800 Page Dick Joke

It' s been a little while. Art season started last weekend, saw some shows. Nothing blew me away....with the possible exception of...

Chinatown. It looked good. Sort of in general. Which makes me happy, because I live downtown. I want downtown to have art I like. Looking back on what everyone had, Michael Lazarus at Sister Gallery wasn't bad. I remember liking Eric Sall's paintings at Acuna-Hansen.

Mark Moore Gallery's 3rd annual Ultrasonic International was up and running. Roberts and Tilton's new space in Culver City opened, but I guess I forgot to walk inside. I was in a mood.

The new show at the Geffen Center is good for some laughs. Good follow up to the Lawrence Weiner show.

If I seem a little bereft of opinions, its probably because I've started teaching again, specifically an Introduction to Art Concepts class (some schools call it 'Art Appreciation), and my mind has been occupied with explaining the basics of what art 'is' to people who have little or no experience with it. This is the kind of fine challenge I relish sinking my teeth into, and, like much of my teaching have taken on the seriousness of it to the point of emotional exhaustion. I love it.

The young people in my class seem to have an aversion to non-representational painting, which interests me deeply, being a painter who loves and appreciates painting of that 'genre'. When I taught 2D Design, by the end, I had most of the students making super-tight Ellsworth Kelley / Theo van Doesburg / Barnett Newman-esque mini-paintings, and they could talk about them. Hmm.....

Besides all that, I finished reading Gravity's Rainbow. I have been making dents in this sprawling tome since December, along with a readers guide that was indispensable. After all of it, I think I can say that I know exactly what Pynchon was doing with GR, and what it is, as whole, and it is this:

Its an 800-page dick joke.

I realized this about 30 pages from the end, and that explanation somehow satisfies a lot of my instincts about the novel, and its overall concerns. Layered, researched, and complicated, yet also juvenile, self-indulgent, and scatological. So I've pretty much committed to reading all of Pynchon's output now, but I must have some lighter reading for the immediate time-being. I began many flings and affairs with other books while I was with GR, and now they will get my full attention. And I've got Daybreak 2250 AD, apparently the first modern post-apocalyptic novel, penned by one Ms. Andre Norton.

Two shows of interest coming up -- Friday, Sept. 19th, my friend Amanda Browder is throwing a show entitled "Um...My Gallery", which I will be taking part in, right here at Raid Projects (602 Moulton Ave, LA 90031). I imagine things will start around 6-ish, hm? Do come.

And, on Saturday, Sept 27th, "Neosapian" at the Cal State LA Fine Art Gallery opens, curated by M-L Flemington. And you are required to attend that as well.

























ps
Be sure to check out Bad at Sports, a super art world podcasting destination, for your listening pleasure.

The Vortex

My parents sent me a Transformers birthday card.  So now you know a little something about me. So I've given the Panter books a look see.  Its good to have touchstones -- art and artists that you know your identifying with, totally consciously.  Nothing is created in a vacuum. Back when I lived in Santa Ana, me and my pal JJ got caught in a Gary Panter / Jonathan Lethem / Philip K. Dick vortex.  Everywhere we went, it seemed everything was pointing towards the work of those three fellows, to the point where we met them (well, Panter and Lethem) during the fabled Masters of American Comics show back in November of '05.  They both are big PKD devotees; Panter interviewed him for Slash magazine back in the day, and Lethem has admitted his influence so much he wrote the introduction to a recent Dick collection.  I was already a Panter and PKD fan, JJ already a Lethem fan -- to find out we were living in the town where Dick lived his last days began to weird us out.  An old Houston artist friend of mine, Mark Flood, told us we were in a vortex, half jokingly, and we knew.  I began to wander about Santa Ana, trying to figure out where Dick used to live.  I tried to make it a point to let everyone in that town know that he lived and died there.  Cal State Fullerton, where I was attending grad school has his original manuscripts archived at their library.  Add to that our friend Bob had a connection to the missing PKD robot head that was making news at the time.  

The new issue of Jonathan Lethem's latest work, the comic book Omega the Unknown, sports a Gary Panter drawn cover.  Now I am in LA, where down by the Nokia Theatre, video billboards begin the visual future for the town envisioned in the Dick-adapted Blade Runner.  It goes on and on.

I seem to be in some Euro-art-comics vortex now.  But that's a whole other post. But it's not hard to see the connections............