Still from El Matador (X5), 2010, silent 16mm color film

Amy Granat came to art through music. “Growing up in St. Louis, I didn’t really have much of a connection to contemporary art as a teenager. The music world of the early ’90s was my culture.”

At Bard College, where she received her undergraduate degree, she was in a band with then-boyfriend, Sebastian, where she played bass, sang, played drums and wrote music. (Here’s a link to a review of an Amy!Pop performance, circa 2004).

When she moved to New York after college, she began playing her music in the subway; meanwhile, she participated in The Film Collective and other film-creating pursuits. Enter Steven Parrino, introduced by a mutual musician friend. Steven, a painter, began including Amy in art exhibitions, where she met more artists – and the ball started rolling.

Knowing all of this, one thinks of Amy Granat’s films differently. Most of Granat’s films in this exhibition are silent, while a select few have prominent soundtracks – such as El Matador, which is accompanied by the crackling, whirring sound of 16mm film running through its projector.

The music at first seems out of place, resonating against the white walls and concrete floor. But it eases into the rhythm of the films, particularly Chemical Scratch (Return of the Creature) and Ghostrider, transforming their disorienting, slightly chaotic, strobe light quality into something that makes sense. The films keep rhythm with the beat of the song, as if they were having a conversation.

The song, “Oui oui non non” from 1999 (the era of Amy!Pop), plays for 2-3 minutes every half hour. Someone could easily visit the exhibition more than once and still not experience the auditory art.

The magic of the song is its ability to transform a formal exhibition environment into a more casual, inhabited space. The music brings viewers out of their reverie. They look around for the source of the noise and wonder if it is happening on purpose. The presence of the music fills in the silence of the films, and even after the last note, the gallery space holds on to the energy generated during the brief musical entr’acte.

The exhibition will be on view until October 22, 2011. For more information on this exhibit and other upcoming events at White Flag, please visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

(Allison Fricke, Intern, 9/22/11)

Greg Stimac is a Chicago-based artist who currently whose solo exhibition of work is currently on view at White Flag Projects. Below is an interview I did with Greg, where he discusses his artistic process, the White Flag show, and some of the themes that recur in his work.

Lynna Borden: I’m interested in the idea of the photographs depicting dead bugs accumulated on small Plexiglas sheets attached to your car. Can you discuss the origins of this project and where these works fit into your oeuvre?

Greg Stimac: Three years ago, I was with my friend Billy Joyce in Portland, Oregon. We had just driven up from Oakland, California and the front of my car was covered with bugs and dirt from the drive. We taped some pieces of mat board to my bumper and drove to Chicago. Most of the debris just flaked off by the time we arrived and we forgot about it. After some time I started thinking about how to bring that idea into photography. I settled on using Plexiglas sheets fastened to the grill with bailing wire.

Untitled (Chicago to Memphis to Little Rock) was the first one made in the series. Arriving in Little Rock at night I pulled over, removed the Plexi, connected a flatbed scanner to my cigarette lighter and made a scan at roadside with the lid of the scanner removed making the background of the image black. It worked out that the black of the image was actually the dark of the night sky.

I enjoyed making photographs that were composed by driving and the road itself, and not really knowing what imagery would emerge. All I could control was the time of night/day, season and rate of speed. I imagined the process to be somewhat akin to the collodion process of old, where the photographer coated their glass plates, photographed and developed in the field.

LB: Travel and cars, specifically, are featured directly or indirectly in many of your artworks, including most of the work in the White Flag show. Would you discuss how the automobile figures into your process as both a means of production and as a motif?

GS: To me the car is just as important an instrument as the camera. I often make work that features automobiles and the road because it is something very present and close to me, it has become part of my lifestyle.

LB: Do you think being a first-generation American has much to do with your perspective on American culture?

GS: Not so much. I was born and raised in Ohio (the heart if it all).

LB: Do you consider your work to be documentary or autobiographical in any way?

GS: I think about documentary photography and the work may have some documentary attributes, but often in more of a ridiculous, mundane, and playful way such as in the series’ Bottle of Piss and Mowing the Lawn.

LB: Do you think road photography and other road narratives as an inherently masculine subject? Do you ever consider your work as being gendered in any meaningful way?

GS: History shows us many woman photographers who engage in this mode of photography. Dorothea Lange for one.

LB: Is your work dependent upon being American and in America?

GS: It’s where I live and work right now. I can’t tell what I’d be making if I lived elsewhere, but why would I? America is a fascinating place.

LB: Do you see your work as any kind of critical commentary on American culture?

GS: I suppose at times certain works carry those layers more than others, such as Bison Silhouette, which is represented in the White Flag show. I had been thinking about the vast herds of bison that had once roamed the Great Plains and the West, now absent except places such as Yellowstone National Park and the occasional meat ranch. I came across this black rusting metal cutout of a bison positioned in the landscape along Hwy 20 in the Methow Valley in north central Washington state, and to me it sadly represented that negative space.

LB: The work in the White Flag exhibition was made over the last several years. Is there anything you’re working on currently that you can discuss?

GS: I’d like to do some aerial video work this summer.

Greg Stimac is on view through May 22, 2010. For more information on this exhibition and upcoming events, please visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

Destroy All Monsters Opens Saturday 9/19, 7-10 PM

Formed at a house party in 1973, Destroy All Monsters was originally equal parts The Stooges, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Velvet Underground, and Sci-Fi B-movie shtick. The band’s music was accompanied by artwork, performances and films, as well as a self-titled zine of drawings, prints, and collages inspired by sci-fi movies, underground music, and iconic elements of 1960s counterculture as filtered through to the collective’s industrial Midwestern hometown of Detroit, Michigan. In 1995, the original collective of Mike Kelley, Cary Loren, and Jim Shaw reunited, and have been in a lot of shows since then, including the 2002 Whitney Biennial, and Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967 at the MCA Chicago.

Destroy All Monsters: Hungry for Death opens Saturday, September 19 from 7 to 10 PM, at White Flag Projects. We’re going to have a public conversation with curators James Hoff and Cary Loren that Sunday afternoon, September 20 at 2 PM.

In 1976 Mike Kelley wrote about DAM for Destroy All Monsters Magazine:

WHAT DESTROY ALL MONSTERS MEANS TO ME

The first point to make is: Destroy All Monsters is not a band. Our main intention is to be engaged in an activity that provides an instantaneous and powerful cleansing noise. We are not interested in making music. A one-to-one relationship is set up, whereby each action is answered by a growling response, like that produced by poking an animal with a stick, or crossing a threshold and setting off an alarm. Once in motion, this response can go on regardless of the actions of the initiator. To produce something, like a sound, and then have it mature enough to keep going without your assistance causes a pleasant sensation – one of creation. Destroy All Monsters is therapeutic. Destroy All Monsters can be a sedative, a pleasantly gurgling muzak to file the rough edges off, an emotion-deadening machine repetition setting up a rhythm for you to live more easily by. Destroy All Monsters can be electro-shock therapy to wake you up when you slip into a coma. It can blow away the cloud with speed and volume and then move away into a rarified atmosphere where each hum in an inaudible mess becomes more clear and an inaudible mess in itself. Yes, Destroy All Monsters does all this, and more. It’s good American physical work to do something over and over again, factory-style. It makes you sweat the poisons out of your system. It’s hard to push a button and have to sit there and listen to it. You can have a nervous breakdown being an air-traffic controller, having the responsibility of choosing which button to push on the drum box. Destroy All Monsters is a hard way of life. It’s a backwards battle toward a cliff that goes down into chaos and silence. But, it’s a rare treat to be involved in the Destroy All Monsters scene. It’s so esoteric, or so you think. Really, it’s easy, just like staying alive. Lastly, Destroy All Monsters is a call for a new therapeutic popular music. I’m sure, by now, everyone realizes the importance of popularization, of mass-production, of the easing of the lives of as many people as possible. Why not mass produce the Destroy All Monsters achievement? Everyone should pump out Monstrous, destructive Destroy All Monsters black noise. If everyone let their aggressions voice themselves in such sound there 1) wouldn’t be any need for popular entertainment of any kind, and 2) wouldn’t be anything – just an existence of total comfort. I told you so. Let us show you too.

White Flag gets a lot of criticism from the local crushed souls about our non-exhibition events, like if we throw a party that isn’t typically pathetic then somehow the curatorial program can’t be serious. They say things like: “It’s just a party venue,” and  “They’re obsessed with youth!”

Well, we can’t all be running mausoleums, can we? And yet something tells me we won’t get any flack for the thing here next Wednesday night, March 25: A evening of French poetry read by writer William H. Gass, poet Mary Jo Bang and the St. Louis Symphony’s David Robertson. And yes-– it’s taking place on the same sullied ground as things like our unforgivable Ian MacKaye show and Stephen Jehle’s infamous party.

There is a catch: It’s a benefit for the St. Louis Poetry Center, and unlike most things at WFP it will cost you a charitable $50 to attend. It’s being billed as a “Champagne Reception” as well, so that’s even fancier. If you want tickets or info you don’t need to call us about it- call the Poetry Center people at 314-973-0616. Their website is www.stlouispoetrycenter.org.

White Flag doesn’t do many repeats, so our audience usually only gets one chance to see any of the artists we exhibit. It’s too bad in way, because they tend to get out of here and then BLOW UP. We’re always getting news about good things happening for artists that have been part the WFP program– and not the kind of fake junk some galleries put in these kinds of things to make it look like an artist who is doing nothing is doing something- THIS STUFF IS REAL. This is what has come in over the past few weeks:

Kansas City-based photographer Jaimie Warren had a monograph of her self-portraits published by the Aperture Foundation, not to mention a review in the last Artforum. She also performed at Deitch Projects infamous holiday party in December.  Jaimie’s exhibition at White Flag was in September 2007. THAT’S REAL.

Jacob Kassay was in January’s “One Loses One’s Classics”. There’s no way for us to confirm it without having to pick up the phone, but we hear his New York solo debut in at Eleven Rivington sold out… these days that is PRETTY DAMN REAL.

Amy Granat was already a big thing when she brought her show to WFP in May 2008, but she just got bigger. Word is the Museum of Modern Art has just acquired two of her works for their permanent collection. THAT’S REAL.

Matt Keegan’s work was part of Cinema Zero’s BENDOVER/HANGOVER show last year. This year his work will be in the much hyped “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus ” at The New Museum… and that’s a hard ticket to get (500 artists were nominated and only 50 are in.) THAT IS REAL.

If you need more of this kind of reality you can get it in April when we relaunch the White Flag newsletter.