SASSAS Presents
Fix-It-Up Too
A Reprise of Jeffrey Vallance & Michael Uhlenkott’s
1981 The Fix-It-Up Show
With 11 Artist “Fixers” Altering Works of 100+ Artists
Saturday, September 15, 2012 – 11:00am to 6:00pm
At Blum & Poe in Los Angeles

Proceeds From Art Sales Benefit SASSAS

LOS ANGELES, CA – August 21, 2012 – The Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound (SASSAS) presents Fix-It-Up Too, a one-day exhibition and silent auction on Saturday, September 15, 2012 at Blum & Poe in Culver City.  Fix-It-Up Too reprises The Fix-It-Up Show, a project first developed by artists Jeffrey Vallance and Michael Uhlenkott for a 1981 exhibition at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) in which well-known artists were asked to contribute works for Vallance and Uhlenkott to alter or “fix.”  Both artists have given SASSAS their blessing to recreate The Fix-It-Up Show as a fundraiser and will also reprise their roles as “fixers.” Nine other internationally recognized artists including Barbara Bloom, Meg Cranston, Lisa Lapinski, Dave Muller, Stephen Prina, Jim Shaw, Alexis Smith, Mungo Thomson, and Christopher Williams have also agreed to alter the works of more than 100 artists for this special exhibition and sale.  The event features live performances by the Harmonica Rascals, Fat and Fucked Up, and Scott Benzel, wrapping up with a special sculpture/performance by Benzel an Mark Hagen. Blum & Poe is located at 2727 South La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90034 (www.blumandpoe.com; 310-836-2062).

Doors open at 11:00am for viewing and bidding.  The silent auction for items in the gallery concludes at 5:00pm.  At 6:00pm, the auction for the Benzel/Hagen sculpture will close, ending the evening.  Full schedule with performance times is listed below.  Admission to the exhibition and auction is free.  Starting bid for all artworks is $100.00. Further information is available at www.sassas.org/fixitup.

The stellar list of contributors includes artists featured in major exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and New Museum, among other world-class art institutions.  Several artists from the original 1981 exhibition are participating including Simon Gad, Jim Isermann, Marc Pally, Joe Potts, Rick Potts, Alison Saar, John Schroeder (courtesy of his estate), Alexis Smith, Robert Wilhite, and B. Wurtz.

Proceeds from Fix-It-Up Too will go towards relieving a $10,000 deficit that SASSAS has been running since Welcome Inn Time Machine, the very successful free event that the organization produced for the Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival in January 2012.

“Fixer” Artists –
Barbara Bloom, Meg Cranston, Lisa Lapinski, Dave Muller, Stephen Prina, Jim Shaw, Alexis Smith, Mungo Thomson, Michael Uhlenkott, Jeffrey Vallance, and Christopher Williams.

Contributing Artists –
Irina Alimanestianu, Tom Allen, Nena Amsler, Kevin Appel, Stuart Arends, Lisa Ann Auerbach, Jamey Bair, Judie Bamber, Scott Benzel, Stephen Berens, Cindy Bernard, Jordan Biren, Jennifer Bolande, Josh Blackwell, Ursula Brookbank, Kaucyila Brooke, Elizabeth Bryant, David Bunn, Krista Chael, Claude Collins-Stracensky, Eduardo Consuegra, Heather Cook, Eileen Cowin, Katy Crowe, Aaron Curry, Dorit Cypis, Tony De Los Reyes, Lecia Dole-Recio, Zackary Drucker, Dana Duff, Sean Duffy, Sam Durant, Brad Eberhard. Nancy Evans, Judy Fiskin, Brendan Fowler, Eve Fowler, Simone Gad, Liam Gillick, Eamon Ore Giron, Piero Golia, Alexandra Grant, Katie Grinnan, Mark Hagen, Kevin Hanley, Richard Hawkins, Micol Hebron, Drew Heitzler, Doug Henry, Nick Herman, Patrick Hill, Julian Hoeber, Evan Holloway, Margaret Honda, Violet Hopkins, Cannon Hudson, Nathan Hylden, Jim Isermann, Cameron Jamie, Kathleen Johnson, Annetta Kapon, Brian Kennon, Ellina Kevorkian, Kristyne Kryttre, Molly Larkey, William Leavitt, Simon Leung, Sharon Lockhart, Euan Macdonald, T. Kelly Mason, Kim McCarty, Jason Meadows, Christopher Michlig, John Miller, Yunhee Min, Ivan Morley, Yoshua Okon, Marc Pally, Renee Petropoulos, Joe Potts, Rick Potts, Tom Recchion, Stephen G. Rhodes, Marco Rios, Ry Rocklen, Amanda Ross-Ho, Erika Rothenberg, Allen Ruppersberg, Christopher Russell, Alison Saar, Analia Saban, Connie Samaras, David Schafer, John Schroeder, Susan Silton, Alex Slade, Joe Sola, Thad Strode, Mitchell Syrop, Haruko Tanaka, Stephanie Taylor, Diana Thater, Caroline Thomas, Elizabeth Tremante, Geoff Tuck, Lesley Vance, Dawson Weber, Marnie Weber, James Welling, Jennifer West, Robert Wilhite, B. Wurtz, and Bruce Yonemoto.

Event Schedule –

• 11:00am
Blum & Poe doors open for viewing, bidding begins.

• 2:00pm, Gallery
Harmonica Rascals
LA-based Harmonica Rascals play old-time Americana music. The string band was formed by artist David Bunn (guitar & vocals) in collaboration with champion fiddler Heather Bennett and Donnie Stroud (banjo & vocals).  The project takes its name and inspiration from visual artist, Thomas Hart Benton’s old-time music band of the same name, formed in the 1930s in New York City. Made up of Benton, other artists and his students, including Jackson Pollock, his was the first urban revival Americana music band.  As the Italian Collective, Lucie Fontaine, has written “David Bunn’s Harmonica Rascals is the cover band to the first cover band of old-time music.”  Bunn’s visual and performance based artworks have been shown internationally and locally in exhibitions at both MOCA and LACMA.  The Harmonica Rascals is his newest project.   As old-time music is social music, The Rascals are often joined by special guests.

• 3:00pm, Gallery
Fat and Fucked Up
“Thrash-classical chamber group Fat and Fucked-Up hail from those queasy days of the warm and groovy arts scene when it seemed like everybody and his brother from Downey was in a band of some sort.  In fact, Fat and Fucked Up started as a joke.  Legend has it that when they would catch the fragrant wind of self-promoting rockers, viola player Josie Roth and cellist Michael Intriere spurted out that they were in Fat and Fucked Up (even though the combo didn’t exist).  After awhile, they started to actually get gigs, so they figured that they had to do something besides cause scenes at parties.” (Jac Zinder, LA Weekly, 1992)

• 4:00pm, Gallery
Scott Benzel, Variations for Commercial Arcade for Solo Viola 
This performance features a solo viola playing a series of notes derived from words formed from musical notes, as examples: “d.e.a.d.” and  “f.e.e.d.”  The piece takes Bruce Nauman’s seminal Violin Tuned D.E.A.D.as its starting point and continues to 21 musical phrases based on commerce-related words.Interested in the contradictions inherent in mythologized cultural histories, Scott Benzel’s work shows an ongoing fascination with the disjuncture between embodiments of popular culture – from the classical music score to photographic ephemera – and their accumulated meanings. His visual and sound-based artworks have been shown at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), The Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (in collaboration with Sam Durant and Tom Recchion), Performa 09 (New York) in collaboration with Mike Kelley, Blum & Poe (Los Angeles), Human Resources (Los Angeles), The Santa Monica Museum of Art, The Western Front (Vancouver, BC), Mandrake (Los Angeles), and Art Basel: Statements in collaboration with Andrea Bowers. Benzel was selected for inclusion in the first Los Angeles biennial, Made in L.A., at the Hammer Museum.

• 5:00pm, Gallery
Bidding inside gallery concludes.

• 5:30pm, Blum & Poe Parking Lot
Scott Benzel & Mark Hagen, Bass Elegy/Devil’s Night (for M.K.)
The piece is an homage to Mike Kelley and features a wrecked Ford Pinto (the model of car that Kelley drove when he moved from Detroit to Los Angeles), modified to house a black pyramidal bass speaker cabinet (based on the grave markers of 19th Century Paris). The performance element is based on an idea of Kelley’s and involves playing Detroit bass music (ghettotech, booty bass, and early Detroit techno) through the system so that the body of the car vibrates loudly.  An original composition featuring cello and 808 bass will be played as well. This work will also be among the auction items.Mark Hagen’s sculpture and paintings tackle the legacy of Minimalism, suggesting alternatives to its endgame. His sculptural installation, We’ve Seen the Future and We’re Not Going, is a grid of roughly cut black onyx plates mounted onto an aluminum frame.  His standout To Be Titled (Additive Sculpture, Los Angeles Screen) resembles a mid-century architectural screen, but he has cast the cement units from plastic bottles and tiles from the infamous Rampart Police Station, injecting problematic content into a pristine modernist object.  His work has been included in Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum and The California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art.  He shows at Almine Rech Gallery (Paris) and International Art Objects (Los Angeles).

• 6:00pm, Blum & Poe Parking Lot
Auction for Bass Elegy/Devil’s Night (for M.K.) ends.  Event concludes.

The Fix-It-Up Show (1981)  –
In the Fall of 1981, Los Angeles Contemporary Art Exhibitions (LACE) presented works by more than 37 well-known LA (and one anonymous Etruscan) artists that were altered by Michael Uhlenkott and Jeffrey Vallance, recent art school graduates at the time.  Modification techniques included banging against and dragging over concrete, glueing on hair, and similar broad, gestural treatments.  Some of the artists included Chris Burden, Ed Ruscha, George Herms, Mike Kelley, Suzanne Lacy, Betye Saar, and Alexis Smith.  In a 1982 Art in America review of the exhibit, Post-Modernist art critic Craig Owens noted that the irreverence of the project traces back to Dada and the Surrealist artists.  “At least in concept, Uhlenkott and Valance’s Fix-It-Up Show demonstrates the iconoclastic stance we associate with a specific tradition of avant-garde practice in the visual arts,” said Owens, “… they inscribe their own work on top of other artists’ works.”  Vallance and Uhlenkott, who conceived and developed the project, have graciously allowed SASSAS to reprise their original concept and will also participate as “fixers.”  Vallance is best known for projects that blur the lines between object-making, installation, performance, curation and anthropological study.  Uhlenkott is an artist, musician, surfer and world traveler.

Fix-It-Up Too is curated by Cindy Bernard, Danny Gromfin, Laura Fried, Carole Ann Klonarides, and Dawson Weber.

SASSAS –
The Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound (SASSAS) is a  501(c)(3) charitable organization that serves as a catalyst for the creation, presentation and recognition of experimental art and sound practices in the Greater Los Angeles area.  Inspired by the resonance that occurs when experimental music is combined with unconventional performance environments, SASSAS seeks to foster new collaborations and improvisation to spark further exploration in the field.  Programs include the sound. concert series; soundShoppe, a monthly workshop for experimental musicians; Ad Hoc, a new project supporting touring musicians seeking to perform in Los Angeles; online concert archives at www.youtube.com/sassasdotorg; and soundNet recordings, CD compilations drawn from sound. concerts.  The organization is supported in part through grants from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Good Works Foundation, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, and the West Hollywood Arts and Cultural Affairs Commission.

For more information, images, or to request an interview, please contact Green Galactic’s Lynn Tejada at 213-840-1201 or lynn@greengalactic.com.

PHOTO CAPTION for Yellow Pinto with pyramid:

Bass Elegy/Devil’s Night (for M.K.)
photo courtesy of the artists