This ‘Post Moral Neanderthal Retardist Pornography’ (don’t ask me about the title!) exhibition held at Shepard Fairey’s Subliminal Projects was like a compilation of different styles all gathered in the same place, but united by music and a cartoonish-nightmarish-subversive weirdness.
HAZE-XXL’s work was the most represented, dominated by propaganda black and red colors and habited by comic book and political signs and characters – there were a few swastikas, Communist Hammer and Sickle, and even Mickey Mouse shooting Lenin. But when you know that HAZE-XXL’s is Tom Hazelmyer, founder of Amphetamine Reptile, the label featuring the Melvins, Helmet and Hammerhead, you understand why the Melvins and other bands’ names were all over his work. During more than 20 years, AmRep has always been ‘dedicated to musicians who find their own sound and fight to keep it authentic’, and has hired visual graphic and street artists to create posters for shows, releases, tours (Shepard Fairey was one of them), and this explains even more the art-and-music collision represented in the exhibit, showing vinyl turned into object d’art, featuring musicians turned visual artists. And Hazelmyer is one of them: he was in a coma for a month and said that his work has been affected by his brain damage as he can now write a note backwards as fast as he can do it forwards! The prints are all post-coma and are part comic-book-super-heroes, part Robert Crumb's characters, populating a dark universe.
There also were some gothic and creepy paintings by Camille Rose Garcia, some childish-pinkish-noir drawings by Japanese manga artist Junko Mizuno, and an oil painting by The Replacements’ drummer Chris Mars, a sort of nightmarish post-future landscape coming straight from a science fiction apocalyptic movie.
Also featured in the exhibit, was the work of Mackie Osborne, who is also the wife of the Melvins’ guitarist/singer Buzz Osborne, and who has designed the artwork for the band and other related bands and side projects for many years, the surrealist collages of Math.i, an ensemble of colorful imageries so hard to describe because so saturated with random stuff in all directions that the brain couldn’t process anything – but I noticed the abundant presence of body parts, which could explain the pornography part in the title of the exhibit – the art of Grand Hart (that sounds so perfect!) from the hardcore punk band Hüsker Dü, as well as a few pieces by Shepard Fairey.
Five of these artists had been asked to design the artwork for the split Melvins/Hammerhead 7”, featuring Melvins, ‘a Growing Disgust’ and Hammerhead, ‘Lite Industrial’, and the results were decorating a wall of the gallery.
Soon, the studio filled up with a large tattooed-crowd wearing band t-shirts (The Melvins were largely represented) whilst a special, lo-fi performance by members of Melvins, Hammerhead, Halo of Flies, and Husker Du was projected via live audio stream on one of the walls of the gallery; but it was kind of hard to follow and was rather a background noise of distortion than anything else. The opening reception was followed by a performance of these same Amphetamine Reptile artists (Hammerhead, Helios Creed (Chrome), Gay Witch Abortion, Hepa/Titus (Cows) and Seawhores) at the Echoplex the same night.
It is always weird and awesome to be among such a crowd of artists and art-music lovers, as I feel like a foreigner in another land, asking myself what do I know about post moral retardist? And in what subculture have I landed? But at the same time, I always feel at home surrounded by so much inventive quirkiness and mysterious unconventionality.
The exhibit will be open till June 22 at Subliminal Projects, before traveling to to TT Underground Gallery in New York City on June 30th.
