All Aboard the Xprez — Half-animation, half-performance piece brings the weird to CAF Thursday

Above: screenshots from the animated centerpiece to the new CAF show "Cartune XPrez." Photo courtesy of Hooliganship
Above: screenshots from the animated centerpiece to the new CAF show “Cartune XPrez.”
Photo courtesy of Hooliganship
Sometimes, a childhood spent watching Saturday morning cartoons pays off. For Peter Burr, one half of the artistic collective/band Hooliganship, now performs inside one (sort of) in the Cartune Xprez performance coming to the Contemporary Arts Forum next week.

Half animation revue, half performance, all weird, Cartune Xprez (its name a nod to USA Network’s own animation show) grew out of the minds of Burr and his co-conspirator Christopher Doulgeris.

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Deep in Red — CAF’s Valentine’s Auction one of the year’s biggest

All hail the Red, White and … Pink!

It’s time again for “La Vie en Rose,” Contemporary Arts Forum’s annual Valentine’s exhibition, benefit auction and fashion show. The exhibition side — featuring works from a slew of Santa Barbara artists like Stephanie Dotson, Warren Schultheis, Zacarias Paul, Mary Heebner and more — is already up, but Saturday night’s gala event is the time to really show the love.

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My Dead Morning Jacket


I don’t really know where to start getting my head around this one.

One of the central works in the exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (until 12 May), Victimless Leather, a small jacket made up of embryonic stem cells taken from mice, has died. The artists, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, say the work which was fed nutrients by tube, expanded too quickly and clogged its own incubation system just five weeks after the show opened.

And furthermore:

Ms Antonelli says the jacket “started growing, growing, growing until it became too big. And [the artists] were back in Australia, so I had to make the decision to kill it. And you know what? I felt I could not make that decision. I’ve always been pro-choice and all of a sudden I’m here not sleeping at night about killing a coat…That thing was never alive before it was grown.”

I also heard that the coat, all cramped up in its incubator, started shrieking “WHY? WHY??? FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE KILL ME!!!” Okay, that’s not true, but if it was, wouldn’t that be cool? I’d wear that.

Surely this will make us question preconceived ideas about science, life, art, fashion, laboratories, pleather (That’s enough – Ed.)

Marcus Keef: That ’70s Guy


Who was the photographer, Marcus Keef? I’d like to know, but the Internet is rather quiet. What I do know is that his album cover art for the Vertigo, Neon, and Nepentha labels of the early ’70s is very distinctive. Often gatefold, widescreen works, Keef’s photos usually manipulate color, obsess about old British households, creepy interiors, dusty attics, and occasional shots of the band members sitting around looking lost and/or freaked out. I’m sure a lot of kids were weirded out by their older sibling’s/family member’s copy of the first Black Sabbath album, with that witch/old hag/meth head/Ozzy in drag on the cover, waiting outside her dilapidated old country barnhouse, waiting for you to come in for tea.

To me, it’s like the dark flipside of the late ’60s interest in nostalgia, all 1920s funfairs and post-WWI memorabilia. No, those people didn’t come back from the war, and we shuttered up the attic with a dead man’s things. Going to look for the past, these people found that it’s, well, past. And dead. And eldritch, which is a perfect word for this.

Of course, not all of Keef’s works were like this, like the awful bloody clown cover for Jimmy Campbell’s “Half Baked” or the studio shot for Raw Material’s “Time Is…”. But for the most part, these two galleries show a definite style that evoke a certain period in British rock. You can almost feel the album covers with their matte finish, their musty, unplayed smell, and tiny detritus of hand rolled tobacco/weed that’s fallen in the inner sleeve.

No album dates past 1976, and the best work is 1970-1973, so I wonder what became of him. Is he still alive?

Tim Flach and Equus


This horse fetus thingamydooder is the cutest, most angelic thing I’ve seen in a long time. All together now: awwwwwwwwwwwww.
However, it turns out that photographer Tim Flach, who took this and other amazing horse-themed photos, has an amazing eye for more than just the awwwwwww-some.

The method I used was to ask people who have spent their lives with this subject: what is it that really touched you about the horse? What is it that you remember? And as you ask people, they’ll recount stories or things they experienced about a particular breed or how when they were a child they rode a Shetland pony, and what it meant to them. Shetlands are very intelligent and they also have the tendency to be very challenging. Most people who become quite good riders often start out with that kind of pony. If you ask them which pony has significance to them, they’ll often cite the Shetland pony over all other ponies. So then what I did was I went to Shetland and spent a week literally within the Shetland islands to find the origin of each horse, and where it came from. So that you could be a child in an arena in Moscow and see a picture of where your pony had really come from and the environment that created it.