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Dear Readers:
After months of labour on the part of many, many extraordinary individuals, Eric Johnson’s Maize is up and complete in it’s home at the Torrance Art Museum. Today at around 6:30 PM I had the great honor of placing the final kernel (right before I engaged in the mundane taske of spotting and helping Raymond flip over an upsidedown kernel). I’m not posting any pictures of the completed corn until after the opening, because you have to come and see the magic for yourself.

Opening Reception is this Saturday, September 6, 7-10 PM. Be there or else! This project is one of the most amazing efforts I have ever seen or participated in in my lifetime, the culmination of the efforts of hundreds of participants. So many people have had a hand in this project, as laborers, funders, kernel makers, BBQ attendees and in a plethora of other roles. It’s just completely amazing. A big and special advance thanks to Eric Johnson for giving me the opportunity to have a hand in this baby, and to TAM Curator Kristina Newhouse for her patience and support as we make our mess in her yard.

Love,
Kernel Monkey Marshall

P.S. You can see almost all of the 387 kernels that go into the structure in the shot below. Laid out they covered more than half the floor of the whole museum.

Technorati Tags: Eric Johnson, Torrance Art Museum, corn, Maize, kernels, sculpture, LA art, art, contemporary art

Well, In Black and White opened last week, but tonight is the night for the reception. I’ve got one of those dreaded “summer colds”, so I’ve been out of it for the past two days. But I’ll be there, a coughing and a sniffling, and drinking the ECC Gallery’s punch and eating their snacks. Parking on campus is $2, but if you arrive after 7PM, you can park in the very convenient staff lot, which is pretty empty at that time.

Technorati Tags: In Black and White, art opening, art exhibition, El Camino College, El Camino College Art Gallery, art

Thanks Phill for pointing out this excellent mash-up. Obama’s going to turn salt to pepper and pepper to salt, you know.

Technorati Tags: The Warriors, Barak Obama, speech, mashup

Well, if humanity’s supply of rare metals and petroleum holds out long enough to forestall a brutal, post-technological dark ages (get ready to defend your canned food with a bat with a nail through it!), these are the baby steps of the species that will likely come to replace us. And they’ve got just the soundtrack to boogie while they do it.

Seen on Boing Boing Gadgets.

Technorati Tags: robots, Boing Boing Gadgets, competition, The Final Countdown, Eye of the Tiger, sign of the end times, your moment of apocalypse, robot apocalypse

In which Sthephen Cohen Gallery hosts an Artillery roundtable digesting Paul McCarthy’s Chocolate Santa with Butt Plug.

Technorati Tags: Artillery Magazine, art, chocolate, Stephen Cohen Gallery, Chocolate Santa, Butt Plug, Chocolate Santa with Butt Plug, contemporary art, roundtable

I recently stumbled across the BLDG BlOG’s excellent post, Where Cathedrals Go To Die, about breaking container ships. As someone who’s daily life includes the constant, neighborly presence of these post-modern wonders of the world, I’m fascinated by the smallest details regarding their life and use. The post features numerous photos from Edward Burtynsky, a Canadian photographer who also has a staggeringly beautiful body of images of quarries, which have also been featured on BLDG BLOG. Follow links for enjoyment.

Technorati Tags: Edward Burtynsky, BLDG BLOG, container ships, shipbreaking, photography

Final stretch. Everything at this point is hard, repetitive and not immediately rewarding. Not like pouring the kernels. But it’s got to be done so that we can get the whole circus into the gallery next week and then assemble everything. The show opens September 6, which is really, really soon.

Above - Jack, polishing the steel struts for painting and working on a serious sunburn. He was determined to just boil away, listening to his iPod while working in the hot sun.

Above - This is what I did on Wednesday. Raymond and I polished all of the kernel backs so that they could be painted. The kernels that already have backs attached are being painting inside of a protective jig Eric rigged up.

Above - The last (I think) kernel arrives. Neil Nagy (at left) wanted to paint his by hand. So Eric poured a green kernel and gave it a matte finish for painting.

Above - My world yesterday was being in the spray booth with Nick, blowing out and generally assisting while he cut larger holes in the back of some of the kernels so that they would fit better onto the structure.

Technorati Tags: Eric Johnson, Maize, art, contemporary art, process, documentation is everything

There are many things film and art going on this weekend. Especially if you’re eagerly awaiting visions of the end of the world.

Friday, August 22

Wizards, Damnation Alley, A Boy and His Dog @ The Aero Theatre. Day one of the Post-Apocalyptic Film Festival. Wizards is Bakshi’s masterpiece (in my opinion), Damnation Alley is a weirdly compelling classic and A Boy and His Dog is both the best post-apocalyptic film of all time, as well as the best adaption of anything by Harlan Ellison. Triple feature starts at 7:30.

Saturday, August 23

Desertshore (image at top) @ Luckman Gallery. Group show that “addraddresses notions of progress and decay similar to those provoked by the cultures, geographies and metaphors of the American southwest, or, more explicitly, its “flattest landscapes”.” Featuring work by Dave Hullfish Bailey, John Divola, Mark Hagen, Marie Jager, Harry Dodge & Stanya Kahn, Brian Kennon, Euan Macdonald, Christopher Michlig, Sterling Ruby , Brad Spence, Charlie White, Mario Ybarra Jr., Amir Zaki, and Andrea Zittel. Reception is 6-8 PM.

Buffmonster, The Sweetest Thing @ Corey Helford Gallery. Get your fine art with agressive marketing fetish into full gear for the devotedly superflat, character driven work of LA’s resident prince of pink. Reception is 7-10.

Last Man on Earth, The Omega Man, 12 Monkeys @ The Aero Theatre. Day two of the Post-Apocalyptic Film Festival. This is a weird billing, because it consists of two film versions of I Am Legend, followed by 12 Monkeys, with the excellent recent remake missing. I figure they probably couldn’t get the print, too bad. But The Omega Man is Charelton Heston (currently appearing as Moses, filling in for God in my new installation, part of In Black and White, which opens Monday…) at his brutal best, and cannot be ignored. Triple feature starts at 7:30.

Bandits vs. Samurai Squadron @ The Silent Movie Theatre. The Cinefamily’s Nakadai/Samurai series continues with this 1970’s samurai revenge film. Not to be missed and rarely shown. If you see one vintage samurai movie this year, this is it. $10, starts at 7PM.

Dude Dogg @ Mandrake. “An intimate evening of song, celebration, and REAL talk.” Starts at 8PM.

Sunday, August 24

Maybe you should take a break and just watch the amazingly hyperbolic Tom Cruise: 25 Years intro video at the world’s best known cultist’s website. Put aside some time for this one.

Monday, August 25

In Black and White @ El Camino College Art Gallery. The show opens with the first day of the semester, but the reception is on September 2. Featuring works in black and white by Marshall Astor, Mariona Barkus, Barbara Berk, Angie Bray, Connor Everts, Craig Havens, Rico Lebrun, Patrick Merrill, Kamran Moojedi and Pierre Picot. Curator Susanna Meiers really hit the mark with this show. It’s well balanced and I’m so happy to be showing alongside so many excellent artists.

Technorati Tags: art, LA art, Luckman Gallery, Corey Helford, Buffmonster, Aero Theatre, Silent Movie Theatre, Cinefamily, Dude Dogg, Mandrake, Tom Cruise, El Camino College, In Black and White

It’s done. Yesterday was knot tying day!

I had a hard time keeping it this simple, but the alternating, argyle pattern of criss-crossed strings does so many awesome things with shadows that I would have messed it up if I added any more string. Also, the black strings disappear over the black painted areas at the right distance. You’ve kind of got to be in the room with the piece to get it, but it’s got some nice optical tomfoolery going on. If you zoom into the image below you can kind of see what’s going on with the shadows. I love how the shadows on the floor look, too. That was a happy accident.

There are other artists in the show, too…

Above - Patrick Merrill, Whore of Babylon (being installed). Patrick Merrill’s work is raw vision. His 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse piece has gotten out there quite a bit, and the amount of detail he’s capturing in his massive woodcut telling of the Book of Revelations is completely, admirably, intimidatingly insane. I am in awe of this man.

Above - Detail from Whore of Babylon. I could shoot detail shots of this work all day, and still not comprehend how he’s doing it, and doing it so well. This is one of the heads of the scarlet beast, “having seven heads and ten horns”, from Revelation 17:3.

Above - More detail from Whore of Babylon. The whore herself, holding a chalice with nuclear trefoil. The clean, crisp detail on the chalice, which sits at near the exact center of the print, just draws your eye. Everything seems to radiate from the chalice.

Above - Angie Bray painting. Angie makes installations with these motorized long plastic tubes. They rotate and are unbalanced, they move against one another like grass moving in the wind, they scrape against walls, they fill the space with organic actions and movement, and they are simple machines. She was still installing when I finished, so I shot her painting one of the tubes. These pieces really deserve close-up, long term, contemplative viewing.

Above - Connor Everts. Connor has a connection to El Camino, and I presume these pieces came out of the college’s collection. This is one of a series of ten prints that are on view in the gallery, which were made in 1970.

Above - Mariona Barkus, The Zen of Terminal Waiting. Mariona’s work, especially this piece, often pokes fun at the absurdities of “modern life.” I like how this piece brings together the unrelatable flavours of the “airport experience” and contemplative religion.

More photos are in the Flickr set. In Black and White opens August 25, and the reception is September 2. I will also be taking part in an artist talk on September 9.

Technorati Tags: In Black and White, El Camino College, art, Marshall Astor, Angie Bray, Patrick Merrill, Whore of Babylon, Mariona Barkus, Connor Everts, contemporary art, woodcut, installation art, art exhibition

Today Michele and I installed the first part of my installation for the upcoming show, In Black and White, at the El Camino College Art Gallery. This show entirely consists of works by ten artists who work in monochromatic black and white. I’m especially excited to be a part of this exhibition, because I get to show with Angie Bray, who is one of my favourite people in the whole world, and also with Patrick Merrill, who’s oversize woodcuts are staggeringly and artistically intimidating.

The piece is called Equally God and Equally Satan, and is “an opportunity to highlight the simple and interdependent relationship between the Western Culture’s best known invisible superheroes (or gardeners, depending on your philosophical school).” The two painted biblical characters are bookended by a pair of enameled aluminum posts that are machined with holes at two inch intervals, through which hundreds of strings (I’m bringing back string art, dammit!) will criss-cross over the image. Susanna Meiers, the ECC Gallery Director, asked me to use strings in this piece largely because she liked the overhead support grid that I designed for Edith Abeyta’s Cry Me a River installation that was part of her show, Salty: Three Tales of Sorrow at the gallery last fall. The strings get installed tomorrow. On to the rest of the pics.

Above - God. I like to work with banal found images, whenever possible. This version of everyone’s favourite bearded authority figure is based upon Charleton Heston as Moses, from The Ten Commandments. While re-watching this movie to find a good screencap to use as source material I almost lamented that I wasn’t able to do a whole piece based upon Yul Brynner’s Ramses II. But I grew up busily trying to imagine exactly what face lurked behind God’s mighty, bushy beard, and Charleton Heston’s self-certain grin is probably a pretty good guess.

Above - Satan. Satan here is being played by The Devil, as presented in the Adult Swim cartoon Lucy The Daughter of the Devil, where he is voiced by H. Jon Benjamin. I also carved a pumpkin last Halloween with a version of this particular Devil. Lucy is one of my favourite cartoons, largely because it presents Satan as such a totally sympathetic, Cosby sweater wearing shlub. It was actually hard to decide which horned beast to play this role, since there are just so many great images of Satan out there. He’s just more photogenic than his cloud-bound counterpart.

Above - God and Satan, together forever… Those black lines are the posts for the strings, which get strung tomorrow. More photos of today’s labours are in the Flickr set for the show.

Technorati Tags: art, contemporary art, installation art, God, Satan, Marshall Astor, painting, In Black and White, El Camino College, El Camino College Art Gallery,