I took this portrait of Anthony Burdin next to the ES Freak Motel in his Junk Tomb around 1999. He called this performance installation: "Junk Tomb Ritual with Freak Styles Beyond." I heard he is driving a Toyota Prius after showing in the Whitney Biennial.
I am also including a catalogue/fanzine presentation I wrote for his first solo show at Three Day Weekend: “Rock and Roll All Night”: Anthony Burdin, Three Day Weekend, Los Angeles, 1998.
Going to Pacoima somewhere around where the 210 Freeway meets the Golden State Freeway there is a Trailer Park on the hills where there used to be a hacienda owned by no less than Mr. Stetson, the man of the Stetson hats. If you dare to jump a couple of fences and to walk inside, you can find an old bridge in the remnants of what used to be cowboy landscape. In this bridge you can see the vestiges of earlier Californian civilizations. Scrutinizing underneath spray painted murals of later cultures we can see original carvings of earlier settlers. They seem to be classic runes from the late seventies. Some of these hieroglyphs have been deciphered. They represent the former four high heeled, black and white, long haired, sacred deities that spit blood and fire. The dragon was the god of blood, the cat the god of rhythm, the space man was the galactic god and the star man the god of love. The inscriptures are attributed to a member of the Kiss Army tribe known as the OG Kiss Freak. On top of these old fine examples of the classic period there are some more recent carvings from the postclassic period of the late OG Kiss Freak. Among them we can recognize a fine example of the sign that represents LMS, the Lithium Masium Superstar.
My first encounter with the Kiss Army happened when I was learning English in a catholic school in Atchison, Kansas. At the time I was a long haired outcast agnostic (suspect of being a communist for wearing ripped jeans) relegated to hang out with the Muslims during mass time while my roommate indulged in all sort of satanic rituals that involved fire, fake blood and loud music. The proctor of the dorm eventually caught my friend Flavio spitting fire with a spraycan while listening to Strutter very loud. As a result, he got his butt spanked with a cane. Knowing the risk of challenging the norms of such a strict medieval institution he had already stuffed his shorts with a cushion to soften his punishment. The whole human sacrifice was preplanned and the inquisition expected. Despite the torture, he did not repent and continued his pagan activities challenging my musical taste. Puberty was already a painful experience by itself to have it made worse by uncomfortable clothes and the exacerbation of its eccentricity during the seventies (not to even mention disco music, Latin American military dictatorships and other horrible things of those days).
Years later in Michael Asher’s post studio critique class in Calarts Anthony Burdin brought an extensive collection of OG Kiss Freak’s collages. They were composed of an exuberant array of cutout images of Kiss from different magazines glued to varnished pieces of wood later glazed with polyester resin. Some of them dated from the seventies and others were done more recently. It was impossible to distinguish the new ones from the older. One had pornographic images hidding in it perfectly integrated and camouflaged with the concert photographs. Needless to say that the reaction of the class was pretty mute and clueless. I guess the particular iconography and this specific practice at the time were still an unspoiled territory for the voracious anthropological avant garde. To be a fan you have to be militant and to be a Kiss fan is also a provocative statement beyond any sort of redeeming morals. This was not an attempt to do contemporary art about the subject using the usual strategies to lift popular culture to the status of high art or to bring art down to the level of the masses. It was just simply an attempt to be consequent with a practice, a present and a past we can’t escape. An effort to present, accept and reconcile a moment of personal history.
In the Recycler a series of adds have appeared advertising the sale of different collectibles and memorabilia from the OG Kiss Freak. The telephone numbers that appear belong to important galleries that might not be aware of the market and the artist they are unwillingly representing. They are the reliquias of the ongoing performance that happens to be the life of a Valley boy and where the San Fernando Valley is his stage.
Rock and roll is an elastic warp zone. It has been the black hole that crosses the hyperspaces of gender, ethnicity and age. It is where whites can be black (like Elvis or Vanilla Ice) and where blacks can be white (like Michael Jackson). It is the space where Domingo Samudio from Texas transformed into a middle easterner known as Sam The Sham and where a Hungarian Jewish called Ron Gregory became Little Johny Herrera, the father of the East L.A. sound. It is where Gene Simmons turned into a blood spitting human dragon, David Bowie into an androginous extraterrestrial, Marilyn Manson into... ?, and Prince into an abstract sign. Rock and roll radiation mutated Anthony Burdin into the OG Kiss Freak, a.k.a. Scum Pirate, a.k.a. Desert Mix, a.k.a. Swamp Mix, from the bands Scum Pirates Freak Show, Universal Drifter, LMS and Anthony’s Revenge. He didn’t just emulated his idols but eventually created his own to be themselves. Although he doesn’t get the media attention of a pop star, he can’t come back from this fourth dimension because these guys are now himself. This is not some retro fashionable decontextualized Lenny Kravitz nostalgia or some identity politics postmodern strategy. This rebellious schizophrenic act is a simple refusal to suburban boredom, the regular poser of the art world and to pretend to do art. With his dyed long hair, his sunglasses, his old school sneakers and cruising/living in the Es Freak Car (a car the eventually became the Es Freak Motel and his home), Burdin has become his art piece. In that sense he is the real shit.
Labels: Aliens, arte, Los Angeles, Photography, Published Texts
