Tag Archives: PARIS LA #10

PENTTI MONKKONEN BOOK LAUNCH PRESENTED BY DoPe PRESS & OOGA BOOGA THIS THURSDAY!

Please join us this Thursday night, June 5th, from 6-8PM, in Los Angeles at Ooga Booga Chinatown, for the launch of Pentti Monkkonen‘s new monograph Box Truck Paintings, published by our very own DoPe Press! Pentti Monkkonen was also featured on the cover of issue no.10 of Paris-LA Magazine. At 7PM, artist Evan Holloway will perform a piece of experimental music based on the INTONARUMORI of Italian Futurist, Luigi Russolo. Please see details below!

ON THE BOOK
Box Truck Paintings is an artist’s book that presents the series of paintings Monkkonen exhibited in early 2014 in Switzerland at the Hacienda gallery in Zürich and at Truth and Consequences in Geneva. The “paintings” represent a continued engagement with transit, and are actually hybrid combinations of sculpture and painting. The tension inherent in the work evolves from this dual existence: relief sculptures of trucks which are also paintings on the trucks’ surface. In order to highlight the correlation between the art market and our oil-based lifestyle and capitalist superstructure, the work creates parallels between techniques of contemporary painting and traditional methods of image-making on the sides of trucks. The publication is accompanied by a stimulating conversation— especially commissioned for the book—between the artist, and the writer and curator Aram Moshayedi.

ON THE PERFORMANCE
In 1913 Russolo’s manifesto of futurist music L’Arte dei Rumori (The Art of Noises) proposed an expanded field of orchestral practice that would include the sounds of the Industrial Age. To this end, Russolo created an orchestra of noise producing instruments, the INTONARUMORI. At the premiere of his first composition, it is reported by fellow futurist F.T. Marinetti that the audience revolted, and the performance was loudly booed and shouted down. The Futurists, who were fond of boxing, responded by beating members of the audience, proud of sending several to the hospital. One can assume that this was all part of the fun, as one of Marinetti’s manifestos is titled “The Pleasure of Being Booed.”

The original instruments long ago disappeared. This particular instrument is not intended to be a faithful historical reproduction, but uses the same principles of the original instruments for a similar intention. It may or may not be historically accurate in its sonic results.

SCHIZO-CULTURE EVENT AT OOGA BOOGA

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Sylvère Lotringer was in conversation with Dorothée Perret in the Paris, LA #10 article ‘The Importance of Being Unfinished,’ with an introduction by Barlo Perry.

On Wednesday night he was at Ooga Booga’s second space at 356 Mission Road, to celebrate the launch of Semiotext(e)’s new publication Schizo-Culture, along with Semiotext(e)’s Noura Wedell and Hedi El Khot. For those of us who were only somewhat familiar with Semiotext(e), as an independent publisher inhabiting a lofty space in the art world (Semiotext(e) is included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial) and academia, and who brought the work of many French theorists to the United States, the evening was only somewhat informative. A basis of knowledge and understanding of the topic was already assumed, so the panelists dove straight in.

Chris Kraus introduces Schizo-Culture at Ooga Booga

The Schizo-Culture conference took place at Columbia University in November of 1975. Lotringer described it as a complete shock. He had expected about fifty people to show up, but instead there were a thousand. He said the conference erupted into creative chaos. Of those who presented at the conference were French philosophers and thinkers Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Félix Guattari, and a wide range of Americans such as William Burroughs, John Cage, and Judy Clark. Lotringer said that when he thinks about schizo-culture, it is all about New York City, and the good energy that was felt there at the time. At the time it was joyful to be in New York City with all of the creative people there, the “old art world,” the punks, the young radicals, and the young academics. “People were afraid to go to New York back then, and they could have never predicted that 42nd St would turn into Disneyland,” said Lotringer.

Noura Wedell, Sylvère Lotringer, and Hedi El Khot

Three years later, Semiotext(e) published the Schizo-Culture issue of their journal. He described the issue as being very fun to put together, and introduces it in the book as being “…not the same as the Schizo-Culture conference. The issue was put together three years after the conference in a very different context with very different intentions and with different material. …[It] doesn’t recount the shock encounter that took place between French and American philosophers and artists at ‘the Event,’ but instead consummated the magazine’s rupture with academe. It also took Semiotext(e) one step closer to the New York art world at an exciting and innovative time. No one could have anticipated that in just five years it would mutate into an art market, and then into an art industry. It was more than anyone had bargained for.” (v)

Jack Smith, Jungle Island, 1967

Lotringer’s introduction to the Schizo-Culture conference and the Schizo-Culture issue of the journal was followed with Jack Smith’s film Jungle Island from 1967. Lotringer said that Smith knew nothing about French philosophy, yet he embraced the same ideas. He said he had a presence and a simplicity, that you just need to look at the world around you. His beautiful film was a jungle island dream, a layering of images of tropical plants, water, and a drag queen in heavy colorful makeup sparkling in the sun.

After the film, Noura Wedell and Hedi El Khot asked Lotringer a few questions, trying to start a discussion, but it was mostly Lotringer who spoke. The questions were opened up to the audience, and with each one, Lotringer became more and more impassioned. Towards the end he stated, “We are taught to be individuals, to draw attention to ourselves. That is how we are raised. Subjectivity is a false problem. You have to break from individualism by being mad.”

JENNIFER WEST: MIND AND MATTER

Nirvana Alchemy Film (16mm black & white film soaked in lithium mineral hot springs, pennyroyal tea, doused in mud, sopped in bleach, cherry antacid and laxatives – jumping by Finn West & Jwest), 2007, 2 minutes, 51 seconds, 16mm film negative transferred to digital video. [Courtesy of the artist and MARC FOXX, Los Angeles]

Los Angeles-based artist Jennifer West grew up in Topanga Canyon in the 1970s before spending her college years in Seattle and Olympia during the early years of the Riot Grrrl and grunge movements. Inspired by West Coast subcultures, her organic films and printouts depict surfers, beach parties or natural phenomena that she captures on 16, 35 or 70 mm film before damaging its surface with the use of bodily, cosmetic or culinary fluids, thereby pushing the manipulation of celluloid film to the level of performance. The emulsion can be combined with perfume, alcohol, mascara, or pepper spray; the film can be scratched by a skateboard, kissed, or dragged in tar. She then uses this altered prime material to create projections of photographic prints, producing a sublime visceral action.

In PARIS, LA #10, Jennifer West talks with curator and writer Martha Kirszenbaum about filmmaking, her artistic process, and her roots as a native Californian growing up with hippie parents on the coast. West’s exhibition ‘One Mile Film’ was recently on view at Marc Foxx gallery in Los Angeles in January, 2014.

Portrait of Jennifer West [photo by Martha Kirszenbaum]