Jeffrey Vallance: A Voyage to Extremes - by doug harvey

A Voyage to Extremes: Selected Spiritual Writings By Jeffrey Vallance 704 Pages Tenement Press

A Few of Jeffrey Vallance’s Favorite Things

REVIEWED BY DOUG HARVEY

BOOKS

Mike Kelley: Artist and Friend, 2011. Enamel and mixed media on panel, 16 x 20 in., collection of the Hammer Museum, courtesy of Jeffrey Vallance and Tanya Bonakdar. Jeffrey Vallance holds a unique position in the LA art world. A contemporary of Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Jim Shaw, et al, his work has had a comparable impact locally and internationally, while not transitioning to the industrial fabrication mode demanded by the global fiscal laundromat subdivision AKA The Art World. Part of the reason is that he’s actually from LA—the Valley, specifically—which somehow means you can’t actually represent LA to the rest of TAW.

Mostly though, it’s because Vallance responded to his initial burst of fame by embarking on an extended peripatetic global R&D expedition that had nothing to do with Kunsthallen, art fairs, or high-end public art commissions, but rather Kings of Tonga, Presidents of Iceland, and Las Vegas vanity museums. He never so much fell off The Art World’s radar as evaded capture like some international man of mystery. Yet another factor is that Vallance writes about his own projects better than any hack critic could, with a deadpan humor and open-mindedness completely analogous to his idiosyncratic semiotic investigations. In 1995, in conjunction with a survey show at SMMOA, Art Issues Press published The World of Jeffrey Vallance: Collected Writings 1978–1994—encompassing the Tonga and Iceland adventures, as well as his first forays into paranormal reportage and, of course, the last (and subsequent) rites of Blinky the Friendly Hen—the Ralph’s fryer whose pet cemetery funeral service landed Vallance on Letterman and MTV. Long overdue, A Voyage to Extremes: Selected Spiritual Writings collects close to 700 pages of Vallance’s musings and reports from the intervening decades. That may sound daunting, but this ain’t War & Peace—nor Being and Nothingness neither. Not that it isn’t narratively compelling or philosophically deep—but it’s funny. And entertaining in many other ways—strangely informative like the best internet curations, or like your weird uncle who gave you Charles Fort’s The Book of the Damned and a sealed vinyl copy of Spiro T. Agnew Speaks Out for your 12th Kwanzaa. A hundred little stories forming a cubist mosaic of a singular artist’s singular journey.

Art historically, the ginormous yellow tome is a gold mine, providing off-the-cuff anecdotal accounts of Vallance’s legendary curatorial interventions in various offbeat thematic museums in Vegas, while elsewhere detailing extensive cross-cultural research into the religious, anthropological and philosophical significance of clowns.

As promised by the subtitle, much of the work addresses spirituality, religion, shamanism and paranormal phenomenology. Richard Nixon, Thomas Kinkade, Martin Luther, Charlie Manson, Ronald McDonald, the Loch Ness Monster and other spiritual teachers all make appearances. It’s not a fluke that Vallance’s curiosity-driven ideational flow is so reminiscent of an extended Wikipedia surf.

Much of Vallance’s most significant recent works have been embodied—however ephemerally—in his absurd and prolific social media activity, with Facebook groups that range from the absolutely authentic Valley Plein Air Club to the mind-scrambling Polytheistic Butt Plugs.

Consequently, Vallance’s Voyage to Extremes seems to me to be the most successful literary embodiment of the human cognitive structures that have evolved with the internet—not from imitation, but from pre-existing structural resonance. A playful, weightless curiosity may seem like a fey and inconsequential thing, but when it drifts across a border as if the border wasn’t there, watch out! That’s when Luther’s excrement hits the Devil’s fan! And that’s why the internet is still (though sadly less and less) dangerous.

In counterpoint to this ADHD-currency, Vallance has provided a newly written overarching autobiographical framework. Arranged approximately chronologically, the included materials chart Vallance’s aforementioned trips, his mythic residencies in Vegas and Umea (Sweden), and his return to the San Fernando Valley (from whence he deploys his current, peculiar global/local influence).

This interstitial narrative skeleton generates a knowing—occasionally dark, even justifiably bitter—storyline detailing the obstacles and joys of being an artist in the 21st century, from which the oddball essays radiate like feathers on a bipolar peacock. The power of art to short circuit the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune have never been articulated more elegantly.

From excrement to ecstasy, from Texas to the Arctic Circle, from the taxonomy of butt plugs to the etymology of the Tetragrammaton—all the indeterminate territories TAW tiptoes around—Jeffrey Vallance relentlessly but non-aggressively burrows beneath, collapsing rickety categorical imperatives in favor of rhizomatic ‘patacritical revelations that are equal parts Art Bell, Roland Barthes, and S.J. Perelman. Copiously illustrated.

By William Moreno

Victor Estrada erupted onto the art world landscape with his confounding work in the 1992 Los Angeles MOCA exhibition, “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s,” along with other luminaries such as Harry Gamboa Jr., Megan Williams and Mike Kelley. What’s mystifying is that a broader examination of his work has been elusive—until now. The current exhibition at his alma mater, ArtCenter, is evidence that he’s continued creating works that both perplex and intrigue; it’s a startling corpus of images and media. Curated by Marco Rios, the purple-and-pink walled show’s overwhelming sensorial impact is extraordinarily confident.

Estrada, with roots in Los Angeles and El Paso, Texas, was active in the early social justice movements such as MECha (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán), and later turned his focus to community teaching and, currently, instructing at UCLA. The exhibit’s title, “Victor Estrada: Purple Mexican,” is a deliberative cue that takes its nods from the hue’s lofty ascriptions: purple, an unstable color that exists somewhere between red and blue and has long been associated with royalty. But its contemporary alliteration also refers to the purportedly hallucinogenic properties of purple-branded marijuana; not unlike like its legendary pharmacological cousins. Its mythos was famously attributed to Jimi Hendrix’s 1967 song, “Purple Haze.”

The prolific show of drawings, paintings and sculptures are loosely organized by media with some 40 never-before-displayed early drawings anchoring the exhibition. On my initial visit, the lack of cohesive signage forced me into a hunting mode but, notwithstanding that challenge, the works are thought-provoking recompense.

The central suite of drawings are plaintive time capsules of the artist’s experience teaching in the City Terrace district of Los Angeles. Composed primarily in the 1990s through the early 2000s, the pencil and mixed-media works mirror the decade’s prevalent social-historical markers of a conspicuous cultural presence, now in the throes of gentrification. The drawings’ distinctive visual aesthetic reflects a parallel influence: the groundbreaking 1990s Chicano publication Teen Angels. At the time, no other magazine did more to manifest the Chicano cultural zeitgeist. It was a zine known for its straightforward black-and-white prison-style art, vernacular photographs, drawings of lowrider culture and published letters from the incarcerated seeking companionship. Teen Angels, with other

Victor Estrada, Pink, Brown, Yellow. 2022. Photo by Gene Ogami then-contemporary zine offspring, helped popularize a visual and written language that few other periodicals would approach.

Estrada’s drawing, Sabes Que Loco (1993) pointedly places a stoic young woman in the center of a surrealist landscape surrounded by images of passion and struggle; it’s an utterly uncompromising portrait of determination. Another, The Love Machine of Nature (1996) positions women as life-giving and transformative central figures with preternatural hybridity, delivering sustenance to lifeforms unknown. The watercolor, Consubstantiation (2000) takes its cue from a somewhat obscure religious doctrine that promotes the simultaneous cohabitation of the spiritual and the corporeal. The morphing central figure in transition provides a fitting visual commentary.

Estrada is clearly in his element as a painter. His animated and lush works line the perimeter of the pink-and-purple-walled gallery, with imagery of anthropomorphic beings floating and emerging through vaguely biophilic landscapes. Both daunting and familiar, they appear as cartoon-like troglodytes of the unconscious, cavorting across canvasses with unbridled abandon. Pink, Brown, Yellow (2022) is a masterful astral composition of color and form, with a twist. At the foot of the painting sits a small, nondescript sculpture of indeterminate origin. It is an easy-to-miss element, but one that effectively demands agency and eliminates the boundary between viewer and object. Other pictures take a more direct approach. Honey Bunny (1992) depicts an ostensibly benign hare with a mixed-media protrusion jutting toward the viewer—reassuring it isn’t—but the net result is a convincing and witty provocation, reminiscent of Rauschenberg’s “combine paintings.” Lavender Glitter (2022), one of the imposing sculptures in the exhibit, is something of a paradox. It’s an intemperate if captivating piece, on wheels and framed by pink walls, its apex appearing to birth an elusive phantasm of indeterminate origin or intention.

Estrada has created a powerful and wryly engaging realm, and somehow, we know this domain. In the miasma of contemporary culture, the imagery seems consonant with the parade of social media contortions that define the moment. The artist knows what he wants, and the viewer is left to parse the work’s nuances—it’s an audacious expedition.

“Victor Estrada: Purple Mexican,” runs through February 25, 2023.

Justin Liam O’Brien

Richard Heller Gallery

By Ezrha Jean Black

For someone brought up within a more or less secular Roman Catholic culture, living now (atheism aside) essentially as if she were a nun, one would think I might know something about “Vespers”— the title of Justin Liam O’Brien’s current show at the Richard Heller Gallery. But I can scarcely imagine these kind of services practiced in modern times by anyone but clergy, and then only as a cure for insomnia.

Justin Liam O’Brien, Hands of Providence, 2022. Courtesy of the Artist and Richard Heller Gallery.

Although any quasi-religious or devotional aspect to his subjects must be viewed as deliberately ironic, O’Brien’s style has evolved both technically and stylistically—attenuating and sharpening what was once a rounder and Léger-loopy (almost cartoon-like) figurative contour, and moving in a distinctly surreal direction, along the (not always spiritual) lines of, say, Leonora Carrington. But O’Brien takes a more distinctly hard-edge approach to his contours, extending even to atmospheric effects, more or less in keeping with his Quattrocento Italian Renaissance inspirations. Even the explicitly transected paintings in this exhibition—e.g., Hands of Providence (all works 2022)—have the effect of separate planes or panels—very different from Carrington’s subtle dissections and excavations. The full range of O’Brien’s technical virtuosity is on display in Hands of Providence, from its stagy apprehension and notional (if undersexed) ecstasy, spatial counterpoint, slightly schematic atmospherics and aspirational poetics to its quirky details (the figure’s specs) and its scale (at 7-feet in height, the largest in a show of large works).

But, as in say, Peter Shaffer’s Equus, true believer or not, there can be no redemption for our clear-eyed seeker of—what exactly?—a guile-free “way in?” (Yes—that’s actually in one of the titles); “unconditional love?” (ditto); “sanctuary?” cultural (or maybe environmental?) renascence? Doubtful—at least under the flattened terms presented in these visions (or vigils?). The implied narratives are amusing but disingenuous. That haunted lover in Vigil isn’t waiting, much less praying for the ghostly swimmer in the nearby moonlit waters. The tech-sleek architecture tells us as much. Guardian angels are one thing; a big bail bond is quite another.

In Adage, O’Brien messes entertainingly with both mythology and style-chronology, slipping in a distracted Carravagio-esque Gen-Z’er carrying a glowing handheld device beneath a large swan predictably annoyed by the switch. In true Carravagio-esque fashion, mayhem and violence proceed apace some distance directly behind the figures. A different kind of mischief is afoot in The Bottom of Heaven, where flattened geometrics compete with discrepancies of scale and expression. Here, a red ladder rises off-center from a red plateau, while a Quattrocento surf shop denizen sits mournfully astride a white horse or pony, roughly the size of a large dog, in foreground waters, abutting a suspiciously sheared embankment. Neither love nor prayer will take this pair any higher.

Far more successful, both formally and narratively, is O’Brien’s recasting of the Annunciation. O’Brien has an outstanding facility for commingling figures within variously composed interior and exterior spaces. But here he’s exploded scale and perspectives, launching his messenger clad only in carmine shorts up and away from a similarly russet-hued pavilion as if he were leaping onto a skateboard, ready to hurl himself into the ether. A similarly out-of-scale raven presumably bestows her blessing—as Piero della Francesca himself might have if he’d known anything about skateboarding.

Judy Fiskin

Marc Selwyn Fine Art

By Jody Zellen

During the early months of the pandemic, Judy Fiskin needed a new way of working in which she did not have to leave the security of her home. Fiskin happened upon a real estate website with interior images of houses for sale and realized “I had thousands of photos of rooms, furniture and decor at my disposal.” Rather than photograph architecture and her surroundings, as she had done in the past in many of her earlier photographic series, and more recently her video work, she drew from the vast array of images presented on real estate websites, changing what she found to suit her needs.

Studying these websites begged a number of questions: How are homes for sale presented? What draws people to certain types of interior views rather than others? What would the ideal home look like? Are real estate agents trying to present spaces that follow trends and appeal to the differing tastes of their clients?

In Fiskin’s re-decorations, things are a bit off. Each of the 16, untitled, modest-sized digital prints presents a different interior—be it a bathroom, den, wine cellar, TV room or attic, or even an exterior space like a building’s facade or a view from the deck. As Fiskin’s photoshopping is seamless, it is impossible to know what was in the original and what she added or took away. In one image depicting a bathroom/laundry room shot with a wide-angle lens, the walls are covered floor to ceiling with a blue-toned, mountainous Asian landscape that contrasts with the gray-and-white geometric pattern of the parquet floor. The one window at the back of the room frames a few trees separating this home from the next. Lined up against one wall is a bathroom sink with ornate faucets, a small blue-tiled bath,

as well as a washer and a dryer. Two vintage light fixtures emitting a warm glow hang from the ceiling. Easy to overlook, but key to the image are the arm and head of what appears to be a teddy bear seated in the bath, inserting a quasi-human element into the scene.

A Google search for “pink flamingos” returns rolls of wallpaper available at Home Depot (Horace Pink Flamingos) indicating that the bathroom covered with this pattern and depicted in another of Fiskin’s bathroom images is more generic than unique. The suite of photographs ranges from cluttered and ornately decorated rooms to those that are eerily sparse, as in Fiskin’s photograph of an empty room with deep green painted walls, a subtle white cottage-cheese ceiling and badly vacuumed beige carpet. Green, brown, beige and white translucent drapes cover a window with horizontal blinds. In the corner, just to the side of the window, is a television set on a modern stand that predates todays’ flatscreens. This room is more off-putting than welcoming.

Hot tubs might be a selling point for many home buyers, but one tucked into the corner of a low-ceilinged room without a view (the only window in the space is frosted over) is not particularly desirable. A similar feeling of claustrophobia occurs in Fiskin’s photograph of an empty attic with a golden aura that comes from yellow walls and gold-toned drapes that extend from floor to ceiling to cover a distant window. The only other object in the room is a ceiling fan trimmed in gold.

Many years ago, there was a billboard on the freeway as you approached Valencia (where CalArts is located and Fiskin still teaches) that proclaimed “If you lived here you’d be home now.” It was an advertisement for a new community that was being developed on the outskirts of Los Angeles to lure those fed up with city life. The places depicted in Fiskin’s images are more dystopic than utopian:

Judy Fiskin, Untitled (8), 2020-2021. Courtesy of Marc Selwyn Fine Art.

they are displays of bad taste masked as good taste and a seller’s idea of what might be appealing to generic audiences. While the pandemic redefined isolation, it is interestingly counterintuitive that Fiskin chose to composite images that reinforced that notion, rather than explore more desirable fantasies.

Paulo Nimer Pjota and Patricia Iglesias Peco

François Ghebaly

By Lane Barden Occasionally a gallery delivers a show of work that activates the intellect, rewards an afternoon of driving, and restores a little hope. In the small gallery at François Ghebaly are Patricia Iglesias Peco’s large works on paper. Flowers rendered in understated transparent oils generously fill the paper spaces of the frames without crowding them. Sensually painted in a rich, muted palette

and wandering, inventive brush strokes, the paintings exude a casual mastery of an old art history standby in a fresh new style. The exhibition text includes quotes from Bataille about the flower’s death drama between earth and sky, and reflections on the erotic suggestiveness of the stamen serve to clarify Iglesias Peco’s inspiration and intentions.

Entering the main gallery, Paulo Nimer Pjota’s installation is a jarring arrival into a very different world. Heads and masks with hybrid grins or grimaces—derived from both ancient and pop culture—are tethered to the floor, to paintings and to grinning bronze ashtrays filled with butts. The paintings directly reference walls in the streets of São Paulo and are explosively stylus-scratched—the marks sparking and scattering like fireworks. Cutouts stylized as ancient vases floating on colored panels hint at previous empires. Stickers and logos are placed here and there throughout the works along with orange and black pumpkins, black-toned bronze cannonballs, bronze masks and cherries.

Altogether, this is a visual vocabulary in a field of signs that don’t add up until you accept that the colored ‘street wall’ panels (distressed tempera paintings) have been ‘tagged’ with disparate references. In Ballet Triadico amarela (2022), an elongated mask and red ball from Oscar Schlemmer’s incredible Bauhaus Ballet (early rebellious modernism) hover on a scarred yellow wall above an antique vase (culture and empire). In the adjacent panel, a cherry X (the cherries that come with luck at the slot machine), and below on the floor, four black-colored bronze cannonballs (empire and defeat). Elsewhere in the room there are mysterious logos, a lone cactus and some LA Dodger stickers.

Okay, maybe it still doesn’t all quite add up, but the way it doesn’t add up is charged with a palpable, tactile authenticity. There is chemistry here. Maybe the empire will, after all, break like a vase.

Patricia Iglesias Peco, Las Flores del bien, 2022. Photo by Paul Salveson.

Lisa Solomon

Walter Maciel Gallery

By Genie Davis Lisa Solomon creates evocative watercolor self-portraits wearing the traditional attire of the countries that make up her ethnic heritage, as well as the traditional clothing of countries she’s had misidentified as a part of her cultural Lisa Solomon, From from Japan, 2022. Courtesy of history. Perfect, precise the Artist and Walter Maciel Gallery. and delicate, the portraits depicting her true heritage are 35” by 23,” while those depicting countries that are not a part of her ethnic identity are 14” by 11.” Using native attire culled from photographic archives and evoking the style of traditional portrait artists, both Solomon’s costuming and positioning of her figure varies with each culture it represents.

Both of Solomon’s bodies of work are as layered and complex as personal lineage itself. Each are based on photographic images that she took of herself, from which she creates a watercolor painting. To these paintings she adds vividly colorful paper cutout garments and a variety of vivid geometric shapes pinned to the work, as well as embroidery thread and yarn. By using these multiple layers, Solomon creates not just beautifully realized, dimensionally alive portraits, but also draws attention to the layers of mixed racial and cultural identity present in both her own, and this country’s, often fraught heritage of immigration.

In the larger images that represent the countries in which she has heritage—Japan, Russia, Poland, Lithuania and Romania— her portraits use polychromatic watercolor for the skin and hair. Her physical positioning is both comfortable and commanding. In From from Japan, Solomon is clad in a zig-zag patterned lavender kimono, with a spray of lovely lavender and white flowers cascading from a traditional hairstyle. Her half-smile is proud and comfortable, almost reminiscent of an icon, with a gold circle positioned behind her head. From from Poland uses an emerald-green halo shape behind her in a three-quarter profile view. Here, the artist wears a floral, richly embroidered jumper and a slightly lighter emerald headscarf.

When representing countries in which she has no heritage, as in From from Ecuador, her face and hair remain in monochromatic watercolor, the black, gray and white emphasizing that the subject isn’t wholly present in her bright clothes because she does not belong in the garb of this nation. In these images, her smile appears a bit uncomfortable, her gaze slightly skeptical, as if questioning what she is doing in clothes which don’t “fit” her culturally. It is the same in other images depicting the artist in Inuit and Tibetan attire.

In an adjoining room of the gallery, Solomon’s brightly colored crochet links are gracefully looped and draped down the walls. The

links are meant to reference a human connection that goes beyond cultural or ethnic differences or arbitrarily dictated points of origin.

Inclusive, beautifully wrought and highly relevant as our socalled melting pot society grows ever more divided, Solomon’s work shines with humanity and a spirit of belonging, regardless of culture or origin.

Alonzo Davis

parrasch heijnen

By Shana Nys Dambrot

Alonzo Davis’ paintings are breathtaking in their materiality. Using saturated, refractive palettes, and woven paper and canvas to form a layered topography, the works assert their physicality as much, if not more than the imagery. Abstract—but with elements of pictographic language, landscape and quilting to which the title “Blanket Series” refers—Davis’ works are engaged with their 20th-century milieu, the art history that preceded it and, intriguingly, with the current discourse surrounding abstraction.

Davis is in a lively conversation with such art historical figures as Robert Rauschenberg, Paul Klee, Carlos Almaraz, Howard Hodgkin and Joe Ray; but his work also has much to contribute to the present moment. We are in a period in which abstraction has been increasingly cultivating its power of storytelling through expanding its material and gestural fields into more dimensional, personal and even spiritual territory. This includes an understanding of traditional craft as a deep cultural expression, with voices from Gee’s Bend to Sanford Biggers taking up quilting as a practice and a metaphor—which is exactly what Davis is up to in these affecting and unforgettable paintings.

Each brushstroke is as articulated as a stitch, and layered such that the foundation remains visible even under coats of assertive color and thick pigment. Compositions are built in sections, square or shard-like, overlapping and woven in wide strips, or sewn like patchwork. But, because of the generosity of the paint-handling, despite fragmentation, each stiffened unframed work occupies its wall space with the singularity of a modern painting and the gravitas of a regal tapestry. Celebration with Melon (1986) displays a skirt of fringe that enhances the textile effect, but the glow of its pink-forward personality forces a conversation on paint. Copper Flash (1989) also explores such possibilities, buried in a deep pink field of granite split by a lightning strike, perhaps being held together by gold at its broken seam like kintsugi. Flotation Reflection (1996) presents like an elaborate picture window looking out across the sea to the horizon. Its receding pictorial depths are a sweet spatial bend that is echoed elsewhere in the exhibition. It finds a curious counterpart in Twilight (1986) whose massive central window is a celestial glitter bomb with a small arrow pointing skyward. The arrow is a recurring motif, of the kind most heavily expressed in the urban musicality of Crescent Moon Over Memphis (1993), the most scenic of the works, and the most literal as to hiding a story in its codes.

Alonzo Davis, Crescent Moon Over Memphis, 1993. Courtesy of the Artist and parrasch heijnen, Los Angeles.

By George Melrod

“My Electric Genealogy,” Sarah Kanouse’s engrossing multi-media performance at 2220 Arts + Archives, opened with projected images of various looming electrical towers, and for a moment it almost felt like a quirky homage to the mid-20th century technological sublime. In reality, it’s just the opposite: a heartfelt reckoning with a highly fraught legacy, both societal and personal. The impetus for the artist’s exploration is her grandfather, Ed Kanouse, who spent 40 years with the LA Department of Water and Power, designing the vast web of transmission lines that conveyed power from such sources as the Hoover Dam to the burgeoning metropolis of Los Angeles. His obsession with his career was such that when he died, he left his descendants stacks of snapshots of power infrastructure with just a handful of family holiday photos mixed in.

Stories of his dismissiveness to his wife and mother, as well as a brutal home invasion, further cloud the family’s anxious history. But the heart of his legacy lies in the philosophy he espoused, of expanding energy usage through aggressive consumption of fossil fuels. That reckless ambition is revealed in a jaw-dropping plan (which was thankfully never realized) that would have placed over thirty power plants along the California coast, from the Mexican border up to San Luis Obispo, which Kanouse elucidates by reciting a speech that her grandfather gave proudly touting the proposal. Another focus of her critique is the Black Mesa strip mine in northern Arizona, which fed the coal-fired Navajo Power Plant. A quick synopsis of that project, with its exploitation of indigenous peoples and their lands, and of the local aquifer, gives jarring evidence of the type of environmental destruction that was tolerated in a relentless thirst for energy.

Weaving these disparate strands together is Kanouse herself, who orchestrated her multi-media display dressed primly in a vintage jacket and tie and slickly parted hair. Her persona veering from journalistic archivist to indignant inheritor, she expertly navigated three screens of running images through a mash-up of family snapshots, homemade videos and period documentary films, including one memorable 1920s scene of streetlights switching on in downtown Los Angeles. Punctuating the narrative were her own choreographed movements—shuddering to jolts of electricity, or assuming pylon-like poses—which helped inject her presentation with glimpses of playful vitality.

A rigorous, academic thinker, Kanouse calls the work “an essayistic working-through of energy infrastructure as a personal and collective inheritance,” and it’s in that parallel deconstruction of her family’s individual and global legacy that the work resonates most deeply. Behind her impassioned critique is a palpable exasperation at the damage that her grandfather left in his wake, especially given the urgent realities of climate change, and the epochal shift in thinking needed to contain it. While that’s surely not the grandiose legacy that her grandfather and his peers envisioned, it’s one we all have to live with. Watching Kanouse grapple with this weighty shared inheritance, through such crafty layering of text, sound and imagery, is at once sobering and illuminating.

Sarah Kanouse, “My Electric Genealogy,” performance still. Photo by Cairo Marques-Nieto.

AFROFUTURE ZOMBIES

BY SKOT ARMSTRONG

BUNKER VISION

One of the very positive effects of MTV and YouTube is the restoration of demand for short films. Early cinema consisted mostly of short films. Auteurs of early cinema managed to pack a lot of plot into films that ran 20 minutes or less. MTV also inspired a lot of musicians to try their hand at making films. These films were often short. Many musicians went to art school, so short films by musicians aren’t necessarily vanity projects by celebrities.

Baloji was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo. When he was three his father took him to Belgium without telling his mother. He grew up as an outsider and started performing with a rap group when he was 15. A letter that he received from his mother when he was 26 was a paradigm shifter. It served as inspiration for his first album, which he dedicated to her. His stated goal is to make art that stands the test of time. In 2019 he made his first film. Although his music serves as the soundtrack for it, the film transcends the music video genre. It opens in a Kinshasa barbershop. The opening lines of the song that provides the soundtrack are sung a cappella by a customer who is getting a haircut. The camera lands on a man walking by the shop in a lurid yellow jacket, and follows him. As he navigates the crowded streets, the jacket keeps our focus on him. He heads across a swarming traffic circle that has as its central feature a sort of robot that directs traffic. (Traffic control robots are an actual thing there.) He arrives in a residential neighborhood as night falls, and everybody’s face is lit up by their cell phones. Tossing off the yellow coat he makes his way up a flight of stairs to a dance club. In the club, everybody is glued to their phone as he sings about “everybody in the spotlight” of their phones. (The song is called “Zombies,” and refers to people becoming mobile phone zombies.) There is a lot of spirited dancing with selfie sticks and VR headsets. The camera lands on a flashy pimp who is partying at the club. One of his ladies gets up to leave.

As she leaves, we get a wonderful instrumental interlude that could have been torn from a Belmondo secret agent movie. She makes her way to the traffic circle wearing bright red so that she is easy to follow, and after crossing it starts to tear off her club clothing, starting with the straight black wig. She arrives home, where her mother appears to have a underground beauty shop in her living room. A young girl is getting an elaborate hair treatment (a sort of ironic Topsy). She explains how many likes she’ll get for it on social media.

Then follows a segment in the courtyard outside which most resembles a music video. It is a fashion show of wild Afrofutristic costumes with characters dancing outdoors. Following this scene comes a parade in the street featuring those costumes and a live brass band. A white man (the only one in the film) is being carried on a litter in a colonial uniform. He is tossing cash to the people watching the parade. In the final shots of the film his bloodied body is carried pieta-style to a dump. As the final melancholy music plays, a giant (a man on stilts) leads a horse (two men in a costume) down a long alley. The credits are a mobile text exchange superimposed on the action. Although this film is made by a musician, it is more of a short film than a music video. Let’s hope that this becomes a trend.

Under the Bridge

BY ANTHONY AUSGANG

OFF THE WALL

Thrift stores are potentially the end of the line for any object on sale therein; after that, it’s either ref- use or reuse. Consequently, there’s a poignancy to the purchase of any artwork from a thrift store, whether by an ironic hipster being or a sincere abuelita. But despite prices that tend to be 99 cents and not 99,000 dollars, some art pieces seem destined to remain orphaned, which adds a certain noblesse oblige to their appreciation and collection by artists and cultural decoders like Jim Shaw, who first published his findings in the 1990 book Thrift Store Paintings. The book exults in artworks good enough to be for sale in legitimate galleries but too weird to be bought there, which explains the occasional discovery of a thrift store masterpiece “in the wild.” It’s an unfortunate paradox as thrift stores are considered as low as it gets, and collectors of Outsider Art prefer a more respectable provenance than Goodwill.

This discretion may be warranted: most donations of naïve art to thrift stores are aesthetically and financially worthless. Even so, there is artwork whose repugnance and abysmal dollar value exclude it from even that group. Homeless Art is made to satisfy the primitive, often drug-induced, art urgings of nomadic people who may not describe themselves as artists. Many of their burgeoning number are more likely to be searching for a drug dealer than an art dealer. But for those with a different agenda, busking art on the avenues is a good source of income. R.A. Wood is a “houseless” artist “in downtown LA who makes cash with his custom calligraphic drawings of names. But on a different block of Spring Street, the homeless work for pedestrians’ baksheesh, most of them favoring honesty’s comedic value to openly advertise whatever they’re lacking. One step above panhandling, sales in this quaternary art market depend on sympathy and amusement more than skill and name recognition.

Still, many Homeless Art pieces are made without an audience in mind; as a result, they can represent a self-expression purer than anything on display in many galleries and museums. And even though Homeless Art can include genres approved by the “official” art world, there is a multitude of factors making any relationship between the two impossible. After all, promoting homeless artists is difficult when most also prefer to remain nameless. Such is the case of The Master of Victory Bridge, known only by a grouping of four small paintings discovered this year in an abandoned homeless camp near the LA River. Their appearance evidences an innate artist’s ability and preference of material, even with the random art supplies available to the homeless. Individually wrapped in plastic Vons’ bags, the works seem to have had personal significance at one time, but their current state of ruinous decay shows that preservation became a low priority. Whether this is Process Art or simply circumstance is immaterial; the Homeless Art made by The Master of Victory Bridge excels. With their imagery bolstered by damage, the paintings successfully invigorate a cavalier attitude that’s refreshingly antithetical to contemporary cultural fetishism. Got art? We could use some…

thecheechcenter.org

Now–March 19, 2023

This is an exhibition of 70 black-and-white silver gelatin prints selected from the extensive archive of the Chicano photographer’s work. The exhibition was organized by Melissa Richardson Banks and will embark on a national tour after closing in Riverside through her firm CauseConnect. Image: Sueño, 1972 (Downtown Los Angeles) riversideartmuseum.org

February 25-May 28, 2023

Land of Milk & Honey is organized by Ed Gomez, Luis G. Hernandez, Rosalía Romero, and April Lillard-Gomez. Focused on concepts of agriculture in the regions of California and Mexico and drawing inspiration from John Steinbeck’s portrayal of the region as a corrupted Eden, the exhibition questions ethical, cultural, and regional practices related to foodways and the venture from seed to table. Image: Janet Diaz, Sangre Sudor y Amor: Hunger for the American Dream, 2018 Now–April 30, 2023

Iristay’s work is a representation of the identity created in the in-between spaces, creating installation work that critically examines the traditions in the cultures she has experienced, specifically as they relate to tradition, identity, gender, and custom. Image: Tracing Acculturations, hand cast soil mixture tiles, underglazed paints, metal, 2021 Photographer: Zeynep Dogu

No One Leaves Me Like You Do

A soft and rotten moment of loving you hits the pavement like seasonal fruit gone overripe. Skipping to the part where you leave a cigarette burning in my ashtray, I take out eyes swollen by another’s prying that pass through the mouth and caress the teeth dead. Scared they will flay me, say open wide, and betray my secret appetites and unrighteous desire for the same thing everyone else wants. I lay still as August heat in the unmade bed, a love motionless as a lake covers the deception of a quiet moment. I dissect this land of exile for instances too small to be seen, and get my voice snagged on emotion.

—ALEXANDRA JADE

The Lugubrious Game

While you were busy multiplying, begetting superfluous spawn, I was lying in the darkness, emitting solitary groans.

—JOHN TOTTENHAM

Jack of Not All Trades

Dear Babs, One of my greatest music heroes recently started painting. So when a local gallery showed his art in a pop-up show, I was excited to go. But his paintings are really not good. He’s had a very long career as a musician and always puts a ton of effort into his music and it shows. But his paintings look like what they are: indulgent play by someone who hasn’t done the work to understand what they are doing. The problem is that now when I listen to his music, all I can think about are his paintings, and it’s starting to spoil the experience. I guess my question is, are there any examples of famous musicians who eventually became excellent painters? Is there hope for my hero’s paintings?

—Frustrated Fan

Dear Frustrated, Of course, it’s possible for your hero to make better paintings, but his visual art probably won’t surpass the impact and importance of his music. Becoming an innovative and important artist (musician or painter) takes time and dedication, at least if you want your work to mean something more than name recognition. It’s unfortunate but predictable that galleries are eager to capitalize on his fame to make a quick buck, with little serious investment in ensuring the work can withstand critical scrutiny.

There are few famous artists who are equally well-known for their music AND their visual art. Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth is a good example; she’s just a good artist in general and her visual art is as exploratory as her music. It’s the same with Yoko Ono, but she’s not really a painter. Miles Davis made some inspired paintings and drawings that could hold their own in most galleries today. Joni Mitchell can draw as lyrically as she can sing. What all these musicians/artists have in common is they had to work on their craft, try, fail and try again—and hold their visual work to the same standards as their music. That is a very rare ability indeed. It would actually be surprising if your hero was one of the few who could pull it off.

HOSTILE WITNESS