GARY PANTER BLOG

Eno- Baby’s On Fire- Here Come the Warm Jets
Beefheart and the Magic Band- Click Clack- Spotlight Kid
The Mothers of Invention- Jelly Roll Gumdrop- Ruben and the Jets
Cream- Tales of Brave Ulysses- Disraeli Gears
Pere Ubu- Thriller- Dub Housing
The Rolling Stones- Flight 505- Aftermath
The Jefferson Airplane- Coming Back to Me- Surrealistic Pillow
The Beach Boys- She’s Going Bald- Smiley Smile
Ornette Coleman- What Reason Could I Give?- Science Fiction
Todd Dockstader- Scene of the Crime- Bijou

 I think that I can speak for the both of us and not be demure and say that Devin Flynn and I are stoked about the swell review of our record “Devin and Gary Go Outside” penned by CHIZZLY ST. CLAW on the TINYMIXTAPE blog, even though there is the ‘Gary and David’ typo. It doesn’t matter. Thanks very much!

I would just like to say to CHIZZLY that we are DEVIN GARY & ROSS, now, and working on a new psychedelic record and that now we are a lot more swirlier than before, when it was only Devin and me, because three people swirling is a third more swirly than two and just maybe more than the sum of the swirl and that I hope that you will be stoked when you eventually hear it!

http://www.tinymixtapes.com/music-review/Gary-Panter-Devin-Flynn-Gary-David-Go-Outside

In early POP ART books, Peter Saul’s work  is most often represented by a painting of oranges, cut in half, running around firing guns indiscriminately in the company of money, rendered in bright oil paint colors and slashes. He says that he was trying to paint like De Kooning.

De Kooning had been ruling the world of painting for half a decade already, way back then, with his lavish calligraphic arm-long gorgeous linear sweeps and lovely color overlays– with his big fat ABSTRACT paintings. He had out bravura’d Picasso, a major road block in the way of painter’s ambitions since the first decades of the 20th century. Plus, De Kooning had re-introduced figuration into the newly established church of abstraction and the nudes were ugly and insulting to women.  De Kooning parked his paintwagon in the middle of the art highway and there was a traffic jam. Everyone was honking the horn.

So Peter Saul gets out of his fucking ice-cream wagon and out flails and outsmears and out color-composes De Kooning and not only kicks DeKooning’s ass in the abstraction domain, but opens a Pandora’s box, a Fibber McGee’s closet, of obscene, slanderous, jaw-dropping satirical pictorial indictments of humanity. Guns, ducks, nudes, soldiers, jet fighters, bombs, pirates, stagecoaches, Roman centurions, swans, cupckes, exploding subway cars, bridges twisting like licorish whips, Chairman Mao, Hitler, Andy Warhol and Stalin slugging it out. He not only insulted women he insults everyone on planet earth–all of humanity. Everything we hold dear. Yet, we are not hurt. This critical alchemy might serve as a lesson for all sensitivities. Or not.

Peter is a nice guy, but he is not going to protect you from yourself, or me either. If you don’t know his work you are in for an electrocution of your sense of what is funny and profound. It’s not for everybody. Peter could care less. He has his own ice-cream truck, metaphorically speaking, and he is one of the best painters in the world and folks know it.

Thursday August 19, 7 PM Gary Panter and PETER SAUL in conversation with Keith Mayerson Admission: $5 | Free for MoCCA Members, Manhattan

In the early 1970s, pictures of the work of Oyvind Fahlstrom started jumping out of art books at me. A lot of exciting pictures of art were jumping out of books at me– Peter Saul, Jim Nutt, Karl Wirsum, Cliff Westermann, Claes Oldenburg, Martial Rayesse, Eduardo Paolozzi, Frank Stella, Eduard Kienholz, Larry Poons, David Hockney, Ed Ruscha–a lot of exciting art was coming into view.

Forty year later, Fahlstrom’s work continues to fascinate me in the beauty of conception, strange intensity and the many forms it takes. If you look for Fahlstrom in a POP ART book, you will probably notice, first, his paintings that use the devices of KRAZY KAT, a conceptually advanced newspaper comic from the 1920s, which was already abstract. Making it even more abstract made George Herriman’s KRAZY KAT even stranger, yet it was not diminished or defaced by the reinvestigation of the strip by the younger artist. One suspects kindred sprites inhabiting Herriman and Fahlstrom.

Fahlstrom made all kinds of work: paintings that had magnetic elements that could be reconfigured, image elements floating on water, board games, vacuum-formed signs, happenings, radio plays, labyrinthine drawings tracing the flow of money and power around the globe in comic book hieroglyph, exploded comic environments, three dimensional porcupine-like wall pieces bearing poetic fragments. 

Later in the 70s, I discovered and purchased the catalog for a project and art show called E.A.T.– Experiments in Art and Technology . The idea of the project was to partner artists with corporations to enable artists to utilize advanced manufacturing techniques and information technology, such as it was. Many artists were involved– Rauschenberg, Oldenberg, Kitaj, Lichtenstein, Warhol to name a few. (Another topic would be Warhol’s wonderful shower-stall sculpture and Rauschenburg’s robotic mudpit produced with E.A.T.) The catalog recounted the course of the project’ varied attempts, successes, failures and near-misses. Fahlstrom was paired with an outdoor sign manufacturing company and produced a series of plexiglass and sign mounts inspired by the work of ROBERT CRUMB in ZAP comics, which really got my attention.

“Oyvind Fashlstrom, The Art of Writing”, is delivered in dense academic prose, yet not impossible for mortals to read. Bessa explores Oyviind’s early work with concrete poetry and radio plays, contrasting Fahlstrom’s procedural and strategic approach to an architecture of poetry, resonations between words, sounds, meanings, associations, usage, overlay and multilingualism– as opposed to the more typical graphic, schematic, concrete poem, which is often primarily visual and typographic. Relations between his textural experiments and early magnetically mobile paintings are demonstrated and that is helpful in trying to visualize the complexity of play in Oyvind’s work and mind. This is an informative well-crafted study of Fahlstrom’s varied approaches medium to medium. Clues are clues, the research is extensive and welcome.