Work and Play Performance Series in Dunedin

Work and Play, a performance series curated by Korean-born Wellington-based artist Samin Son recently completed its run of exciting performances and related events. I'm sorry I didn't get there in person but it's nice to see a gallery of images on Blue Oyster art project space's Tumblr blog and there is an associated Facebook page as well. Congratulations to Samin and all the participating artists and attendees, sounds like it was an intense series!

Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art

I just wanted to note the really wonderful amount of video, sound, and image materials available on the website for the exhibition Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art which recently finished its run in NYC at the Studio Museum in Harlem. As the curatorial/press information for the show states: "Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art is the first exhibition to survey over fifty years of performance art by visual artists of African descent from the United States and the Caribbean. Black performance has generally been associated with music, theater, dance, and popular culture. While the artists in Radical Presence draw on these disciplines, here their work is considered in relation to the visual arts. The show begins with examples dating from Fluxus—a loose international network of artists from the 1960s and ’70s—and Conceptual art of the same period, and continues up to the present day. Featuring live performances as well as objects, Radical Presence includes more than one hundred works by thirty-seven artists." The site features videos, interviews, and documentation of works by artists including: Papo Colo, Coco Fusco, Theaster Gates, David Hammons, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Dave McKenzie, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O'Grady, Benjamin Patterson, Adrian Piper, Pope.L, Dread Scott, Carrie Mae Weems, and many others.

Angel Olsen's "Burn Your Fire For No Witness"

The American singer-songwriter Angel Olsen's most recent CD Burn Your Fire For No Witness is in repeat mode on my desktop at the moment. Although the amount of pain, misery, woe and longing present (everything is tragic/it all just falls apart) in Olsen's sometimes ephemeral, sometimes rousing songs has been frequently commented upon, the sureness of her delivery is altogether affirming and joyful. Currently picking up loads of positive press from the likes of SPIN and the NYTimes, hope the hype doesn't submerge her evident talents. Here are two links to radio performances on KEXP Seattle (with full band) and NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts (solo). 

Desperate Man Blues

A fine Australian documentary from 2003 on the American record collector Joe Bussard who has collected old 78 records for decades, amassing one of the world's greatest archives of early 20th Century country, folk, old time, blues, and jazz music (more than 25,000 records in his Maryland home). Prone to making harsh statements like "rock is the cancer of music" or that there's been "no real jazz since 1933" Mr. Bussard is definitely one of a kind. Who would have thought that a film that devotes the bulk of its time to an excitable man playing records amidst cigar smoke in his basement could be so much fun? Vinyl-revival be damned, Bussard's collection dates from the "shellac" era! You can also read a lengthy and informative 1999 profile from the Washington City Paper here.

The Women of Rockabilly

Welcome to the Club: The Women of Rockabilly is an hour-long film directed by Beth Harrington (and narrated by Roseanne Cash) on four amazing singers: Janis Martin (billed as “The Female Elvis”), Wanda Jackson (dubbed “The Queen of Rockabilly”), Lorrie Collins (of “The Collins Kids”), and Brenda Lee (once “Little Miss Dynamite”).

Alex Chilton "A Man Called Destruction" Biography

Having been a longtime fan of Alex Chilton, I fell into a deep dark hole in between any official activities reading the exhaustively researched new LX bio A Man Called Destruction by Holly George- Warren. Chilton would be a rather daunting subject for any biographer due to his rambling, idiosyncratic career and sharp turns in musical orientation. Given all that, the author (who was well acquainted with Chilton for some years) offers a sometimes harrowing but detailed tribute to an artist who didn’t always know what was best for him, perhaps, but created a wealth of his own music (Big Star and various solo permutations) and produced heaps of other fine projects (The Cramps, Tav Falco’s Panther Burns, and many more). Chilton was a pop star of sorts crooning soul with an affective, mature voice as a teenager with the Box Tops (The Letter, Cry like a Baby) recorded three LPs with the innovative pop band Big Star, and then travelled a winding road of treacherous anti-fame and fortune, in that commercial potential mattered not at all to him in comparison to lively, spontaneous improvisational music that drew from eclectic sources: rock and roll, r and b, blues, country, folk, jazz, classical, noise. Chilton died suddenly of a heart attack in 2010 at the age of 59 in his adopted home of New Orleans, and this feels no less jarring as George-Warren’s account comes to a close. The book dishes out plenty of dissolute rock and roll gossipy anecdotes along the way but is delivered in a measured, readable prose that generally avoids hagiography and rounds out the too often flattened portrayals of this very complex character. I have my own biases, having seen Chilton perform, loving his records for decades, but also thinking a lot about the kind of rather perverse decisions he made in the name of “artistic independence.” But if you are at all interested in one of the most fascinating figures of rock and roll and alternative music, do check out this book, and if you don’t know his music some beautiful stuff (and totally wild shit) awaits you. (You can read an excerpt of the biography here.)

David Bowie and the Story of Ziggy Stardust

The addictively watchable BBC four documentary David Bowie and the Story of Ziggy Stardust (narrated by Jarvis Cocker) depicts the long road leading up to Bowie’s big breakthrough persona, by way of an almost startling range of eclectic influences: dance, mime, folk, music hall, Anthony Newley, mod, children’s music, theatre (both avant-garde and not-so), and of course, early rock and roll, fashion, androgyny, gay culture, Iggy Pop and the Velvet Underground. As “Spiders from Mars” drummer Mick “Woody” Woodmansy comments: “I think he was trying on what can I do and what do people want, going through the trial and error period, and there was a lot of error!”

Anthony Byrt on the Sydney Biennale in Artforum

Writer Anthony Byrt has contributed an interesting critical overview of the current Sydney Biennale to the Artforum website. Clearly a difficult exhibition to tackle in a short piece, particularly given the debates around its problematic financial support that created tensions in the lead-up (and aftermath) of the opening. As Byrt incisively notes:

"The letter and the boycott, heartfelt though they were, placed a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” cloud over everyone involved. Several artists who’d decided to stay in the show spoke off-the-record of the immense pressure they’d been placed under to withdraw. The standoff also inadvertently oversimplified a remarkably complex issue that all of us in the art world have to take a position on: not the detention centers, which are a horrific response to a humanitarian problem, but global art money’s relative cleanliness. Then there is the fact that a huge amount of arts funding in Australia, including for the biennial, comes from the Australia Council, which in turn is funded by the Australian government—the same one implementing the detention-center policy. The dispute may also have a nasty tail for the future of the biennial. In early March, one government minister, speaking on national radio, labeled the protest an act of “vicious ingratitude,” while the Federal Arts Minister called for a change in the Australia Council’s mandate, which would see recipients of funding penalized for turning down corporate sponsorship on “unreasonable” grounds."

Vintage Power Pop: the dB's

The dB's, who began in NYC but all hail from my homestate of North Carolina, were a pretty amazing band in the 1980s, synthesizing a wealth of 60s pop influences (Kinks, Beach Boys, Big Star) into a tight, compact, and highly listenable sound. They never had great commercial success at the time, but have recently reformed just as a style such as theirs seems eminently historical and somewhat distant. That said, with the resurgence of LP buyers and rekindled interest in underappreciated "cult" bands of the past maybe there will be some new attention paid to their fastidious, catchy pop songs. For more dB's info, you can check out their website. 

Assorted Fluxus video links

Here are some links to some pretty interesting Fluxus material floating around on YouTube, including Dick Higgins describing the origins of Fluxus and a (re-)performance of his piece "Danger Music # 17" by Australian scholar Geoffrey Gartner. There's some great footage of the early (1962) German Fluxus festivals here and experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas speaks of his friends Andy Warhol and George Maciunas here. Alison Knowles was interviewed on the occasion of MoMA's Fluxus Editions exhibition, and performance artist William Pope.L devised his own particular response. Nam June Paik speaks about his motivations to make video art in a vintage documentary, and another documentary focuses on his longtime collaborator and partner "the topless cellist" Charlotte Moorman.