Living at the Movies

This is a piece that I wrote for Critical Superbeast that didn't make it onto the blog. I wanted it to see the light of day, so here it is-- some of my thoughts around old media, and the proliferation of VHS movie nights in Hamilton as of late. Read on and use the comment section if you have thoughts to share or add.

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I dreamt up, and have been recycling, this line lately: “Vinyl records have been gentrified.” Indie, punk and fringe music kept vinyl manufacturing going when it was in doldrums at the dawn of the 1990s. For the last few years, news outlets have been claiming that vinyl is BACK, IF YOU CAN BELIEVE IT.  Now, the Beatles’ back catalogue and Adele records are being pressed on vinyl, causing a bottleneck in production out of what few record-pressing plants exist today. Small quantities equal lower priority and longer waits for small-scale releases to see the light of day. As a consumer, the landscape has changed too. Gone are the days of the dollar bin. 2016 is the year of the $40 reissue, not the $4 bargain.

What do such conditions mean for the weirdos whose life’s blood is to see oddball production, whether they created it or not, see the light of day? We don’t just exhume the media graveyard for fun; we do it out of neccessity. For many of us, the humble audio cassette has recently become a cultural lifebuoy.

Perhaps this same impulse has informed the proliferation of VHS film screening nights in Hamilton. At least three currently exist— one celebrates the trashy bowels of cinematic experience, mostly horror, while one is dedicated to punk rockers on celluloid. I went to one two nights ago, a private version which identified as a “secret film screening society of sorts” in an unassuming location on Rebecca Street. A motley group of seven, we sat in a room watching a curated pair of films selected with the theme “Trump’s America” in mind: The Stepford Wives (1974) and George A. Romero’s zombie prototype, The Crazies (1974). In The Stepford Wives, a feminist wife and mother tries to resist the local men’s association’s plot to turn all of the town’s women into baking, scrubbing, glossy-eyed, submissive cyborgs. In the lesser-known The Crazies, a biological warfare tool— a virus called Trixie— unleashes an epidemic of rage across swing state Pensylvannia as a small group of insurgents struggles to not succumb to one of two things: the sickness, or the trigger-happy army that is trying to keep citizens, whether stricken with madness or sane, in line. Sound familiar?

Why VHS? Tape hiss, packaging and charming tracking issues—aspects of VHS’ unique visual and aural vocabulary now only known through the twice-removed simulacra of Youtube— are all possibilities. It is tempting to question whether their slowness— the fact that we can’t surf, binge or replay a VHS with the ease of a Youtube video—adds to the formality and intensity of our reception of them. But I refuse to believe that it’s simply a matter of novelty, or an infatuation with the old or obsolete.

The late, great Jim Carroll’s first poetry collection was called Living at the Movies. I always imagined that Living at the Movies was Carroll’s metaphor for escapism. Some might suggest that the impulse to exhume and appropriate old technologies, and the media they contain, is a way to escape the dauntingly rapid change of contemporary technological change…either that, or it might be dismissed as knee-jerk nostalgia. In a world that often feels like a runaway train racing towards oblivion, it’s hard to deny the comfort I experience when I revisit the first media— cassettes, vinyl records and VHS tapes— I experienced as a child. But as with audio cassette tape being a safe haven in a gentrified media landscape,  perhaps old VHS tapes carrying weird and wonderful films from past decades might hint at another interpretation of what it might mean to live at the movies.

In the 1970s twilight of my cinematic dreamscape— the space of Rocky’s lonely night walks past flaming garbage cans or DiNiro’s night ride through Manhattan in his cologne and cigarette-stenched cab— the movies, like a bus station or a 24-hour diner, is a place where someone with nowhere else to go can spend the night and fade into the background, unnoticed. When we live with and embrace the media of the past, we carve out a space for our own imagination, presence, culture and difference. Through it, we live in a movie, or a eutopian space, that draws from the past to talk about the present. This eutopia is a place where misfit media can continue to be vessels for misfit stories-- perhaps a more political act than any humble secret film screening society in the name of good fun might guess.

Introducing: Critical Superbeast

I am resurrecting this blog with the announcement of Critical Superbeast, a blog of art criticism put together by a collective of artists, writers and administrators in Hamilton, Ontario. Stay tuned for my post about Trisha Leigh Lavoie's exhibition at hundreddollargallery The Comfort Bureau next week.

http://criticalsuperbeast.tumblr.com/

About Critical Superbeast:

Critical Superbeast is a collaborative art writing and publishing project seeking to actively de-stigmatize the act of being critical. While firmly rooted in a sense of place, content is not strictly focused on the Hamilton area. Contributors are encouraged to take a broad geographic view, to constellate cultural production in Hamilton within a greater contemporary context, and to challenge the opposition of centre versus periphery in arts discourse. 

Image: Suzy Lake, 322 Beaubien, Dorothy Evers-Marx 1910-13, 2014 (printed in 2016)

Gorilla Graphics: This is Our Brain on Vinyl

Ben and I whipped up a little installation for our awesome friends at local record shop Hammer City Records for November's art crawl. This installation is also a big crazy promotional scheme for Ben's new business, Gorilla Graphics. We are grateful that Craig and Leah gave us the space to purge our brains of some silly imagery lifted from the annals of pop culture's sewer.

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GORILLA GRAPHICS: THIS IS OUR BRAIN ON VINYL 
Art Crawl Night 
Friday, November 14 7-11PM

Hammer City Records



Gorilla Graphics is a small business run by lifelong punks Ben Needham and Tara Bursey that specializes in producing custom vinyl and sign graphics for exhibitions, promotions, artists and businesses big and small. 

Part showcase and part mural, Gorilla Graphics: This Is Our Brain On Vinyl blends the objects and visuals we love from the worlds of punk, art, pop culture and design. This installation illustrates the countless possibilities for producing vinyl graphics for application on everything from walls to windows to drum heads. Radical vinyl decals for cars/skateboards/your UFO/etc. will be sold at the opening, with all proceeds going to Hammer City Records!


http://www.gorillagraphicshamilton.com/

http://gorilla-graphics.tumblr.com/
 

http://www.facebook.com/gorillagraphicshamont
Twitter: @gorillasdovinyl

Hammer City Records

228 St N at Rear off Robert Street Alley
Hamilton, ON
Show runs until the second week of December!

California

Carpet shop signage, West Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles 

South African Embroidered Panel at the Fowler Museum, Los Angeles 

Mexican Human Skull Mosaicwork, LACMA, Los Angeles 

Jenny's, Chinatown Alleyway, San Francisco 

Ricky Henderson Planter Mosaic, Temescal, Oakland 

 San Francisco Botanical Gardens, Golden Gate Park

Night palms in Westwood, Los Angeles 

Chris Burden and Me, LACMA, Los Angeles

Scenes from my time in California, September 2014.

Changing Education Paradigms

Amazing video!

More Punk Art

Setting in to my new digs in Hamilton has been a trip!  Work contracts, back-n-forth travel to TO, (unsuccessful) job hunting and moving has more or less put a halt to art-making endeavors except for some punk rock-related bits and pieces.  This kinda makes sense considering the very last things I did before leaving TO were putting on the Fear of Punk show and popping of a quick LP cover for a friend's band.

A few weeks ago, I was asked for an interview for an incredible NYC-based comics anthology called Happiness, published and edited by the talented Leah Wishnia.  The interview will also include contributions from two of the four School Jerks-- I've done the art for all of their recorded output, and the interview is mostly about the work I've done for them.  Doing this interview gave me a rare opportunity to talk about my other "art-half" (the one that does art for punk bands) and reflect on how I started doing this this type of work.   I've included some of the interview text here (it's only a small portion of the entire interview):

Doing show flyers and album artwork grew out of my work making zines.  I remember being 17 or 18 thinking that it would be a really great job to be a freelance illustrator, doing art for bands both in and outside of punk that was not unlike the work I did for the zines I had been making for years.  This was before I realized how hard it was to get paid by bands that see you as a friend or acquaintance doing the band a favour!  When I was 18, I dropped out of art school and had a string of crappy jobs.  Doing flyers for neighbourhood bands and the odd flyer for performers and punk bands was less a way of making money than a way I kept an art practice going and got to know people while I just floated around aimlessly working retail, socializing, and trying to make an adult life for myself.

My first real job doing an album cover that was widely distributed was for the LP of a Toronto band called Action in 2003 or so.  They were pretty young and got signed to the label Punkcore from New York and were really excited about the prospect of touring and being on the same label as some of their favourite bands growing up.  The drummer Greg was my best friend at the time.  I was really happy to be a part of it because they were all friends of mine, we were all from the same suburb of Toronto, and it was such a big deal for all of us to feel like we were “making it” on some level-- they were under 20, and I was a couple years older.  I ended up doing their pin designs, t-shirt designs and the front cover, back cover and insert art for their LP.  This was my first taste of having a hand in shaping the entire visual identity of a band and at the time it was really rewarding and exciting for all of us to be doing something we knew a ton of people would see and hear. 

To be honest, ten years later, punk rock isn’t as much a part of my daily life as it used to be when I was 20, or even 25.  I have a pretty broad art practice that involves making art for punk bands but also sculpture/installation, publications and curating among other things.  I listen to way more 60s psych and hard rock than punk these days.  I am lucky to have developed my drawing skills at a really young age (I went to an arts high school where most students wanted to be animators for Disney!), so now I have this skill that I can basically pull out of my back pocket when I need to.  Most of the time it’s to draw a dripping skull or something grim for some punk dude, which is fine when I have the time.

(...)

I think Ben said it best in another interview when he said that while art has always taken a backseat in punk, it plays a huge part in how punk is understood by itself and the world.  Also, within punk, art (lyrics too) can be an introduction or passage to social and political issues that would be more difficult to understand through a textbook or a news source, especially for young people.  For example, when I was a teenager, the art of Gee Vaucher and Winston Smith (for Crass and the Dead Kennedys respectively) was a way for me to begin to explore radical politics. Punk art can be frightening, stimulating, exciting, thought provoking and (gasp) even beautiful.  Over the years, I’ve learned a lot from it, too.

Collage by Gee Vaucher

The Fear of Punk//Fear of Art show has been a great way to expand on the work for bands and connect with people who are serious about doing art work in and around punk rock.  Along these lines, I was also asked recently to do contribute a page to a screenprinted zine of fake comic book covers by punk artists, organized by another awesome artist, Yecatl Pena in Mexico.  My recent fixation on post-apocalyptic films produced this silly but fun comic cover based on the cover old comic book of mine, inspired by the record cover I did for Absolut at the end of the summer-- in progress!

Esther Bubley

I'm writing about the work of American photographer Esther Bubley in the 1940s right now--she was known for depicting working class female subjects.  While working for the IWO in the 1940s, she travelled up and down the east coast by Greyhound on assignments because she didn't drive.  Many of her better known images were taken of passengers, drivers and workers on the bus.  These images were collected in the IWO photo series, Bus Story.

"In these respects, Esther Bubley's photographic apprenticeship was very different from that of other women who had worked for the FSA in the 1930s. Bubley's small town, lower-middle-class background pales in comparison with Dorothea Lange's intrepid documentary adventures across the country. Bubley also did not have the advantage of Marion Post Wolcott's bohemian education in Greenwich Village and Vienna. Furthermore, unlike her female predecessors, Bubley's pre-FSA photographic experience was in commercial and fashion photography rather than in socially concerned documentation, like Lange, or with photojournalism, like Post Wolcott. Bubley did not even have a driver's licence. Her photographic projects for the FSA were therefore confined to the Washington, DC area and the outskirts of Virginia. When she travelled, it was not for thousands of miles through the Southern states solo with an axe in her trunk; nor was it across the Midwest and California consumed by a vision to reconstruct a social and economic history of agricutural production in the United States. Instead, Esther Bubley travelled from Washington, DC to Memphis on an overcrowded Greyhound bus. Her view of America in the 1940s was not of an unobscured road heading west seen from the roof of her car, but looking awkwardly through the bus driver's windscreen as the bus moved along, trying not to get in the driver's way.  Consequently, Bubley's vision was a little lopsided, her view not quite squarely framed."

- Jacqueline Ellis.  (1996).  "Revolutionary Spaces: Photographs of Working-Class Women by Esther Bubley, 1940-43"

Busby Berkeley

I'm working on my second-to-last assignment for school right now on Busby Berkeley's choreography for depression-era musicals, for a seminar class on the topic of Beauty.  The choreography really is a feast for the eyes, which involved not so much dancing as it did posing and the movements of chorus girls in unison and shot from above to create some pretty dazzling living patterns.

In a 1998 documentary called “Going Through The Roof,” Busby Berkeley’s dance routines were described as the “Epitome of Broadway Modernity."  Best known for his choreography in depression-era “talkies” such as Footlight Parade, 42nd Street, Dames and Gold Diggers of 1933, Berkeley’s elaborate routines involving the synchronized movements of chorus girls and revolving stages were crowd-pleasing, ground breaking and highly influential-- echoes of them can be seen in everything from advertising to music videos of the late 20th Century. 

Providing some of the context that surrounded Berkeley’s choreography is important to a reading of his work. Berkeley’s signature work can be seen in films made between the two world wars during the years of the Great Depression, and he was at his most prolific in 1933-- widely believed to be the worst economic year in US history. Interestingly, despite the depression movie attendance was at a high, and depression-era audiences were most attracted to feel-good, codified genres. On a related note, central to the character of Berkeley’s choreography are synchronized, machine-like series of movements that feel rooted in Taylorist and Fordist principles of standardization and assembly line production such as harmony, anonymity and perfection.  A veteran of World War One, many of Berkeley’s ideas also came from military drill formations.  


Above: "We're In The Money" from Gold Diggers of 1933, featuring Ginger Rogers.

That's All Folks!

Installation with popcorn kernels, uniform and props, completed last week.  I've never put popcorn kernels on a wall before...now I know it's possible!

I think this piece is a distillation of a lot of the feelings I've had and things I've seen while visiting the States.  Most of all, I think it is about how history moves from one period of time to the next, and about the feeling that things are about to change.  It is also about the loss of illusions.

One of my favourite movies of all time is The Last Picture Show, which I couldn't help but think of as I was thinking up this piece, as well as thinking up the performance I did in McKeldin Square a few months ago.  While the film's trailer focuses a little more on the torrid affairs between the residents of the fictitious town, Anarene Texas, the movie is set during a time when the movie theatre was beginning to play less of a role in people's lives because of the home television set.



Also on the topic of the movement from one historical period to the next, I read the following quote in a class recently, written by the American art critic Martha Schwender on the use of appropriation in the work of the artist Sherrie Levine.  It excited me because it questions whether or not we are nearing the end of a long period of overarching irony/cynicism in contemporary art...or perhaps also a period plagued by a sense of cynicism in general?

Appropriation rose out of this desire to have it both ways, to keep what you loved-- or at least knew intimately-- and still make art. It was a great solution.  But I was born in the 1970s, following the burnout of the 60s, and it has run aground in recent years. Not only have artists like (Sherrie) Levine, Jeff Koons and Richard Prince been dragged through the legal system for their cultural borrowing, but the postmodern irony and cynicism on which Appropriation was founded also feels outmoded in the Occupy Age.

AVAM, Baltimore

Between the earthquake and the hurricane, I managed to make it out to the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore late last week. Lots of amazing work there and lots to think about. Their current exhibition What Makes Us Smile? was full of happy-sad work by a wide range of individuals, from outsider artists to Patch Adams, M.D. I loved the beaded Alfred E. Neuman headboard by Patty Kuzbida. It was also a unique pleasure to see the work of a Toronto friend in a huge museum show in a totally different city-- Rev. Aitor of The Misanthrope Specialty Co. had some of his infamous Unflattering Portraits in the show, and seeing them there was like seeing a familiar (ugly) face in a crowd of strangers.

After seeing the exhibition, Ben said that it was great that a museum like this exists because the things on display were "things he would have wanted to make when (he) was a kid." In saying this, he was referring to art made out of salvage, and a huge model boat made out of toothpicks (!) in particular. In so many words, I think he was implying that the work at the AVAM might encourage people to make things just for the sake of making them or follow a creative impulse that might initially seem odd or "pointless." This is an important thing for artists to keep in mind too-- there is nothing wrong with just making for the sake of making, or doing something "just because you want to." After all, experiments are the mothers of invention.

The Twilight Zone, The Uncanny Valley and Rod Serling on Creativity

I've been at home with the stomach flu for the past three days. I have a ton of work piling up around me, but all I can bring myself to do is watch episode after episode of The Twilight Zone on Youtube. I have been a fan of TZ for as long as I can remember, but I've fallen back into love with Rod Serling and TZ in a big way recently. Here is an amazing picture taken during the production (I'm guessing?) of my all-time favourite episode, The After Hours, which involves mannequins coming to life, and a hidden floor of a shopping mall. Also, the episode was shot in 1960, and the episode's lead (pictured on the left, with her mannequin double on the right) looks exactly like the first Barbie doll, that would have been released less than a year earlier in 1959.

This photo also reminds me of a theory I learned about recently called the uncanny valley. It is a robotics theory that determines at what point humans become repulsed or "creeped out" by robots that look like humans. I would say that the mannequin definitely sits in range of the uncanny valley, without making the episode remotely unwatchable.

Not entirely unrelated, here is a video of Rod Serling in the late 60s or early 70s speaking with students about writing for television, specifically about creativity and working with ideas. Everything he says could be applied to making visual art too, and it's all fine advice, even if at times it is a little "dad-like." I believe my own father said "if it wasn't hard, everyone would do it" to me at some point within the past month...!