The "Pogs" section of the OJ Museum at Coagula Curatorial!

http://mentalfloss.com/article/54202/weird-history-pogs

Still Standing!

"Dark Fudd Rising"

New Flash Fudd icon painting for the eclipse - "Dark Fudd Rising" 61 X 42 ins, acrylic + shoe polish on paper (2017)

"Whom should I turn to, if not the One whose darkness is darker than night, the only one who keeps vigil with no candle, and is not afraid -- the Deep One, whose being I trust ..." --Rainer Maria Rilke

Further reading:

http://femininemojo.typepad.com/ssww/black_madonna_and_dark_goddess/

http://kvltofnyx.tumblr.com/post/84690735000/embracing-the-black-moon-the-role-of-the-dark

Bud Handelsman, PUNCH, 1964

When I was a kid I used to get anthologies of PUNCH cartoons (as well as from The New Yorker and others) out of the library and make photocopies of my favorites -- this was one of them, and it stuck in my head, long after I lost the xerox -- just tracked it down on the interwebs. Timeless.

Shana Nys Dambrot on Summery Appeal

Summery Appeal: A Group Show Curated by Doug Harvey

August 16, 2017

There are a handful of unforgettable breakout stars among the 50+ artists included in this, the most epic of summer salons. But the true strength of the showing is the sheer breadth of eclectic styles represented, definitively pushing back against the idea of any kind of monolithic Outsider Art aesthetic. A dialogue is increasingly ongoing as to whether it’s better to consider Outsider Art as a stylistic denomination, or as a demographic focusing on the background of the practitioners? In any case, with this kind of diversity and clarity of vision representing the genre, the real question might be, outside of what?...

https://artandcakela.com/2017/08/16/summery-appeal-a-group-show-curated-by-doug-harvey/

Summery Appeal People

Pix from various sources - Cathy Ward, Paige Wery, Marlene Picard, Babak Motamen & ?...

Guy Peellaert's Duchamp/Dylan/Driscoll Pop Pastiche

So here's a brilliant and improbable cultural collision - Julie Driscoll & Trinity performing their searing rendition of Dylan (& Danko)'s "Wheel's On Fire" on a Belgian/German TV show dedicated primarily to the BeeGee's 1968 album IDEA, with spot-on Pop Art sets by Guy Peellaert (who later did Bowie's Diamond Dogs cover) which in this case consists of a pretty solid homage to Marcel Duchamp. Guy Peellaert also did amazing comix in the mid-60s...

http://fantagraphics.com/flog/the-adventures-of-jodelle-by-guy-peellaert-pierre-bartier-previews-pre-order/

Further reading:
https://mercurialblonde.wordpress.com/2013/05/12/guy-peellaerts-usage-of-green-and-white-in-the-adventures-of-jodelle/

Hell Up in Harlem!

John Kilduff Punk Ass Bitch (Hell Up in Harlem), 2007? 2006? oil on canvas, 70 X 70 ins, created for my (DH) UCLA grad painting seminar on the cinema of Larry Cohen!

KISS Salukis in jail!

I guess Peter Criss is still under that bridge. [Lance, Lily, & Rose in Lompoc]

7 Days: My Art Life

New book from the inimitable Holly Crawford at AC Institute. Includes a riveting selection of my emails from a particularly multiple personality week-long period from last year! Essential. Available from https://www.rizzolibookstore.com/7-days-my-art-life and RAM It's not on Amazon, yet. http://acinstitute.org/7-days-my-art-life/

"Horizontally Stretched" Panter's New Thing

Gary Panter wears many hats—visionary punk cartoonist, Emmy-award winning designer for Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, psychedelic lightshow revivalist, cutting-edge graphic designer, experimental musician, candlestick maker. Having dazzled the comic art world with his elaborate and sumptuous freeform adaptations of Dante (2004’s Jimbo in Purgatory and 2006’s Jimbo’s Inferno), Panter has just released a final, tangential volume—Songy of Paradise, based on John Milton’s 1671 Paradise Regained.

DOUG HARVEY: Can you give a bit of a rundown on your upbringing and relationship to Christianity?

GARY PANTER: I was born in 1950 in Durant, Oklahoma. My father was [a member of the] Church of Christ which considers itself the only true church with a literal reading of the King James version of the Bible. We were lower class people who went to church three times a week and had Sunday school, Wednesday night bible class and singing. The church forbade imagery in worship, musical instruments in worship and orbit dancing and frolicking in general. I was a Christian missionary to Belfast in the summer of 1969—bringing Christ to the Irish religious war. Many things about it bothered me and it took a while to get over, if I did.


Do you consider yourself a Christian now?

I am not part of the cult of Jesus. And I am not a fan of organized religion. I am superstitious to an extent. I was raised to try to obey and conform with the end in mind of getting to a better place with the right ritual and magic words, which generally makes no sense. And also the idea that this place is a horrible torturous test seems ungrateful to the gift of some kind of existence—and not digging this one, why would you trust the god to give you an untricky one next? I just have to dig this one as much as possible and not seek THE ANSWER. Interesting questions are enough.

Read the rest at http://artillerymag.com/radar-gary-panter/ or ATJ

Desert Lighthouse Launch Event!

I think that may have been the best art opening I have ever attended! Thanks and congrats Daniel Hawkins!  http://desertlighthouse.org/

Don Suggs' photo of myself and Portfolio silhouetted in the lighthouse doorway towards the end of the evening.

DESERT LIGHTHOUSE Launches this Saturday!

DESERT LIGHTHOUSE
Launch Event
Saturday, July 1, 2017, 6 - 9pm
Hinkley, CA 34.957, -117.212

RSVP to info@desertlighthouse.org
desertlighthouse.org/LAUNCH
facebook.com/thedesertlighthouse

Desert Lighthouse is a land art project by Daniel Hawkins: building a full-size functioning lighthouse in the Mojave Desert near Hinkley, CA. The nearly 50ft tall Lighthouse features a high powered “guiding light” to aid wayward desert travelers through the complex Mojave landscape.

“Hawkins initially conceived of the Desert Lighthouse during an agoraphobic experience while driving through California’s High Desert at night — the lack of any visual reference point while careening through a featureless void recalled the sublime Romantic condition of being lost at sea, and provoked a craving for the orienting singularity of a homing beacon. On his return to Los Angeles, he immediately set about acquiring a small parcel of land in the high desert, and began researching the engineering and legal logistics to construct a full-size, functioning lighthouse.” - Doug Harvey, writer/artist

The Desert Lighthouse now provides a visual landmark for those passing through the sprawling desert. For the viewer the Lighthouse will offer a steadying beacon in the vast expanse of this beautiful and challenging environment. The Desert Lighthouse is a permanent on-going installation open to the public.

Directions
From Los Angeles, take either I-10 east or I-210 east, to I-15 north towards Las Vegas/Barstow. Just before Barstow, take Highway 58 west. Proceed approximately 9 miles to Hinkley Rd. Turn Right on Hinkley Rd and drive north 2 miles. After crossing the train tracks, turn left on Santa Fe Ave. Proceed 2 miles to the marked parking area. Transportation will be provided from the parking area to the base of the lighthouse.

https://goo.gl/maps/xBSkfb76RrB2

Preparing for the Desert
Although the event is during sunset, the weather is expected to be hot and there is little shade. It is recommended that you bring a hat, sunscreen, and water. Due to the conditions of the roads a short hike may be required. The nearest town with food, water, and gas is Barstow. For those interested in staying overnight, there are motels in Barstow and camping on the grounds is allowed at your own risk.

Press Inquiries / Contact:
info@desertlighthouse.org

Desert Lighthouse has been made possible through the generous support of West of Rome, Center for Land Use Interpretation, and the Center for Cultural Innovation among many generous individual donors.

XOREX Unearthed!

"XOREX the Puppetmaster", part of the "Lost & Found & Lost" series from 1992 -- a secret project I did in grad school where I took objects from the street (in this case a panel from a copy machine), painted clip art images on them, then returned them to the street. There were about 60 of these, and only 2 were not returned to the streets - this is one of them, recently rediscovered in an early collector's attic, and now available to the canny investor as part of POST's online fundraising auction ending today!

https://www.post-la.com/auction/
https://www.facebook.com/NotPOST/

UPDATE: SOLD! Congratulations to canny collector Julia Schwartz!

Looks Like We Made It!

Spotted by Holly Crawford at City Lights Books in San Francisco!

Happy Father's Day!

 I can't believe I tracked this down on youtube. It may be killing me, but I love the internet!

Did somebody say NW3 Elite?

"I first became aware of Daniel Hawkins’ artwork..."

From my essay for Daniel Hawkins' DESERT LIGHTHOUSE PROSPECTUS catalog, available now at a limited-time reduced price in advance of the launch event tentatively scheduled for June 10th:

"I first became aware of Daniel Hawkins’ artwork when he was still an undergrad at UCLA in a senior painting class taught by my wife, M.A. Peers. Daniel was already producing remarkably sophisticated work, including two of the funniest and richest engagements with the problematics of painting-as-event and painting-as-artifact I’ve ever seen. In the one, he videotaped himself from above, attempting to clean a paint spill with a broom but only managing to fill a monochrome rectangle with the wayward medium.

The resulting AbEx gestural documentary (a cinematographic inversion of the famous glass sequence from Namuth’s 1951 Pollock Painting) was then projected onto a vertical stretched canvas of the same dimensions as the original surface. In the other, he embedded a blank stretched canvas in a monolithic slab of cast concrete, then (eventually) proceeded to attempt to excavate it. Antics ensued. In spite of their high conceptualist quotient and canny humor, both pieces – as with all of Hawkins’ work — possessed a stark, effortless formal beauty. Here was one to keep an eye on.

He didn’t disappoint, embarking on a series of ambitious, narrative-laden, interwoven interdisciplinary projects, including an attempt to realize Radical Mountain – an alpine adventure film about the conquest of a summit with an elevation of zero; a making-of documentary about the aborted first attempt; and a fictionalized documentary about the auteur’s campaign to secure the acting services of Val Kilmer.

At Las Cienegas Projects Hawkins showed a funhouse-optics sculptural installation that extended a section of railroad tracks into infinity: a hiccup in the Great Western Matrix, a ghostly manifestation of the iconic depiction of one-point linear perspective; Manifest Destiny as a house of mirrors.

Other enterprises included infiltrating a reality television show about bizarre food addictions as the concerned friend of an actor cohort who in turn pretended to be living entirely off a variety of vinegars; a series of solo improvised sound art performances played entirely on the amplified lid of a peperoncini jar; some sort of road trip/endurance test involving the confining of a death metal band in a van tricked out as a portable studio/pirate radio transmitter for two weeks; and the long-term building of an actual size replica of the Hoover Dam in manageable sections to be distributed across the American landscape. And this was all before entering grad school!"

... read the rest of "A STORM IN ANY PORT: DANIEL HAWKINS FAILS HIS WAY TO THE TOP!" in the Desert Lighthouse Prospectus, available now.

Burden of Fame

While we're on the topic of Professor Burden, who shuffled off two years ago today, I would like to share this unlikely artifact. One of the last items I pulled out of the Magic Recycle Bin before the authorities cracked down and paved over, it's a PEOPLE magazine (Aug 28, 1989) featuring Ringo Starr on the cover, which I grabbed for collage materials. Needless to say, I was quite surprised to find this profile therein. What were they thinking? I love the caption on the final image, with "pal Charles Ray on their sloop."

Happy Teacher Day!

No Accounting for Taste

C.M. Coolidge, A Friend in Need, 1903.

The He-Man Action Movie Appreciation Society meets regularly to interrogate promising high-budget mainstream shoot-’em-ups in the context for which they were designed—big, loud movie theaters. The Society’s inaugural screening resulted in my report “Is Jason Bourne a 123-minute Psychotronic Blipvert for Hillary?”, which ended with a pre-endorsement of The Accountant—“a film that finally addresses the question ‘What if Good Will Hunting was a chick and Jason Bourne banged her and they had an inbred baby that was all like Shine-meets-Transporter and turns out to be the other guy from Good Will Hunting? Whoa.’”

This précis, though based entirely on the impressive trailer that screened before Bourne, is in fact a pretty accurate summation of The Accountant’s conceptual underpinnings. Ben Affleck is an autistic accountant who practices out of a strip-mall in suburban Illinois, but secretly jets around laundering money for drug cartels and terrorists. He knows kung fu and is a deadly marksman, because his dad was Special Forces. But the Treasury Department is onto him! J. Jonah Jameson sends his statuesque African-American data analyst to track Ben down, or else be exposed as the violent teenage vigilante she was! Antics ensue.

The H.M.A.M.A.S.’s most recent screening was actually John Wick Chapter 2, a film that received surprisingly positive reviews, many of which single out the impressive use of actual fine art in the art direction (not to mention the bizarrely Gilliamesque secret hitman telephone exchange!). My analysis of this cinematic milestone will be forthcoming, but I was particularly struck by the inert literalism of JW2’s fine art factor when compared to two brief pictorial incidents that raise The Accountantseveral notches above the herd.

The first occurs when young Ben’s parents are visiting some hippie therapist’s autism ranch to see if he can help with their problem child, who sits in the common area working obsessively at a jigsaw puzzle. We don’t see it at first, but in a rapid sequence intercut with the parental consultation, L’il Ben starts going all “Judge Wopner!” because he can’t finish his task, until the resident neurodiverse cutie finds the missing piece and hands it to him. It’s at this point that we get our first actual look at the puzzle he’s working on—it’s a monochromatic gray rectangle, like a Brice Marden painting.

Brice Marden painting

Pollock puzzle, collection Sam Erenberg

Which isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. In the early ’60s the Springbok company began issuing die-cut puzzles depicting abstract works by Kline, Krasner, Hofmann, de Kooning, and Pollock—whose Convergence was marketed as the most challenging puzzle of all time. Later in the decade, game companies upped the ante by manufacturing puzzles that were completely monochromatic—sometimes on both sides, though I doubt Brice ever saw a dime. And on the surface, the level of cognitive complexity required is what the blank puzzle signals to us about L’il Ben.

But just as he’s gratefully inserting the last piece to complete the non-image, the camera angle shifts radically, looking up through the glass table, through the gap in the blurry puzzle, framing L’l Ben’s bespectacled eyes. As he snaps the last module into place, the image snaps into focus, revealing that he has been assembling—upside down—Neil Leifer’s iconic shot of Muhammed Ali looming over the knocked out Sonny Liston in 1965. In a few seconds, the filmmakers have established a complex symbolic metaphor —the outsider warrior poet constructed in secret beneath a veneer of unparseable late-capitalist sang-froid; the Emperor card reversed—encoded in an equally (if more esoterically) loaded set of references to the production, distribution and valuation of 2D pictorial artifacts in contemporary culture.

Normally, if I perceive this sort of reference to Painting and its Discontents as coincidental—it’s just an upside-down jigsaw puzzle for God’s sake, not some dissertation on the tangled political and phenomenological relationship between photography, the avant-garde and kitsch. But The Accountant brackets its Revenge of the Asperger Ronin storyline with a second, even more explicitly art-historical sight gag, which is set up early, but delivered only in the tying-up-all-the-loose-ends montage—in fact the last shot in the movie before the hero rides off into the sunset.

We first glimpse grownup Ben’s art collection when he retreats to his secret storage unit holding his airstream full of currency, weapons and other tangibles—including a decent Renoir and—more improbably—a Jackson Pollock. And not just any Pollock, but 1946’s Free Form (mutated to more than double size), thought to be his very first drip painting. Ben must have done some real ugly shit for the Rockefellers to score that. So the whistleblower girl in distress is also an accountant, but one who wanted to go to the Art Institute, but Dad said “No,” and she makes an awkward friendship overture to Ben that includes an exchange on the merits of C.M. “Cash” Coolidge’s “Dogs Playing Poker” series. On the run from industrialist mercenary hitmen, she winds up in the trailer and is all like “OMG a Pollock original! You’re not like other accountants.”

Umm… spoiler alert, I guess. Once the antics are out of the way, she’s back at her modest flat and a mysterious package arrives, and here is the second incident. The package contains a stretched and framed canvas, which we see her unwrap and plunk down on her bed with a puzzled, then amused expression. The picture is Coolidge’s A Friend in Need (1903), probably the most famous Dogs Playing Poker image, whose central narrative detail of cheating is conspicuously cropped from our clearest view of it. Distress Girl’s expression goes frowny again, because she notices a surface anomaly in a corner of the painting, pokes around and actually tears away the Coolidge canvas to reveal the gazillion-dollar Pollock beneath. Both Ox and Self overcome, Ben heads off for his next adventure—Jason Bourne vs. The Accountant: The Treadstone Audit. Stay tuned.

                                                       How the World Looks to a Crazy Person

Under the Radar column, Artillery Magazine

Corrected Slogans

(Royal) Flash Fudd Memory Gasket Epithelium No 1

For those who have been following my Rectilinear Occlusion Gear series (particularly the Memory Gasket Iteration seen in the Everything is Coming Up Roses exhibit at LAVA Projects) and/or my ongoing (Now in its 45th year!) collage comic strip Flash Fudd, here is a real treat! The first entry in a new sequence bearing the self-explanatory title Flash Fudd Memory Gasket Epithelia, this being No 1. The Green Man's chakra Doppelgänger may be tinted appropriately, and He may yet acquire a crown. Please to bend down.

Will the Real Doug Harvey Please Stand Up?

Sheriff 'Honorary Barber': Sheriff Doug Harvey examines a plaque which designates him an "honorary barber." The plaque, presented yesterday at the County Building, was given by Barbers Union Local 689. Harvey is defendant in a U.S. District Court suit in Detroit in which eight University students allege their constitutional rights were violated by haircuts given them during a brief stay in jail. Harvey is being sued for $200,000. The eight were arrested during a campus demonstration. Harvey promised to display the plaque in his office. Ypsilanti barber William Boatwright, who made the presentation, said the local's 94 barbers in the county "support Sheriff Harvey and his prevention of disease in the county jail."

World Imitation Radio

Apropos of tomorrow's opening of Afraid of Modern Living: World Imitation & Monitor 1977-1982 at These Days Gallery in downtown LA, I was looking for a blog entry where I linked to the episode of DOUG HARVEY's LESS ART RADIO ZINE featuring Michael Uhlenkott and Damon Willick discussing World Imitation and Damon's [San Fernando] Valley Vista exhibit, and I realized I never made one. Those were hectic times. So here it is, link is still good, the music riveting, the banter scintillating...

http://archive.kchungradio.org/2014-08-24/Doug_Harvey's_LARZ-08.24.2014.mp3

* Rectilinear Occlusion Gears #s 2 - 5

Now I'm really worried...

#asleepercellineveryhabitrail