Whitney Kimball, our 3rd AUX Fellow, will present programming celebrating and examining the rough and incandescent world of radical collective making with a survey of collaborative performance art events in September and October. Kimball will present SCHMARTWORLD featuring six nights of events by artists who work outside the mainstream art world. Through screenings, panels, and lectures, artists will present their collaborations with just about anybody who is willing to listen: local sanitation workers, prisoners, rural communities, hippies, and kids. The month-long series will culminate in the broadcast of Philadelphia-based performers on public access TV.
Friday, September 26th
The Debut of “Pig Story”
Screening & Performance
Miles Pflanz & Kate Levitt
8:00pm
AUX is proud to debut “Pig Story”, a film conceived of by inmates at the Lincoln Correctional Facility in Manhattan, and produced in the spring of 2014 by video/performance artist Miles Pflanz and sound artist Kate Levitt. The film represents the experience of incarceration through a fictional story of monster pigs, told through deranged flashing visuals, primal electronic noise, and a motorcycle stunt.
READ MORE event details about “Pig Story.“
Sunday, October 5th
Whitney Kimball
AUX Fellow Artist Talk
6:30pm Curatorial Talk
Art F City editor and AUX Curatorial Fellow Whitney Kimball will give a curatorial lecture regarding her interest in collectivism after modernism and the contemporary collaborative urban performance art context in East Coast cities.
Friday, October 10th
The Videofreex Pirate TV Show
Q & A w/ Skip Blumberg and Nancy Cain
8:00pm
In 1969, hoping to get an inside scoop on the youth culture, CBS assigned a group of young video artists who’d just met at Woodstock, and who called themselves “the Videofreex,” to document their travels across the country. A few months later, to the dismay of the network, the collective returned with raw footage of interviews with radical movement leaders like Yippie Abbie Hoffman, Black Panther Fred Hampton, legendary Bay Area radio station Ksan, a progressive school, and avant-garde performance artists. Their resulting pilot, “Subject to Change,” never aired on CBS. But the group stayed together and built an underground TV station. In 1971, the ten-plus Videofreex moved the whole operation upstate to Lanesville, New York, where they launched the world’s first low-power unlicensed pirate TV station.
AUX is proud to present a variety of short clips from “Subject to Change,” Lanesville TV, and a melange of footage from Woodstock, the streets of Chicago, and New York City. Rated R for drugs, nudity, strong language, and radical politics. Broadcasts will be followed by a Q & A with Videofreex members Skip Blumberg and Nancy Cain.
READ MORE event details about the Videofreex and “Subject to Change.”
Saturday, October 11th
Jeanine Oleson Artist Talk
6:00pm
Jaimie Warren Artist Talk
8:00pm
AUX presents artist talks from two contemporary performance powerhouses who orchestrate large-scale collective spectacles in galleries, museums, opera houses, and performance festivals, Jeanine Oleson and Jaimie Warren.
In a particularly captivating performance from her recent New Museum residency, “Hear, Here”, Jeanine Oleson’s Rocky Horror Opera Show staged live opera performers before a crowd of hardcore opera fans. Audience members were encouraged to applaud, throw roses, and sing along to their favorite parts; imagine Bizet’s “Toreador” with hoots and whistles from rows of people in 18th century outfits. Absurd parlays like the above often characterize Jeanine Oleson’s performances, sculptural objects, and photographs– from bringing Hilton Kramer and Clement Greenberg to a “Womanhouse” panel, to fusing Harold Camping’s apocalypse radio sermons with arias from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. Oleson is an award-winning photographer, performance/video artist and educator.
Jaimie Warren is an artist, photographer, performer, and the co-creator/co-director of the traveling variety show “Whoop Dee Doo”. Founded in 2008 in Kansas City, the show travels the country and creates unlikely collaborations of local talent– drag queens with clogging troupes; high school students and Peruvian folkloric dancers; American Indian drummers with local scientists; and so forth. This is all performed with puppets and sets designed by, and before an expectant audience of, children. Warren also has amassed a large following for her own work, photo portraits and murals inspired by scenes from art history, pop culture, and the Internet– making for such titles as “Lasagna Del Ray”, and “Pretzel Rod Stewart”. She is represented by The Hole Gallery in New York, and her work has appeared in the New York Times, i-D, the Huffington Post, New York Magazine, Paper, and Dazed & Confused. In 2014, Warren co-produced, co-directed, co-wrote, and co-starred in her own video special, B.A.L.F., for VICE.
READ MORE event details about Jeanine Oleson and Jaimie Warren.
Saturday, October 18th
Trash Collectors Ball
Jenny Drumgoole
8:00pm
AUX presents the work of Jenny Drumgoole, a video artist and accidental activist who has gotten involved with labor and morale issues with Philadelphia sanitation workers. The “Trash Collectors Ball” is part of an on-going series of radical and celebratory events bringing attention to various struggles of urban sanitation workers. Drumgoole was shooting a video on the streets of Philadelphia and asked her local trash collectors to help her with one of the scenes. The workers obliged, and were so gracious that Drumgoole decided to thank them with a surprise party with refreshments, snacks, and party favors. The event “Happy Trash Day!” was a success, and became a recurring phenomenon over the course of several months. Hovering between birthday party, hardcore fan club culture, and social practice performance like Mierle Ukeles’s “Touch Sanitation”, each party grew more wild and memorable than the last.As Drumgoole got to know the workers, she found out that Philadelphia’s sanitation union hasn’t gotten a raise or a new contract in more than five years. Drumgoole received her MFA in Photography from Yale.
READ MORE event details about Jenny Drumgoole and The Trash Collector’s Ball.
Friday, October 24th
ESP TV
Live Broadcast of Experimental Performance from AUX
8:00pm
Since 2011, ESP TV has been broadcasting experimental performance and video to New Yorkers through Manhattan Neighborhood Network (MNN) public access television. Using arcane technologies like CRT warping effects, green screens, and lo-fi noise distortion, ESP TV presents a blaring contrast to TV’s high production value “Golden Age”. Recent performers/collaborators have included Phamakon, Colab, Martha Wilson, and the Joshua Light Show, and ESP TV lately shot four episodes at Iceland’s Reykjavik Festival and produced a live Spanish-language performance of Robert Ashley’s “Perfect Lives” for the Whitney Biennial.
ESP TV will live broadcast a range of experimental performances from the AUX Performance space including local and national acts TBD.
READ MORE event details about ESP TV.