Los Angeles Visionaries Association

The wreck is an art installation that will amaze, astonish, and amuse. It's pretty darn incredible. After the opening, make an appointment (323-254-4565) to see it until March 2. The opening is part of NELAart.com's Second Saturday Gallery Night--North East LA's art night. It's a really terrific art night, with a big variety of venues, and lots of reasonable and delicious places to eat & snack en route. Awesome art and friendly folk--a nice combo. Plus, we'll have some snacks and the Chicken Boy Souvenir Stand inside the gallery will be open (Future Studio being the home of Chicken Boy, the Statue of Liberty of Los Angeles in Highland Park). Oh, plus which--we are located on Historic Route 66 near to the Highland Theatre and it's now nightly-lit historic roof sign AND Las Cazuelas restaurant, which features the newly restored and relit neon and opal glass Manning's Coffee Store sign and Cazuelas's own starburst neon sign.

THE CACOPHONY SOCIETY – ZONE SHOW  is Grand Central Art Center’s retrospective look at the Cacophony Society, a national collective of guerrilla artists, dada pranksters, and various eccentrics pursuing “experiences beyond the mainstream.” Dedicated to activities mocking societal expectations, sacred cows, and good taste, The Cacophony Society evolved from the San Francisco Suicide Club and its members were chief organizers of the Burning Man Festival in Northern Nevada. The Society’s pranking served as inspiration for the activities of Project Mayhem in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. The exhibition transforms the museum's main gallery into a wildly immersive environment filled with photos, graphics, video, props, costumes, and original art from Society events. Exhibition runs through April 15. FREE!

BLOCK PARTY: The Feburary 4th opening will be celebrated with a block party featuring carnivalesque music and performance from artists associated with the Society, art cars, competing protestors, dangerous stunts, an on-call ambulance, and other surprises. That is if the Department of Homeland Security doesn't shut us down!

Check http://intothezonemovie.com for updates and complete lineup TBA.  FREE!

The LAHTF is especially honored to present All About the El Capitan. This immersive tour will take you from the basement to the booth. Trained docents will lead you backstage and behind the footlights, where technicians operate sophisticated performance systems to make the live shows come alive. The tour continues under stage where the performers prepare. There are some amazing special stage effects to see, as well. All About the El Capitan is an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour of America's most successful single screen theatre. Don't miss it!

Before the tour begins, theatre historian Ed Kelsey will present a photographic history of the El Capitan - first as a legit house then its transformation into the Paramount. Ed Collins, El Capitan Executive Director, will pick up the story from the beginning of the Walt Disney Company's restoration and operation of the theatre. El Capitan organist, Rob Richards, will present a demonstration of the Mighty Wurlitzer. 

Doors open at 7:45 am. Presentation and tour begin at 8:00 am. Advance reservations are strongly recommended.

Reservations: (through PayPal only)
Current LAHTF and Hollywood Heritage Members: $5; General Public: $12 

See the LAHTF website at www.lahtf.org  to make your reservations.

As part of the Echo Park Shop Hop on December 10, Stories Cafe will host Dr. Paul Koudounaris, the author of The Empire of Death. He will present original photos from his book, as well as give a talk and slideshow related to his research and fantastical travel experiences in the process of compiling this unique tome of macabre art, which illustrates bone-decorated religious sanctuaries from around the world. The book, which entered the UK Amazon sales charts at number one in both religious history and social/cultural anthropology, was compiled over a five-year period of travel and research, which to took the author to four continents to document many sites which had never before been published. Information on the book and a preview of its content can be found at: http://www.tandhhighlights.co.uk/9780500251782.html

The photos will be on display at Stories through January 10.

LA alternative arts organization, Carp, shows selections from its 1970s ephemera archives of contemporary art—mailers, letters, photos, and other documentation—from a cross-section of LA’s early performance and media arts. Artists include Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, Kim Jones, Alexis Smith, Richard Newton, and Bruce Nauman. Carp encouraged experimentation in non-traditional venues for art like television and print, sponsored LA’s first pop-up galleries, and organized a number of signficant public and private installations and actions. Carp was founded by Barbara Burden and Marilyn Nix in 1974, and was funded by NEA and private donors.

Carp’s mix of installation, performance, television, video, print magazine and street influenced many experimental art organizations that have followed. As part of Pacific Standard Time, this exhibit reflects an under-appreciated but growing-in-importance aspect of contemporary art—ephemera. It includes the early and experimental work of both well- and lesser-known LA artists in the 1970s.

After the Oct. 8 opening, the show will be open Saturdays Oct. 15, 22, 29 from 1 to 5 pm, and by appointment.

Los Angeles art historian and author Paul Koudounaris presents his new publication, The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses (Thames & Hudson, October 2011). Question and answer and discussion afterward. Books will also be available for purchase. Lecture accompanied by slide show.

From the Publisher:

In this tour de force of original cultural history, Paul Koudounaris takes the reader on an unprecedented international tour of macabre and devotional architectural masterpieces in nearly 20 countries. This is the first book to bring together the world's most important charnel sites, ranging from the crypts of the Capuchin monasteries in Italy and the skull-encrusted columns of the ossuary in Évora in Portugal, to the strange tomb of a 1960s wealthy Peruvian nobleman decorated with the exhumed skeletons of his Spanish ancestors. Illustrated with specially taken photographs of sites rarely open to the public and forgotten archive images of others long destroyed, this mesmerising, shocking and deeply moving book is an essential memento mori for our modern age.

LAVA Visionary Paul Koudounaris signs his book The Empire of Death, and also select photos from the book will be on display. The work of several other artists will also be featured. 

ABOUT: For centuries religious establishments constructed decorated ossuaries and charnel houses from human bone. These unique structures, which stand as masterpieces of art, have been pushed into the footnotes of history; they were part of a dialogue with death that is now silent. Dr. Paul Koudounaris completed a PhD in Art History at UCLA in 2004. His interest in the bizarre and suspicious led him to an extraordinary charnel house in the crypt under the Church of Saints Peter and Paul in the Czeck Republic town of Melnik. It was gritty and dirty, but contained an arrangement of bones that reflected both a beauty in artistic principles and an understanding of philosophy and theology. Upon discovering that the local hostel receptionist had no idea of its existence, Dr. Koudounaris set his sights on discovering how many more of these charnel houses might still be standing, eventually visiting, researching, and photographing charnel houses on four continents - plus countless others he found in historic documents, grande dames which had fallen by the wayside of the passing centuries. They are presented in his book, which not only recovers their history, but the history of the religious movement which gave birth to them.

In addition to the LAVA talk I will be giving on this book on 9/25 at the monthly Sunday Salon, I will be doing a book signing and opening a photo show on 9/24 at La Luz de Jesus. Free, and fun for the family. Provided yours is the Addams Family. Read on for details.

For centuries, religious establishments constructed decorated ossuaries and charnel houses from human bone. These unique structures which stand as masterpieces of art have been pushed into the footnotes of history; they were part of a dialogue with death that is now silent.

In 2006, Dr. Paul Koudounaris who two years earlier completed a PhD in Art History at UCLA, found a research topic which would preoccupy the next four years of his existence. Koudounaris’ interest in the bizarre and suspicious led him to an extraordinary charnel house in the crypt under the Church of Sts Peter and Paul in the Czeck Republic town of Melnik. Unlike the “Bone Church” in nearby Sedlec, it was gritty and dirty, not for tourists and even unknown by most locals, but contained an arrangement of bones that reflected both a beauty in artistic principles and an understanding of philosophy and theology. Upon discovering that the local hostel receptionist had no idea of its existence, Dr. Koudounaris set his sights on discovering how many more of these charnel houses might still be standing.

Dr. Koudounaris eventually visited researched and photographed charnel houses on four continents – plus countless others he found in historic documents, grande dames which had fallen by the wayside of the passing centuries. They are presented in the book The Empire of Death which, with detailed photos and text not only recovers their history, but the history of the religious movement which gave birth to them. This is not a book about the macabre or death. It is a book about beauty and salvation.

In this tour de force of original cultural history, Dr. Koudounaris takes the reader on an unprecedented international tour of macabre and devotional architectural masterpieces in nearly 20 countries. The sites in this brilliantly original study range from the Monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Palermo, where the living would visit mummified or skeletal remains and lovingly dress them, to the Paris catacombs, to elaborate bone-encrusted creations in Austria, Cambodia, the Czech Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Italy, Peru, Portugal, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, and elsewhere. Koudounaris photographed and analyzed the role of these remarkable memorials within the cultures that created them, as well as the mythology and folklore that developed around them, and skillfully traces a remarkable human endeavor with 250 full-color and 50 black-and-white photographs in a beautifully bound leather covered book.

It's been ten years since Richard Ankrom, an artist disguised as a state employee took a direct approach to correcting guide signs on the California freeway system. With the manufacture and installation of a duplicate route shield Interstate 5 and directional North signs to aid motorists on the 110 Pasadena Freeway in downtown Los Angeles, indicating an exit two miles ahead. Documentation of conceptual, performance, funcational, and public art is taken to the realm of civic duty. In this exhibit, sketches, plans, and ephemera from the project will be shown, as well as the video documenting the project and its aftermath, which includes what happened to the original work.