“Performance Now” KCHUNG Radio Archives Now Accessible on ART!

It’s been a little over a year since John Tain and I began hosting a monthly show on KCHUNG Radio called Performance Now. The show was conceived in response to popular demand, after a special two-hour Community Debrief performance discussion in August 2013 generated an enormous amount of interest.

Broadcast live every third Sunday of the month at 5 p.m. and also archived at kchungradio.org, Performance Now is an hour-long show in which John and I host in-studio performances as well as in-depth interviews and discussions with artists, curators, writers, and scholars. After more than a year of programming, I must say we’ve amassed a pretty great archive of recorded material, all of which can be accessed via pinned posts on our Facebook page.

I’ve also compiled a convenient page of embedded mp3s here at ART! called KCHUNG Radio Archives, accessible on the sidebar to your right. This is a great page to bookmark for those long days in the studio. Among my personal favorites are a great interview with Rafa Esparza, a lively discussion with Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst at their home, a live radio play with Dorothy Hoover, an invocation of the power of ritual with the Oracle of Los Angeles, and of course, our inaugural episode, in which Mutant Salon cuts my hair in the studio while we play Xina Xurner tracks.

Like us on Facebook to get notified about new shows. The page here on ART! will also be updated whenever a new recording becomes available. Enjoy!

Introducing ART!’s first INTERNS

This year, Another Righteous Transfer! is experimenting with institutional partnerships as a way to broaden the scope of this blog, incorporate new voices, and help mentor a new generation of arts writers. I am currently in talks with several local schools about ways to engage students with this blog, and if all goes well, the results should be rolling out slowly over the next year or two.

Artist and Otis College of Art and Design instructor Dorit Cypis got the ball rolling by accepting ART! as an internship site for her upper level undergraduate arts course in Public Engagement Skills. Thanks to Dorit, ART! has been working with Maia Lee, a painting and digital media major, and Andrew Chung, a photography major. Look for their contributions to the world of LA performance art writing, coming soon!

Announcing Documents on Dance, a special guest residency by Chloë Flores

I am thrilled to announce the launch of Documents on Dance, a special yearlong guest residency by my talented colleague and friend Chloë Flores. Dance is an important part of the performative fabric of Los Angeles, where it enjoys a flirtatious and generative relationship with the visual arts, as well as an experimental freedom that is hard to find in cities renowned as centers for the dance mainstream. I have occasionally covered dance events on this blog before, but have long wished for some deeper and more sustained form of engagement. Chloë answered my prayers when she proposed this residency. I’ll let her explain the concept in her own words:

Documents on Dance (2014) is a year-long online research project, journal and public archive on dance in the expanding field of performance. This project positions curatorial research as an alternative form for documenting performance art in Los Angeles through, but not limited to: formal and informal interviews; edited notes from performances; conversations; passages from texts; margin notes; artist, performer, and dancer profiles; historical references and research; citations; bibliography; etc. The compilation of information will form the basis for an exhibition.

Stay tuned for DoD’s first post, coming later today!

A series of exciting announcements

Big things are about to transpire at ART! Following two years of neglecting this blog while I pursued other interests, I am returning to it this year with passion and renewed commitment. Over the next few weeks I’ll be rolling out a series of exciting announcements related to the blog’s growth. ART! will soon be expanding to accommodate a greater variety of voices, coverage and material than ever before — which is how it was always meant to be.

For today, I’m just going to drop one teaser announcement that is tangentially related to this blog. Perform Chinatown, LA’s scrappy annual festival of performance art that’s been happening (and covered by this blog) since 2009, will be curated this year by none other than yours truly in partnership with the awesome Chloë Flores. I am super excited to take on this challenge with a friend whose work and vision I totally respect. We’ve already got a bunch of ideas brewing and look forward to conducting an epic series of studio visits as we attempt to put together one of the best Perform Chinatowns ever. Stay tuned for more details!!

And finally, don’t forget that the Performance Now radio show, hosted by myself and John Tain, is still going strong on KCHUNG Radio every third Sunday at 5pm. Check out our most recent show here, an in-depth interview with Rafa Esparza, who we think is one of the most important artists working in LA today.

Year One, you’re one, I’m one

Salton Sea, February 2009

Year One in their history, year one in society
They’re waiting for the son, for any son to come
Year one, you’re one, I’m one

– X, from Wild Gift, 1981

Today is ART!’s one-year anniversary. The time of course has gone by quickly. One year ago today, I put up my first blog post, recounting Nathan Bockelman and Eric Svedas’ fantastic Feel NRG performance, a line from which inspired the name of this blog. Having been a regular attendant at performance art events since I moved here in 2005, I had been thinking for a while about doing a blog to share my experiences and to document the scene. The captivating energy that burst out of the Bockelman/Svedas performance was the final catalyst that spurred me into action. Interesting and significant performance art was happening in LA, dammit, and someone needed to start writing about it on a regular basis.

Like many new ventures, ART! started out with overly ambitious goals. I was going to cover everything and I was going to enlist a fleet of guest bloggers to help me. These goals, of course, were to be modified. I soon realized that there was no way I could possibly cover all the performative projects that happen in this wild, sprawling, unpredictable city that is so completely resistant to order. Too much happens, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes with little or no notice. There is also this cellular compartmentalization thing that tends to occur in LA; people like to cluster in small communities or scenes, and they only do outreach to their particular circles. This is why there are many attempts to provide art listings in LA, but every one of them is necessarily subjective and incomplete.

Finally, how does one delimit “everything?” There are a lot of crossovers among performance art, theater, and dance. I have really enjoyed the projects I’ve seen that incorporate dance and critical inquiry, but I generally tend to be predisposed against more theatrical works—and I’m sure a lot of people would consider that sacrilege.

Righteous transference

Over the past several years, we have seen a “performance renaissance” happening in the Los Angeles contemporary art community. A groundswell of energy has given rise to a range of vibrant and engaging performance-oriented activities held in galleries, museums, project spaces, warehouses, and the studios and homes of artists. In spite of this development, however, there has not been a serious, sustained effort to document or comment on what’s happening out there.

Another Righteous Transfer! is a blog devoted to documenting and exploring the performance art scene in the greater LA area. Its content includes reviews, commentary, interviews with artists, photos, links to videos, and occasional notices of upcoming events. I am the main blogger as well as the editor in chief. I’ll be tapping other writers to do guest blogs as frequently as possible—a plurality of voices is key to this endeavor. My hope is that this blog can become a space for archival information as well as ongoing community dialogue about the time-based art that is happening in our midst, as we speak.

* Thank you to NATHAN BOCKELMAN and ERIC SVEDAS, whose brilliant Feel NRG performance inspired the title of this blog.

** To get in touch with me, please send email to ccheh at hotmail dot com.