Hello LA!

I’m culture writer Carolina A. Miranda and I recently saw Robert Pruitt’s terrific one-man show at Vielmetter Los Angeles — which is up for just four more days (through October 25th).

Pruitt creates elegant, larger-than-life depictions of Black figures out of materials that include charcoal, coffee, and Conté stick, and imbues them with magical details. A woman’s body might morph into a mountainous landscape; another has a head made of African statuary. In 2018, he was the subject of an enthralling one-man show at the California African American Museum. Now he has a series of new works on view at Vielmetter that continue his investigations into invented myth. It’s a gorgeous show; check it out before it closes.

Other events on my radar include the Acid Free V: Los Angeles Art Book Market, kicking off on Friday, October 24th at 4 PM in Silver Lake.

Plus, on November 1st, I’ll be at the Philosophical Research Society to check out this talk by tech writer Joanne McNeil. If you haven’t read her all-too-prescient novel, Wrong Way, about a too-good-too-be-true company purveying self-driving taxis, get on it. 

In the meantime, here’s what else is on my checklist:

• Contributor Matt Stromberg on the wild stylings of shock rockers GWAR
• Heidi Duckler Dance at 40
• LA trigger words

Keep scrolling….

At top is a view of Robert Pruitt's painting, All y'all, errbody (is from Africa), 2025, on view at Vielmetter Los Angeles through October 25th. (Carolina A. Miranda)

LET THEM SLAY
by Matt Stromberg

The infamous rockers of GWAR are now the subject of their very own gallery show. (ofstudio)

Imagine a band of fleshy Viking alien demons who descend to earth to play blazing guitar licks and offend anybody with a lick of good taste — that’s a small sense of what it is like to see GWAR take the stage. The shock rock band has made an otherworldly splash since emerging from Richmond, Virginia four decades ago: they’ve been nominated for a Grammy, can count Beavis and Butt-head and conceptual artist Matthew Barney among their fans, and were banned from performing in North Carolina for one year after their lead singer wore a monstrously phallic codpiece dubbed the “Cuttlefish of Cthulhu” on stage. But they’ve never taken over an art gallery, that white-walled sanctuary of high culture — until now. 

Let There Be GWAR at Beyond the Streets in the Fairfax District is the first retrospective to focus on the outlandish visual art of this collective, showcasing their gory costumes, props, flyers, comic books, videos, and other ephemera that make up GWAR’s expansive, transgressive, and repulsive universe. “With GWAR, the visual side is part of our DNA, it's built in,” said lead vocalist Mike Bishop, a.k.a. pig-faced Blöthar the Berserker. 

Curated by longtime GWAR member and band archivist Bob Gorman and Beyond the Streets’ founder Roger Gastman, the exhibition creates an orderly foil to GWAR’s messy, effluvia-soaked performances. Costumes for over a dozen key members from the band’s extensive, rotating, creatively-named cast of characters — including Oderus Urungus, Balsac the Jaws of Death, Beefcake the Mighty, Jizmak Da Gusha, and Slymenstra Hymen — are presented on mannequins, alongside earlier versions, highlighting the creative process behind these suits of latex and foam. And yes, the Cuttlefish of Cthulhu is on view. 

The angry toilet sculpture is an important part of the GWAR aesthetic. (Matt Stromberg)

Expect to also see the first version of a T-Rex character named Gor Gor, unboxed for the first time since 1987. (Fans can see the beast’s latest iteration at GWAR’s Anaheim concert on October 23rd.) A sense of the band’s extreme live performances are likewise glimpsed through large scale set pieces that include a demonic toilet, as well as a drum set with a faux meat-grinder that audience members (and an occasional celebrity like Danny Trejo) are fed into, as stage blood shoots out into the crowd. 

Vitrines of comic books, flyers, and photographs highlight less visceral, though no less vulgar, aspects of their creative output. A living room installation features a wall of TVs playing clips of GWAR’s brief forays into mainstream culture:  Beavis and Butt-head, The Joan Rivers Show, and the 1995 film Empire Records.

 
Blöthar strikes a pose at Beyond the Streets before a vintage Blöthar costume. (Matt Stromberg)

Gorman became GWAR’s de facto archivist shortly after joining the band, “because no one else was saving stuff,” he recalled. “There were flyers on the floor being walked on or used as spray paint stencils, and I just said, ‘Okay, I'm going to start making a little pile over here.’” That pile grew to comprise all manner of objects and art the band had created, eventually filling his house. Gorman and Gastman sifted through his archives for three days to select the work for the show with the dual aim of providing an engaging experience for longtime fans, “yet at the same time,” said Gastman, “not being so insider baseball that we are turning off the general public.”

“We tried to celebrate the people that are currently in the collective and the people that have been in it over the years,” Gorman explained. “I say that we're like SNL. There's a different cast, but there's a similar spirit to the entire thing.”

Gwar began as a one-off collaboration between musician Dave Brockie and Virginia Commonwealth University student Hunter Jackson, who was looking for a band to appear in his film Scumdogs of the Universe. Brockie’s punk band Death Piggy fit the bill, and was renamed "Gwaaarrrgghhlllgh" for the film, appearing as a group of costumed rogues from Antarctica. The fake band began opening for the real band, quickly eclipsing its popularity, and after a merciful name shortening, GWAR was born. They moved into the Richmond Dairy, an abandoned bottling plant, which became the headquarters for their collaborative, multi-faceted practice, creating art and music side by side.

 
Let There Be GWAR features plenty of wild ephemera. (ofstudio)

Their mythology is vast and convoluted, but GWAR is essentially a band of intergalactic barbarian pirates who have come to earth to enslave, murder, and eat people. Their unique vision fuses sci-fi, horror, punk, heavy metal, and underground comics. Although they revel in bad taste, sex, and violence, there is a subversive humor that balances the menace. “The po-faced seriousness of heavy metal is utterly contemptible. It’s supposed to be funny!” Bishop said. “We're not the dudes strutting around backstage wearing leather pants. We're on our bus playing video games and reading comic books. That's who and what we are.”

Although the current line-up doesn’t feature any of the band’s original members (Brockie died in 2014), most of the current members have been in the band for decades, including Bishop, who joined when he was in high school. “No, I didn't expect to be 57 years old, wearing a big rubber suit,” he said, as he absent-mindedly twiddled one of four phallic udders on Blöthar’s ensemble. “But I knew that we'd keep doing it as long as it was fun, and when it stops being that, then there's no reason to do it.”

AROUND THE INTERNET 

Untitled, c. 1985, by Howard Smith, at the Palm Springs Art Museum. (Carolina A. Miranda)

It’s Carolina! I’ll be taking it from here…

• Dean Rader writes about how the Howard Smith retrospective in Palm Springs blurs the distinction between art, design and décor.
• Heidi Duckler Dance is turning 40. Duckler recently joined Madeleine Brand to talk about how her company makes dance all over LA. (Find the segment at the 21:36 mark.)
• The City of San Francisco wants to remove a highly unusual (some say ugly) fountain; some San Franciscans are not having it.
• The Art Newspaper digs into the city’s lack of transparency around who was responsible for maintaining the fountain.
• Robbers broke into the Louvre and stole priceless jewels.
• Rebecca Rothfield reflects on the facts of hard data versus the squishy nature of feelings in our time of budding authoritarianism.
• I really dug these essays by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Eric Reinhart on shame (or lack thereof) in U.S. politics.
• Signing off with LA trigger words.

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