Poli-Vinyl DougH

From the KCHUNG Mobile DJ station in the Hammer Museum courtyard, Doug Harvey will perform a live DJ set of interesting political songs, music and audio in advance of the Hammer Forum "Conspiracy Theories and Real World Challenges" in the Billy Wilder Theater with Kathryn Olmsted and Arthur Goldwag, moderated by Ian Masters.

http://hammer.ucla.edu/programs/detail/program_id/1913

Degrading

"Social and political changes in art have to be where Arts now are free to express there are where there are no more hard boundaries so the Artist in the modern period become less scared and felt as though they could have there Art a little more broader." True or false?

Reflections in Purple...

Best of Opposite and (finally) his first major! Viva Las Vegas! More to follow...

F Bomb Baby

A series of secret meetings over the past few months have resulted in a wealth of new recorded material that, once sifted and collated, may well push the limits of what the world has come to know as F. F for what? F for Whatever. Spring Break Forever. Stay tuned, bitches!

No Region Would

Anyone else notice that LA's junior college galleries are becoming the Kunsthall alternatives to to the top-heavy markademic fArtworld? Kio Griffith's been curating a series of awesome shows at the West LA College Gallery - a hidden gem of the west side/Culver City scene, just off Overland & Jefferson. His latest is the best yet, and closes Friday.

In an LA art season that offers more exceptional painting shows than any Fall I can remember, No Region Would has a number of very strong, overlooked local talents, including father/son abstractionists Dan and Ryan Callis, and three powerful Burchfieldesque landscapes in extreme (but intermittent) impasto on large unstretched canvases by Nick Brown.

 

There are some very interesting sculptures and painting/sculpture hybrids, like Nicholas Shake's two-part work pairing a wretched albino clump-entity made from "friendly" plastic casts of tire treads and what looks like a basketball hoop with a circular monochrome black painting; your basic dog/moon kind of relationship, filtered through Rauschenbergian irony.

Rema Ghouloum and Satoshi Saegusa both offer up successful experiments in painting/object confusion, while Shigenori Ebata's Waltz consists of a radical poetic reconfiguration of the artist's apartment door, which he lived without for a month during its deconstruction. Noise legend John Wiese contributes an multi-screen display of Iron Maiden, Deep Purple, and Led Zeppelin performances with interactive soundtrack mashup capability.

There's lots of other cool stuff, but it's only open two more days, Thursday and Friday Oct 3 & 4, from 12 Noon - 6 PM, so hustle on over to
WLAC Gallery
Fine Arts Complex
West LA College
900 Overland Ave

Culver City, CA 90230

Here's a map and directions on the gallery's new website.

Images: Dan Callis, Kio via Shigenori Ebata, Nick Brown X2, Ryan Callis, Nicolas Shake (install shot photoshopped by DH), Rema Ghuloum, Satoshi Saegusa, Shigenori Ebata, John Wiese

Night Conformation

Thursday night conformation class with Julie Kay at the Rose Bowl, featuring M.A., Julie, and Donna Arcaro, with Chloe, Brego (Donna's star greyhound), and Portfolio. Nigel (above) had some unofficial postclass escapades - hard to catch in nightvision due to the intense frolic factor, but this shot turned out. Look for the receding Portfolio between Julie's legs - like Russian nesting dolls!

HITS! HITS! HITS!

Home Inspection Trainin School, that is! Come in for free Inoidario! No ApooiTnest equie! Someone needs to design a font based on peeling vinyl. Or has someone already? I love the internet. BTW that domain name appears to be available - go figure!

Early Desponder

Three early responses to 9/11- my review of the Shaker Gift Drawings exhibit at The Hammer; Hunt Down & Punish, a Mannlicher Carcano piece recorded within a few days (and debuted September 21st at the Mark Dutcher-curated exhibit-in-a-van "Gas, Grass, or Ass"); and above, Ground One (2001) - a hand wited-out bootleg of Art Spiegelman's 9/11 New Yorker cover limited edition print Ground Zero.

"Last Tuesday when I got up, I was uncharacteristically organized due to the fact that I had to catch a noon plane to Dallas to participate in a roundtable discussion on the influential art schools of Los Angeles. Of course I never made it, and, having cleared my schedule for a couple of days, spent a therapeutic afternoon chopping firewood for the coming nuclear winter. When the smoke cleared, it seemed the Weekly’s Best of L.A. issue had been postponed and my column was back on schedule for today, so I had to find something to write about. It’s hard to come up with anything that doesn’t seem frivolous or disrespectful. A hypothetical précis of the canceled discussion on the influential art schools of Los Angeles? A roundup of the current bout of gallery gewgaws that mark the new L.A. art-world season? It’s hard enough, at the best of times, to make believe that my opinions are more important than anyone else’s. An aesthetic analysis of the World Trade Center destruction as a brilliantly choreographed appropriation of John Carpenter–esque B-movie cliché? No thanks, I can live without the death threats..."

Read the rest of Tis the Gift to be Simple here

Welcome Aboard!

Rat Fink on a Record Truck, Sunset Blvd, Echo Park, Sept 2013

Hey, Same Address!

Not bad for an uncropped shot from a moving car, if I do say so myself! Echo Park Blvd @ Montana.

Guaranteed for the Life of the Bulb

"The Los Angeles Free Music Society had its original heyday back in the 1970s, as much a dada and LSD-inspired piss-take on the high seriousness of experimental music—these were the days when Stockhausen was God—as a shaggy-dog extension of the Zappa/Beefheart/Wildman Fischer axis of dissonance that defined the fringes of “rock” music.

Coalescing around Pasadena’s legendary Poo-Bah record store, the LAFMS jammed, played out, issued cassettes and vinyl (in editions between 20 and 1,000, the average being 200), and published weird mail-art journals from 1974 to 1982, when they fell into a period of dormancy.

This hibernation ended with a bang in 1995 when Gary Todd’s Cortical Foundation/Organ of Corti label issued a staggering 10-disc retrospective box set of LAFMS archival material that was justly lauded by such international tastemakers as Thurston Moore and UK magazine The Wire. The LAFMS were hailed as pioneers of noise music (having allegedly jump-started the Japanese noise scene) and avant-garde deconstructionist turntablism (with the 1977 cassette Dennis Duck Goes Disco), but their collective range extended across the spectrum of experimental sound-making...

The latest and perhaps most unlikely exercise in LAFMS revivalism comes from EoB Books, the hard-copy publishing wing of the oddball online academic journal East of Borneo, shepherded by Tom Lawson and Stacey Allen at CalArts. Since 2010, EoB has offered an interestingly destabilized, populist version of academic scholarship by employing a limited wiki interface to amend art history according to a relatively non-hierarchical model.

With Second Life: Light Bulb 1977–1981, EoB Books pays tribute to a predigital paradigm of non-hierarchical creative networking, the LAFMS’ pay-to-play house organ/artist zine edited by Chip Chapman. Comprising a run of just four issues—the last of which was a double cassette compilation—the original Light Bulb doesn’t exactly offer an overwhelming wealth of material from which to cull an anthology..."

Read the rest of WRITING NOISE: Chronicling the Chaos of DIY Media here, or pick up the hard copy in the September 2013 issue of artillery magazine.

Order a copy of Second Life: Light Bulb 1977–1981 here.

Pointillist Portfolio Entity

Close encounter with a radiation-drenched canid, observed safely from behind protective shielding. This is not a put-on, people!

Glendale Nights! II

California landscape painting, bitchin' rims, and a massive hexagonal display case filled with cheap stuffed animal toys. It all adds up to a little touch of magic on a hot Glendale Night!

Kamikaze Recovery

Recovering one of my two dead hard drives made me conscious of how much documentation I haven't got around to putting online, so I've started to dig in. Here's a sampling of the dozens of photos I just posted to my website - about half that I have on hand from Mannlicher CarcanoPlex Mach 01 - the PØST one-night-only Kamikaze show I curated in 2010 - an "expansion of  Mannlicher Carcano's collage-based aesthetic principle to 3 Dimensions, including sound, performance, didactic elements, food and drink, sexy projections, and all manner of art objects." Participants included Lily Simonson, Michael Q. Schmidt, Joshua Aster and Kristin Calabrese, Michael Arata, Eamonn Fox, Walpa D'Mark, Phyllis Green, Daniel Hawkins, Lee Lorenzo Lynch, Laurie Steelink, Brad Spence, Jimmy Chertkow, Aaron Wrinkle, Joe Deutch, Young Summers, and many many more! It was one of my best curatorial experiences ever. 

If any rich people want to pay me to take a year off and start tackling Chain Letter, message me!

Images (some by DougH, some by Michael Gomez-Burton): Joe Deutch performance; Michel Q. Schmidt as Bacchus; install with George Budd, DougH, Young Summers; Lily Simonson's Anne Frank Karaoke; Ross Rudel's Wet Column; Michael Arata's Hot Dog/Drawing Exchange (with Peter Frank! Get it?); Lee Lynch's Tin Man meets Lily Simonson's Anne Frank.

O! Cean Seafood!

AKA Chinatown Nights! Oh wait, that's already taken. Been wanting to document this backlit sign for a while, and walking the whippets in Chinatown to beat the heat was the opportunity I needed! This is an album cover waiting to happen - Scotty Vera's Greatest Hits?

Glendale Nights!

Deflated Rubicon and The Circle of Life (depicted by ants, a dying cockroach, and an empty Dentyne Ice packet).

Coming soon - Derek Boshier, Modern Painter

My feature on LA-based English Pop artist Derek Boshier is out in the September issue of Modern Painters magazine - hard to find in LA, but worth searching out. I'll excerpt it here when it actually hits the stands...

"Our spacecraft is coming!"

I must have got the date wrong, or the space brothers gave me the wrong coordinates or something. It doesn't really matter, I guess it's back to school for another semester after all!

(photo by D. Hawkins)

Literal Metaphorical Collapse

I just updated my website with a series of Daniel Hawkins' photos from the closing deconstructive event for my solo show Never Paint Again at Jancar Gallery in the summer of 2011. After being laid flat with a combined attack of viral meningitis and the gout for the duration of the show, I reemerged briefly for a closing event that included a walkthrough/discussion, but was mainly centered around the disconnection of the supports and collapse of the moldy stretcher architecture. We disconnected the secondary supports and left the main one in place while further drinking and discussion occurred, but just as Don Suggs and Linda Stark were passing under the arch (Chapel Perilous!) it started to list
and creak. They got out of the way just as it came crashing down in a heap! I had a gout relapse, and Tom Jancar kindly broke the stretchers down and left them in the street, phoning them in as abandoned trash for the City of Los Angeles' official Collectors.