Must See Show in Irvine - One Week Only!

Daniel Hawkins and Jenn Berger are two of the most interesting artists among the current crop of LA grad students, and they are mounting their MFA thesis shows at UC Irvine (along with Jimena Sarno and Isabel Theselius, neither of whose work I know) this week, opening the afternoon of Saturday May 24th from 2 - 5 PM.

Daniel may be familiar as a recent addition to F, my noise band with Marnie Weber and Dani Tull, or from his Amplified Pepperoncini Jar performances from a couple of years ago, or his 2009 show at Las Cienegas Projects. These activities are just the tip of the Hawkins iceberg, though, which is chockfull of epic, ever-expanding Sisyphean Gesamtkunstwerks, including the production of a Val Kilmer mountain-climbing movie and the piecemeal construction of an actual-size replica of the Hoover Dam.

His thesis show, Desert Lighthouse Protocols, collects a portion of the documentation and preparatory works for the titular beacon for wanderers in the Mojave Desert, allegedly built, destroyed by vandals and currently under reconstruction. 

The show features a spectacular large-scale panoramic landscape painting, the completed housing cap for the Fresnel lens, a patchwork actual-size drawing of the lighthouse, a sample stock certificate for potential investors, and an array of other elements and ephemera in a sort of virtual rendition or mock-up visitor's center for the actual land art intervention. 

Hopefully a more centrally located gallerist will snap this show up and restage it, but in case they happen to be from central Manhattan or central Berlin, you should cross the Orange Curtain, just this once, and dig the construction.

Daniel introduced me to the work of fellow MFA candidate Jenn Berger, and if she followed my installation advice to the letter, her show should be just about as spectacular as Daniel's. Jenn's work also runs the gamut from painting and drawing to kinetic sculpture, video projections, photography, and various disciplinary hybrids.

Jenn's work pretty consistently explores dysfunctional -- or at very least decidedly non-vanilla -- family dynamics, as well as off-kilter examinations of the animal kingdom -- often in overlapping configurations as seen in this somewhat disturbing kangaroo love sketch.

This free-standing life-size digital photocollage places her still-living father in his coffin, more or less. And these giraffes appear to be in the midst of some kind of aesthetic vivisection. And don't get me started on her sister, niece, and Granny. Just haul ass and check it out "in the flesh".

UCI MFA Thesis Exhibition Part III

Daniel Hawkins (Font Gallery CAC)
Jimena Sarno (Back Gallery CAC)
Isabel Theselius (Room Gallery)
Jenn Berger (UAG Gallery)

May 22 - 30, 2014 | Reception 2 - 5 pm May 24 | Soft Opening 6 - 9 pm May 22

University Art Gallery | 712 Arts Plaza | Irvine, CA 92697-2775
For a map and directions: http://uag.arts.uci.edu/directions

Elliott Hundley on LARZ Sunday at 12

This Sunday, May 11th, 2014 at 12 Noon, painter/sculptor/collagist Elliott Hundley will be joining me on Less Art Radio Zine to decide once and for all who is the more genius: Lindsey Buckingham or Stevie Nicks? (The answer is it's Lindsey.) KCHUNG Radio 1630 AM or at www.kchunradio.org

Also, Elliott's current show of amazing new works - described by David Pagel in the LA Times as the most "muscular and skeletal ... since his first solo show in 2006" - are on view at Regen Projects  through next Saturday (May 17th). I also advise you to check out his recent work from last year's show at Andrea Rosen Gallery.

"...In truth, Hundley had been searching for a method to dislodge his praxis from the tyranny of glue, and—inspired by both the poetically formalist land art of Andy Goldsworthy and Öyvind Fahlström’s magnetic variable paintings—he hit on the humble solution of turning the picture plane into a pincushion. This single small shift had enormous repercussions within Hundley’s craft, allowing him to isolate individual pictographic elements literally and allegorically and to deploy them across a newly liberated topological landscape in a manner that suggested a roiling surface frozen in one of an effectively infinite set of possible configurations.

 In addition to these dimensional, compositional, and semiotic benefits, the pins incorporated a whole sphere of connotative content, with the domestic craft of sewing being the most immediately observable. From the outset, Hundley’s collage works have openly embraced the disparaged amateur side of their heritage, most fundamentally in his constant integration of original photographs of emotionally significant personal friends (the artist has likened his work to “the back pages of a high school yearbook”), but most conspicuously in his abundant use of beads, sequins, shells, costume jewelry, ribbons, upholstery, dollhouse furnishings, plastic flowers, peacock and ostrich feathers, and sundry items of the type reclaimed as fine art materials by the feminist artists associated with the pattern and decoration movements of the 1970s. His use of straight pins as both basic structure and (in the case of colored-plastic-headed and other specialty pins) content aligns his collages with the body-centered art of sewing (as well as the world of haute couture fashion) in an emphatically process-oriented manner; sewing pins are explicitly temporary placeholders, meant to be removed as soon as the garment is complete.

Of almost equal and somewhat creepier import are the pins’ connotations of entomological taxonomy: the passion of the insect collector, whose specimens, on retrieval from the killing jar, are mounted on specially coated beetle-juice-resistant display pins, usually with an accompanying didactic panel. This association summons a dark pop cultural archetype of erotic fetishism—à la John Knowles’s 1963 novel The Collector (in which a butterfly collector wins the lottery and repurposes his hobbycraft towards an art student with whom he’s smitten)—that adds considerable gravitas and humor to Hundley’s inventory of partial friends. But it also speaks to the less caricatured fetishism inherent to amateur keepsake collage: the identification of even the smallest ephemeral object as identical with (or a vessel for) a fond or meaningful memory and therefore deserving and in need of preservation.

It is difficult not to imagine these connotations spilling over to encompass the eventual acquisition of Hundley’s finished works by museums and private collectors—and the role of collecting in the history of art to which Hundley so often makes reference. The displays of natural history museums have been an important strain in recent art, from the Museum of Jurassic Technology (which includes several insect exhibits) to Damien Hirst, but Hundley’s approach is more allusive, his categorical impulse filtered through a nonverbal, nonhierarchical syntax, more akin perhaps to Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne-Atlas (1924–29), or the Internet.

Social stitching and phallic piercing aside, Hundley’s pinning bears several fruitful second-tier connotations, most notably as a form of mutated cartography, where coded pins are arranged to represent troop movements or consumer demographics, in constant flux, simultaneously a site for accounting and strategizing. This aerial topographic motif has emerged as a subtle but typically expansive formal device in Hundley’s art, with undulating contours articulated through variations in the height of the pins and the placement of the collage elements along their length. The results have been uniformly organic: a wall-mounted relief map of a forested landscape or ocean floor, or a giant model of some parasitical worm bristling with setae..."

by DH from "Cut Up or Shut Up: The Unspeakable Narratives of Elliott Hundley" in Elliott Hundley: The Bacchae , published by the Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University in 2012.

Your Ad Here

I don’t remember when I first ran across Ad Reinhardt’s dazzling, sarcastic collage comics—probably in the ’80s (around the same time I stumbled upon his brilliant “Art is Art. Everything else is everything else” screeds, but before I saw his equally but oppositely amazing non-monochromatic “black paintings” at MOCA in 1991). Reinhardt’s cartoons are timeless classics, at least as far as art magazines go—perennially relevant probes into Modernism and its discontents, rendered in camera-ready graphic design gold—what’s not to like? All art students and most art world denizens could learn a thing or three from ol' Ad.

What’s surprising is that—until now—their circulation in mass media formats has come in dribs and drabs, sometimes with years-long droughts between doses. Finally, in conjunction with last winter’s museum-worthy Reinhardt retrospective at David Zwirner gallery, these bitingly satirical yet earnestly didactic broadsides have been collected in a high quality hardcover book from the gallery and Hatje Cantz publishing.

Created mostly between 1946 and 1954, Reinhardt’s cartoons are remarkable in both their form and content—often elegantly intertwined, since the subject matter never strays far from the vicissitudes of pictorialism. Picture-making, according to Reinhardt, was the reactionary nemesis of “Pure Art”—a position he reiterates tirelessly with cut-and-paste fragments of popular, scientific and art historical line illustrations spanning the entire history of visual culture, augmented by his own cheerfully loopy penmanship.

Using pictures to undermine the authority of pictures is typical of Reinhardt’s wry ambiguities. A contentious contrarian, his ceaseless bullshit-calling leaves no stone unturned, no heel unwounded, and no tenable ethical position in sight. In addition to his profound disdain for pictures, Reinhardt expresses constant contempt for commerce and criticism, and mocks virtually every contemporary artistic persona—from the self-mythologizing romantic heroicism of many of his AbEx colleagues to the pernicious “Artist as Freelance Prick-of-Conscience Busy Bee.”...

Read the rest of Under the Radar: Looking at Ad Reinhardt in the May 2014 issue of Artillery Magazine, available in both physical and virtual reality.

Ad Reinhardt | How to Look: Art Comics | Text by Robert Storr | Hatje Cantz/David Zwirner 2013

Images ©2013 Estate of Ad Reinhardt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London.

Colin Cook on Less Art Radio Zine limited time download!

Between the coupons and the car troubles, haven't had much bloggy time, but since the KCHUNG archive is taking its time slithering over to its new server, I've uploaded the most recent edition of Less Art Radio Zine, featuring the lovely and talented Colin Cook playing his video soundtracks and "musical" offerings from The Charles Ray Experience (including some unreleased material!) and The Legion of Rock Stars.

Colin's visual artwork has ranged from interactive kinetic sculptural installations to video, but he has been focussed for some time on his hilarious but disturbing collaborative drawings with Bill Shambaugh, who made a rare appearance on the show as well. While well-known in Europe - with representation in Germany and his current hometown of Paris - Colin's work is less familiar to Angelenos -- an unfortunate lapse, as the collaborative drawings are simultaneously knee-slapping populism and cutting-edge conceptualist drawings, as can be seen from these examples. These babies give a whole new meaning to "objectification!" Won't someone offer this feller an opening?

On the show Colin said something about getting free made-to-order LORS CDs? I don't see anything specific about that on their website or their Facebook page, but you can contact them there, and link through to some of their amazing online videos -- original music videos overdubbed with the Pure Pleasure Processed LORS versions of the songs. Screenings of these were the hit of my 'patacritical Interrogation Techniques Salons last year! 

The Charles Ray Experience Anthology: Hooked on Dialectics is available for free download at archive.org, courtesy of Pleonasm Music. Here is the link to an unedited mp3 of Colin and Bill on LARZ on KCHUNG -- available for a limited time: the link.

Colin Cook on LARZ this Sunday

"...unlike the closed-circuit reflexivity of his solo projects, these works shift much of their anxiety away from the gaps between creator, artwork, and audience. Instead, these discontinuities are internalized along the boundary between two mutually exclusive domains of representation – Cook’s fussy photorealist renderings VS Shambaugh’s unschooled cartoonish primitivism. The role of straight man or foil – previously filled by the viewer – is enacted in the strictly negotiated collaborative process as well as the finished artifact.

But which is which? The abutment of these discrete modes in this once-removed theatrical space encourages literary, symbolic speculation. There is obviously a fundamental dualism at play in these mutually interpenetrating but non-porous illusionistic realms. But what other dualisms -- among the myriad defining the phenomenal world -- are implied? There’s certainly class and gender polarities embedded here, but many of the subtleties of the work depend on the ambiguity of the two drawing styles’ respective validity in the art world.

Ironically, on it’s own, Shambaugh’s incorrectness commands more currency in contemporary art terms – with recent contextual conceits like “Bad Painting”, deskilling, and the continued blurring of high art with the traditions of illustration and comics. In contrast, the accomplished rendering that goes into Cook’s portions of the pictures has been relatively unsupported since the advent of Abstract Expressionism, having to provide its own quotation marks if it wants to become part of the discussion. Thus the areas realized with elevated criteria-laden skills – the landscapes against which men pose, the female participants (almost exclusively) in the sexual pairings, and the beleaguered face of Cook – depend on their symbiotic contact with wrongness to be right.

While these are rewarding areas for narrative conjecture, the most significant impact of the collaborative model has been on the parameters of self-conscious isolation portrayed in Cook’s art, where discrepancies in political nuance are trumped by an emphatic egalitarianism. The seemingly insurmountable chasm between self and other (which in his solo work is played out as a one-sided -- therefore arguably hierarchical -- communication from a tower of creative solipsism) is translated into a diagram of equilibrium, a yin-yang of intricately frustrated miscegenation..."

Read the rest of When Worlds Collude: Colin Cook’s Irreconcilable Differences here.

See more of Colin's collaborative drawings with Bill Shambaugh here.

And tune in to KCHUNG Sunday April 27 at 12 Noon to hear Colin live on Doug Harvey's Less Art Radio Zine, listening to their grad school collaboration with Hector Romero "The Charles Ray Experience," Colin's postgrad antics with 'patacritical oldies cover band The Legion of Rock Stars, soundtracks to some of Colin's amazing videos, and much more!

PS, I got the "COOK" logo from the label of one of COOK Laboratories records, which seems curiously appropriate to the collaborativity discussed above, and beyond. Dig it:

Image: Colin Cook with Bill Shambaugh, portrait of the artist with a pretty girl (nestled fruit), 2012, Pencil and graphite powder on paper, 87 x 61 cm

New F Album Title & Design?

Derek Boshier, Modern Painter

While getting together my material for Derek Boshier's appearance on Less Art Radio Zine, I discovered that Modern Painters had put my feature on him from last Fall online, and that I had never got around to posting any of it here. So since he has this big opening at Night Gallery tonight, I figured what the hell. Right?

Derek Boshier has never had the best timing. In what was perhaps the archetypal grad-school, cradle-robbing, star-making group exhibition of the contemporary era, the 1961 “Young Contemporaries” at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London’s East End, Boshier, alongside Royal College of Art classmates David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj, was anointed one of the seminal generation of British Pop artists. One of the most startling fallouts of this initial burst of attention was a controversial 44-minute BBC documentary entitled Pop Goes the Easel (aired March 25, 1962), featuring Boshier, Peter Blake, Peter Phillips, and the doomed, incandescent Pauline Boty in a dazzling, fragmentary, surrealist—and currently unavailable on DVD—collage by director Ken Russell in his auspicious debut.

Instead of riding the media wave to Swinging Sixties celebrity—as any Pop artist worth his soup would do—Boshier capitalized on his big break by disappearing to India for a year. Was he on some proto-hippie mystical quest or merely looking for more colorful package design to appropriate? “No, I just wanted to travel,” he replies in his art world–burnished but still distinctly working-class accent. “I was finished with college and didn’t know what to do next, and I saw a poster advertising government scholarships to go overseas, to India or Canada. I’ve always loved to travel; I’d already been to Spain and Morocco. So I applied and got it.”

Ensconced on a hillside overlooking the Los Angeles River, the I-5 freeway, and Elysian Park (home to both Dodger Stadium and the LAPD Police Academy), Boshier has about as quintessential a view as one can get of the postmodern city he has called home for the past dozen years. Having recently celebrated his 76th birthday, Boshier is at the height of his powers, operating globally from a 1920s Cypress Park bungalow and tapping a new generation of admirers in the local scene, including Ry Rocklen, Laura Owens, and the proprietors of the übertrending Night Gallery, where he’s just scheduled a show for spring 2014.

Read the rest of Derek Boshier, a British Pop Renegade, Is Rediscovered in L.A. at Blouin/Artinfo's Modern Painter page, or after the jump...

Whippet restitution Pt1

I have been remiss in reporting on the recent triumphs and everyday antics of my sighthound friends, so I'm just going to throw some stuff up with minimal commentary. Here's Nigel at a Night Rally class.

Derek Boshier on LARZ ready for DL!

Derek rocked the LARZ-house on Sunday, with selections from his former student "Woody" Mellor's band "The Clash," plus David Bowie, the Pretty Things, John Lennon, and more. At the end we hear the remarkable audio collage soundtracks to two new films that make up part of the Boshier-centric group show Cogwheels Carved in Wood opening at Night Gallery Saturday April 19th at 7 PM.

Download the program from the KCHUNG archives now. Here's the link: the link.

Derek Boshier on LARZ!!!

Been a crazy week with dog shows and a movie being shot next door and what have you, and I was having trouble getting a guest lined up for Less Art Radio Zine -- Jeffrey Vallance and Elliott Hundley both agreed to do later shows, but I thought I was going to have to wing it with my record collection, until the great English Pop artist Derek Boshier said he was willing to come on, even though he will have presumably been up late at Night Gallery's one-night-only re-staging of his Journey/Israel Project installation originally exhibited at the Miskan Le Ormanut Museum of Art, Ein Harod, Israel in 1996.

Derek's a great talker, came of age in swingeing London, and worked with David Bowie and The Clash, so this should be a good one. Not that they're not all good. That's Doug Harvey's Less Art Radio Zine at 12 noon on Sunday April 13 on KCHUNG pirate radio, www.kchungradio.org

PS: Here's a link to my September MODERN PAINTERS feature on Derek: the link.

Artistic Suicide - Now More Than Ever?

As a sidebar to my catching-up-on-posting-art-writing project, I just noticed that long-running LA-based art journal X-Tra has put some of its back issues online, including the one with my feverish ramblings on why nobody has committed suicide as an an artwork (as of 1998), entitled "This world was never meant for one as beautiful as me: Artistic Suicide and the Blunting of the Avant-Garde". Later on I did a pretty extensive interview with Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh, but that one's not up yet.

F for Found Moldy Slides Performance Pix

Here are a bunch of images from the F performance at my solo show of Found moldy Slides at Jancar Gallery, on Friday April 4, 2014. F was DougH, Marnie Weber (playing theremin with a hoe in a backwards crone mask!) and Daniel Hawkins, with a projection of 80 previously unseen moldy slides (projector operated by Tom Jancar). Thanks to everyone who came out -- I'll try and get an audio recording pieced together in the next while.

Mike Kelley on LARZ available for DL

I really have to start writing out the stuff I want to say beforehand, or at least think about it. You can skip over the bumbling talky parts though, when you download this hour+ of highlights from Mike Kelley's career as an experimental musician. The main point I made that I think is worth re-emphasizing is that if he had produced only this wide-ranging, ambitious body of sound work Mike Kelley would be an extraordinary figure in contemporary culture. 

The most surprising thing to me was that I could have programmed a whole hour of ambient droney instrumentals dating all the way back to Destroy All Monsters -- people expect some one banging on a drum and yelling about poop, but that's just the start!

The mp3 is available for free download from the KCHUNG archive. Here is the link: the link. Bear in mind that this is fairly low bitrate mono mp3, and if you dig what you hear you should seek out the original recordings, most of which are still available from the Compound Annex section of Mike's website. 

Thanks to Jim Shaw for filling the gaps in my collection at the last minute! I'll try to add a playlist here when I get a few minutes...

F (for Whatever) Live Moldy Slide soundtrack FRIDAY!

For their first live appearance since the Mike Kelley tribute concert at the Box in 2012, F (formerly Faüxmish and F for Ache) will perform live, in a free, improvised soundtrack to a previously unscreened program of found moldy slides presented by Jancar Gallery in conjunction with their current exhibit of Doug Harvey's Found Moldy Slides. Special guest saw solo by Christian Cummings.

F is a Los Angeles art-rock supergroup whose motto is "Simplicity Through Noise," and who have developed a practice rooted in improvisational ensemble playing using electric guitars and vintage synthesizers, in various combinations of three or four.  F has released one limited edition full-length vinyl/CD recording and is currently compiling its follow-up, F2. F are (l to r): Doug Harvey, Marnie Weber, Dani el Hawkins,  and Dani Tull (who will unfortunately not be performing on this occasion).

"F for Found Moldy Slides" Friday April 4th, 8 PM

Jancar Gallery, 961 Chung King Road, Chinatown, Los Angeles, CA 90012

Program should run approximately 30 minutes.

Vinyl is Cool Again (Again)

The second in my series of backed up critical links; micro-labels as art medium:

"Lately, I’ve been thinking about the weird inversions of mainstream and underground culture, particularly as regards formats—the vinyl record for example. Talking with Rick and Joe Potts and Dennis Duck (all founding members of the Los Angeles Free Music Society) on my KCHUNG radio zine, they all emphasized what a revolutionary concept it was in 1975 for a bunch of experimental weirdos—the Potts’ band Le Forte Four in this case—to issue their own LP without the imprimatur of a record company.

Of course “Bikini Tennis Shoes”—a collage of Musique Concrète, experimental electronic noise, processed studio chatter and appropriated Papal addresses, packaged in cast-off misprint sheets of Blue Boy and Pinky postcards from the Huntington—didn’t exactly burn up the charts. In fact they couldn’t successfully give away all 200 copies. “People would bring them back,” remembers Rick, “saying ‘Maybe you know someone else who would… appreciate this better.’” Now, copies sell for, well, there’s only one listed on discogs, and they’re asking $743.06.

That’s part of the weirdness—the fetishization of artifacts for their inferred position in a history of cultural resistance or innovation, rather than for their actual content, like they’re props in some nostalgic sitcom—or fashion accessories. And don’t think I’m not talking about The Art World. But the rules of the vinyl game keep shifting. Only a few years after “Bikini Tennis Shoes” every trust-fund punk was starting a micro-label, and there was a still-uncataloged tsunami of DIY releases. Then, with the advent of CDs (and subsequently mp3s), self-released vinyl became first obsolete, then a perversion, then collectible, then a niche consumer demographic—where it got stuck for a good decade.

But the situation has mutated again recently—maybe a critical mass of hipsters has effected a figure/ground shift. The turning point may have been the success of Mississippi Records, which gained international prominence by issuing short-run editions of what are essentially pirated Roots, World and Other music recordings. The record label had become a purely curatorial entity, and moved into the realm of what I suspect to be the future of art-making—the filtration and organization of the overwhelming and exponentially increasing flow of information precipitated by the digital revolution. In other words, collage

In a medium where you can’t even keep track of the thousands of aggregator sites, stepping down to an obsolete technological format is an elegant way to eliminate 99% of the choice work. Sort of like writing a sonnet, or haiku. One artist who has been expressing himself via a tiny record label for several years is LeRoy Stevens. The LA-based, Chicago native’s most recent release was an example of the kind of historical archival project we need to see a lot more of—a double LP of soundtracks by legendary Angeleno performance artist Barbara T. Smith..."

Read the rest of Under the Radar: Plastic is Fantastic Again here, or in the March 2014 print issue of Artillery Magazine.

Images:  Le Forte Four Bikini Tennis Shoes, 1975; v/a Life Is A Problem, Mississippi Records, 2007; Barbara T. Smith, Untitled Drawing from Sound Piece for Notes and Scores for Sound, 1971. Pencil on paper, 18 x 24 inches

Lee and Elvar in da House

Filmmaker Lee Lynch with his young Icelandic spawn Elvar (AKA Kevlar AKA Hiram Thorbjorgson) came by to participate in the Mannlicher Carcano Radio Hour. Bono reincarnated! What? He's not? So Flight #1721 was a hoax? We've got some catching up to do people!

Mike Kelley Sound Work on Less Art Radio Zine

One of the things that sparked the genesis of Doug Harvey's Less Art Radio Zine was the absence of any local radio programming chronicling Mike Kelley's substantial body of experimental musical work in the weeks after his suicide (though John Allen on WFMU did an impressive roundup).

Since so much of this weekend in LA is devoted to the opening of Mike's retrospective at MOCA, I figured I should do a show devoted to Destroy All Monsters, The Poetics, Gobbler, music from Day is Done and Plato's Cave, Rothko's Chapel, Lincoln's Profile (featuring Sonic Youth), a couple of cuts that Mike cited as influences, a songpoem he wrote, and maybe a tribute number or two.

I've sent out a few probes, but since its so last minute and everybody's tied up with the MOCA festivities (for want of a better word), I'm not expecting to have a guest this week, which is kind of appropriate. Sunday March 30, 2014 at 12 noon at www.kchungradio.org

steve roden Picks Rags!

I haven't been posting my recent art critical writings lately, for some reason, so I have a bit of catching up to do -- here's my review of steve roden's most recent show at Vielmetter Projects, published in the December 2013 issue of Modern Painters -- still very hard to come by in LA, and their web presence is negligible -- but definitely one of the better art mags out there. Here's is the slightly longer unedited version:

"Even in his native LA, it’s taken almost 20 years for the art world to grasp the extent of steve roden’s complex, genre-blurring oeuvre. That’s partly his own fault, having begun his career by compartmentalizing his international sound art activities under the moniker in/between/noise. But as the synaesthesia kicked into high gear, roden’s diverse activities – oil painting, drawing, collage, assemblage, sculpture, installation, film, video, writing, blogging, archiving and curating… and sound art – began to resemble facets of a gigantic crystalline matrix. 

Transparent Hauntologies

I was just reminded of this very thoughtful and accurate rundown of the Found Moldy Slides as hauntological artifacts akin to the Disintegration Loops of Billy Basinski and the lo-fi pop gems of Ariel Pink. Be sure and click through to his other articles on art and music as examples of "the haunting of a historicised present by spectres that cannot be ‘ontologised’ away."

"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.
The Caretaker, Basinski and Indignant Senility (call them the ‘playback hauntologists’) create new pieces of music from ancient tape and vinyl recordings that are treated or weathered down in various ways until they become an ironic, emotionally-laden dark ambient noise. Generally their work is not what you’d call collage – the recordings they use are chopped into long extracts, looped or even left to play in their entirety, but significantly they don’t combine samples (as The Focus Group does) or mix in more contemporary elements (as Boards of Canada and Mordant Music do). In this way the outlines of the original source object are faintly intact, but it’s heavily ‘decayed’ or ‘decaying’.
The rotted celluloid paintings of Peter Doig, which I described in my big ol’ treatise on and survey of hauntology, seemed a bit analogical to this process, but since they were paintings, the original image (even if based on a photograph as it usually was) was always ultimately contrived. To make the equivalence closer, the original source object would have to be an image that was recorded in a similar way as sound is recorded on tape or vinyl. Such a recorded image would of course be generated through photography.
The images in this post are slides found by Doug Harvey in the growing pile of waste kipple outside the Los Angeles home of a serial hoarder, following some kind of intervention or change of heart. Untouched for years, the slides had fallen prey to damp and mould, a process which dramatically transformed the colours and forms within them..."

Read the rest of Adam Harper's Out of the Mould, the New here.

Not in the show, but moldy as hell...

DOUG HARVEY - "Found Moldy Slides"

March 15 - April 12, 2014

J A N C A R G A L L E R Y

961 CHUNG KING ROAD
LOS ANGELES, CA 90012
TEL 213 625-2522
Hours: Wednesday – Saturday 12 – 5 PM (and by appointment)
www.jancargallery.com