Rocío Boliver (La Congelada de Uva), “La Virgen Pulpígena” (2014) (photo by Juan San Juan, via humanresourcesla.com)
LOS ANGELES — This week, a show of Riot Grrrl art opens in Orange County, LACE throws a Valentine’s Day party, Frank Lloyd Wright’s first LA home reopens, there’s a mini-conference on the limits of performance, and more!
Frank Lloyd Wright, Hollyhock House exterior (1919-1921) (via barnsdall.org)
Hollyhock House Reopens
When: Opens Friday February 13, 4pm
Where: Barnsdall Art Park (4800 Hollywood Boulevard, East Hollywood, Los Angeles)
The Hollyhock House was Frank Lloyd Wright’s first project in Los Angeles, built between 1919 and 1921 for oil heiress Aline Barnsdall. With a fluid transition between interior and exterior spaces and a Maya-inspired design, it was his earliest attempt to develop a Southern California regional style of architecture. The house, which is the centerpiece of Barnsdall Art Park, has been closed for three years for restoration but will reopen this Friday. For 24 hours beginning Friday at 4pm, the house will be open for self-guided tours, with the admission fee being waived until 11am on Saturday. After that, the house will be open for “Walk Wright In” tours, Thursday–Sunday, 11am–4pm.
Overstimulated: Limits of Performance
When: Saturday, February 14, 4–9pm
Where: Human Resources (410 Cottage Home Street, Chinatown, Los Angeles)
Organized by Dominic Johnson, Overstimulated is an afternoon and evening of presentations, discussions, and performances by artists and scholars on the limits of performance. Participants including Heather Cassils, Sheree Rose, Zackary Drucker, and Nao Bustamante will address how artists deal with limits set by institutions, tradition, history, or even themselves. The event will conclude with a performance by body-oriented Mexican performance artist Rocio Boliver.
Lisa Truttmann and Guido Spannocchi, “Elsewhere Lands” collage, 2014 (via lisatruttmann.at)
Elsewhere Lands
When: Saturday, February 14, 8pm
Where: The Wulf (1026 South Sante Fe Avenue, #203, Downtown, Los Angeles)
On a 2013 road trip, artists Lisa Truttmann and Guido Spannocchi visited numerous theme parks, interviewing the workers and visitors and collecting stories, myths, and memories about these places. Originally intended as a conventional film, Elsewhere Lands is an abstracted, multi-layered, audio-visual installation that weaves together the various elements they gathered.
LACE Valentine’s Party
(via welcometolace.org)
When: Saturday, February 14, 8–11pm
Where: LACE (6522 Hollywood Boulevard, Hollywood, Los Angeles)
One of LA’s longest-running nonprofit arts spaces, LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) is teaming up with Artillery magazine to throw a Valentine’s Day party this Saturday. Performers include Dynasty Handbag, Geneva Jacuzzi, and Tiffany Trenda, who often performs in a full-body cat suit covered in glowing screens or QR codes, giving her the appearance of a robo-dominatrix. An erotic reading room will feature poets John Tottenham and Warhol superstar-cum-cult-movie actress Mary Woronov, among others. Tickets are only $10 ($8 for LACE members).
(via lazinefest.com)
LA Zine Fest
When: Sunday, February 15, 11am–5pm
Where: Homenetmen Center (3347 N. San Fernando Road, Glassell Park, Los Angeles)
If you didn’t get enough independent artist books at the LA Art Book Fair last weekend, don’t fret, the LA Zine Fest is coming. Now in its fourth year, the fair was started in 2012 with the mission of “promoting zine culture as a means to connect the pre-exisiting communities in LA–artistic or otherwise.” This year’s free, all-ages event will include over 200 zine makers and small-press publishers including local poetry collective The WOMEN Group, Lucas Bros animator Sean Solomon, and Boyle Heights bookseller Seite.
Alien She
Photo documentation of “The Swan Tool,” performance by Miranda July (2001) (photo by David Nakamoto, via ocma.net)
When: Opens Sunday, February 15
Where: Orange County Museum of Art (850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach, California)
The Riot Grrrl movement of the early ’90s combined the immediacy and fury of punk with a radical DIY, feminist, queer, and egalitarian stance. Although it was mainly considered a musical phenomenon, Alien She explores the influence that the movement had across a wide spectrum of artistic production. Focusing on seven contemporary artists — Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Tammy Rae Carland, Miranda July, Faythe Levine, Allyson Mitchell, L.J. Roberts, and Stephanie Syjuco — the exhibition presents work produced over the past 20 years, ranging from posters to sculpture to new media. (For more, check out Hyperallergic’s review of the show when it was in San Francisco.)
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How does Rocío Boliver’s near exact copy of Carolee Schneemann’s “Meat Joy”, a piece performed a half century ago ( in1964), at a time when performance art was barely a genre, qualify as either “overstimulating” or pushing the “limits of performance art”? The press release claims these works are challenging institutions, as if performance art started in November. Maybe I’m showing my age.
Hi Ruth, Women performance artists cite each other in homage. They must, because no one else does it! That said, that a photograph from a performance reminds us of another performance does not mean that one performance is a “near exact copy” of the other. Rocío’s work shares with Schneeman’s a deeply feminist concern with the politics of the body, it operates as a counterpressure against the shaming, and often violent ways in which women’s bodies are visualized, approached and handled by the world. You might learn more about that work here: http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/enc09-trasnocheo/item/376-09-rocio-boliver-trasnocheo This is Rocío’s first performance in the region: She lives and works in Mexico. (I am associated with Human Resources LA, and figure since you took the time to respond to our programming, I would do the same. J Doyle)
Let’s also not forget the Hokusai reference: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream_of_the_Fisherman%27s_Wife
Rocío has rescued all squid-slurped vaginas from the phallogocentristic hegemony, promptly 200 years later.
Thanks for the comments, J Doyle. True, it isn’t fair to judge an entire piece based on a photograph, but the photograph is the selected PR for this performance, and associations and provocations of the work are why this photograph is being used. I don’t wish to condemn the artist’s efforts from such a distance, but the curatorial statement postures the work as boundary-pushing when there is no evidence of this whatsoever. The press release:
“What limits are imposed on performance? How are these imposed, both actively and tacitly, by institutions, or by form, by tradition or by history? How are limits imposed by artists themselves, towards productive ends, as constructive boundaries with which to wrestle? Or by collaboration? How do artists comply with, reject, or overcome limits in the course of their work, or in its presentation, documentation, or dissemination?”
How is Rocío’s work pushing institutional boundaries not already crossed by “Meat Joy” or “Interior Scroll” or Annie Sprinkle’s “Public Cervix Announcement” (1990), an honest question? Perhaps I’m a little irritated today, but maybe it’s the presentation of the work as doing something especially vanguard that is bothersome. Or take Mr. Vartanian’s reference to a work that’s 200 hundred years old. Where am I supposed to see in Rocío’s work her doing something beyond the (feminist) performance canon?
Thanks again.