Adrienne Walser Reviews Winter/Spring Collection, a collaborative video work by Narcissister and A.L. Steiner

Artists Narcissister and A.L. Steiner recently unveiled their Winter/Spring Collection on MOCAtv. This Los Angeles–inspired collaborative video plays with the strange and messy combinations of the city—its cold/hot couplings of flesh and plastic, organic and unreal, pretty and grotesque.

Merging together materials from fashion, art, porn, and nature, Narcissister and Steiner create strangely familiar and uncomfortable amalgamations in which the seams show and the parts don’t match up. Bringing to the collaboration their shared interest in forms of exposure, they have made a video that is appealingly alienating—something that might be said of good art and the city of LA. The video’s bricolage of bodies, objects, images, and sounds culled from natural and cultural terrains of the city creates confusion about what is flesh and felt, what is constructed and produced—the lines between these are sometimes distinct and sometimes blurred, as the video playfully utilizes and subverts images of pleasure.

homeLA, Mount Washington, May 4, 2013

Alexandra Shilling’s Absence: A History deconstructed, performed by Sarah Jacobs, Aaron Kahn, Carol McDowell, and Madison Page

There’s a grand experiment afoot; the pioneering dance maven Rebecca Bruno, in partnership with the folks at Pieter and the Dance Resource Center, is seeking to infiltrate private homes throughout Los Angeles with a “site-sensitive” dance series called homeLA. The concept is a mutually beneficial one; the city’s small but scrappy experimental dance community opens up new performance venues for itself, while the sites themselves are enhanced by evocative dance works that play off their unique architecture.

The first installment of homeLA took place this past weekend at the home of Chloë Flores and Tim Lefebvre—a stunning, custom-built modernist compound nestled at the top of Mount Washington. The four-story main house and adjoining guest house, which sit elegantly on a hillside and deftly engage indoor/outdoor dynamics with elements like sliding glass doors and hidden patios, offered many unique spaces for dancers to experiment with movement.

Six Twelve One by One discussed on KCHUNG Radio

Six Twelve One by One, the Saturday evening movement performance by six pregnant women choreographed by Emily Mast and Hana van der Kolk, has generated quite a bit of buzz in the community. Several people have approached me to ask what it was like. One of those people was John Burtle, who together with his friend Guan Rong puts on a radio show called “nooooooooooo” every Monday night on KCHUNG. After we talked, John decided to devote the other night’s show to live-calling several friends to discuss the performance. I participated along with Corey Fogel and Elana Mann. I thought the results were quite excellent so instead of writing a review I am providing a link to the archived show here. As a bonus, check out a few of my poorly lit photos while you are listening.

If you did miss the performance, which took place in the historic and architecturally unique Onion building in North Hills, don’t despair. Complete video footage was taken, not just of the performance but of rehearsals too, and a documentary film is in the works.

All kinds of labor afoot and it’s not even Labor Day

Six Twelve One by One, a performance by Emily Mast and Hana van der Kolk. With Abbey O’Bryan, Emily Mast, Julie Clark, Leslie Stevens, Ruby Rain and Whitney Carter. Photo: Martin Dicicco.

I know this is random since it's been forever since I've posted about upcoming events. But I realized there are intriguing performances happening every night this weekend, so I might as well share the wealth.

Friday through Sunday, you can catch a new performance/lecture by Sara Wookey at Automata in Chinatown. Wookey is a dancer who gained a bit of notoriety two years ago by posting Open Letter to Artists, an eloquent statement of protest against art world labor standards as represented by Marina Abramović’s notorious 2011 MOCA Gala. This weekend’s performances will continue dialogues around dance practice and the economics of art. Seating is limited so get your advance tickets here.

An epidemic of pregnancy has recently overtaken the LA art world. I personally know 11 artists or dealers who have just given birth or are expecting soon. To commemorate the Great 2013 Baby Boom, artists Emily Mast and Hana van der Kolk have put together a choreographed evening of movement by pregnant women, to take place in the iconic Onion building in North Hills. RSVP here.

Finally, LAND will present its latest Nomadic Night on Sunday at Human Resources. The event will feature a performance by Anna Sew Hoy, Math Bass, and Claire Kohne. A poem will be read while a clay ball is rolled around on the floor; guests are encouraged to bring small items like pennies, shoestring, old cables, etc. that can be thrown on the floor to be picked up by the balls. RSVP by Thursday to rsvp at nomadicdivision dot org.

Native Strategies 3: Rituals and Congregations, Part 1: Invocations, Human Resources, Chinatown, February 1, 2013

Jane Brucker with cellist Mary Beth Bolin, UNRAVEL 2009–present.
Photo: Brian Getnick.

Amidst the substantial art fanfare of this past weekend, Native Strategies somewhat quietly released the third issue of its LA-centric performance art journal with a two-day series of performances at Human Resources. Unlike previous issues of the journal, which were created and published as documents long after their accompanying performances took place, issue 3 was created first and served as a sort of incubator or idea manual for the subsequent performances. The dynamic that results between publication and event is an entirely different one, perhaps less unified than the previous editions, but no less substantive.

The artists included in the journal’s essays and interviews include David Wojnarowicz via an interview with biographer Cynthia Carr, Samara Golden, Liz Glynn, Samuel White, Amanda Yates, Rafa Esparza, Alexa Weir, Jane Brucker, Tanya Rubbak (who is also co-director and designer for Native Strategies), and the collective Signify Sanctify Believe. It’s an interesting mélange of people who all, in the eyes of chief NS visionary Brian Getnick, speak to the artist’s “hope to communicate to audiences who will survive them.” Death, history, ritual, and magic are all part of this dialogue. The artists who gave performances over the weekend included White, Yates, Brucker, Weir, Esparza, and Guru Rugu (who is a freelance member of SSB).

‘corey marc fogel’ explodes Facebook, then self-destructs. Save ‘corey marc fogel’!

Courtesy Corey Fogel

Recently I included Chloë Flores’ Facebook residency, in which a different artist occupies the curator’s Facebook identity every month, in my list of 10 “alternatives to the alternative art spaces” on the LA Weekly. These residencies, which are rigorously curated and theorized by Flores, are in essence highly specialized spaces for performance and social practice. Although subversive in nature—especially in the beginning when few were hip to what was going on and thus subject to being “punked” by the fake Flores—the residency does have a few strict rules that can’t be broken: the settings can’t be changed, i.e. the page must remain public at all times; the About page, which explains the project, can’t be altered; and the password can’t be given out, so as to avoid unwanted hacking. In principle, everything on the page could be deleted by any of the participating artists, but so far no one has decided to go the Erased de Kooning route.

This past week, artist/musician Corey Fogel completely exploded the social media occupation model by granting admin privileges on his fan page, corey marc fogel, to 1,000 of his unsuspecting Facebook friends. Rampant chaos, alarm, and merriment ensued. Some, believing that their friend’s account had been hacked, valiantly attempted to delete the page. Others, understanding that it was a prank/performance/random action, played along, repeatedly saving the page from deletion, messing with its various controls, and running wild with the corey marc fogel identity.

For a couple of days, users’ newsfeeds were overrun by embarrassing cmf status updates, cranky demands for removal, and references to the über-meta nature of what was going on—some people posted screen shots of themselves as cmf responding to other posts from cmf, and so on. One ingenious interloper even got blogger Geoff Tuck to allow all cmf postings to show up as part of his Twitter feed, further complicating the identity stew.

Mulholland Dérive, organized by Stephen van Dyck, December 9, 2012

Christy Roberts belts out “Bohemian Rhapsody” just for me. Janne Larsen’s scentless air freshener hangs on the mirror.

The latest edition of Los Angeles Road Concerts, an annual daylong art/performance/music/literary event that takes over the entire length of one of the city’s iconic boulevards, took place on Mulholland Drive yesterday. It was very cleverly named Mulholland Dérive, after a Situationist strategy for combating the numbing effects of capitalism. In the words of theorist Guy Debord, “In a dérive [people] drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.”

It’s a sexy proposition, and previous incarnations of the Road Concerts (taking place on Sunset Boulevard, Washington Boulevard, and San Fernando Road) have been filled with an exuberant, untamed diversity that reflected the nature of the city and its varied inhabitants. This year’s adventure was markedly different; in place of the gritty, unpredictable urban sprawl that characterizes the other streets, Mulholland is a rarefied, bucolic wonderland of uniform class privilege, closely patrolled by a phalanx of park rangers. The long ridge drive that extends from Hollywood to the Pacific Ocean is populated by wealthy home owners, obnoxious Porsche drivers, and a series of state-owned overlooks that provide stunning views as well as the sting of authority.