) Patrick Paper for his nonjudgmental complicity. Above you will see the ireeproducable comic panel, meaning check it out in person at such and such a place. Below, LA art connoisseurs Linda Stark and Anita Bunn sublimate their profound emotional response to "Flash Fudd: The Amazing Power of Fudd"

Solo Collage Exhibitionette

Doug Harvey's "Flash Fudd: The Amazing Power of Fudd"
Oct. 15 – Oct. 28
The Grey Wall @ ALIAS BOOKS
3163 Glendale Blvd
Los Angeles, CA (in Atwater just east of the I-5) 90039
Phone: 323. 661.9000

OPENING Oct 15, 7 - 9 PM


"Flash Fudd is both the title and vague androgynous protagonist of a series of collage comic strips dating back to 1978 (though rooted in a series of comic collages dating to 1972) and continuing to the present day. A hybrid of Flash Gordon and Elmer Fudd, FF is nevertheless most often depicted as a woman. The collages derive from all manner of graphic narrative sources, from daily... newspaper strips to pictographic directions for opening Japanese noodle packets, as well as virtually any other form of printed image and text. Although non-linear, they are intended as a form of narrative, and motifs recur across many years. New episodes are often constructed atop photocopies of older episodes, incorporating fragments of the earlier collage into the new one. The smaller FF’s have often been printed in small runs and distributed through the mail to random addresses or left in record stores, bus stations, phone booths, etc." 'The Amazing Power of FUDD' is the most recent of the FF collages, part of a series of larger scale (and therefore unreproducible) 'stories'. More examples, dating back to the 70s, are viewable online at http://dougharvey.la/doug_harvey.php?ID=173.

the showing of one work by one artist on
THE GREY WALL

within the confines of
ALIAS BOOKS
3163 glendale blvd.
los angeles (atwater) 90039
323. 661.9000

the artists
Peter LIASHKOV, Sept. 3 – Sept. 16
Anita BUNN, Sept. 17 – Sept. 30
Francesco SIQUEIROS, Oct. 1 – Oct. 14
Doug HARVEY, Oct. 15 – Oct. 28
Constance MALLINSON, Oct. 29 – Nov. 11
Dr. LAKRA, Nov. 12 – Dec. 2
Pierre PICOT, Dec. 3 – Dec. 16
Derek BOSHIER, Dec. 17 – Dec. 31

Curated by Pierre Picot
"soft opening" on the first Friday of each show (7 to 9pm)

We've all heard the theory; Now Comes Proof!

Miller: Well the way I see it it's exactly the same. There ain't no difference between a flying saucer and a time machine. People get so hung up on specifics. They miss out on seeing the whole thing. Take South America for example. In South America thousands of people go missing every year. Nobody knows where they go. They just like disappear. But if you think about it for a minute, you realize something. There had to be a time when there was no people. Right?

Otto: Yeah. I guess.

Miller: Well where did all these people come from? hmmm? I'll tell you where. The future. Where did all these people disappear to? hmmm?

Otto: The past?

Miller: That's right! And how did they get there?

Otto: How the fuck do I know?

Miller: Flying saucers. Which are really... Yeah you got it! Time machines. I think a lot about this kind of stuff. I do my best thinking on the bus. That's how come I don't drive, see?

Otto: You don't even know how to drive.

Miller: I don't want to know how. I don't want to learn. See? The more you drive, the less intelligent you are.

Semi-Triumphant Redux

Portfolio continued his almost-winning streak by taking his class and Reserve Winners at the Burbank Kennel Club All Breed Show held, paradoxically, in Van Nuys (at LAVC where my Untidy retrospective was held). Above we see Portfolio and his (and Chloe's) half-raccoon-faced brother, Diesel (handled by Val Nunes-Atkinson), in the ring. The mysterious and sinister Viggo won Best of Breed, but the photos I took of him were all mysteriously clouded and unusable. I did manage to get a shot of the back of his co-owner Bo Bengston (in aqua shirt) in the background of this trophy shot.


When the shouting died down, we walked around and found a crateful of Manchester Terrier puppies with their ears done up all fancy like. This aerial shot seemed necessary. Por lil fellers.


Finally, we never made it into the photography area to pose with cardboard cutouts of dead celebrities, but I managed to squeeze off this clandestine shot revealing Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe in what might be a compromising pose. If this art criticism thing doesn't pan out, I'll be looking into the paparazzic arts.

Further Puzzling Evidence

This was the sky in LA at 6:43 PM on Wednesday, Sept 29, 2010. These images were taken with a canon Powershot SD900 and have not been altered in any way except to resize them for online viewing.

Big Break in Squash Baby Case!

Those of you who have been following the local saga of Squash Baby and the recent disappearance thereof (as reported on the Homegrown Evolution blog) will be startled by the new evidence which has been brought to light by independent researchers who forwarded to myself as an unbiased journalist the above photo, clearly depicting Mayor Villaraigosa in an act of Tempecultural Sabotage. Let us break out the scythes and possum tallow torches and surround his castle, brothers and sisters!

Don't Take the Bad Information

I had a feeling we were going for the gold, and as it turns out today's high of 113 degrees Fahrenheit not only broke the 105 record for this day in 1963, but set an all-time record for high temperature ever in downtown LA! We're #1! USA! Due to in vivo brain boilage I haven't got around to finishing up any of my writing chores, but I painted a portrait of young bobby Fischer. Last night in my fevered, fitful sleep, I thought I heard the name of Mouldy Slide enthusiast and multimedia Svengali Mark Pilkington mentioned as a guest on Coast to Coast AM. As it turns out, Mark was indeed the 2nd-hour guest on George Knapp's show last night, discussing his overdue rationalist (in the true sense of the word) reassessment of UFO theories and evidence from the last several decades.

This Heat

For those outside of the metropolitan Los Angeles area, we've been having a wicked heat wave - supposed to go at least to 105 today, maybe hotter. On top of that I've had a bad flu with fever the last 3 days, so I've been having crazy dreams (most recently in the form of layered postmodernist - but pulp vintage - comic books by and about a female mad scientist... the details are drifting away....) I used to write all this stuff down, but it gets to be a full time job in itself, and I already have three of those...

Catching "Up" with steve roden

Things have been hectic - not least as regards Chloe's nether regions which have been in estrus, necessitating constant supervision -- and precipitating mental craziness in Portfolio. Nevertheless we did manage to load them all up and drive 99% of the way to Pomona for steve roden and Ginny Bishton's openings at the Pomona College Museum of Art before the left rear tire on the Accord shredded and we had to spend the evening at the Glendora Walmart Lube & Tire Express instead. So I had a few pieces in the recent LA Weekly Art Issue, the largest of which is a piece on none other than steve roden, and it goes a little something like this...

"Until I finally saw them standing next to each other at a barbecue a couple of years back, I always had a suspicion that Steve Roden and Tim Hawkinson might be the same person. This in spite of the fact that I've known both personally for a couple of decades, and they bear almost no physical resemblance to one another. I couldn't completely rule out the possibility that some alien with the hyperdimensional equivalent of a fun-house mirror was pulling a fast one. Come to think of it, he could have been using some doppelgänger beam at that barbecue. The theory may bear further scrutiny.


OK, here are the facts: Tim and Steve both live in Pasadena and have weird-ass record collections with frequent overlaps. I mean weird-ass like Vachel Lindsay reciting "The Mysterious Cat" in 1931, just before committing suicide — and it doesn't get much more weird-ass than that. Each one's work is a personal and idiosyncratic exploration of systems — systems of construction, of communication, of cognition. Both invent and build their own musical instruments. They have identical birthmarks on the left buttock in the shape of Léon Theremin's right profile. (That last item is unconfirmed.)

What's certain is that they are two of the most unschmoozy artists I've ever encountered. They're happy to talk about their work, but shun the spotlight in favor of long hours in the studio — hours that are fantastically productive in both their cases. In spite of this, they seem to be everywhere ... well, almost everywhere. For a long time, Hawkinson was the most egregious example of the L.A. museumscape's "prophet without honor in his own land" syndrome. The lightbulb should have gone off in 1996 when Jay Belloli — the recently retired director of Pasadena's Armory Center for the Arts — curated "Tim Hawkinson: Ali Ikmnostw," but it wasn't until almost 10 years later when the Whitney came sniffing around that Howard Fox was able to persuade LACMA to do the right thing (the 2005 retrospective "Tim Hawkinson").


Now Belloli's left the Armory, Fox is free of LACMA and Steve Roden — who has been perennially jamming out stellar solo shows of his gorgeous painterly puzzles for Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects since 2003, while gaining international acclaim for his experimental music and sound art installations — is a front-runner for the most-egregious-prophet award. (Don't get me started on Jim Shaw and Jeffrey Vallance!) So what's the upshot? Fox curating "Steve Roden: In Between, a 20-Year Survey" at Pasadena's Armory Center for the Arts! Mere coincidence?"

Read the rest of Unfinished Symphony: steve roden shifts into overdrive here.

See steve roden: in between, a 20 year survey at The Armory in Pasadena through january 9th

See steve roden: when words become forms at the Pomona College Museum of Art through december 19 (and Project Series 41: Ginny Bishton through October 17)

Images: transmission 11/60 (stellar regions) 2002; bowrain 2010, installation; fall after moons fall after... 2008

Note: I'm not sure if steve's actually caught "Up" but he should, and so should you.