Great God Pan

He just got back from the ghost tree. His mom thinks he had to come home and something happened out there, and he didn't go to school today. He has some kind of a cough now, and he says a deep sound is always in his ears. We all tried to talk him into surfing Cheyenne's after school, but he said he just wanted to go to the Java Hut and think about it and they say he just sat and stared.
I just don't want him to freak out with Halloween coming up in like ten months. I am trying to get him used to his new bluffside home and I hung a dummy up like a dreamcatcher that is supposed to soak in the bad vibes and send them out to the Valley. Some shaman gave it to me. Guess it's pretty powerful further inside, when it got shallow, there was a deep wall and it feathered and swayed diagonally, trying to describe itself in the emerald drapery. New colors slipp'd by in the wintery light and the year's face was reshown. Maybe this is the moment he is trying to relive there inside his mind.
I thought maybe he was cured, and so Shayla carefully wrapped him up in her blanket on the beach so that he looked like a woven corpse watching said surf with a hollow and dark look. His blood had turned as white as seafoam and cold too. He had gotten Ugg boots for Christmas but left them in that minivan on New Year's Eve near the ranch, even if he did find them, covered in his own vomit, there was little that could reverse the effects of the you know what now.
Now the students write his name on their notebooks and imitate him in the parking lot as if he were our high school's version of Dora, and I have seen his last name spraypainted all low-budge in the drainage ditch down by the football field. Whatevs. In the early mornings, with that canyon breeze breathing it's hills through the parking lot, I finger the cassette he gave me until we are both satisfied, rewinding it by hand again, just to hear his first favorite song.

Posted by Blazer

Posted by Erik at 06:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

West Coast New Energy returns to the Île-de-France with a collage show in Paris featuring the "Who Am I?" shape art of Erik Bluhm (below) among others. "What glue do you use?" curated by Yves Brochard, opens today and runs through Feburary.

The exhibition features the work of Dianne Bellino, Brian Belott, Erik Bluhm, Aline Bouvy/John Gillis, Sebastien Bruggeman, Richard Fauguet, Christian Holstad, Aleksandra Mir, Javier Piñon, Kirstine Roepstorff, Amy Sarkisian, Leonor Scherrer, Frieda Schumann, Josh Smith, Robert Suermondt, and Marnie Weber.

“All the books on the history of dada tell the story of how Kurt Schwitters would comb the streets of Hanover looking for used ticket stubs to use in his collages; illustrating that the basic dadaist idea that art can be made from anything is tantamount to the basic punk rock idea that anyone can make art.”(1) It is of course only one of the reasons, but we could find many others, for which the term “collage” is found regularly within the 20th century. From cubism to the current-day, going trough dadaism, futurism, and surrealism to Richard Hamilton’s seminal “Just what is it that makes today’s home so different, so appealing?” from 1956; some works from these periods maintain contemporary relevance through their use of juxtaposition, innovative use of found materials and source images, which are re-contextualized to create new and unexpected situations. In this brief introduction we should also take note of the aura that now surrounds these historical pieces, this aura that André Breton pointed out in “Le point du jour” when he evoked the years that “yellowed the bits of newspapers, whose fresh ink contributed to the insolence of the wonderful papiers collés of 1913”. We should also underline the similarity of methods between Raoul Haussman’s “Tatlin at home” in 1920 and Richard Hamilton who, forty years later, had established a sort of of “programmatic” classification: men, women, food, history, newspaper, cinema, domestic tools, cars, space, comics, television, telephones. This exhibition will make no distinction between collage, montage, assemblage... on the contrary, in its elaboration this project might have pointed to other questions : which images, which constructions, which sources?

The title is simply the first question that was asked in an interview of one of the few English artists that has always worked in collage : John Stezaker. This exhibition at the Atelier Cardenas Bellanger was built like a collage. Different artists, gallerists, and curators were asked to propose an overview as well as artists’ names for this project ; we should therefore see different perceptions of current issues, but also different methods of production of what Jean Clay called “this truly infernal machine”, whose vitality is still quietly (but significantly) influential today : “Thirty years later, I’m still here with my x-acto blade, my pile of magazines and my tube of glue.” (2)

(1) Greil Marcus: “Lipstick Traces” Allia, Paris 1998.
(2) Linder: “Dream a little dream of me” Frog N°4, Paris fall/ winter 2006.

Thanks to :
Olivier Antoine, Kyle Field, Michel François, Laurent Godin, Florence Bonnefous & Keren Detton.

Image: Untitled (Forest Dawn), 2006. Erik Bluhm.
______________________________
Atelier Cardenas Bellanger
43, rue Quincampoix, 75004 Paris, France
t/f. +33 [0]1 48 87 47 65
http://www.ateliercardenasbellanger.com

Posted by Erik at 12:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Legendary musician, philosopher and anti-art activist Henry Flynt will make a series of presentations in San Diego and Los Angeles, including two lectures on “Musicology,” a lecture on “Dignity” and a screening and discussion of his recent “Abstract Cinemas.”

Born in 1940 in Greensboro, North Carolina, Henry Flynt studied mathematics at Harvard University while pursuing what would become his life-long work in philosophy, new music and radical politics. After meeting La Monte Young in 1960 and through his exposure to Indian classical music (including studies with vocalist Pandit Pran Nath), Coltrane and country blues, Flynt began producing solo fiddle pieces that embody his revolt against the clinical modernism of Cage and Stockhausen (against whom he demonstrated in 1964 with Fluxus artist George Maciunas), and his allegiance to what he calls "new American Ethnic music." This was the music of the south of his childhood whose traditions he reshaped according to his own vision of an ecstatic, trance-inducing sound.

In 1961, Flynt coined the term “concept art” to refer to "an art of which the material is concepts, as the material of for ex. music is sound.” Originally published in in An Anthology (ed. La Monte Young), this text appears in Blueprint for a Higher Civilization (Milan, 1975) a collection of Flynt’s early writings that includes the first draft of his Philosophy Proper (1960), an attempt to “refute analytic philosophy and logical positivism with their own means.”

In the late 70s, Flynt resumed his studies at the New School for Social Research where he produced a dissertation on socialist economic allocation. He has continued to write speculatively on a diverse range of topics (mathematics, musicology, psychedelics, meta-technology, revolutionary politics, acognitive culture, and dignity, to name just a few), with many of these texts available on his website.

Flynt has performed and exhibited his work internationally. His Logically Impossible Space was exhibited in the 1990 Venice Biennale and his photographic portfolio The SAMO(c) Graffiti appeared in the 1993 Lyon Biennale. In addition to releasing archival recordings of his music (including You Are My Everlovin'/ Celestial Power (2001) and Hillbilly Tape Music (2003), available through Recorded, Ampersound and Locust Music), Flynt’s current activities include live dance performance, visual/text-pieces produced under the title The Aesthetics of Eerieness, and a series of “abstract cinemas” that combine fast-paced imagery and motion-dependent illusions using an approach Flynt calls “cinact."

Flynt’s visit is made possible through the collaboration of the UCSD Music Department, Visual Arts Department, University Libraries, Weird Shadow, and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles. All events are free and open to the public. (Thanks to Kye Potter for this)

HENRY FLYNT

Wednesday, January 10, 3:00 pm
Lecture on Musicology Erickson Hall, UCSD

Thursday, January 11, 7:00 pm
Dignity, a Lecture, VAF Performance Space

Friday, January 12, 3:00 pm
Lecture on Musicology, Erickson Hall, UCSD.

Sataturday, January 13, 6:00 pm
Screening and Discussion of Abstract Cinemas
MAK Center at the Schindler House, 835 Kings Road, Los Angeles

Posted by Erik at 05:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

History was made last September when Arrak brought New Energy to northern India. During his stay, Arrak visited such energy spots as the Hindu city of Dwarka, where Lord Krishna once reigned. Driving up the coast from the south, the spires of the 1,400 year-old Jagat Madir (or “temple of the world”) jabbed into the sky above the sleepy coastline. Inside the ornately carved temple, hundreds of pilgrims jockeyed to receive the blessing of the “Lord of Dwarka.” The holy cloistered city—once "guarded outside by sharks and filled with fierce and fanatic mercenaries"—has changed little from when Sir Richard Francis Burton visited in 1842. Machine guns light upon the temple gates, and the narrow streets bustle with colors, patterns, and tones. Other memorable experiences were had, including chanting at the Ramakrishna Temple in Rajkot, visiting with new friends at ISKON, and paying homage at the magnificent main Sikh Temple in Delhi where young men sang amplified prayers to harmonium accompaniment and devotees strolled clockwise around the massive reflecting pool. In the north Arrak inspected the ruins of the 4,000 year-old civilization at Dholavira near the Pakistan border. Underfoot at every step were shards of painted pottery representing centuries of involvement. “This is the closest our energy has been to these distant cultures who have strong energies of their own,” Arrak told a reporter for the Rajkot Tribunal on hand for the visit. “It makes both of us stronger, or at least it would if they were still around like we are.”

Posted by Erik at 09:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)