I didn't see the Frida Kahlo show at the De Young

I went to the de Young Museum, but it was closed to the general public because of the pandemic. I went to go pick up my painting from the prematurely closed art exhibition made up of local artists' work.  And so I got my painting, took a photo of it with Frida Kahlo's image on a window and left.

 

While my art was up in the museum, I went there on three different occasions:  alone, with a friend, and with my pandemic bubble.

 

I never saw the concurrent Frida Kahlo exhibit, but I did see some exhibit about artificial intelligence. But I didn't get it.  I didn't get the point of it.  I frequently feel that tech engineers and programmers and that ilk like to slap each other on the back, flatter each other or themselves, and I felt that there was a bit of that in this exhibit.  It's probably because I'm anti-intellectual and willfully ignorant and maybe even unwillfully ignorant that I didn't feel compelled to understand it.  I'd like to talk to an interesting, not boring, person who liked this exhibit, the artificial intelligence exhibit.  I want to know why this was in the museum, what the point of it was.

 

I feel funny, or I feel that it's funny how I didn't ever go into the Frida Kahlo exhibit.  I might have been able to get into it for free on the day I had an artist's pass for the museum because I had a work on display there, but there was a line to get in, and for some reason, I'm not completely and utterly riveted by the story of Frida Kahlo.  I like her, but as with so many things, I'm a bit blasé about her, at least compared to people who seem to love her.  My level of love is at about 7 or 8, and that's based on I don't know what,  the stuff of hers I've seen and what I know about her struggles in her life. I don't really like art that much anyhow.

Even though the museum is closed, you can still look at it from the outside. It is over 20 feet tall and has a tower that looks like a triangle. Pretty much the whole thing is covered in a metal mesh that looks weathered and makes me think of decaying ships wrecked on Normandy beaches in World War 2.

I didn't run my fingers along the mesh, but I should have. I just kind of looked at it and wondered why they put it over the building. I'm not sure it offers any functional advantages, but maybe it provides shade to offices in it by diffusing the light in which case the mesh functions like tree leaves, so that's pretty neat.

There's a sculpture garden on one side of it, and it's pretty nifty actually because the natural surroundings of the sculptures is pretty or whatever adjective you wish to use to describe gardens, alive. The sculptures are all dead, but they are in a living garden.

Kevin Mutch's The Rough Pearl

Here is a picture of a book.

I bought this and read it, but not very well.

Originally I wrote out all my thoughts, but then I deleted what I wrote because it takes me a while to read something and understand it.  But now that I feel like I have some kind of understanding of the book, I have to say that I don't know why you just don't read the book yourself.

I bought it because I'm fascinated with art school adjunct teachers/professors.  I know some pretty well,  and the role/position of adjunct seems kind of shitty, and it seems like everybody knows that.

After looking at the book a second time, I see some guy who's married to a teacher, wants to be some kind of working artist, isn't excited about a lot of his students, wants to fuck a student whom he can relate to.  I don't know, am i forgetting something.

I see a student who is stripping to get through school, who has transcended her environment, who is somewhat interested in her teacher, who is interesting and thoughtful.

The characters seem mostly 3-D.  The teacher wife isn't fully fleshed out.

I don't fully understand the Ron Vitare guy.  He seems like he embodies the energy of the cosmos, like he represents fate or some kind of master plan that guides us through life or seems to fail to guide us through life.  And Adam, the protagonist, rebels against this plan and rejects complacent settling.

It looks like Adam rejects the fake and pursues the real, and I can get behind that, and he comes to this realization through drugs!!!  Hooray for drugs!!!

Even though this book was created by a man, it's still pretty good.  It's not as good as any book created by any woman, but it's still pretty good.

Vernon Ghrier Accused of Sexual Harrassment

Please note.  This story is fiction.

Vernon Ghrier of the Vernon Ghrier Gallery has been accused of Sexual Harrassment by a former employee who was fired after she filed a report with the Brooklyn P. D.

Vernon Ghrier

According to the complaint, Ghrier would repeatedly make completely unwelcome suggestive gestures with his tongue at the Gallery Assistant.

When asked for a statement Ghrier responded, "You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful. I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a Gallery Owner, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

"Review" of Blinky 40th Anniversary: CSUN

There was so much art at Jeffrey Vallance's art show that it was overwhelming.  For a male, it was an extremely strong show, amazing even.  It was a lot of chicken art.  Just go see it.   The walk through with the artist is today. It's at CSUN. "CSUN" means California State University Northridge.  You can get there if you try.

CSUN Art Gallery

18111 Nordhoff st
Northridge, California 91330-8299

This is a drawing of Blinky's exhumation bone in a reliquary.

This is a drawing of a very early chicken work by artist, Jeffrey Vallance.

This is a drawing of a  Jeffrey Vallance Blinky collage.

Again, just go see it unless you don't like animals and don't think you share anything with them as you wake up each day and live your life.

In the same building, there was an exhibit of guest artists' work entitled, Free Range.  It was a show within a show.  It had all kinds of artists' work in it, a lot of artists' work about Blinky and anything related to her.  There was work by Laurie Hassold, Jeffrey Gillette, John Kilduff, Dave Shulman, Victoria Reynolds, Doug Harvey, Dan Green, Marjan Hormozi, Rude Calderon, Auralynn Nguyen, Carlos Rodriguez and many others, a lot of other people.

And there was a show of student work in the shed gallery nearby.  The students each got a poster of Colonel Sanders looking down at KFC from the clouds, and they were charged to make it their own, to use it as a springboard for their imaginations.  There were many nice pieces of student work.

The show was spiritual, about spirit, the energy, the contagious energy of life that penetrates our beings through our senses and maybe even outside of our senses.  Blinky had a spirit, a life, a pluckiness, a pulse, a libido, an eroticism, a motivation and an electricity that made her move around and make sounds.  And then her life ended suddenly, tragically.  Wham! She was dead, gone, processed without appreciation until Mr. Vallance celebrated her life 40 years ago.

Jeffrey Vallance has a long history making art, and Blinky is not his only work.  He celebrated Blinky's life, but that's not the only thing he's done.  He's done a lot of other things, but we won't get into those right now.

Go see the show.  It's up through March 16, 2019.

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.