A Beautiful Deep Dive Into Our Worldwide Arts + Culture
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A Beautiful Deep Dive Into Our Worldwide Arts + Culture |
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DEFINING THE LAS VEGAS ARTIST |
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I soon found there were no fine art museums in town. Yet, there was a multitude of outrageous Vegas-themed museums like the Clown, Magic, Cranberry, and Liberace museums. How do you define a city? By its artist community, or the number of museums? It became my quest to curate art exhibitions in every museum on The Strip.
When I was young, I never really liked Las Vegas. My family would take long cross-country trips in our station wagon and inevitably pass through Vegas in the middle of the night. It was always as hot as hell. Upon taking up residence there, I immediately evaluated the situation: Las Vegas's fabulously glamorous museums could be perfect sites for art exhibitions. The Liberace Museum was the first institution I approached with my “perverted agenda”: to infiltrate and subvert Vegas reality. A Liberace portrait show was planned. First, I had to round up a band of glamorous Las Vegas artists. Victoria Reynolds, who lived in a Beirut-ish military bunker-like complex, meticulously rendered ornate paintings of raw meat; Mary Warner, who made beautiful black velvet paintings; Jane Callister, from the Isle of Man, whose work resembles elaborate, sickly sweet cake decorations; Phil Argent, who paints gigantic and garish paintings of personalized Nevada license plates emblazoned with the word "Methlab"; Troy Swain, maker of superhero action figures of Nietzsche, Foucault, Marx, Freud, Duchamp, Warhol, Pollock, etc., complete with power packs and specialized futuristic weapons; Desert photographer Charles Morgan; Steven Molasky (of The Molasky Group), who made shimmering light box contraptions filled with dangling Vegasy icons; From the far Canadian north, Christine Siemens, who made rubber membrane-like wall hangings; Ron Lee, who had a factory that pumps out clown statuettes by the thousands; and James Gobel, who created marvelous glitter portraits of Rip Taylor and paintings of an overweight Jesus. Included with this group of glitterati were a host of other glamorous artists who made amazing contributions. Championing all this was the mastermind of Vegas, Dave Hickey, writer and art critic extraordinaire.
Each Vegas show I curated had a character all its own, with specific guidelines and rules set forth by each museum. For the Liberace show, as the entertainer never publicly acknowledged that he was gay during his lifetime, as requested by the museum, we had to be respectful of his image and not let him out of the closet. The amazing Liberace Museum was wonderfully completely crammed with his bejeweled outfits, custom cars, rare pianos, photos of the pianist with every possible celebrity, and loads of little stuffed poodles. There was hardly any place to put the art, so I had to install the work in between the existing displays, making it almost impossible to tell the art from Liberacean artifacts. Artist Wayne Littlejohn displayed a piece entitled Tinkling on the Ivories that looked like somebody tore a chunk out of Liberace's bathroom. It had part of a tiled wall with a gold-leafed jewel-encrusted toilet paper holder. The toilet paper was printed with religious Renaissance paintings, giving the impression that Liberace wiped his derriere with the Old Masters.
The next art show was at the fabulous Debbie Reynolds Hotel/Casino/Museum. As the only restriction, Debbie had to look “glamorous.” (At one time, Debbie saw an uncomplimentary image of herself, painted by a student, and she was very disturbed.) This installation followed the same procedure: Art was dispersed throughout the casino among Hollywood props, slot machines, and antique movie cameras. The opening was a star-studded affair, with Paul Revere and the Raiders flashing through in full regalia. Out from behind one of the paintings popped a Robert De Niro impersonator who was beckoning “Come out, Come out, Wherever you are!” from Scorsese's 1991 "Cape Fear." In front of another painting was an octogenarian health nut profusely sweating while doing calisthenics. A well-coiffed Rip Taylor pranced in, wearing a flamboyant Ascot tie while Debbie Reynolds, looking as radiant as ever, held court.
Twenty minutes out of town, in the middle of an almost Martian landscape is Ron Lee's World of Clowns Museum. The clown show featured everything from a crying and praying clown, a newborn clown, and a genuine John Wayne Gacey painting, to artifacts such as a glowing clown skull and a preserved specimen of a clown/salamander mutation. Presiding over this gaudy circus was the ever-perky Lara the Clown (Lara Heidtman Smith). Located in an isolated desert ravine, Cathedral Canyon resembles an abandoned Christian sculpture park. The site is located on a turnoff from Highway 160 on the way from Las Vegas to Pahrump, a haven for Nevada's legal prostitution. The canyon is a hole out in the middle of nowhere that was transformed into a cathedral-like environment by outsider artist Roland Wiley. Since his death, the canyon has suffered much destruction by vandals. Most of the beautiful stained-glass windows, religious statues, and baroque candelabras have been smashed to pieces. From time to time, we went down to the canyon with new statues, decorations, and artwork to place in the canyon's grottoes and niches. Alas, these too are short-lived, as we find them smashed, shot, or gone altogether. The only exception were the well camouflaged or those hidden in the deepest recesses of the caves.
The next Las Vegas, Nevada show was situated near the Arctic Circle, in Umeå, Sweden, at the Västerbottens Maritime Museum. The museum displayed fish hooks, stuffed seals, and oars. In one room was a full-size tugboat, where Swedish artist Karin Persson turned the captain's quarters into a bordello, while Ronny Hansson filled the "whole damn hold” of the ship with pea soup, and Carina Gunnars turned the hall into a throbbing disco with fog machine and laser lights. Most of the art from Las Vegas was displayed along a descending wheelchair ramp. The Reverend Acres decorated the boat with Walmart Santa Claus cut-outs, for Saint Nick is the patron saint of seamen. Not surprisingly once everything fell into place, the boat was barely distinguishable. It caused quite a controversy in the press and the museum's attendance increased a thousandfold over that month.
Back on the Strip, the next show at the Magic and the Movie Hall of Fame in O'Shea's Hilton Casino was underway. The maze-like Magic Museum featured dioramas of magicians' props, Houdini artifacts, mechanical robots, ventriloquist dummies, and Hollywood memorabilia. Proprietor and famed ventriloquist Valentine Vox, popped out, as if by magic, from dark corners of the museum, ready to answer any questions about the mysterious objects therein. The museum was believed to be haunted by the ghost of Harry Houdini, as many of his important magic relics were housed there. The art was so well integrated into the displays that at the opening an angry woman stomped out saying, "Where's the art? I thought this was an art show!" In the audio animatronic display of Dr Frankenstein's lab, Michael Westfall placed his formaldehyde monstrosities. Next to the magician Blackstone's table saw for cutting women in half was a beautiful painting of meat by Victoria Reynolds. In the Curse of the Mummy display, Rob Keller meticulously placed sad little homemade mummies of roadkill squirrels, rabbits, rats, and snakes. Adjacent to John Travolta's original suit from Saturday Night Fever was Myonghae Lee's precisely rendered portrait of Patrick Swayze.
The Cranberry Show was located at the Cranberry Museum in the Cranberry World West Visitors' Center at the Ocean Spray processing plant. Ocean Spray's Vegas mascot is Carina the Cran-Cran Showgirl, a giant dancing piece of fruit with huge grimacing teeth and a feathery showgirl headdress. Ocean Spray went all out for the opening reception with a bountiful spread of fabulous cranberry delicacies, including cranberry burritos with cranberry salsa, cranberry coffee, and one hell of a cranberry tiramisu. A highlight of the installation was a piece by art critic David Pagel entitled The Legend of the Cranberet which was incorporated into a diorama about cranberry harvesting. A life-sized mechanical farm worker operated a harvesting machine, while Pagel's miniature cranberry-colored soldiers fought amidst piles of the fruit. Near the juice bottling assembly line was a piece by the Reverend Acres showing Carina the Cran-Cran Showgirl looking like the Whore of Babylon riding the Beast of the Apocalypse.
About that time, I started thinking about curating shows at the Burlesque Museum and the Brothel Museum. Both erotic institutions were located in the scorching vastness of the Mojave Desert. But alas, it was never to be. One day while I was having a serious phone conversation with a clown, it dawned on me how weird my life had become in Las Vegas. I'd been hanging out with clowns, freaks, magicians, ventriloquists, religious fanatics, compulsive gamblers, showgirls, strippers, dwarves, academics, midgets, UFO experts, alien abductees, lounge singers, has-been stars, and giant cranberries. I wouldn't have traded it for the world.
JEFFREY VALLANCE at the TanyaBonakdarGallery.com Born in 1955 in Redondo Beach, California, Jeffrey Vallance is a Los Angeles–based artist whose work blurs the boundaries between object-making, installation, performance, curating, and writing. His often site-specific projects range from burying a frozen chicken in a pet cemetery to holding audiences with the King of Tonga and creating a museum dedicated to Richard Nixon. In 2004, Vallance curated the only art-world exhibition devoted to the “Painter of Light™,” Thomas Kinkade: Heaven on Earth. That same year, he was awarded the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Earlier in his career, he appeared as the host of MTV’s The Cutting Edge (1983) and as a guest on NBC’s Late Night with David Letterman. In addition to his exhibitions, Vallance has contributed writing to Art Issues., Artforum, L.A. Weekly, Juxtapoz, and Frieze. He is also the author of several books, including Blinky the Friendly Hen, The World of Jeffrey Vallance, The Vallance Bible, and Voyage to Extremes: Collected Spiritual Writings.
This project 'Defining the Las Vegas Artist' is currently open to all high desert creatives. For more info, Click Here to send an email. ----------------------------------- Artist and writer GORDY GRUNDY is the Editor-in-Chief of Art Report Today
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