Event listings and other delights

A few noteworthy events this weekend. Human Resources has put something together for Friday night to coincide with the big CalArts MFA show happening in Chinatown; from 9pm to 1am, you can check out music by Native Fauna and Learning Music, along with a performance by Matt Fielder and Rachel Kessler. Saturday from 12pm to 5pm is the second installment in the Torrance Art Museum’s ZOOM2 series; a whole bunch of sound and media artists will get together for a massive five-hour jam. Also happening Saturday at 3pm is River Bridge Rainbow: A Celebration Declaration for An Other LA, organized by Llano Del Rio Collective. Participants will weave a fabric bridge across the LA River and share their visions for “an other LA.” Meet in the river at Crystal Street off Fletcher Drive.

The event of the weekend will no doubt be Mike Bouchet’s Flat Cola Pool Independence Day Celebration (preparatory drawing above), the culmination and closing event for Bouchet’s very cool show at The Box gallery. The celebration will take place at a private residence in 29 Palms on the 4th of July at 4pm. An entire swimming pool will be filled with 100,000 liters of flat cola (the largest volume of cola in the world) and guests will be invited to take a swim in it. Booze and BBQ will be provided. If interested, contact The Box to get the address: info@theboxla.com or (213) 625-1747.

18th Street Arts Center has put out a call for artist proposals for their 2011 season. The theme for the year will be “Legacy,” and they are “particularly interested in artists who worked in Southern California between 1960 and 1990 in the areas of performance, durational and ephemeral work, or in media with a performance aspect. We are also interested in proposals from younger artists who are re-performing or interpreting works from this period, or whom are interested in collaborating with artists still working from that period.” There is so much unmined history from that period that is ripe for engagement!

Finally, I was really excited this past week to learn that Alex Segade of My Barbarian has launched a new blog, Performance Art World, whose mission is to explore “performance art, self-identified and cross-referenced.” Segade uses a set interview format, kind of like a Proust questionnaire, to talk with a variety of artists working in performance. Interspersed amongst the meaty artist-generated texts are quick notes on predecessors like Nancy Buchanan and Guillermo Gómez-Peña. This is a great new resource for getting more in-depth perspectives on artists’ practices alongside some briefings on the history of the medium.