Interview: Blinky the Friendly Hen 40th Anniversary

This is a drawing of Bahuchara Mata.

If you don't already know about Blinky the Friendly Hen, let me tell you the story.

Jeffrey Vallance bought Blinky, a Foster Farms fryer chicken, at Ralph's supermarket in Canoga Park in 1978 and paid to have the complete burial and memorial service at the Los Angeles Pet Cemetery. His act of treating one chicken's life and death with dignity proved to resonate with a whole bunch of people and still does today. If you want to know a lot more about Blinky, you can look her up on google or read the book Mr. Vallance wrote about her or listen to him talk about it on Youtube.
 
And so it's the 40th anniversary of Blinky's burial, and California State University, Northridge is celebrating with a big Blinky show that has a lot of chicken art in it. And when I say "a lot", I mean a lot.

I had the chance to Interview the artist, and so I did. What you read next is the interview.


PEPIAJW: How do you feel about chickens?

JV: I love chickens.

PEPIAJW: After 40 years, why are we still talking about Blinky?

JV:  Blinky made a crossover into popular culture, so it got out of the art ghetto and into the minds of regular folks. Blinky is out there in the culture as an archetype. It keeps showing up in all these kinds of venues and forums, in punk rock songs or cartoons or little jokes on TV shows, so I think it keeps going by popular culture.

PEPIAJW: If you could be any kind of chicken, what kind of chicken would you be?

JV:  I think I would be a guinea fowl. That was the wild bird that became the domesticated chicken. It's a chicken but it's wild, lives in the forest and has a natural life. I'd want to be a guinea fowl because domesticated chickens live pretty horrible lives on corporate farms and don't have much space and they're crammed in cages stacked on each other, and sometimes they cut their beaks off, and it's not a very good life for chickens now.

PEPIAJW: Do you feel that being a male artist has limited the reach of the phenomenon of Blinky?

JV:  Very much so because Blinky is a hen, a female and I'm a male, and I think Jesus had the same problem because in the bible he says he would like to be a mother hen and would like to embrace all people like a hen embraces her chicks. That's the ultimate conception of god, a mother hen, instead of god being like a stern father. Mostly we have the stern father in the sky image.

PEPIAJW: Have you ever met Bahuchara Mata?

JV:  Yes, actually in my bedroom, I have a shrine to her.  She was a woman in India, and she was walking along and then these criminals came and they were going to rape her, and she didn't want to be defiled, and she had a big knife and cut off her breasts and that turned off the marauders, she became a goddess, and she rode a chicken and that image of her riding a chicken became a symbol. She's worshiped by the transgender community in India. They have festivals and shrines for her in India. People dress up, wear make-up and have great rituals in her honor.

PEPIAJW: How did Blinky evolve in your mind after the initial acts of burial and the memorial?

JV:  The first idea was more like a prank, to see what I could get away with... if a pet cemetary would go through the ritual with the animal.

Very early on, I started to see Blinky as a symbol for all of the trillions of chickens that are slaughtered every year. Blinky started to take on a more serious role, and then a funny thing started to happen.

Later, as I looked back, I saw that all the things I did were symbols for Christ: burial, resurrection, sacrifice. Unknowingly, I went through all these rituals, and it was only later that I saw that Christ saw himself as a mother hen. That opened me up to how the different world religions see chickens as sacred. Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and tribal religions, voodoo and Wicca, and it goes over the scope of religion. That's where the current show is going. My personal take on all this is that I see heaven as a big fluffy chicken. It's a warm and fuzzy place. You're embraced by this giant chicken, and you're safe under the wings.


Opening Reception: Saturday, February 2, 4-6pm
Artist Talk: Monday, February 4,10am
Artist Walkthrough: Saturday, February 16, 1pm

Steven Garen at Around the Block, Oakland, CA Sept 29, 2018

Stephen Garen stands next to his creation.

I went to Oakland Museum's event, Around the Block, in Oakland and ran into the male artist, Steven Garen.  He was a featured artist at the event partly held on the Lake Merritt BART plaza. His artwork was a big musical instrument he made. It was a stringed instrument, a rainstick instrument and a gong.  The kids liked it and spent good time having fun, making noise, hitting, plucking and tipping the created object.

I asked him how his creation was art, and he responded that the A-frame structure created five fields and that these fields are like frames in art and that whatever was contained in these frames became art because of their being framed.

I asked him what art was. I said to him, "What is art?" and he responded that it is standing around for hours, that art is exercise. He laughed because he thought his response was humorous.

I asked him what he was going to do with his contraption after the exhibition, and he told me he reassembles it in his house, that it doubles as a hammock frame which he uses to sleep in.

Financial Instrument at Go Build Business

Here is a flow chart superimposed on a Damien Hirst painting. (Vallance)

This show was a pop-up show in Chatsworth, California at Go Build Business, a rental office and rental business meeting space.  Jeffrey Vallance thought it would be synergistically profitable to rent an office there to exhibit art and circumvent the art world.

This was an infiltration/exhibition/intervention.  This means that these artists wanted to twist the context of art and perception of art and the definition or meaning of art in order to see more clearly their external world and internal worlds.  But the infiltration was secondary to the creation of wealth. The show was primarily about money.

Here is the show description:

"Financial Instrument is an exhibition/intervention/infiltration at Go Build Business in Chatsworth, California. The group show of "essentialist" artists includes Victoria Reynolds, Paulette Nichols, Jeffrey Vallance, Holly Boruck, Carlos Rodriguez and Ken Jones. This dynamic group of artists completely bypasses the art world and goes directly to the business world."

"Essentialism" was stumbled upon and then taken out of the dictionary and redefined to mean "art that has no frills, art that you want to see when you go see art, art that isn't totally boring."  It means meat and potatoes art with some ice cream and maybe some chocolate and coffee and broccoli or spinach.

Punk rock flyer (Reynolds)

Vallance's and Reynold's graphic art created a context for the other, more traditional paintings and drawings of Vallance, Reynolds, Boruck, Jones and Nichols.

Ice cream painting (Reynolds)

Bad Trump drawings. (Vallance)

Fantastical Chasm painting (Jones)

Birthing Kittens in a Dream (Boruck)

The exhibition featured many performative aspects.  There was as a white board with financial equations drawn on it in dry erase ink.  The principle equation congealed by the mind of economist whiz kid, Jeffrey Vallance, was "Art + People = Money."  The seminal pathetic band, Colon Cowboy, sang a song which explored the tonal and rhythmic possibilities of this financial equation.  The rental space's lazy boy was moved into the center of the space and became the unavoidable center of attention.  It was very comfortable.  Participants were leveraged to join in on the exquisite corpse drawings.

The show's pinnacle was when a chicken painting sold because it showed how the equation worked in reality.  The whole goal of the show was to create income, so the show was a total success.

Donald Trump was in the show too because he had a poster of one of his quotes up on the wall.  Same with Steve Jobs and Benjamin Franklin.

Nancy White at Romer Young

This is a drawing of a photo of a painting by Nancy White.

I went to this show with my friends, and we had fun.  The hostesses provided beer, Trumer Pils, which had a Berkeley sticker on it because it's made in Berkeley.  I don't recall seeing hops farms in Berkeley.

The art was really good.  It was about color and shape and size and perception and fluorescent lighting that looks like a blizzard on the brightest day of all time.

My friend said there's a gallery that features art in different types of light.  Artificial light is so strange.

I got to meet Nancy, and she was very nice.  She talked about how she made the work.  She used matte acrylic on prepared, tinted paper. I had a hard time hearing exactly how she tinted the paper because it was loud in the small acoustic nightmare.  But it sounded like she somehow textured the paper when preparing it.

The matteness of the work is partly why it's so successful, the light doesn't bounce off of it and jab you in the eyes, so you can look at it from many angles.

You should go see it.  The man with glasses who worked there was very nice and helpful and showed us extra work in a drawer.  The one in the drawer featured on the website was my favorite.  I liked the green and purple.

After the show, we partied and went home.  We had a really hard time finding a parking space but only because goddess was punishing me for making fun of the fossil fuel industry.

P.S.

I just read the Romer Young website description of Nancy's art, and it mentions the lack of white in the paintings.  This lack of white, absence of white does something.  The degree/range of contrast is reduced.   The values of the painted shapes are rather similar, so they kind of blend together instead of having any one shape dominate the painting.  This makes me think that there's a lack of subject other than maybe color or the painting as a whole.

Beth Krebs' Candy Land at Recology

Here's a screenshot of Beth's Instagram account.

I went to this show and stood around, looking at the creations.

Beth Krebs made three dimensional work out of packing styrofoam, styrofoam bowls, packing plastic, motors, golf tees, plastic straws and other things people put into recycling or trash in the city of San Francisco.  

Her creations looked like various identifiable objects or unidentifiable objects or colorful sculptures that my brain tried to make sense of or enjoy.

I watched her video on her instagram account which shows her at Recology talking about her residency experience.  She said she's disgusted by the waste created by the human species but that she tries to be empathetic toward that species when making art from their waste.

I also talked to her in person at the show, and she was very nice.  If my memory serves me well, she said kind of the same thing as she said on her video.  She wanted each creation to have some kind of spirit or life in it.  I'm not quoting her.

Also on her instagram are pictures of her art from the show.  See the screenshot above.

I'm kind of a green freak, hypocritical at times, so I too felt disgust when seeing all the styrofoam waste.

So the show is kind of a mindfuck because it's playful but disgusting at the same time.

This artwork was made by Beth Krebs.

Above is a picture of a stack of styrofoam about 10 feet tall.

Below is a styrofoam sculpture made out of styrofoam.  And by the way, "styrofoam" is a dow chemical brand name.  The technical term for it is EPS which stands for "expanded polystyrene."  Hooray for chemicals!

This artwork was made by Beth Krebs

Jennifer Brandon and Jay DeFeo: Photographic Works

I liked this show in general.  Maybe two pieces in it didn't do anything for me.  It was fun to just look at the pieces.  I don't know why, and I'm not sure I care why.  I'd say that the whole show is about reflected light and its perception.

Jennifer's work is what you see first, and it takes up a lot of space, most of the room is filled up with the size of her work.  Jay's work is smaller.  Pretty much every single work by both artists is monochromatic stuff, shapes and textures represented in two dimensions.  Polychromatic work sometimes offends me, so it's absence from this show left me unoffended. There was a vitrine or whatever you call the art display with the glass that holds work in it.  That held some 3d stuff that the artist or artists used as source material, I believe, and some 3d works.

The man who ran the gallery had his two kids with him, and the one kid would say what the art looked like, "This looks like a cactus.  This looks like a mountain."  And he said, "Come over here, and I'll show you what it is."  "Here" was the vitrine.

How the show will improve my life, I don't know, but there were a lot of nice people there, and the show was hung exceedingly well.

As always it's nice to see the superior art of women as opposed to the inferior art of men.  Even though Jay DeFeo lost one of her teaching jobs because of criminality, her soul was more evolved than any man's.

I took some photos with my camera and then drew the photos.  Here are the drawings.

This is a Jennifer Brandon work of art.

This thing, opus, oeuvre, creation has subtle shapes.  I don't know what it is.

This is a Jennifer Brandon work of art.

This thing is all subtlety.  If you look at it long enough, you start to see it.  It's like some weird story about who knows what the fuck.

This is a Jennifer Brandon work of art.

This was kind of neat.  Broken glass patterns.  Like the invisible patterns we feel but never see in our lives.  Here is a poem I made about this work of art.

my heart is broken into one hundred quadrillion pieces

like safety glass

when a golf ball hits it

because

some dumbfuck was teeing off on a hill overlooking the freeway

This is a Jennifer Brandon work of art.

These three go together because they are of the same subject.  I know what the subject is, but I won't tell you because I don't know what the subject is.  This group of three struck me as lacking controversy.  I can't see people going to war over this grouping of photos.

This is a Jay DeFeo work of art.

I think this was a photocopy.  I like it because it's like looking at clouds and every other natural thing with form and shape that reflects light.

This is a Jay DeFeo work of art.

I liked this one.  It looked like an explosion of paint.  I'd recommend this to people who like art.

This is a Jay DeFeo work of art.

This one looks neat as a drawing.  It's interesting how these works translate to drawings.  This is something that interests me.  I don't know what this work is about.  I don't get the feeling it's about an emotion, but I've been wrong before.  It seems like some kind of observation, like in humor when the comedian says, "Did you ever notice how when you put two shapes next to each other, it changes the way you see them."

Is the stuff in this show art?  I don't know.  It's made by people, so I'll say yes.  It involves manipulation, interpretation of images and control of light and form.  Sure, it's art.