Hi 'n' Lo at LAXART

LAXART
2640 S La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles, California
90034
US

Rubén Ortiz Torres: High ’n’ Lo  

Julio Cesar Morales: Interrupted Passage 

House of Campari Presents LAXART Project Space

November 15, 2008 – January 3, 2009
Opening reception: This Saturday, November 15, 7-9pm


Walk-through with Julio Cesar Morales and Aram Moshayedi
November 15, 6pm

For more information, gallery hours, and contact information, please visit www.laxart.org

LAXART’s programs are made possible with the generous support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Peter Norton Family Foundation, The Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation, Danielson Foundation, The Audrey and Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, Campari, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Eileen Harris Norton, The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, ForYourArt, The Standard Downtown LA, and the LAXART Board of Directors, Producers Council, Curators Council, founding members, and patrons. 

This exhibition is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission.

These projects are affiliated with the 2008 California Biennial, organized by the Orange County Museum of Art and curated by Lauri Firstenberg. 

High 'n' Lo was produced with support from Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia; MACLA; and the Zero1 Festival. Hydraulics by Salvador “Chava” Muñoz. Paint, chrome, rims, and grill by ADMWorks. 

Interrupted Passage was commissioned by New Langton Arts, San Francisco and produced in association with LAXART, Los Angeles, and OCMA, Newport Beach. It has been supported by the Nimoy Foundation, Tim and Nancy Howes, Fleishhacker Foundation, The San Francisco Foundation Fund for Artists Matching Commission, Larry Mathews, Deborah Schneider, Ted Ridgway and Ellena Ochoa, and Christopher Vroom. 

Hi 'n' Lo.

Finally Hi 'n' Lo had its debut at the 01SJ global festival of art on the edge. The scissor lift danced a couple of times to a track composed by Jorge Verdín (a member of Clorofila of the Nortec Collective). The music was done with samples of hydraulic sounds, the scissor lift and others made by the tools we used to fabricate it. Salvador "Chava" Muñoz did the inspired hydraulic engineering and hit the switches. This piece was made in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia. Additional support by MACLA and 01SJ. The paint job, chrome, rims and grill were done by ADM Works. Particular thanks to Javier Valdivieso and painter Rigo Hernandez. Transportation by Tony Ortiz from Backyard Boogie Hydraulics. The photographs are by Patrick "The Dude" Miller.

The customized machine and some of the original designs will be on display at MACLA in San Jose until August 8. If in the bay area stop by to check the missing link between Brancusi, constructivism and the low rider pick up movement of the late eighties and early nineties.

Fabrication and First Test.

We worked until the late hours of the night for a couple of months welding, cutting and installing in the metal shop of the Visual Arts department at UCSD while listening to a radio horror show in Spanish called “La Mano Peluda” (the Hairy Hand). We scavenged the junkyards of San Ysidro and Chula Vista. We bought a cheap used lift from Otay Mesa Sales that came all rusty with stains of cement and bad batteries. We got our hydraulics set up from Pro Hopper, the steel from Material Sales Inc and hardware from K Surplus.

Finally we were able to test the machine. Even though we still need to make some adjustments, it was very exciting to see how this portable monument unfolded, spun and danced. We will certainly need to change the used batteries that came with the lift since they are very weak and reinforce or change the frame of the basket because it bends with the force of the spin and the dance. We should also add some legs on the side of the body to make the lift more stable when it is unfolded so that it doesn’t collapse when we turn the steel arm to the side.

But once that is all done, we will soon be ready for the next stage of the production that involves metal flake painting, some chroming and as much pimping as we can afford.

Chava's Drawings.

Eventually I was invited to do a project with the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia. I pitched them different ideas, among them customizing the scissor lift. They liked it and finally we are making it.

I am working with legendary radical bed dancer world champion Salvador “Chava” Muñoz from Colotlán, Jalisco. After seeing the photo montages and getting a used scissor lift we came up with a plan. The idea was to graft a Z-rack on top of the scissor lift. On the base of the basket we installed the hydraulic pumps and the batteries. On top of the Z-rack we are making a new basket that will unfold and spin. The Z-rack also turns and the base of the basket tilts up.

These are a couple of technical drawings that were made by Salvador to figure out the system and the flow of the oil in the hydraulic pumps.

MTV and the Border Patrol.

When we finished Alien Toy I received a call asking me about including the truck in a music video. The video was going to be directed by Doug Aitken. At the time I did not know who he was. He contacted me through Cameron Jamie. The music video was for Fatboy Slim and the song was The Rockafeller Skank. I did not know neither who Fatboy Slim was so I called my friend B+ who works with rappers and musicians to find out. B+ told me to hold on and wait for a better opportunity to show the truck in a video of an artist better known. I told the producer that Salvador “Chava” Muñoz wouldn’t dance the truck for less than $500, which was the amount he was getting at car shows. The producer accepted and Chava needed the money.

Eventually the song became a huge hit. Somehow the aesthetic of the video is very similar to Miguel Calderón’s work. The truck is painted like a border patrol but it does not say that. This has some particular meaning and humor to the people that recognize that.

Alien Toy.

This is the original video of Alien Toy that was presented first at Insite 97 in San Diego ten years ago. Tom Pattchet now owns the whole piece. The Tate Modern recently acquired the video. The truck has been shown at Site Santa Fe, Track 16 gallery and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It danced at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, Bergamont Station, the Hospicio Cabañas in Guadalajara and four times in the Lowrider Super show winning the Radical Bed Dancing Award in all of them. The video was presented at PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, the Kunst Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, the Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid and the Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Artes in Mexico City among other places. The truck also appears in video clips of Fatboy Slim and Hextatic and it was featured in the Jay Leno show.

The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Political boundaries start with private property of land protected and defined by force. Real state borders are usually defined by gardens. Modern gardeners have become the urban and industrialized version of peasants and artists. They work for the owners of the land. Southern California is distinct by its beautiful gardens. Workers who have to cross these political and real state boundaries usually tend to these gardens. They own their means of production and have become small entrepreneurs. These are sleek power tools. They are functional and symbolic objects. They pollute and make noise but we depend on them precisely to create the necessary green areas and artificial nature of the city at a low cost.

The Garden of Earthly Delights is a mechanic ballet where the pastoral and the industrial clash and depend on each other. The aesthetic machine is a contradictory means of expression and an end in itself. It is customized technology at the service of art, culture and politics.

Originally presented at “Mixed Feelings,” USC Fischer Gallery, Los Angeles, 2002. Now in the collection of the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago. Original music made with gardening tools: Gabriela Ortiz. Hydraulic engineer and mechanics: Salvador “Chava” Muñoz. With the original participation of Jaime Alemán (vice president of ALAGLA). Thanks to Adrian Alvarez and ALAGLA (Association of Latin American Gardeners of Los Angeles).

Alien Speech.

“Alien Speech”: Alien Toys, Smart Art Press, Santa Monica, California, 1998.

“Venimos de Marte, ¿de Marte de quién?”.

“Los marcianos llegaron ya y llegaron bailando el ricachá. Ricachá, ricachá, ricachá así llaman en marte el cha cha cha”.

Dr. Octagon says: “Earth people, New York & California, I'm from Jupiter”.

A very strange pick up truck with sixteen hydraulic systems has been sighted close to the San Ysidro border. Images of extraterrestrial phallic creatures drinking beer or in revolutionary outfits can be seen in Tijuana. 39 earthlings got black Nike sneakers before crossing the gate to heaven in Rancho Santa Fe, San Diego. Others haven't been that lucky and have been deported.

The dystopian deconstruction of modernism is what we call desmothernismo from the word desmadre in our mother tongue.

Salvador Chava Muñoz (radical bed dance world champion four years in a row) from San Ysidro altered the shape and the function of his car to an extreme where it is hard to recognize it at all. His research locates him in the avant garde of low rider culture. The Chevy Impala is the classic and revered mechanic icon and fetish of cold war post industrial America. The tradition dictates not to worship other makes. You shall alter the function but not the shape of the Chevy Impala.

Nobody is a prophet in its own planet. Pablo Ruiz Picasso had to leave Spain and settle in Paris in 1904 in order to break with tradition and the original form. As an outsider he was free to break Brunelleschi’s laws of perspective and the notions of French good painting. He finally developed cubism and simultaneity in the picture plane. Picasso was an alien. The other most influential artist of the twentieth century had to migrate not to Paris but from it. After producing several canvases in the current mode of Fauvism, Marcel Duchamp turned toward experimentation and the avant-garde, producing his most famous work, Nude Descending a Staircase, number 2 in 1912; portraying continuous movement through a chain of overlapping cubistic figures, the painting caused a furor at New York City's famous Armory Show in 1913. Marcel Duchamp finally settle in New York and became a U S citizen in 1955. Duchamp was an alien. Aliens have played an essential role even in the development of nationalistic art. The influence of Edward Weston and Tina Modotti was essential in the developing of a Mexican renaissance after the Mexican revolution. A second renaissance is happening there right now with the new arrival of artists from Europe, Cuba and the U.S.

Salvador Muñoz is an alien. He came from Jalisco to California. As an outsider from the low rider community he was able to free himself from the classicism of the Chevy Impala. He is a self taught iconoclast. He transformed a 1973 Nissan pick-up truck into "Wicked Bed". The bed of the truck rises and spins opening itself in four independent parts. The doors shut out and spin fast while the hood jumps off and spins too. The front of the truck separates itself from the back and drives around independently while the rest of the car dances. Like some sort of doctor Frankestein he has given life to this aggresive irrational machine. The future is happening and is out of control like a mutated virus. Technology has been appropiated and used in seductive unexpected ways. It has become a tool of culture jamming and resistance in the streets.

Barrio ballet mechanique.

Desmothernismo.

Cultural exchange is essential in the development of new forms of art and expression. Migration implies cultural exchange. Therefore it is an essential factor in the development of a cosmopolitan avant garde. This certainly locates California in a privileged position to become an important cultural center.

Take me to your leader!!

We come in peace.

Guess what? We don't need any leaders.