I’ve always loved comics that mess with conventional narrative. My sweet spot is somewhere between more conventional comics, and the work showcased in Andrei Molotiu’s Abstract Comics anthology and blog. In my favorite pieces, I love the friction between the art and the texts. Here’s some recent work that I find really interesting, all from the last 10 years or so. They play with conventions of horror and science fiction, and veer into surreal dreamscapes and wild explosions of abstraction.
DeForge needs no introduction for most of the regulars here. Holy Lacrimony is his first book in a few years, his dark, twisted, surprising take on a certain instance of alien abduction. The story is probably more linear than most of the other work in this post, but DeForge’s baroque invention is mindblowing.
New Delhi-based Pratap’s second collection, from Fantagraphics. There’s just scraps of text here and there, and no more than whiffs of narratives. But I’m captivated by the flamboyant ideas, the visual non-sequiturs, delirious perspective changes, the Francis Bacon-esque conflating of abstraction and body horror. Squishy, and irresistible.
More samples here
Pratap’s first collection Dear Mother is also available online here
Galvañ’s drawing style is disarmingly cute, with a palate of pastels and minimal cartoony figures. She does interesting things with color and texture, and slides effortlessly into abstraction. The design of the collection is immediately unusual and intriguing. There’s what looks like a contents page listing five stories, but none of them have titles. Successive stories are separated by endpaper-like pages, with a similar design theme.
Most of the pieces are cryptic pseudo-narratives, with deliciously unsettling text, and many text-less pages. Overall, this is one of the more original and memorable graphic novels I’ve come across in awhile. Just looking at a random page or two can be disappointing. I had to settle down before I could take in the design and the quiet, contemplative strangeness.
A gorgeously designed book that needs to be held for full appreciation. Lots of references to old leather-bound books of medical illustrations, natural history museum displays, cryptozoology, all with a sly sense of humor. No narrative, but who needs it with these beautiful drawings and paintings of surreal creatures?
Swedish artist Erik Svetoft’s Spa begins like a fairly typical horror story in a resort, but quickly slides into… something more abstract and Lynch-ian.
Old Ground is one of the most bizarre graphic novels I’ve come across, with forms that stretch like taffy, and spin into abstraction like a horrific acid trip. There’s a frog named Otto, a dog, and two characters that are buried for most of the book. And a strange bloody climactic conclusion.
Japan-based Ichiba has published a number of books, though only a few have been translated into English, and are put out by small presses such as Italy’s amazing Hollow Press. His work has similarities with horror manga, but pushes into abstraction way beyond (say) Junji Ito. It’s hard to follow the narrative of Heartbreak Reincarnation, but the striking art combines scratchy and detailed line drawing, painting, and photo collages.
Last but not least: I recently discovered the work of Taiwanese artist Sam Liu (not the American artist). Most of his work is in Chinese or text-less. I have not been able to locate articles or interviews (in English or Chinese). His books have minimal distribution even in Taipei (no ISBN; the staff at Taipei’s fabled Mangasick store indicated that they have to wait for him to bring them new product).
Burn is completely text-free. Its distinctive odd, distorted figures have bizarre geometric faces, sometimes quietly going about their cryptic activities, occasionally bursting into flame, or smoke or ashes. The image sequences are fascinating and quietly disturbing.
A couple more examples of Liu’s art:
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p.s. Hey. Today and for the next couple of days the blog proudly hosts a guest entry by the superb artist/composer Bill Hsu lazer focused on some makers of Graphic Meta-stories aka visualised narratives or narrativised visuals or things in that general realm. You’re certain to find works you don’t already know, and it’s great stuff, need I even say. Dig in, thanks, and major thanks to you, Bill. Also, as I stated on Saturday, the blog’s upper half will be dead still for the next two days while I’m off exploring Efteling. Leave your comments as you will, and I will respond to them along with an accompanying new post on Thursday. ** Tosh Berman, I think you told me that once about your dad’s support for the Kipper Kids. Amazing. Thank you. ** Jack Skelley, I was at that PiL show at the Olympic Auditorium, yes. It was harrowing. One of the best shows ever. Yep on the memories front. Actually, I think that post would make a fun Zoom club text choice. Whisper that in Jacqui/Ruben’s ears? ** Sypha, The US would get the Nobel Prize in Miniature Golf Course Design, for sure. Or I mean seemingly since I’ve hardly been to every country much less mini-golfed in them. That’s true. I’ve been to a couple of horror themed ones. They could have been more horrific, but it’s the thought that counts. ** jay, Hi, jay! Yeah, John Duncan’s wok is great in general, and I remember being disappointed that ‘Blind Date’ was the only one with video evidence that I could use since it’s mostly what he’s known for. Nice viewpoint on the Cobain. There’s a big Wolfgang Tillmans show here, and it’s like somebody found some random iPhone on the street and decided to print out all the photos on it and hang them on the walls, and fantasising that’s what the show was is the only way I could sort of appreciate it. I will (enjoy the long lost actual birthday), I’m pretty sure, but I’ll let you know. Have a rockin’ few days. ** Hugo, Thank you, I’m pretty sure I will. We’re not going to Walibi after all. We might dip into Plopsaland, but it’s way over on the coast. The word from other friends of mine who’ve seen ‘Weapons’ is that the visuals are kind of good sometimes but the script is standard fare blah. Hugs and more to you. ** Tyler Ookami, Hi. Oh, shit, sorry, yeah, once the p.s./post are launched I never look to see if there were late breaking comments, which is a bad habit. Does everything have to a be selfie museum? Jesus. But I’ll look at the example you shared. It just feels like selfie experiences and immersive experiences are crowding out the interesting things these days. I should say over here. That is an insane price for what you went through. Japan also has these over the counter legal pain killers that are like someone mixed Xanax and crystal meth together in a capsule, wow. I’ll try that Frost Children EP first, thanks! ** Mari, You’ve never been to an amusement park? Wow. They’re not everybody’s thing, for sure, but … I grew up in SoCal and went to Disneyland three or four or more times a year since I was about two years old. I don’t … think my senior grad class went there, but I was an artsy fartsy stoner student who didn’t close attention. Thank you so much about my work. If it could help dispel your hopelessness in any way, it would be very lucky. Thanks! If nothing else, it’s supposed to 38 degrees centigrade in Paris on the day I’m at Efteling, and getting to miss that will constitute a great success no matter what. Have the loveliest next coupla days possible. ** Steve, Cool, I’ll obviously watch for that. The WfYE record. And in the meantime, your new show! Everyone, Steve hosts a wonderful radio show, as you probably know, and there’s a new one. Here he is: ‘My radio show will air on Red Berry Radio (redberryradio.com) today at midnight, London time, and 7 PM-9 PM EST. Tune in for Norwegian egg punk, Erik Satie performed on a 13-string guitar, Tracy Chapman mash-ups and Egyptian hip-hop! The Mixcloud link is here. Goddess Bunny was a fascinating performer, and that re-contextualisation was seriously gross. Ah, yes, your ‘Weapons’ opinion conforms to what other of my friends are saying. Avoid. ** HaRpEr //, Yeah, as I was saying, when that exploitative use of Goddess Bunny popped up, it was horrifying. Although I guess it did lead some people into finding her actual work. No, I don’t know that Joel-Peter Witkin image. I’m not a massive fan of his stuff. I always revise as I go along, always have. Works really well for me. But I know some writers don’t like to risk having their impetus to output stalled out. I think writing about painful things always makes you move forward, or it has worked that way for me. Embracing something difficult with writing can be fatal or at least destructive or at least balancing to it in a very good way. Or so says me. Thanks, I’ll try, I will, and see you on the other side. ** Dom Lyne, Hi, D. Thanks. I feel pretty confident that I will (have a great time). It’s a beautiful place/thing. ‘Camelot’ is legendary. I keep reading that there are plans to wake it back up, but it never seems to happen. Routledge, wow, sweet, congrats! I’ll find time for the Doc Who radio drama as soon as I can. Congrats on that too, obviously. Everyone, The fine writer and artist of multiple stripes Dom Lynne wrote a ‘Doctor Who’ radio drama, and the entire thing is newly online and available to your ears, and I strongly recommend that you go absorb that. It’s here and it’s also here. No word on a UK screening yet. Zac and I are having to organise the film’s rollout basically on our own, and it’s a bit overwhelming, but we’re going to start looking for UK options soon. Thanks, bud. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. LA is a good birthing canal, or maybe a fruitful plain. Yeah, as I was just saying, a nice bonus of the Efteling trip is I’ll miss a chunk of our impending heatwave. Stay in the cool. You know certainly how do that stylistically, so … ** Carsten, Hey. Thanks. I was really lucky to be in LA during its performance art explosion and then in NYC when the East Coast equivalent happened. Really, really inspiring times. Most of the North American film festivals use FilmFreeway for their submissions. It’s quite rare that European festivals use it. I think it’s considered a little uncouth or something over here. I post stuff on the films and my books on social media, but that’s all I really do or know how to do. I do think alerting people on social media helps, sometimes a lot. No, I will read the work on your blog as soon as I have the headspace. I’m in a bit of a heavy film supporting period right now, and that eats up a lot of my brain. But that’ll ease up. My pleasure. Thanks, I think Efteling will definitely do the trick. Have a swell next days. ** Misanthrope, Sorry about the MRI delay. Ugh, stressful. Well, happy happy birthday, George! Oh, god, I don’t know what to say about your mom. That’s so scary. I’ll hold out whatever hope there is that the problem is something simpler. So, so, sorry my old friend. Take care, and let me know how it goes. Love, me. ** Okay. Investigate what Bill has placed before you, and I will see you back here on Thursday.
‘In performance art, usually one or more people perform in front of an audience. Performance artists often challenge the audience to think in new and unconventional ways about theater and performing, break conventions of traditional performing arts, and break down conventional ideas about “what art is,” a preoccupation of modernist experimental theater and of postmodernism. Thus, even though in most cases the performance is in front of an audience, in some cases, notably in the later works of Allan Kaprow, the audience members become the performers.
‘The performance may be scripted, unscripted, or improvisational. It may incorporate music, dance, song, or complete silence. Art-world performance has often been an intimate set of gestures or actions, lasting from a few minutes to many hours, and may rely on props or avoid them completely. Performance may occur in transient spaces or in galleries, room, theaters or auditoriums.
‘Despite the fact that many performances are held within the circle of a small art-world group, RoseLee Goldberg notes, in Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present that “performance has been a way of appealing directly to a large public, as well as shocking audiences into reassessing their own notions of art and its relation to culture. Conversely, public interest in the medium, especially in the 1980s, stemmed from an apparent desire of that public to gain access to the art world, to be a spectator of its ritual and its distinct community, and to be surprised by the unexpected, always unorthodox presentations that the artists devise.”’ — John Stockwell
Fred Tomaselli, painter, multimedia artist: “Mark Pauline did a performance on one of the bridges going into East L.A. There was a lot going on down there. There was this performance artist Stelarc, he hung himself with fish hooks off of one of the bridges just long enough to get a photo. He started hanging out at Gorky’s Cafe [where I was the manager] and I remember I booked him to do a performance at Gorky’s. It was this thing with this robotic third hand. That was very alienating to the customers.”
Brett Goldstone, multimedia artist: “I remember we were all in the Cotton Exchange show organized by LACE in 1984. Fred Tomaselli did a great kinetic piece. It was these animatronic legs in a dark room. When you walked in there was a mat that had a switch built in and it made the legs jump. It was kinda funhouse — scary, too.
“Chico MacMurtrie did a huge performance up in the ceiling that you saw as you entered the building. It was a kind of this enormous spider web made out of masking tape, I think. It was growing all through the opening. There was so much stuff in the show. I did a kinetic piece of a guy sitting at a table stuffing himself with fast food, arms flailing. Kathy Norklun did a spread in Spectacle magazine about all of the kinetic stuff.
“I did another piece under my nom de guerre, Art Attack, which I used at the time for all of my guerrilla pieces. It was a big banner (30′ x 20′) that I hung on the building the night before by breaking into the upper floors that were locked. It was a rather emotional response to a scene I had witnessed walking home to Chinatown from my friend’s studio on Broadway and 5th Street.
“There was a drunk, homeless guy on the ground at a hot dog stand and there were three or four cops standing around laughing at him as they whacked him with their batons, goading him to stand up. It went on for a few minutes and I wanted I to say something but I had learned that this was a good way to get whacked myself. I was furious. So I went on home and painted this big scene of what I had seen in very simple cartoonish style so as to be read at a large distance.
“It was hanging on the building for a few days when I got a call from [LACE Director] Joy Silverman telling me I had better take it down as the police had come and closed down the show. They had claimed it was for a paperwork issue but it was understood that the banner was the problem. I removed it and the show opened again. I rehung it the night of the closing party just to show the LAPD that we were still on to their brutality toward the homeless in the downtown area.”
Stephen Seemayer, artist, filmmaker: “It was very bleak. There wasn’t crack yet. There wasn’t AIDS. But there was a sense of desolation. It was so desolate that even the cops didn’t really want to deal with you. I was 3 to 4 blocks away from the Newton Division and it’s famous in the LAPD. They were called the ‘Shootin’ Newton.’ I was like 22 at the time. I would be there at my studio and they’d see me out of my car and they’d roust me and said, ‘What are you doing in this neighborhood?’ And I’d say, ‘I live here.’ And they’d say, ‘Get out!'”
Marnie Weber, artist: “We decided we would have an art show in our building. It was just ourselves on Spring St. We invited everyone we knew to submit a piece. I was taking a class with Chris Burden and I said, ‘Do you want to show a piece?’ And he said, ‘Sure.’ And he shot bottle rockets across the street from our roof. And the cops didn’t care. That was just the kind of thing that would happen.
“I remember our first gig [as the Party Boys]. We said, ‘Where is the least likely place you’d play?’ So we picked a gas station at midnight on a Wednesday. Then we had to change location. So we moved to a parking lot that had been painted turquoise. We rented generators and did play Wednesday at midnight. And there was quite a few people — like 25. In those days, you were happy if 25 people showed up.
“Then we played at a bar across the street called Jacaranda’s. We walked in and offered to play for free. We would play for beer. We got a fair amount of people coming to our shows, from downtown, from Hollywood, East L.A. We started inviting other bands like the Minutemen and punk bands from the period.
“Then Marc Kreisel bought the American Hotel [home to Al’s Bar] and we said, ‘Why don’t you have a show?’ He said, ‘If you build a stage I’ll do it.’ So we built a stage.”
____ Extras
The Lhasa Club Tapes – Hollywood 1985
A Hole in Space LA-NY, 1980
Historic Places in L.A.: The Woman’s Building
____ High Performance Magazine
High Performance was a quarterly arts magazine based out of Los Angeles founded in 1978 and published until 1997. Its editorial mission was to provide support and a critical context for new, innovative and unrecognized work in the arts.
High Performance started out covering exclusively performance art and gradually grew to include video, sound, and public art. It dealt with viewing the arts in the larger context of contemporary life, examining how the arts contribute in addressing social and cultural concerns, and also how those concerns impact the arts. In 1994, High Performance received the Alternative Press Award for Cultural Coverage from the Utne Reader, and was nominated three other times for the same award.
Linda Frye Burnham served as the magazine’s founding editor from 1978 to 1985. Steven Durland was the editor from 1986 until its end in 1997. From 1983 to 1995, High Performance was published by Astro Artz (renamed 18th Street Arts Center in 1988). In July 1995, High Performance was acquired by Art in the Public Interest (API), a new organization formed by Burnham and Durland to research and develop information about artists collaborating with their communities. After a brief hiatus, the magazine renewed publication in early 1996 and published five more issues, but rising costs and an inability to garner needed stabilization funding forced API to cease publication in 1997. In 1999, Burnham and Durland initiated the Community Arts Network on the Web. Much of the content from High Performance is available on that site.
‘Johanna Went is a pioneering performance artist who began performing as part of a street theater troupe that travelled America and Europe in the 1970’s. Combining a wild, chaotic performing style packed with visual excitement, gallons of blood, streams of multicolored liquids, giant bloody tampons, enormous sewn fabric sculptures, wacky scary costumes and enough Styrofoam and found film stock to fill a room, Johanna packed the clubs in LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Phoenix and New York. For more than ten years she was known as an innovative performance artist, particularly for the visual richness of her on-stage characters. She was equally renowned for her use of live improvised music that crossed over from jazzy rock grooves and jungle beats to electronic soundscapes and industrial noise. And always, above all the wild, driving music: Johanna’s completely stream of conscience vocals.’
‘Born in 1955 and raised in Mexico City, Guillermo Gómez-Peña came to the United States in 1978. His artistic production has centered around his life mission: to make experimental yet accessible art; to work in politically and emotionally charged sites for diverse audiences; and to collaborate across racial, gender, and age boundaries as a gesture of citizen-diplomacy. As founding member of the bi-national arts collective Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (1985-1990), Gómez-Peña was featured in the 1990 Biennale di Venezia. He has participated in a vast number of exhibitions, biennials and festivals including the Sydney Biennial (1992) the Whitney Biennial (1993), Sonart (1999), and Made in California at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (2000). In 1991, he became the first Chicano/Mexicano artist to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. He has also won a number of awards including: the New York Bessie Award (1989), the Viva Los Artists Award (1993) and the Cineaste Lifetime Achievement Award at Taos Talking Pictures Film Festival (2000). Gómez-Peña’s performance and installation work has been presented at more than five hundred venues across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, Australia, the former Soviet Union, Columbia, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Brazil and Argentina.’
‘Linda Mary Montano is a seminal figure in contemporary feminist performance art, Linda Montano’s work since the mid 1960s has been critical in the development of video by, for, and about women. Attempting to dissolve the boundaries between art and life, Montano continues to actively explore her art/life through shared experience, role adoption, and intricate life altering ceremonies, some of which last for seven or more years. Her artwork is starkly autobiographical and often concerned with personal and spiritual transformation. Montano’s influence is wide ranging. She has been featured at museums including The New Museum in New York, MOCA San Francisco, and the ICA in London. Montano has taught Performance Art, published five books, and has over fifty free videos on YouTube.’
‘BOB & BOB is written like a long, meaty press release, which is in keeping with these two artists’ general tactics. I have never seen one of their live performances, but I like the way they tread the thin line between silly-smart and silly-stupid in this book. It tells the who (Francis Shishim and Paul Velick), what (music, performance, public action, drawing, self-advertising, film, photography and whatever else was at hand), and where (California) of the first five years of this team’s collaboration. Texts of songs, interviews and routines are included. Two of the worst art jokes ever put into print came from Bob & Bob’s early school days at the Art Center in Los Angeles: “I went to the dentist to get Matisse fixed”; and “Hey Bob, who’s your favorite Artist?” “Lautrec!” “Well, I think his work is Too-loose!” With a beginning like that, anything is possible.’
‘Though he was only 32 at the time of his passing, the Iranian-American theater director Reza Abdoh’s (1963–95) mark on the world of theater was unmistakable. Relentlessly inventive, he pushed his actors—and audiences—to their limits amid ambitious, unusual, disorienting stage sets. Abdoh’s aesthetic language borrowed from fairy tales, BDSM, talk shows, raves, video art, and the history of avant-garde theater. This exhibition, the first large-scale retrospective of Abdoh’s work, will highlight the diverse video works that Abdoh produced for his performances and an installation based on his 1991 production Bogeyman. The exhibition also includes contextual materials reflecting the club scenes in both Los Angeles and New York, the culture wars of the Reagan era, and the AIDS crisis. Abdoh died of AIDS in 1995.’
Reza Abdoh: Theater Visionary, Documentary Film (Trailer)
Vaginal Davis
‘Davis got her start in L.A.’s predominately white punk scene as the front woman of an art-punk band called the Afro Sisters, where she referenced and drew inspiration from iconic black radicals like Angela Davis, after whom she named herself. Throughout the eighties, Vaginal Davis developed multiple personas and performed incongruous identities. She was a black revolutionary drag queen, a teen-age Chicana pop star, a white-supremacist militiaman. These characters often referred to one another: against her better judgment, Vaginal Davis pined for Clarence, a rabid white supremacist; Clarence, too, harbored secret affections. Their dynamic caricatured that illicit desire that exists despite—or, perhaps, because of—racism. This kind of political critique, simultaneously absurd and hyper-real, made Davis a muse to a generation of queer writers and critics, like the late José Esteban Muñoz, who died in 2013.’
‘Sheree Rose and Bob Flanagan (1952-1996) are most known for their intensive bodily performances that explored love, sex, pleasure, sadism, masochism, and Flanagan’s long-term battle with cystic fibrosis. Rose and Flanagan’s history is worth knowing not for what they did to art, but for what they did to love and sex. This is where Rose’s relationship to her practice is quite different from that of the people mentioned above. It was an already-existing active engagement with sex politics as lived and felt that brought Rose and Flanagan into galleries and museums. They were together for years before that relationship morphed into an art practice, and their activism was, at first, an explicitly sexual activism localized to their personal lives and to their activism within and on behalf of the BDSM community.’
‘Linda J. Albertano skeins surrealism and lyricism into eight pieces. The warped reality of David Lynch is an apt reference point, for Albertano’s university degree is in film making: vivid images splash colour into her tales. Lush language and carefully chosen aural bites cultivate texture in a world seeping with heat and saturated with history, a world unburdened by chronology. Sexual and political power relations form Albertano’s stomping ground. With satire and simile as her tools, she unravels scenarios, attempting to uncover their subtexts… A commentary that entertains and educates as it inquires.’
‘Starting out in the late 1970s with solo performances, image/text paintings, and gallery andsite-specific installations, Kelley came to prominence in the 1980s with a series of sculptures composed of common craft materials. Featuring repurposed thrift store toys, blankets, and worn stuffed animals, the Half a Man series focused Kelley’s career-long investigation of memory, trauma, and repression, predicated on what the artist described as a “shared culture of abuse.”’
Pansy Metal Clovered Hoof – Mike Kelley and Anita Pace
Suzanne Lacy
‘Suzanne Lacy is an American social practice artist, who coined the term new genre public art. Her work spans from visual art, film and performance art to installation, public practice and writing. All her work is linked by its engagement with social themes and urban issues, through conversation within communities of people. She has addressed issues such as rape, violence, feminism, aging and incarceration. Lacy is concerned with bringing both social and aesthetic purpose to her work, making her, in many people’s eyes, both an artist and an activist.’
Between the Door and the Street: A Performance Initiated by Suzanne Lacy
Ron Athey
‘It’s not easy to comprehend why someone would want to penetrate their scalp with a metal hook, infuse their scrotum with saline solution and invite a live audience to watch. But Ron Athey’s not a simple guy. Over the last 20 years the experimental body artist has been dubbed a masochist and a sensationalist for his extreme practice – a kind of queer performance art that deals with themes of trauma, ritual and resistance through the mutilation of the body. Always challenging, always underground, his work has been heavily influenced by his upbringing in a Pentecostal household and by living the past 28 years of his life as HIV positive.’
Solar Anus
Donald Krieger
‘Donald Krieger passed away peacefully on May 3, 2010 after a short illness. Throughout his life and at the time of his passing, Donald was surrounded by love. He was 57 years old. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico and raised in southern California, he called Los Angeles home. Donald began an eclectic career in art with seminal performance pieces known for their originality, innovative use of media and anthropological subject matter. “The Story of Aviation”, “All Electric”, “The Tesla Project” and “Boy’s Life”, to name a few, established Donald as an important voice in the Los Angeles performance art community. Also recognized for his installation pieces, paintings and drawings in his later career, Donald created a one-man show based on the work of Thomas Edison at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 1995. He continued to explore science and nature in his art and writings.’
‘Island’. Performance by Donald Krieger, featuring Kristian Hoffman and Lance Loud.
Los Angeles Poverty Department
‘The Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) is a Los Angeles-based performance group closely tied to the city’s Skid Row neighborhood. Founded in 1985 by director and activist John Malpede, LAPD members are mostly homeless or formerly homeless people who collaborate with advocates, social service professionals and community members to create performances and multimedia art that highlight connections between their lived experiences and external forces that impact their lives.’
4 excerpts from Los Angeles Poverty Department’s performances
Paul McCarthy
‘Painter (1995) is a single-channel colour video with sound that is shown in a darkened room either as a projection or on a monitor. The video depicts the American artist Paul McCarthy performing as the eponymous painter inside a wooden set that is dressed as an artist’s studio, containing several large canvases as well as over-sized brushes and tubes of paint, along with an adjacent bedroom. Dressed in a blue smock, McCarthy wears a blonde wig and a number of prosthetics, including a bulbous nose, flapping ears and large rubber hands. During the fifty-minute video, he talks and acts in an exaggerated and comic fashion, sometimes behaving violently and at other times more childlike, as he struggles to paint. Midway through the work McCarthy sits at a table and repeatedly hits his rubber hand with a meat cleaver, eventually cutting off the index finger. Interspersed with the sequences in the studio and bedroom are four brief scenes featuring additional characters, all of whom also wear bulbous prosthetic noses. Two of these scenes are set in an office, where McCarthy visits a female gallery owner whom he claims owes him money, and the other two are based around a talk show, in which McCarthy appears alongside the host and an art collector couple. The video concludes with a scene in which a group of collectors line up to see McCarthy, with one sniffing the artist’s bare bottom as if assessing it as an artwork. Painter was shot on digital betacam and is displayed as standard definition video.’
‘The fair-enough question might be “Who the hell are the Kipper Kids?”. But for those who know of them it’s more likely, “Do we really have to talk about the Kipper Kids?” This duo who came to attention in America in the late Seventies/early Eighties opened for the Rolling Stones and Public Image Ltd, performed at the Munich Olympics and got their first big break on US television in a CBS show No Holds Barred. And what did they do? Imagine the sadistic end of the Three Stooges coupled with anarchic French clowns, a more flatulent spin-off from the surrealism of Monty Python, plus silly voices, protracted skits which seem to have no end or even a point and . . .’
‘I wanted to punish myself as thoroughly as I could. I’d decided to have a vasectomy, but that wasn’t enough: I wanted my last potent seed to be spent in a dead body. I made arrangements to have sex with a cadaver. I was bodily thrown out of several sex shops before meeting a man who set me up with a mortician’s assistant in a Mexican border town…’
‘BLIND DATE was performed in order to torture myself, physically and psychically. The sound recording of the session in Mexico was made public to respond to what I saw as a general situation created by social conditions, and to render any further self-torture of this kind, especially psychic self-torture, unnecessary for anyone to perform as a creative act.
‘These experiences — the acts themselves, the shame that inspired them, isolation in Japan soon afterward, suddenly in a completely alien culture unable to read, understand or communicate with anyone — all taught me far more than I could possibly have anticipated. As a result, my perception of all existence, including my own, has permanently and fundamentally changed.
‘These experiences have shown life in all forms to be an incredibly rich, timeless, continuous cycle, with death and corporeal existence interwoven as part of the process. I’ve come to see myself as a microscopic and insignificant part of that process, while at the same time the very embodiment and center of it. I’ve come to understand the act and experience of learning as sensual, as a form of beauty.
‘Since BLIND DATE, all forms of my work are created to raise questions, to find out everything I can about who I am without fear or judgement, and to encourage you to do the same.’ — John Duncan
‘Rachel Rosenthal, a performance artist whose work — fierce, funny, earthy and cantankerous — bemoaned the political and ecological fate of the planet, died on Sunday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 88.
‘Ms. Rosenthal’s work melded dance, theater, dramatic monologues, improvisation and visual art to illuminate her abiding concerns: feminism, environmentalism and animal rights. Internationally renowned — she performed at Lincoln Center and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and elsewhere — she was for decades part of the cadre of Los Angeles conceptual artists that included Paul McCarthy and Chris Burden.
‘With her shaved head, resonant voice, teeming jewelry and take-no-prisoners approach to a great many things, Ms. Rosenthal cut a captivating figure. “The doyenne of performance art,” the news media often called her, an appellation she deplored.’ — NYTimes
‘For three generations, young gay mall punks have praised the Goddess the way other gay men wallow in the tabloid tragedies of Judy Garland. I was one such mall punk. In high school, my goth friends and I obsessed over the Goddess’s story. She contracted polio and underwent several botched surgeries as an infant. The combination stunted her growth, deformed her hands, and left her legs bone-thin and crooked. When she began presenting as a woman—at different times, she has said she was born with both a penis and a vagina and identified as trans—in the late 1970s and early 1980s, she used makeup, wigs, dresses, and, most of all, extreme self-confidence to see the beauty in her disability. She made performance art, modeled for Rick Owens, posed nude with swans for acclaimed photographer Joel-Peter Witkin, appeared as a puppet in Dr. Dre’s “Puppet Master” music video, became the breakout star of Marilyn Manson’s “The Dope Show,” acted opposite Carrie Fisher in the 1986 cult movie Hollywood Vice Squad, and played a female mobster and a number of Tennessee Williams heroines in a series of films directed by the filmmaker and archivist John Aes-Nihil.’ — Vice
‘Keith Antar Mason is a poet, playwright and performer whose stage and literary works have been presented extensively throughout the United States and Britain for over two decades. He writes, directs, and sometimes performs with the Hittite Empire, for which he is the Artistic Director and a co-founding member. Awards and honors include the Brody Arts Fund, Franklin Furnace, Art Matters, Harvard Book Award, the Barbara Mandingo KellyPeace Award and the Midwest Black Playwrights Award.’ — the ridge
‘For Black Boys Who Have Considered Homicide When The Streets Were Too Much’
Barbara T. Smith
‘Smith’s interest in performance and interdisciplinary work was cemented when she attended an experimental theater workshop led by Judson Church dancer Alex Hay. Hay’s workshop pushed Smith to realize that the curious actions forming in her mind were valid. Emboldened, Smith created the environmental sculpture Field Piece (1968–72), part of which was presented at F-Space in 1971, before the full installation was shown at Cirrus Gallery. The work comprised 180 semi-flexible, fiberglass, nine-and-a-half-foot tall columns in translucent colors—clear, orange, pink, yellow, and violet—that glowed via an internal light source, forming a dense, delicately industrial forest. Each column also contained a speaker, activated by sensors underneath a foam floor by the audience (also linked to the light) to emit a vibrating drone sound, making the viewer an integral part of its network.
‘A move into live performance shortly thereafter found Smith exploring the boundaries of audience-performer power dynamics with Feed Me (1973), staged at San Francisco’s Museum of Conceptual Art as part of the event “All Night Sculptures.” For one evening only, Smith sat nude inside the woman’s bathroom, which she outfitted with books, a mattress, pillows, and things the audience could “feed” her with: food, wine, marijuana, and massage oil. (An accompanying tape loop simply intoned “feed me, feed me.”)
‘Smith remained in control, as the participants—only one allowed in at a time—were instructed to negotiate her permission before taking action. Various accounts, by Smith and others, relay what occurred, from discussion and massage to consensual sexual intercourse with several men. Smith described the work as an act to create a positive, affirmative situation—using “feed me” to have her needs met, instead of enacting the stereotype of the nurturing woman. The performance was made in opposition to the male dominance she experienced in heterosexual relationships.’ — artsy
‘Dan Kwong is an American performance artist, writer, teacher and visual artist. He has been presenting his solo performances since 1989, often drawing upon his own life experiences to explore personal, historical and social issues. He is of Chinese American and Japanese American descent. His works intertwine storytelling, multimedia, dynamic physical movement, poetry, martial arts and music. Kwong is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has been an Artist with the multicultural performing arts organization Great Leap since 1990 and assumed the position of Associate Artistic Director in 2011, and a Resident Artist at the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, California since 1992.’ — Wiki
‘With the invention of ‘Happenings’ and ‘Environments’, Allan Kaprow embarked upon a career of intellectually rigorous, site-specific, and timed works that defied commoditization and ultimately gave birth to performance and installation art. His seminal work, ‘18 Happenings in 6 parts’, an evening of seemingly random but carefully choreographed activities, required the participation of both the audience and the performers to complete the piece. ‘Life is much more interesting than art,’ Kaprow wrote. ‘The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible.’
‘Central to Kaprow’s work was his concept of reinventions. As Kaprow explained, ‘I say reinventions, rather than reconstructions, because the works … differ markedly from their originals. Intentionally so. As I wrote in notes to one of them, they were planned to change each time they were remade. This decision, made in the late 50s, was the polar opposite of the traditional belief that the physical art object – the painting, photo, music composition, etc. – should be fixed in a permanent form.’’ — Hauser & Wirth
Ingrvallo is a performance artist, playwright, director and actress best known for her starring roles in the films “Steal America” and “Things We Said Today”. She is based in Los Angeles, and has been performing there since the late 1980s.’ — collaged
‘John Fleck is an American actor and performance artist. He is also one of the NEA Four. In 1990 he and three of his fellow artist became embroiled in a lawsuit against the government’s National Endowment for the Arts program. John Frohnmayer, one of the chairman of the NEA vetoed funding his project on the basis of content and was accused of implementing a partisan political agenda. The government’s case was ultimately upheld at the US Supreme Court and the vaguely worded “decency” clause remains part of the NEA’s regulations. The NEA subsequently stopped funding all individual artists as a result of this case.
‘Fleck has won numerous grants and awards, among them 2 NEA’s, a Getty Fellowship, Durfee Funding, a Franklin Furnace & Jerome Foundation Fellowship, a Rockefeller/NEA- Interarts grant and LA Cultural Affairs funding. He has won 3 LA Critics Circle Awards, 8 DramaLogue, 6 LA Weekly and 2 Backstage West awards, all for outstanding performance. His television roles include Silik on the series Star Trek: Enterprise, several characters on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and the pilot to Babylon 5, The Gathering (1993). He starred as Gecko on the television show Carnivàle, and as Louis on Murder One. He also appears in Waterworld among other films.’ — Kevin Duffy
‘Simone Forti began dancing in 1955 with Anna Halprin, who was doing pioneering work in the teaching and performing of dance improvisation After four years of workshop study and performance apprenticeship at Halprin’s outdoor studio in the San Francisco Bay area, Simone moved to New York City. There she studied composition at the Merce Cunningham studio with musicologist /dance educator Robert Dunn, who was introducing dancers to the scores of John Cage. Thus she began her association with the Judson Dance Theater Group which revolutionized dance in New York in the 1960s.
‘From her early minimalist dance/constructions through her animal studies, news animations and land portraits, Forti has worked with an eye towards creating idioms for exploring natural forms and behaviors. Over the past fifteen years Forti has been developing Logomotion, an improvisational dance/narrative form wherein movement and words spring spontaneously from a common source.’ — Movement Research
‘Jones volunteered for the Marine Corps in 1966 and eventually spent 13 months in Vietnam. After he returned home to Southern California and completed his service, he went back to art school. Jones soon began shocking people with the images that poured out of him. He created the sculptural alter ego Mudman by smearing his beautifully formed and muscled body with mud, covering his head with pantyhose, strapping a bulky contraption of sticks to his back and venturing out into society. He looked like the kind of alien he felt himself to be. “I was an outsider, a spiky thing, walking through the main artery of the city. Molecules fit in, but if something’s spiky it doesn’t fit in,” Jones has said.
‘To categorize Jones’ appearances as performance art is misleading. They were metaphorical actions, four-dimensional sculptures (with time as the added dimension): a psyche turned inside out. The retrospective includes photographs of Jones as Mudman, as well as related stick sculptures, drawings, assemblage and collage work.’ — Seattle Times
Kim Jones Artist Talk at The Vermont Studio Center
Luis Alfaro
‘Luis Alfaro grew up in the Pico Union district near Downtown Los Angeles, and graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in East Los Angeles. His plays and fiction are set in Los Angeles’s Chicano barrios, including the Pico Union district, and often feature gay and lesbian and working-class themes. Many of Alfaro’s plays also deal with the AIDS pandemic in Latino communities. Noted plays include “Bitter Homes and Gardens,” “Pico Union,” “Downtown,” “Cuerpo Politizado,” “Straight as a Line,” “Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner,” “No Holds Barrio,” and “Black Butterfly.” Many of these plays have also been published as stories or poetry. He is currently the Playwright-in-Residence at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and an Associate Professor in the School of Dramatic Arts at the University of Southern California.’ — Wiki
‘Paul Reubens joined the Los Angeles troupe The Groundlings in the 1970s and started his career as an improvisational comedian and stage actor. In 1982, Reubens put up a show about a character he had been developing for years. The show was called The Pee-wee Herman Show and it ran for five sold-out months with HBO producing a successful special about it. Pee-wee became an instant cult figure and for the next decade, Reubens would be completely committed to his character, doing all of his public appearances and interviews as Pee-wee. In 1985 Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, directed by the then-unknown Tim Burton, was a financial and critical success, and soon developed into a cult film. Big Top Pee-wee, 1988’s sequel, was less successful than its predecessor. Between 1986 and 1990, Reubens starred as Pee-wee in the CBS Saturday-morning children’s program Pee-wee’s Playhouse.’ — Wiki
‘Tim Miller has made a career of blending activism into his one-man performances. “I knew from the time I was 15 or 16 that if I wanted to tell stories about my gay identity and outspoken political perspectives, I’d have to create those stories myself as a writer/performer,” Tim told WGCU’s Julie Glenn on West Coast Live. Through the ‘80s and well into the ‘90s, Miller’s Tim Miller 6performance pieces revolved around gay rights and the HIV/AIDS epidemic which struck shortly after he relocated to New York from L.A. “There’s no question that if a global pandemic sails into the world that artists would, could and should respond,” Miller said in the WGCU interview. “In fact, I think that we were first responders. Long before science kicked in in any useful way, the people that were helping were health care Tim Miller 23providers and artists, and we had this explosion of theater and dance and music. For many years, the cultural response was the only response we had. So that, for me, was a strong template.”’ — artsswf.com
‘Buddy Systems’ (1987)
Elia Arce
‘Elia Arce is an internationally known artist and cultural activist working in a wide variety of media including performance, experimental theater, film/video, writing, spoken word and installation. She is the recipient of the J. Paul Getty Individual Artist Award, The Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, The Durfee Foundation and a 1999 nominee for the Herb Alpert/CalArts Award in Theater.
‘Since 1986, she has been creating, writing and directing experimental theatre works-in collaboration with HIV positive immigrants in Houston, breast cancer workers in Washington DC, house-keeping staff in Banff, Canada and the homeless of L.A.’s Skid Row. In 1993 she created her first full-length solo performance: “I Have So Many Stitches That Sometimes I Dream That I’m Sick”.’ — eliaarce.com
‘Nervous Gender is an American punk rock band and performance art unit founded in Los Angeles, California in 1978 by Gerardo Velazquez, Edward Stapleton, Phranc and Michael Ochoa. Their use of heavily distorted keyboards and synthesizers made them, along with The Screamers, one of the original innovators of what is today called “electropunk”, although they could equally be considered an early industrial group. The group was confrontational and experimental.
‘Phranc’s androgynous appearance was the embodiment of the group’s name, garnered the band much press in zines such as Slash and, later, proving inspirational to founders of the Queercore movement. Despite their somewhat high profile, the groups’ habit of provoking the audience, obscene material and harsh erotics guaranteed they would never gain commercial acceptance. In 1979, Don Bolles of the Germs joined as drummer. The next year Phranc left the band and Paul Roessler of the Screamers joined.
‘During the mid-1980s, the band was on the verge of breaking up when members of Wall of Voodoo Bruce Moreland, Marc Moreland and Chas Grey, who were fans, stepped in and offered to collaborate with them. It was at this point that a guitar-driven version of Nervous Gender emerged. During this time Dinah Cancer of 45 Grave was a frequent guest performer with them, and they played shows with bands such as Christian Death, Super Heroines, Kommunity FK and Gobsheit (a side project of Stapleton’s with Patrice Repose) at venues such as the Anti Club. In 1988, Edward Stapleton played his last show with the band.
‘In early 1990, original members Gerardo Velasquez and Michael Ochoa along with Joe Zinnato (a long time Ochoa collaborator) revived Nervous Gender as a trio. This formation did a series of 8 performances, and were working on what would have been the final Nervous Gender album (working title “American Regime”) with producer Paul B. Cutler (of 45 Grave). The final performance of Nervous Gender was on August 26, 1991 at Club A.S.S. in Silverlake, CA. Gerardo Velasquez died on March 28, 1992, at age 33.’ — collaged
Montage: Nervous Gender – Live At The Target (1983)
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p.s. Hey. On Monday I will be taking my very long delayed birthday gift/trip to my favorite amusement park, Efteling in the Netherlands. There’ll be a post on Monday, but, and I’ll put this in italics … On Monday I will only be able to respond to comments left here before 8 pm Paris time on Sunday, because I’m leaving early on Monday morning. The blog will be frozen, posts-wise, on Tuesday and Wednesday, and it will return to normal on Thursday. Thanks. ** _Black_Acrylic, My pleasure, Ben. No, over here we’re getting the opposite: classic summer heat is making a return for the next week at least. Urgh. Enjoy your dreamy respite from the skies. ** Jack Skelley, Hi, J. Happy to bring some joy to those peeps. I’m good, the usual, but soon to immerse myself entirely in an amusement park, and I know you know the big plus there. Rise above. ** jay, She was kind of the go-to actress, or one of them, back when film was wild. She’s amazing. Cobain paraphenalia, okay. A show for the worshipping set. So the interview was kind of a dress rehearsal. That’s valuable. Your high positivity is most happily being digested, thank you, bud. I’m feeling alright myself, so siphon off some of that as needed. ** julian, All of the Godard films featuring her are very highly work watching, I think. 22’s nothing. Cool, go for it. And of course I’d love to hear/have the album when you’re finished. A mighty yes to that question. I’m pretty good. I’m working on our next film script, so that’s where my ideas are heading right now. No novel ideas as of recently. Maybe a short fiction thing. I’m fiddling with something. For whatever reason, film is gobbling up my creative thoughts these days. Have a most splendid weekend. ** Sypha, Oh, that does sound awful: the gag reflex downside. American health care, jesus. I think I mentioned at the time that my root canal involved three long visits, multiple ex-rays, the new ‘tooth’, etc. and the whole thing cost less than 200 euros. That’s France for you. Interesting course, yeah, with the difficult parts happening at the top. Huh. Miniature golf is not at all a thing here, as I’ve probably said, and when they do have them, they’re just tiny usual golf courses, no architecture, no props, no nothing, just cement, grass, and a hole. ** Midnight Matt, Hi, Matt. That sounds lovely. I’m pretty sure there’ll be a way to do that. Cool. Maybe we can sort out a plan through Derek? Have an excellent weekend up there, or over there more like. ** Steve, That’s rough. My shoulders are hunched just reading that. There’s a new Water From Your Eyes? Wow. Everyone, For Steve’s LGBTQ music roundup in Gay City News, he reviewed the latest albums by Ethel Cain and Water From Your Eyes here. I guess we’ll head to Chicago middish September and then hang out in that general area until the Toronto screening. ‘RT’ was in contention for last year’s NYFF, and we didn’t get selected. Weekend: work, see a visiting friend, survive the rising heat, … and some surprises, I imagine. You? ** Carsten, That’s very true. Really miss David. Submittable, gotcha. Nice that exists. Like FilmFreeway for writers or something. Me too on self-promotion and all of that, but I’ve had to jump in anyway since if Zac and I don’t push our film, it’ll just sit there hidden from the world. Hard. Not my thing at all. Yes, I will spend quality time on blog. I just made a note to remember. I need notes and nudges. I seem to always be doing too many things at once. Good weekend to you, pal. Summer’s back here too, and I’m cowering. ** HaRpEr //, Hi. I watched ‘Vivre sa Vie’ again fairly recently, and I agree that it’s very underrated. ‘The Nun’ is not a waste of your time, probably obviously. Frost Children, don’t know them, will. And, yeah, cool about the expanded Um, Jennifer? I hope you can carve out that writing time. Absolutely no doubt that it’s what the doctor ordered, etc. Oh, I was writing about art a lot at a certain point, so people thought of me for art gigs. So the publisher Phaidon asked me to interview Raymond because we knew each other and both lived in LA. I did the same with Tom Friedman for a book. It was fun. And they used to pay really well in the art world back then, so that was an impetus too. ** Steeqhen, Hey. ‘Superman’ is definitely a future plane flight time consumer for me. Sounds like an interesting, fruitful narrative strategy, yes. ** Bill, Oh, man, you gotta catch up on those Godards. Well, gotta, no, sorry. No gottas. We got heat here but not humidity yet, although I can feel the water constructing itself in the air this morning. Let me know if you see any shows worth expounding about. ** Okay. This weekend I’ve restored a post focused on some of the top dawgs from the period when Los Angeles had a very alive and exciting Performance Art scene and when the experimental wing of its theater world was killing it. Investigate as you see fit, and I’ll see you on Monday.
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