YORK CHANG, second life (Project Room)
June 18 – August 28
Artist Reception, Saturday, June 18, 2011, 6-10pm
Artist Statement
This project explores Los Angeles’ legacy as a site of artistic transformation and second chances, through the poetic investigation and fictional re-construction of the Artist Actualization Services, a short-lived and obscure performance art group active in Los Angeles from 1979-1980. The underground group loosely combined the tenets of self-help movements with a strident rejection of fixed artistic identity and normative histories. In a short period of time, the Artist Actualization Services developed a small, near-fanatical following by exhorting its members to take part in a controversial cultural production strategy called “Posing,” where member artists actively thwarted the process of canonization by wholly appropriating the identities of more well-known contemporaries in order to create attention for new work. With the help of silent collaborators on the editorial board of Southern California’s seminal performance art magazine High Performance, the Artist Actualization Services created multiple reports of their fictional actions, successfully attributed to other artists. These reports, undetected by art historians until recently, quietly subvert vested notions of authorship, and ultimately call into question the entire project of art history.
Viewers are invited to critically explore the recently-uncovered history of this enigmatic organization through a range of works and media, including photography, video, performance, and archival documents, which pose questions about the close relationship between artistic identity and art history. A new issue of High Performance magazine will be published in conjunction with the exhibition, to correct the apparent errors generated in the magazine by the Artist Actualization Services between 1979-1980.
JERRI ALLYN and Inez S. Bush, Debating Through the Arts: Exhibition & Performance 3(18th Street Gallery)
June 18 – August 28
Artist Reception, Saturday, June 18, 2011, 6-10pm
EVENTS
From June 3 through August, 28 in the main gallery, Artists Jerri Allyn and Inez S. Bush, with collaborating artists Juna Amano, Micol Hebron, Michele Jaquis, Carol McDowell, Marissa Mercado, Rosalyn Myles,Shana Nys Dambrot, Juliana Ostrovsky, Beth Peterson, Karl Jean Petion, Erika Reynoso, Trinidad Ruiz, Marjan Vayghan, and Erich Wise will present Debating Through the Arts: Exhibition & Performance 3, during the summer based on a model United Nations. The accompanying Exhibition features some of the creative proposals that have emerged from Debates 1 and 2. Discreet installations include sculpture, photography, video projections, interactive stations and conceptual artwork, some of which will change during the residency.
CLICK HERE for more information on the Debating Through the Arts: Exhibition & Performance 3 project
Each year 18th Street Arts Center sets an annual theme which provides a unifying principle for our artists’ research and inquiry. The theme for 2011 is Legacy. Our 2011 artists will explore the idea of artistic legacy and the numerous forms it can take as well as the debates that are provoked by such forms. According to 18th Street Artistic Director, Clayton Campbell, “18th Street is one of the 60 cultural institutions across Southern California creating a 2011 exhibit for the Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945-1980 initiative sponsored by the Getty Foundation. The nature of Pacific Standard Time, which is a celebration of the L.A. art scene during its birth, involves a critical examination of artistic legacy. This opens up numerous questions and lines of investigation for artists whose work is ephemeral, durational, or fugitive. Because of our Pacific Standard Time exhibit (featuring Suzanne Lacy, Leslie Labowitz- Starus, Rachel Rosenthal, Barbara T. Smith, EZTV, and Electronic Café International) we decided to devote our entire exhibition year to the theme of Legacy.”
We have selected four fellowship artists from a competitive process who will activate our galleries as artists in residence from February through late August 2011, followed by the opening on September 24 of Collaboration Labs. The 18th Street Artist Fellows will address basic questions about how artistic legacy is passed down, whether it should be passed down, and whether ephemeral performative and media-based work can be re-performed/re-envisioned by the authors or by new generations of artists. The projects of the Fellows involve a strong degree of public engagement that will open new lines of thinking while considering the legacy of art-making and intellectual ferment that has made Los Angeles such an amazing site for creativity. Beginning in February 1 through April 24, 2011, Richard Newton will be in residence in the main gallery. His project, Have You Seen My Privacy, will involve multiple presentations of video, ephemera, and correspondence accompanied by public dialogues with artists active in Southern California from 1960 onwards. Newton will actively collaborate with younger artists to develop three performances allied with the presentations. At the same time in the 18th Street Project Room, Vincent Ramos’ research-based project, Outsider Art: Others From Elsewhere Doing Something Altogether Different…Sort Ofwill look at works developed in Southern California in the 1960’s by artists who were not from the region, but whose projects informed and influenced the work of local artists. He will develop new works along with constructing a visual time-line of the many disparate pieces from these “outsider” artists. From June 3rd through August 28th in the main gallery, Artist Jerri Allyn, collaborating with Inez Bush and other artists, will present Debating Through the Arts: Performance Art 3, based on a continuation of a model United Nation as paradigm. Besides further debates, they will create a mediation environment housing and exhibiting creative proposals emerging from the debates. In the Project Room, York Chang’s Second Life imagines itself as the art world version of the video game ‘Second Life’ where participants construct their own fictional artistic identities drawn from LA artists from 1965-85. His exhibit will reconstruct the offices of Artist Actualization Services, a short-lived but influential artist organization in Los Angeles between 1980-85, which called on artists to constantly reinvent themselves.
Barbara T. Smith is one of the pioneers of performance and body art. Along with such artists as Chris Burden, Allan Kaprow, and Paul McCarthy, Smith redefined the nature of art by creating durational performances in which she used her own body often at some personal risk. Beginning in 1968, Smith was foregrounding her own corporeal and gendered experience in experimental performances such as Ritual Meal and Feed Me. In the 21st Century Odyssey, Smith embarked upon a journey quest for spiritual transformation thus re-inscribing the tourist landscape. Her life long commitment to alternative spirituality as in Celebration of the Holy Squash anticipates many contemporary artists who incorporate spiritual practices in art making. A co-founder of “f space” in Santa Ana, Smith also worked with alternative spaces from the 1970’s in Los Angeles such as LAICA (Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art) and Close Radio, and was the Director of the New Gallery at the 18th Street Arts Center.
Pacific Standard Time is an unprecedented collaboration of more than sixty cultural institutions across Southern California, coming together to tell the story of the birth of the L.A. art scene. Initiated through grants from the Getty Foundation, Pacific Standard Time will take place for six months beginning October 2011. Pacific Standard Time is an initiative of the Getty. The presenting sponsor is Bank of America.
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