Made in L.A. Music Series to kick off with Hammer Bash! to spotlight local artists
By Jessica McQueen
June 24, 2012 1:08 a.m.
Hammer Bash!
June 28, 7 p.m.
Hammer Museum
Free
Reels of tape intertwine costumed dancers who hold items such as rifles, arrows or bottles of Coca-Cola. The dancers use these objects to maintain tension on the tapes as an electronic composition created by the reel-to-reel tape machines and orchestral instruments fills the air.
Artist Scott Benzel will present and perform this piece, titled “(Threnody) A Beginner’s Guide to Mao Tse-tung ““ for 2 tape loops, dancers, cello, viola, violin and percussion,” at Thursday’s Hammer Bash! event.
The event is the first night of the Hammer’s and KCRW’s Made in L.A. 2012 Music Series. The weekly series, which runs until the second week of August, will feature emerging and overlooked local artists as well as musicians and the bands the Allah-Las and Chicano Batman.
KCRW DJs will also play live sets in the museum courtyard each week of the event. Jason Bentley, KCRW’s music director and host of the radio show “Morning Becomes Eclectic,” and DJ Jeremy Sole will play a live DJ set inspired by Hammer’s ongoing biennial exhibition “Made in L.A.” at the Bash!
Benzel’s performance is also part of “Made in L.A.” He said this piece was inspired by the disturbing contradiction he saw in an article in the December 1967 issue of “Esquire,” in which provocative photographs of actress Sharon Tate surrounded by luxury goods were paired with aphorisms from Communist revolutionary Mao Tse-tung’s “Little Red Book.”
The performance will exhibit Benzel’s interpretation of this juxtaposition as the end of the radicalism of the 1960s. The dancers will be dressed as the faux-Maoist rebel that Tate channeled in “Esquire,” and the musical composition will be improvised.
“A lot of my work involves this complexity. There’s a sense of reversal or inversion to (it),” Benzel said. “I’m interested in making art that doesn’t always necessarily appear to be art at first glance. It’s art that has an idea but simultaneously functions as a visual or auditory presence.”
Benzel said he is interested in cultural history and references to pop culture that have complex or altered meanings. In the past, he has created an installation piece in which he showed a movie poster for “The Trip,” a movie about tripping on LSD. The actual word “LSD,” however, was covered, altering the meaning of the poster for Benzel. He has also displayed a pair of counterfeit Nike shoes he ordered from a Chinese counterfeiter. The original version was never actually produced by Nike because the colors of the shoe coincidentally matched those of the Heaven’s Gate cult, a group that believed in UFOs.
“Art can enhance the intellectual growth of anyone. I think performance art that is challenging or unusual in some way can cause us to think about the world differently,” Benzel said.
