Sonia Oleniak's "Entropica..."

U-N-M-A-R-K-E-D Co-Artistic Director Sonia Oleniak's performative installation,
"EntropicA: Balance It Between The EYES" as part of SMUTOPIA! 

 

More on SMUTOPIA! here.

All Stars

Patrick Kennelly in "The All Stars of Non-Violet Communication"

"The All Stars of Non-Violet Communication" lands in Santa Monica after 2 hit performances this past spring in Hollywood & Chinatown.

As part of 18th St. Art Center's ART NIGHT, on September 24 @ 8.00pm, Highways Performance Space will be presenting a free performance of this tragicomic work from cult writer/director Asher Hartman.

This blue vaudevillian poem in three parts unleashes the vitriol of four dead, under-appreciated gay entertainers of the 1970s. Featuring veteran performers Franc Baliton, Michael Morrissey, Joe Seely, and myself, Patrick Kennelly, with costumes by sculptor Curt LeMieux and sound accompaniment by Corey Fogel (riffing on an original score by Jasmine Orpilla), Hartman stews a compact exploration of the brutality of language, the grief from which comedy emerges, and the ways in which language empties out
into the passage from life to death. Although brief, the work is written in a dense amalgam of poetic speech, one-liners, movement, and sound with plenty of bite and aftertaste.

CLICK HERE for video from the original performance @ Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) in April of this year as part of the Thursday night performance series "So Funny It Hurts."  CLICK HERE for a posting on the 2nd performance (@ Human Resources in Chinatown) from the L.A. art blog tryharder (the picture below is from that posting).

Highways is located @ 1651 18th St., 1/2 block North of Olympic Blvd.

Vaccination

image by Patrick Kennelly

Yes, buzzy British band The Vaccines are just another over-hyped import, an uneven knock-off of The Strokes, itself a knock-off of any number of great rhythmic post-punk/edging on power pop acts.  But that doesn't neccessarily make it unpleasant - to the contrary, its innocuousness is more than a bit welcome in the ever-expanding glut.

But, more than anything, The Vaccines are an example of the rising power of the online video renaissance, where more and more experimentation and innovation has been wrapped around more and more of the same.  Their videos for the singles "Blow It Up" and "All in White" are supreme examples of how the image can both complement and often (as in this case) elevate the sonic.  These works get it just right (VHS+flares+fires+spotlights+corruption+slowmotion), while also nodding to the emerging "vintage"/"lo-fi" chic in a way that doesn't make the attached hipsterism soooooo offensive:

SMUTOPIA!

design by Patrick Kennelly

On May 20 + 21 (2011), I "pimped" out a performance party with Philip Littell in celebration of Highways Performance Space's 22nd Birthday. This crazy, untethered, occasionally erratic event was another of my experiments in "anti-art." By engaging the audience in the writing of the narrative, and allowing them to become part of the performance in construction, it had an excitement that fully realized the hyperbole of its promo description:

STAND UP AND SALUTE our Brave Boyz in Bootz, Ladies in Lonjeray, He-She's 'n' What-All! This year, in celebration of our 22nd Birthday, Highways Performance Space is going to take The Low Road, Transforming into An Erotic Hypnotic Hysteric Frenetic MIDWAY featuring Festival Stages, Private Booths, Stag Film Sets and THE PALACE OF PEEP and more! more! more!

Philip Littell & Patrick Kennelly pimp out over 30 Dirtee Artists in Continuous, Late Night Action! Nudie Cuties, Sin and Skin, Booze and Sleaze, the Highways to Hell...

Unfortunately, no pictures were taken of the event & some of the videotape has "mysteriously" gone missing, but here's some surviving stills. Hopefully more to come...

Cut-and-Paste

(mashup by Patrick Kennelly)

I'm in the early stages of development for the May 2012 premiere of PATTY, a rock concert/performative installation that utilizes a cast of performers who identify as “Woman” to question what “Woman” represents in a modern culture where one’s sense of self has become split across a multitude of both physical and virtual spatial platforms, most of which are mediated by the Male gaze. 

The process of constructing this work is inspired y the post-modern punk feminist, cut-up techniques of Kathy Acker. This allows a means of investigating hyper-evolving communication patterns dictated by a 140 character, browser tabbing, micro-blogging, linking matrix.

The result, hopefully, will have less a Mashed-up than Cubist visual and aural quality paired, hopefully, to a rhythmically taught pop backbeat.

We'll see.... in the meantime, some inspirations, references, etc :

Pop #2 - Tabloid Aria (in 3 acts)

Anna Nicole / Ackerlund / Jerry Springer: The Opera

 

 

 

 

Ephemera

USC Sex Photo Scandal coverage

- Dream of digitized Alexandria becoming a nightmare?

- Lady Gaga is not a capital P capital S Pop Star...

Works by found-footage alchemist Peter Tscherkassky now available online 

The All Stars of NonViolet Communication

Patrick Kennelly (photo by Leo Garcia)

Patrick Kennelly (photo by Leo Garcia)

Some pics from Asher Hartman's blue vaudevillian poem I performed in this past Thursday @ Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions as part of the curated series "So Funny It Hurts."  It unleashed the vitriol of four dead, underappreciated gay entertainers of the 1970s in a seething round of comedy and complaint (or, as one friend put it, enacted a "faggot jihad").

Outer-Disciplinary

Patrick Kennelly / U-N-M-A-R-K-E-D

This article in the LA Times from last week got my goat (does anybody still use that phrase?) by again latching onto those retro hip "art" terms - particularly "inter-disciplinary."  For a minute now, I've been espousing something I call "outer-disciplinary."  This is both conceptually contemptuous and perhaps another useless container.  By believing in it, my process as somebody who does work (I don't like to consider myself an "artist," mostly because I don't know what that means anymore), has become scarce, fragmented, and of an ambition that is ultimately futile.  But I'm hoping to instigate a fluid, open conversation, something that is increasingly rare in the development, creation, and presentation of new work today......

When I say “outer” disciplinary, I am specifically addressing the complications I have discovered in using the word “inter” in regards to work that brings together artists, tools and methodologies from different disciplines.  In the extensive curation I have done over the past number of years, I have come to feel how abused this term - "inter-disciplinary" - has become.

Rauschenberg / Cunningham / Cag

When Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, and John Cage came together in the 1960s, unexpected convergences of content and form were enacted in a critical dialogue within the performance itself.  The unexpected possibilities of what would result were expansive.  Now, anyone can decide to employ video or music to their work and call it inter-disciplinary.   This allows them to stay in their comfort zones, while creating an illusion of true collaboration.  It eschews the foreign, unexpected, and potentially dangerous nature of its actual reality.


With my conceptual project U-N-M-A-R-K-E-D,  I'm always seeking to interrogate, exploit, question, and subvert what it means to have a conversation between dance and video, sound and performance, storytelling and fashion design.  Inevitably, the artists and the tools move out from the “inter” in opposing directions.  The work becomes less gravitationally bound and more like a constellation of ideas, occasionally glimmering or bouncing off each other - much like the work of Rauschenberg, Cunningham, and Cage.

Rauschenberg / Cunningham / Cage

"The All Stars of Non-Violent Communication" @ LACE

I'm performing in a new work by the consistently re-inventive Asher Hartman as part of the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition (LACE) series "So Funny It Hurts," curated by Brian Getnick.  This bizarre, hilarious, tragic short play considers identity, death, and showmanship.  All one and the same, obviously.  Here's a bit more:

THE ALL STARS OF NONVIOLENT COMMUNICATION 
Featuring Franc Baliton, Patrick Kennelly, Michael Morrissey, and Joe Seely
Written and directed by Asher Hartman with costumes by Curt LeMieux
Sound by Jasmine Orpilla

A blue vaudevillian poem in three parts, THE ALL STARS OF NONVIOLENT COMMUNCIATION unleashes the vitriol of three dead, under-appreciated gay entertainers of the 1970s in a seething round of comedy and complaint.

Featuring veteran performers Franc Baliton, Patrick Kennelly, Michael Morrissey, and Joe Seely, with costumes by sculptor Curt LeMieux, sound by composer and performer Jasmine Orpilla, and text and direction by Asher Hartman, THE ALL STARS OF NONVIOLENT COMMUNICATION is a compact exploration of the brutality of language, the grief from which comedy emerges, and the ways in which language empties out into the passage from life to death.   Although brief, the work is written in a dense amalgam of poetic speech, one-liners, movement, and sound with plenty of bite and aftertaste.

Loosely inspired by the lives of Paul Lynde, Charles Nelson Reilly, Barclay Shaw, and Wayland Flowers, THE ALL STARS OF NONVIOLENT COMMUNICATION takes its cues from the moment in a stand up routine when the comedian turns against the audience, heaping savagery upon it in an attempt to defend the comic’s role as container and messenger of a society’s unacknowledged debts and burdens. 

START TIME: 7:30PM

Running time: Approximately 30 minutes.

Inappropriate for children, very strong language

Ephemera

photo by P. Kennelly

- "Barely 15 percent of Wikipedia contributors are women, with the lion’s share of the articles being written, edited and updated by men in their mid-20s."

- Writer-for-Hire Gets a Book Deal to Write About Helping Students Cheat

- Is The 'CSI Effect' Influencing Courtrooms?

- Four awful music endeavors by reality stars that made more than you make in a year

- "This moment in Charlie Sheen: Final broadcasts, fermented puke, poppycock, porn offers, and more from the media tsunami" (courtesy A.V. Club)

- Ke$ha new music video with James Van Der Beek, unicorns in suits, and rainbow shooting guns; unlike Lady Gaga, there is a somewhat charming lack of pretension and unforced appeal in Ke$ha's personality/presentation (not to mention that all of the Nashville, trailer/mansion queen's electro pop bites Miss Monster hands version of the same Hard)

"State of Incarceration"

Here's a short video I edited out of three nights worth of JD Matta's filming the Los Angeles Poverty Department's State of Incarceration (an examination of the personal and social costs of incarceration) @ Highways Performance Space.

Los Angeles Poverty Department's "State of Incarceration" @ Highways (2011) from Highways Performance Space on Vimeo.

Each performance of State of Incarceration is an experiment in which the performers, the audience, and the performance material are inserted into a restrictive prison architecture that replicates the over-crowded California State Prisons, where gymnasiums and cafeterias have been turned into dormitories housing 3 and 4 hundred prisoners. The performance space is filled wall-to-wall with 60 bunk-beds, the same model used in the prison system. The US Supreme Court is at present deliberating whether these conditions prevalent in the California State Prisons constitute cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the Constitution.

In State of Incarceration, Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) artists articulate the mental and physical challenges of incarceration and the resources needed to endure and recover from it. When released from state penitentiaries with $200 gate money, parolees are directed to Skid Row with the largest concentration of low cost housing in LA County. 33% of parolees released to the Los Angeles area settle in the 52 square block neighborhood of Skid Row.

Wreckin'

In anticipation of Dr. Dre's highly anticipated performance @ tonight's Grammy's & the supposedly forthcoming Detox, a 12-yr. in the making follow-up to his 2 highly influential gangsta-rap solos of the 1990s (1992's The Chronic & 1999's 2001), here's a bit of forgotten history.  Leading up to and briefly overlapping with the birth of N.W.A. Dre was the resident DJ for the World Class Wreckin' Cru.  Today we equate rap & particularly Dre with the violently sexist, homophobic thug mentality, but the true roots of the genre were in the disco//house club scene, an ecstatic queer explosion of fashion, music, and dance.

 

UPDATE (3/19/2011) :

While the performance itself left much to be desired, this video for the lead single from the new album is self-mythology done right.  Eschewing the distracting sci-fi window dressing & the fact that, actually, the doctor has far from disappeared for the last ten years, it makes clear how deep and complex the idea of "brotherhood" runs in the hip-hop community.

State of the Arts

I wouldn't pretend that the world (and our country in particular) doesn't have bigger problems...but...really?

 - A job-killing plan for arts and culture 

- Artist Could Face 15 Years In Prison For Recording His Own Arrest

 

Free! Theater

 

I have great doubts about the essential effectiveness of political theater meant to to be staged for a static audience - even more so when the lines between purpose and aesthetic are explicitly marked.  But the case of the Belarus Free Theater, who have been getting a lot of publicity & support for their current U.S. tour, exhibits the possibilities in the greater power of artistic expression as a cause towards social justice.  When they came to Los Angeles in 2009, the work's purpose DID trump its aesthetics, but both felt like they were (nobly) striving to inform the other.

Flag Burning

RIP....

TURU SATANA, 1938-2011

----- Listening to the Crack of Doom on the Hydrogen Juxebox .........

image by P. Kennelly

Theosophy

image by P. Kennelly

Tammy Faye

drawing by P. Kennelly

 Mascara stroked tears roil
Alabaster Madonna statues
In miniature

Her head bowed
Clasped hands
Requiring
Support

Choir boy eyes reflected
In the light
Of the stacked candles
Recalling
The flickering televised halo

And the millions
Waiting with faith
For a sign of God

Eyelids dropping into the fog below
Going back to a time
Of electronic hope
Unscorched by radiation

The Hills

 

 

The Artful Dodger

image by P. Kennelly

coming soon...

There is a sufficient lack in my new book of photography (coming April 2011):

Teutonic

"All of the" rip-offs

 

UPDATE (3/7/2011) :  So, Kanye West has perpetrated the inevitable blockbuster rip-off/homage, depending on how you look at it.  The concept is likely the handiwork of director of Hype Williams, who, after a run of original, trend-setting music videos in the 90s, has made, in the last few years, a sort-of cottage industry of gratuitous (albeit visually lush) versions of other people's work. 

 

sidenote: then again, the true originator of this font technique was Jean-Luc Godard, who has seen most of his ground-breaking visual, aural avant gestures co-opted by far less internally motivated filmmakers over the past 40 years.

The Vatican Hall of Shame

 

“Lord, give me chastity and self-control — but not yet." 

— Prayer of the young Saint Augustine, c.380 A.D.

 http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article05111001.aspx

“Art is the lie that tells the truth.” Picasso

"When Life Gets in the Way of Art"

Ronald McDonald Killer

photo by P. Kennelly