Let's Enjoy A Bit of Tradition - Grace Jones Does Little Drummer Boy

I don't know about you, but the Christmas music that is being blasted all over shopping malls at this time of the year makes me slightly nauseous. So I thought I could, as a perfect antidote, post two or three videos of counter-Xmas music, you know, just to keep occupied.

Ladies and gentlemen and transgendered reading me, please enjoy the one and only Grace Jones!

Your Social Life - Abbreviated

Casino-Luxembourg Forum d'Art Contemporain, "Aquarium". Photo: Jessica Theis – Blue Box Design, 2009.

As I warned my beloved readership recently, the posting here at FBC! will be very light until mid-January, as I'm busy preparing a trip to the old homeland. I haven't paid attention at all to whatever was going on in town this week, so quickly:

1) A few galleries in LA are showing David Wojnarowicz A Fire In My Belly, but better yet, the Hammer Museum which, shall I remind you, is celebrating its 20th anniversary by offering a free entrance to its premises (until Dec. 18th), will be showing the video in its entirety and on a loop, starting today and until Dec. 17th. You can also watch it online on the site of PPOW who represents the estate, and has been kindly sending out screening copies all over the country.

2) EGHQ is having an opening on Sat, for David Hendren. 

3) There's an opening at Pepin Moore  in Chinatown tomorrow evening.

4) For the writers out there, Triple Canopy is issuing a call for proposals. I normally don't relay this type of info but this particular case, the areas covered are interesting, and they do pay a (very modest) $500 fee for the winning commissions.

5) And, for the artists under 40 reading me (the many, many of you, right?) the Casino-Luxembourg has a residency program. Yours truly has curated there in the past, it's a really cool space and it is smack right in the middle of Europe. residencies are always a great way to meet people and create new work, so I hope some of you will apply.

6) I apologize to the few people who asked for an exchange of links during the past week. I'm open to it as long as it is an arts link, but I haven't really had the time to update the links section of the blog recently and it probably won't happen before mid-January. So, if you're still reading me, please email me around January 15 and I'll work on it. Thanks!

7) Lastly, yesterday I went on a whim to the opening of the Lucknow exhibition at LACMA. I know zilch about Indian Art of the 18th century, but even with zero knowledge I was blown away by the artworks. It's a fantastic exhibition and it officially opens to the public on Sunday. It's also the perfect show to take your family over the holidays.

It Must be December 1st, Let's Blame "The Gays"

When the Republican Party ignited the Culture Wars in the late 1980s, it was after the failure of the Ronald Reagan and then George Bush governments to lead the country out of the economic crisis that followed the 1987 stock market crash.
Now that two decades have passed and that out-of-control deregulation (it's the point of deregulation to be out of control, isn't it?) and the ferocious greed engineered by Bush The Second and his cronies have unleashed on the United States its worst recession since the Great Depression, they are at it again.

If you've been following a bit what happened, you know that Senate Majority Boehner, He Of The Ridiculous Name, has decided to curate the current Hide/Seek exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington instead of, I don't know, doing more pressing legislation.

For example, voting on extending the unemployment benefits of several millions Americans whose sudden lack of funds will mean more economic hardship for everybody.
It's a no-brainer, really: unemployed people lose benefits, therefore can't pay the rent/the mortgage, landlords/banks lose money, housing stock go derelict, less money gets into the economy to encourage consumer spending, Santa won't come this year for  the millions of little Christian offspring of the unemployed (take that, Glenn Beck - or is it O'Reilly?-  and your idiotic rants about the "war on Christmas"). It's 2 millions people who are going to lose their benefits. Out of a population of roughly 300 millions Americans. You likely know one of them. I know one, a hardworking grandmother whose benefits have been cut and who may find herself homeless in a couple of weeks if she can't come up with the rent.

In a nutshell, Mr. Boehner got his penis in a tick because of a David Wojnarowicz video, demanded that the video be removed after being alerted to it by a right-wing religious organization, and the Smithsonian powers that be caved in. It's the video above, which you can find easily on YouTube, obviously.
This all should remind you of the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition being canceled at the Corcoran in DC which, in fact, did much more for Mapplethorpe's posthumous fame than if the show had processed ahead.

Now let's be clear here: as an art lover, former curator, writer, and plain old human being, FBC! is resolutely against censorship of any kind.  I find censorship abhorrent mainly because I resent the fact that anybody would think they can decide in my name what should or shouldn't be allowed to read, watch, see, listen to, attend, witness, enjoy, react to, or even dislike.  Heaven forbid. If I'm going to be shocked by a David Wojnarowicz video, I demand the right to see for myself whether I will, in fact, be shocked or not. For the record, I'm not. But even if I was, I'd want to see it to decide for myself.

And, I also feel that if I have moved all the way to a country that embedded the right to free speech in its Constitution, I should  demand that this right be respected. In France, we don't have a right to free speech embedded in our Constitution.

Lastly, we are constantly bombarded by tons of right-wing propaganda from the likes of Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and their ilk. You just need to long on the internet and go to a newspaper homepage to see their last idiotic, outreagous comments.
Do I demand that their pictures and videos and speeches be removed from the airwaves, medias, the internet and all that because they shock my atheist and progressive core beliefs?
No, I don't, because I think wingnuts should be allowed to express their own baseless, fact-less beliefs if they want to, even if they disturbed my Cartesian, scholarly and scientific values.
To be fair, what really shocks me about US right-wing propaganda in general is how stupid it is and how it assumes that the American People at large are a populace largely constituted of morons.
It may very well be, but I have a bit more faith in human decency and intelligence than the condescending Republicans have in their own constituency.

In any case, I strongly feel that the National Portrait Gallery shouldn't have caved in to Mr. Boehner's demand and should have kept the Wojnarowicz video in the exhibition, even if threatened with federal funding cuts. If you put something in your exhibition, it's because it has a place in it, so removing it is senseless and spineless, intellectually speaking.

I'm pretty sure that in real life, Mr. Boehner doesn't give a damn about David Wojnarowicz, who has been dead for 20 years and can't therefore defend his own work.
What Mr. Boehner, as a politician, is likely to be interested in, is  to find a way to distract the public opinion from the project of his own party to stall all bills until the Bush-era tax cuts in favor of the wealthy are extended, instead of creating a strong fiscal policy that would help reign in the nation deficit.
A large part of it being inherited from 8 years of George Bush's administration, including the TARP banks bailout (remember? it was before the Nov. 2008 election). As were the useless, senseless wars waged in Iraq and Afghanistan that have drained the nation of the blood of its youth and of the money in its coffers to enrich  the arms dealers and private contractors in cahoots with the people who initiated the slaughter in the name of the Nation. Your "representatives".

Which leads me to the Pentagon study released yesterday in favor of repealing the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy, and to the date chosen by Senator Boehner to target an artwork made by an openly gay artist who died 20 years ago.
Have you noticed today is December 1st? It's World Aids Day?
Instead of writing about Republican's smokescreens created to dissimulate their own economic ineptitude, I would have much preferred spending the time remembering the wonderful people who died of Aids, gay and straights alike, anonymous and famous artists alike, and look at the work of Gonzalez-Torres or maybe watch a Dominique Bagouet dance piece. Many great artists died of Aids, and today should be a day to remember them and their contribution to world culture.

Instead, I can't help but reflect that each time conservative political parties are in a bind, they like to deflect the attention from their lack of results, from their criminal inaction or worse, from the corruption that is endemic to political life (hello, secret corporate donations to parties!) by blaming the Other.

Now, since the atrocities of World War II, Western democratic governments can't really go on blaming the Jews as their political forebears did for a couple thousands years, so they have to find another Other to blame.

In France right now, Mr. Sarkozy has found a perfect build-in minority to point the finger at and enact discriminatory measures against, the Roms, after distracting the French from his failed economic policies - which also favor the rich -  by making the wearing of the burqa illegal in public.
It should be noted that less than 2,000 women were wearing it in France, out of a population of 60 millions.
I have no idea how many Roms are currently living in France (ethnic statistics are illegal in France because they are inherently a racist tool of oppression, and because we have quite an ugly history with our own Jewish population, as I'm sure my erudite readers know), but I'd be ready to bet it doesn't hover much more above 200,000 people.

In the United States, the two Others that the Republican party has been trying to blame for the last couple of decades at least are either the illegal immigrants; a minority that is easy to construct because immigrating legally to the United States is almost impossible, or "The Gays".

For clarity's purpose and because this is a long post, "The Gays" encompass all LGBT, a category of Americans whose core identity is in fact increasingly being accepted, albeit slowly, by the American people a large (see: repeal of DADT above).
There are setbacks to gay marriage, obviously, but just the fact that it is a legislative issue is a big advance, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were definitively legalized everywhere in the States within the next two decades or so. The instance of gay teens bullying have generated a large viral online campaign in support, the It Gets Better one, though your truly thinks it would be more effective to ban bullying in all schools, period.
Now *that* would be a piece of legislative work the Republican Party could enact and I'd totally support it. I can be bi-partisan that way.


The GOP has to thread a thin line when targeting illegal immigrants because they are trying to attract the legal Latino ones who are bound to become a huge political force in the next few decades. Since many Latino are catholic, what's best than manufacture a symbolic scandal that costs the Republican Party nothing, can be disguised as fighting "anti-catholic propaganda" (whereas no one gives a damn about defining the US as a "nation of Christians", which I personally resent as anti-Jewish, anti-secular, anti-other religions propaganda), and that targets the work of a dead gay artists on the eve of World Aids Day?

What I'm trying to say is that the date chosen by Rep. Boehner to enact censorship is a highly symbolic one, one to warn the LGBT part of the population that they are being the next target.

The Republican majority is rearing its ugly head, and already prepares whatever symbolic action it can take to hide the fact that is has become the party of the ultra wealthy and not of the poor millions schmucks who voted them back into power.
The next few years are going to be hideous economically for 80% of the American people, and the Republican policies are going to make them worse. Because the Republican Party knows it is bound to fail economically, it is now choosing a convenient scapegoat to divert the attention from its own future political and economic disasters, be it at the price of discriminating against The Gays.

If you feel as strongly as I do about the issues at hand, please join this Facebook page where the email address of the various concerned officials are given (including Mr. Boehner's) for you to express your disappointment at this act of censorship and its deliberate attack against the gay community at such a symbolic period.
Meanwhile, give as much support as you can to your LGBT friends, to artists and to the arts, and fight senseless discrimination.

Your Social Life, A Free Hammer Museum Interlude and John Cale OBE

Einstürzende Neubauten, Ein Seltener Vogel


It's Thanksgiving holiday, most galleries are closed, and next week they will all be going en force to Miami (for Art Basel, Pulse, etc.) so there's not much going on in Los Angeles until the week after next.

FBC! takes advantage of the hiatus to let you know that rather than go spend the money you don't have on items you don't need on Black Friday, you could make a better use of your time and dough by going to the Hammer Museum today. The Hammer is turning 20, and for the next 20 days the entrance is free, so you can go see the Eva Hesse, Mark Manders, Julian Hober Hoeber and My Barbarian shows, in addition to the selection from the Grunwald Center by Frances Stark (I think it's still up).

Meanwhile, I also want to remind you that Einstürzende Neubauten will be playing 2 dates in Los Angeles next week, at the Music Box in Hollywood on Wednesday and at the Echoplex on Thursday. FBC! will be there, hoping for a great experience. I always heard great things about them on stage, but it will be my first EN concert.

Lastly, congratulations to John Cale, O.B.E, (does that make him the new OBE Wan Kenobi?) who came to pick up his chocolate medal from Prince Charles last week with a tie that matched his hair colors (while, pink and blue).  Cale proves once again he's the real Prince of Wales, as for the medal, some people seem pissed off he accepted it. Me, I think it's pretty cool, maybe he'll be invited to sing Guts at Prince William's wedding, who knows, with Chicken Shit as an encore?
As long as it doesn't distract him from coming up with the new album the world has been waiting for during the last 5 years...

[I don't know where the image of John Cale with Prince Charles comes from, except for the PA watermark. I'll be happy to attribute proper credit if someone directs me to the right source, thanks!].

Your Social Life, The Way The Morning Broke Was Quite Unusual

Sorry for the absence of posting last week, yours truly was drowning in French paperwork, grading students papers and having badass allergies, so I had no time to look up what was going on. This week (and the next few ones until early next year) I won't be able to attend much art social stuff, so the posting will likely remain spotty.

Let's start with tonight, at Frank Pictures Gallery in Santa Monica where Vanessa Place and Barry Schwabsky, among others, will participate in a reading. The event starts at 7.15 with nibbles and drinks and the readings proper at 8 PM.
Tonight as well, synchronized open doors from the galleries at the PDC, where our friends at anotheryearinla will present Gift Shop. Still at the PDC, Standard Deviation at See Line Gallery, a group show with Natasha Snellman in it, while Annie Wharton presents The Way The Morning Broke Was Quite Unusal, a show whose title is taken from the opening line of my favorite Front 242 song (it's pronounced Front Deux Quatre Deux, BTW).
Still at the PDC, Paul Young presents Deadpan and Soft & Hard. Deadpan presents videos by John Wood and Paul Harrison, whom you may know as the duet behind the Art In Theory series (you know, the white books with tons of excerpts from famous art theoreticians), while  Soft and Hard presents videos by a selection of women including FBC! gal pal Julie Lequin.

Proving that Thursday is the new Saturday in Los Angeles, Art Center Los Angeles on Pico, a place that is so criminally close to me it's surprising I haven't been there yet, shows Hans Weigand tonight.

And if you are in Pomona tonight(you need the gift of ubiquity to see everything in Los Angeles, unless you are Peter Frank who does see everything there is to see), don't miss the opening for M.A Peers and the panel discussion as well, featuring artists Steve Roden and Doug Harvey (who's also the distinguished critic for the LA Weekly).

On Friday 323 Projects presents You've Got Problems? We've got Solutions, featuring Matthew Timmons, a telephonic exhibition if I understand correctly.

On Saturday, Margo Leavin presents an exhibition curated by the great James Welling, The City Proper, with FBC! faves Amir Zaki (hi Amir!) and John Baldessari, plus Zoe Crosher, Catherine Opie, Shannon Ebner, William Leavitt, Allen Ruppersberg, etc.
Steve Turner opens Big Four, while Tom Solomon shows Brett Lund. Meanwhile, yours truly will be doing her annual workout by going on the Great LA Walk, rain or shine, so you likely won't see me around at any openings after.

Have a great art-filled weekend, and before I sign off, congratulation to former LA art dealer and all-around  curatorial force of nature Sue Spaid who is now the new executive director of the Baltimore Contemporary Museum!
Hurray Sue Spaid, and Hurray the Baltimore Contemporary!

Your Social Life With Iannis Xenakis, Rachel Lachowicz,Edgar Arceneaux, Etc.

FBC! is still marveling at the awesomeness of last week when the Blinky Palermo and the Matthew Brannon exhibitions illuminated what is otherwise a really trying period of my life, so I can only encourage my beloved readership to run see these shows as fast as they can, and to see the Kaltenbach exhibition at anotheryearinla before it closes (on the 10, I think).

There are a few openings in town this week, starting with FBC! pal Edgar Arceneaux at Susanne Vielmetter  who's also showing Martin McMurray. Still in Culver City, where you can also go attend Kelly Barrie's at LAXart. While in the neighborhood, don't miss Zoe Crosher's An Unveiling at EGHQ. Also in Culver City, Stop Move at Blum and Poe, a group show with Nathalie Djurberg, Hirsch Perlman, Robin Rhode and Matt Saunders. At François Ghebaly, Candice Lin presents Holograms.

FBC! never sets foot on the Westside (given the traffic there and the horrible parking situation) but I highly recommend the Rachel Lachowicz show at Shoshana Wayne at Bergamot Station. It's been a while since I've seen Lachowicz work, about a decade at least, so I'm curious to see where she's at with her work right now.

On the other side of town, MOCA presents something really interesting and not completely vapid for once, the Iannis Xenakis (who once taught John Cale avant-garde composition at Tanglewood) event Persepolis, at Los Angeles State Historic Park (on the Eastern edge of downtown). It starts at 6 PM and it's free, without reservations required. And, if I wasn't going to the Edgar Arceneaux opening, I'd attend it, it's not every day you have avant-garde music/events being recreated in LA. It goes with the MOCA/Pacific Design Center show about Xenakis, which I assume comes from the Drawing Center in NYC. If you click on the link above you can go through the sketches/notation and listen to his music.

On Sunday there's a mega-event at LACMA to end (?) the year-long Fallen Fruit residency, Let Them Eat LACMA,  with many performances (including Ann Magnuson) but I won't attend because I work on Sundays, and also I need to come  clean on that: I really, really dislike group activities and participatory/interactive art. I understand how people like to have fun together, but I like my art less crowded. Which makes me a fucking elitist, I guess, a label I can live with, as long as I don't have to mix up with hundreds of people.
This being said, I wish Fallen Fruit lots of success in their enterprises.

(pic on top from the MOCA website, I suppose an original photograph of the historical Persepolis event, but I couldn't find credits).

Einstürzende Neubauten, Bleib, To Enlighten A Crummy Day

Today is the Day of The Deads, of whom I have plenty to remember, thank you Grim Reaper, for harvesting my family first and foremost (we're so distinguished, you have no idea); and  today is also the day where America is poised to welcome back into power the same vociferating fascists who got 8 years to put us in the crap we are in presently, but couldn't let the spineless, pussyfooting current majority more than two years to try and clean up after them.
In short, we're fucked, your fault, you people who don't bother to vote,  so please shut up if you're unhappy during the next 2 years and your precious freedoms are taken away from you while you're getting poorer and poorer and the 2% of the population that's wealthy becomes richer and richer.

Meanwhile, I thought we needed a bit of something to cheer up, so I'm posting a bit of Einstürzende Neubauten, who are coming to LA on December 1st and 2nd for two concerts, at Music Box (formerly the Fonda) and at the Echoplex. FBC! will be there (thank you, Carmen, for the tickets!). While not as batshit crazy about them as I am about John Cale, I like their music a lot but never got the chance to see them live. Everybody I know who's seen them told me it was a sight to behold, so off I'll go.
The song is called "Bleib", it means "Stay".

Also, art lovers, I highly recommend, praise, love the Matthew Brannon show at David Kordansky. I haven't stopped thinking about it since last Saturday night. It's the most perfect show, ever. I am not sure I will have time to write about it any time soon (too many deadlines and other issues), so I want to let the word out that this is the most important show you can see in Los Angeles this year.