CC on LARZ Pt 01: Juvenilia Mix

This Sunday at Noon on Doug Harvey's Less Art Radio Zine, I'll be doing a live uninterrupted hour-long mix of cassette recordings made by Christian Cummings as a young self-taught experimental audio artist over a decade ago. These tapes miraculously escaped the devastating studio fire by being in my possession.

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.

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?

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

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.

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 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...

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 special radio programming (to my knowlege) chronicling Mike Kelley's substantial body of experimental musical work in the weeks after his suicide. Or since.

And 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

Download Glenn Bray on LARZ

Glenn Bray and I got to stretch out over almost 90 minutes for Sunday's Less Art Radio Zine  on KCHUNG, playing the music of Spike Jones, Basil Wolverton, Fred Blassie, Omo the Hobo, The 3 Haircuts, Zacharly, Tuli Kupferberg, Bowen Weems, The Dinks, anonymous "blue" country swing 78s, an audio collage recreation of the Sunset Strip riot by Sonny Bono, and much more! We got to discuss Glenn's huge new book from Fantagraphics, The Blighted Eye, and many of the artists represented therein -- including Carl Barks, Harvey Kurtzman, Byron Werner, Cameron Jamie, and others.

I once again forgot to take a photo during the session -- but above is a wholly convincing artist's rendition of what it must have looked like. Although most of the music Glenn selected tends toward the novelty/fringe R&B categories, it came out in our off-air discussion that he actually attended the T.A.M.I. show, saw Syd Barrett live (and post-Syd Floyd in a bar with about 10 people in the audience), BowWowWow's debut in London, and many similar epochal moments in rock history! Guess I'll have to have him back! Sorry about the loud Chinese opera. Oh yeah, and we're doing a book signing at Arcana Books in Culver City on Sunday April 6th - details TK.

And here is the link: the link.

Glenn Bray on LARZ Sunday March 16

To coincide with the publication of Fantagraphic's massive "Blighted Eye: The Collection of Glenn Bray," Glenn will be my guest on this Sunday's edition of Doug Harvey's Less Art Radio Zine (Sunday at 12 noon at www.kchungradio.org), spinning Spike Jones, Basil Wolverton, wrestler Fred Blassie, and other sound artifacts from his chequered past. Here's a profile I did on him a couple of years back...

Glenn Bray
Visionary quester

Most art collectors are passive and predictable, content to acquire works that represent their good taste and knowledge of the art historical canon. Then there are those who are more correctly identified as patrons — initiating projects, conducting obsessive research, sometimes bringing to light overlooked or forgotten niches of culture.

For years, Jim Shaw kept urging me to visit Glenn Bray’s collection, but it wasn’t until I wrote a catalog essay for an exhibition of his archive of work by the visionary grotesque comic book artist Basil Wolverton that I finally made the short trek to the Valley, where Bray still manages the hardware store his father founded, and lives with his partner, Dutch underground comix legend Lena Zwalve.

Bray has several peculiar claims to pop-culture fame — his rediscovery and patronage of Wolverton in the early ’70s initiated a revival of interest in the artist’s work and a flurry of high-profile gigs. Bray brought forth into the world the entirely new genre of Wrestling Music by recording and releasing Fred Blassie’s 1976 Pencil Neck Geek single, which became one of the iconic records of Outsider Music after Dr. Demento put it on heavy rotation. Bray also sought out Carl Barks, the then-still-anonymous Uncle Scrooge comics auteur, and convinced him to get Disney’s permission to create an oil painting based on one of his classic cover illustrations. One painting, A Tall Ship and a Star To Steer Her By (1971), became hundreds — and a welcome income stream in Bark’s later years.

While the bulk of his collection focuses on comic art — in addition to the largest private collection of Wolverton material, he owns probably the finest collection of original work by MAD’s Harvey Kurtzman, and was a major lender to the Masters of American Comics exhibits — Bray tends to support the fringier elements of the graphic narrative world, with major shelf age devoted to underground geniuses like Kim Deitch, S. Clay Wilson and the late speed primitivist Rory Hayes, plus substantial dosages of punk-era torchbearers Gary Panter and Savage Pencil. Not surprisingly, his taste in contemporary Art World artists leans to figures like Shaw and Jeffrey Vallance, not to mention a long-term strategic alliance with Cameron Jamie, who shares Bray’s obsession with the European Anti-Santa Krampus.

Bray’s most momentous jump-start was probably to the career of the extremely eccentric Polish modernist Stanislav Szukalski, whose gorgeous and idiosyncratic hybrids of Art Deco, Picabia-esque Surrealism, and non-Western visual motifs was almost as startling as his complex theories of malevolent yetis interbreeding with humanity, or the physiological evidence of the Great Deluge mappable in every human’s facial features through the science of Zermatism. Bray found the aged Szukalski living a few minutes from his Sylmar home and undertook the restoration of the larger-than-life artist’s rightful place in history by publishing several tomes of Szukalski’s art and philosophy and promoting the work to anyone who would listen.

The quixotic sculptor became a cult figure and a star in the early Juxtapoz canon. When Szukalski died in 1987, Bray and Zwalve — with artists Rick Griffin and Robert and Suzanne Williams — scattered his ashes in the quarries of Easter Island, the ground zero of Zermatist cosmology. In 2000, Bray’s boosterism finally came to fruition when the Laguna Art Museum hosted “Struggle: The Art of Stanislav Szukalski,” the artist’s first museum retrospective and quite possibly sponsor Leonardo DiCaprio’s greatest contribution to Western culture.

Flugeldar live radio session now available for free DL!

As always, Lee and Christian's chemistry was spectacular, and previous DJ didn't show up so we got in nearly an hour and a half of inspired post-contemporary singer-songwriter treasures, including old chestnuts such as "Our Name is Fireworks," UNRELEASED new material including "Freedom in Three Weeks" and "Asking Rachel," and an adaptation of the Beastie Boys' "Fight for Your Right to Party"!

It's a bit of a shambles, so I'll probably edit out the tech fumbling and add some stuff to make a mixtape, but I also recommend the unrefined experience, available now for free DL or streaming from the KCHUNG Archive. Here's the link: The link.

FLUGELDAR (Christian Cummings & Lee Lynch) on LARZ tomorrow

This week's edition of Doug Harvey's Less Art Radio Zine will feature the historic reunion of Flugeldar (originally known as Fireworks), the mid-Zeros art school band that galvanized the milieu from whence sprung forth Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, Lavender Diamonds, and others. Anchored by the dual singer/songwriter geniuses of visual artist Christian Cummings and filmmaker Lee Lynch, the band has been on hiatus for several years, while Cummings produced his solo album Slavebation and Lynch was enjoying the hospitality of the underground fairy civilizations of Iceland.

The band will perform live in the studio, and we'll listen to some of their new demos, some vintage recordings, and some of their influences, and - if there's time - touch on their recent extracurricular activities, including Christian's recent solo show ANTI-URGES & STARGATE at Chin's Push and Lee's new documentary on failed capitalist archetypes, ranging from a full-time Dog The Bounty Hunter imitator to James Holmes, the Aurora theater shooter who dressed as The Joker.

Valentine Slash Presidents LARZ featuring Abstract Heartthrob Joshua Aster

Our Valentine Slash Presidents weekend edition of Doug Harvey's Less Art Radio Zine welcomes LA-based abstract painter and experimental musician Joshua Aster, whose reliably powerful and sumptuous new paintings (alongside those by under-recognized idiosyncratic paint genius Spencer Lewis) are on view at Edward Cella Gallery through March 1st.

Josh is a founding member of the post-rock jam band OJO -- whose diverse catalog we'll be dipping into -- and he'll also be performing some live solo acoustic guitar on the show. 

Hopefully Josh won't be all talked out by his and informal exhibition tour and Spenser's walkthrough
conversation on Saturday afternoon at 5. But you might want to show up to that as well, just in case.

Joshua Aster and Spencer Lewis in Conversation
Saturday, February 15th, 2014 | 5 pm
Edward Cella Art + Architecture
6018 Wilshire Blvd.,
Los Angeles, CA 90036

Doug Harvey's Less Art Radio Zine

Sunday Feb 16th, 12 Noon

www.kchungradio.org

Images: Contentcontainer, Oil on linen, polyester, or canvas/linen over panel 18 x 18 ins; Shifting Gears, Oil on linen 30 x 24 ins; OJO in alphabetical order: Aster, Avitabile, Cole, Medina, Ore-Giron & Youngblood; Avatar, oil on linen, 50 x 42 ins; Thru a Net, Oil on linen 30 x 24 ins; Wistful Thinking, 2014, Oil on linen 78 x 82 ins. All paintings by Joshua Aster 2013, except that last one.

Where's LaBeouf?

Chinese New Year meant that the L.A. Printed Matter Art Book Fair at the MOCA Geffen Contemporary on Saturday was chaos - it took me 40 minutes to find a parking space, and all my collaborators on rADIO fREE 'pITA3 had to bail... except for Shia LaBeouf, who read his Meta//Modernist Manifesto, thanked his supporters, and apologized again to Daniel Clowes. Did you ever notice that his last name is one letter "shy" of being an anagram for the name of another hero, Beowulf?

If anyone needs to get up to speed on Mr. LaBeouf's trajectory to art world legitimacy, here's a nice precis. We're not sure if anyone got video, but we're hoping to get further documentation of this magical event uploaded ASAP!

LAFMS on LARZ!

In the first of a projected gazillion shows devoted to the Los Angeles Free Music Society, on Sunday February 3rd, 2014 Doug Harvey's Less Art Radio Zine welcomes founding LAFMS operatives Rick Potts, Joe Potts, and Dennis Duck, fresh from their opening-night gig at the Printed Matter LA Art Book Fair. The LAFMS were a loose aggregation of like-minded audio experimentalists that emerged from Pasadena in the mid-70s; part of a global phenomenon of artists who suddenly came into possession of the trickle-down means of production to make and distribute records, tapes, and magazines. We'll barely have time to scrape the surface of the back catalog of just these three -- Mr. Duck was the drummer for Dream Syndicate, after all, and Rick Pott was 1/3 of Solid Eye, one of my favorite local bands of the 90s -- but we'll have fun trying.

12 Noon Saturday Feb 3, 2014 at 1630 AM in Chinatown, LA or www.kchungradio.org

Photo by Fredrik Nilsen

rADIO fREE 'pITA3 at the LA Art Book Fair

On Saturday, Feb 1st 2014 from 3 - 4 PM, Doug Harvey's Less Art Radio Zine will present rADIO fREE 'pITA3 -- a special program based on the 'patacritical Interrogation Techniques Anthology Volume 3, live from the KCHUNG Radio booth at the Printed Matter LA Art Book Fair.

The program will include live performances and interviews from contributors to 'pITA3, plus a selection of audio materials of varying pertinence, including musical selections by Peter Blegvad, steve roden, Adolf Wölfli, and the Legion of Rock Stars; spoken words from Raymond Roussel, Christine Wertheim, Edward Lear, J&H Productions, pitta of the mind, and Francis E. Dec; experimental theory from Sheridan Lowery and Craig Baldwin; and recordings of glossolalia, inuit throat singing, and scat from the ethnopoetics collection of Jerome Rothenberg.

Copies of the book will be available (with a possible signing event after the broadcast) at the RAM Publications table.

Listen on 106.9 FM in Little Tokyo and www.kchungradio.org/stream.html

Annie Lapin on Less Art Radio Zine

After experiencing some brief technical difficulties, KCHUNG has uploaded the most recent edition of Doug Harvey's Less Art Radio Zine, featuring Annie Lapin discussing her new work, which opens to public view at Honor Fraser this Saturday from 6-8 PM, and playing the music she listens to in the studio, ranging from R.L. Burnside to Mongolian throat singing to the glitch remix of Dolly Parton's Wildflowers. Download or stream it here: Annie Lapin on Less Art Radio Zine

Image: Annie cutting a section from DH's St Sebastian Soylent Rainbow Labyrinth at PØST Gallery
September 4, 2009.

Annie Lapin on Doug Harvey's Less Art Radio Zine

My guest this Sunday (January 5th 2014) will be LA-based painter Annie Lapin. We haven't had a lot of time to work out the details, as Annie's busy finishing up her solo show Forget the Name, which opens at  Honor Fraser Gallery on Saturday the 11th from 6 - 8 PM. One for sure playlist item is the new CD Ritual by flugabonist David Dominique, which features cover art by Annie, and was recorded in LA with a group of local improv and new music luminaries. Tune in at 12 Noon Sunday to AM 1630 or www.kchungradio.org to hear what else Annie has up her sleeve.

Image: Various Peep Shows (Through), 2013 Oil on canvas 82 x 72 inches