performance
Everyday War at Ashes/Ashes, Los Angeles, 2016
(Mayakovsky) Study for Instrumental Trans Communication, Voice, and Autotune at Rainbow in Spanish
Scott Benzel Book Launch and Art Writers Open Mic
Scott Benzel Book Launch
and Art Writers Open Mic
1-1:30PM (Book Signing); 1:30-3PM (Open Mic)
The Los Angeles Contemporary Archive is pleased to announce the release of Scott Benzel’s untitled collection of poems. This event will include a book signing by Benzel from 1-1:30pm.
From 1:30-3pm, the even will open up an ‘open mic’ reading of art writers’ work, featuring Benzel, Andrew Berardini, Suzy Halajian, Carol Cheh, Martha Kirzsenbaum, Steve Kado, Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal, Travis Diehl, Catherine Wagley, and many more! Art writers and critics are invited to sign up ahead of time or on the day of to read up for up to 7 minutes.
To sign up, email: info@wendyssubway.com
About the book
Art dealer Seth Siegelaub’s campaign throughout the late ’60’s to have the new conceptual work of his stable of artists understood and accepted, through the creation of catalogs, exhibitions, and entreaties to leading art writers and magazines to review the work, resulted in the still-operatal thesis that the content of much contemporary work is interpretable only through written material created by critics and other writers. This untitled collection of poems was composed by rearranging reviews and publicity materials into mostly metrical, unrhymed lines of blank verse and by removing any form of attribution, systematically ‘blanking’ the subject as well as the author(s) of the works and poems. The poems are credited as being ‘after’ a number of well-known critics and art writers, presumably the writers of the originary texts
Op. 21 Inner Experience Fellowship / Friends of Crime at Schindler’s Fitzpatrick House Aug. 1
Scott Benzel, Op. 21: Inner Experience Fellowship / Friends of Crime for prepared piano, vintage electronics, guitar, experimental percussion, tape loop, gong, and central mixing station. R.M. Schindler’s Fitzpatrick- Leland House, August 1, 2015. Presented by the MAK Center for Art and Architecture http://makcenter.org/programming/scott-benzel/
Roland Barthes, Sade Fourier Loyola; R.M. Schindler’s Fitzpatrick- Leland House, Los Angeles
“…in their activities as logothetes, our authors, it seems, have each had recourse to the same operations…The first is self-isolation. The new language must arise from a material vacuum…Loyola requires retreat; no sound, little light, solitude; Sade shuts his libertines up in inviolable places, Fourier decrees the dispersal of libraries…
The second operation is articulation. No languages without distinct signs. Fourier divides mankind into 1629 fixed passions, combinable but not transformable; Sade distributes ejaculation like the words in a sentence…Loyola cuts up the body as he cuts up the Christian narrative…our three authors deduct, combine, arrange, endlessly produce rules of assemblage; they substitute syntax, composition…for creation.
The third operation is ordering…to subject the vast erotic, eudaemonist, or mystical sequence to a higher order…the new discourse is provided with an Ordainer, a Master of Ceremonies… in Ignatius, it is the retreat director, in Fourier some patron or matron, in Sade, some libertine who sets up the postures and directs the over-all progress of the erotic operation; there is always someone to regulate the exercise, séance, orgy, but that someone is not a subject; the producer of the episode, he acts only for the moment…an operator of the sequence. Thus the ritual demanded by our three authors is only a form of planning: it is the order necessary for pleasure, happiness, divine interlocution…but this economy is not appropriative, it remains “excessive”. “
– Roland Barthes, Sade Fourier Loyola
Self-isolation, articulation, ordering, All elements of the time-honored Los Angeles tradition of a group isolating themselves in a house (usually in the Hollywood Hills), and using the environment as an incubator for the above-mentioned articulations, for the ordering of their ‘exercises, séances’, and sound. In Op. 21,: Inner Experience Fellowship / Friends of Crime, R.M. Schindler’s Fitzpatrick/Leland house becomes both incubator and generator of an ‘allover’ soundwork.
Desert Center with Palm Springs Art Museum
Desert Center (Composition I10 Mvmt IV: Dusk) for string quartet, experimental percussion, AM radio, and electronics in collaboration with the Palm Springs Art Museum and L.A.N.D. April 3 and 4, Palm Springs Museum at Palm Desert and Desert Center, CA
photographs by Christopher Adler
SPLIT CHORALE (FOR VILJO REVELL) NUIT BLANCHE TORONTO W KATHRYN ANDREWS
Nuit Blanche Toronto October 4, 2014, Toronto City Hall
Split Chorale for Viljo Revell, with Kathryn Andrews
Review: The Buffalo News
Preview: The Globe and Mail
Plays selections from the Billboard Hot 100 for the week of Feb. 28, 2013
Scott Benzel plays selections from the Billboard Hot 100 for the week of Feb. 28, 2013 for radio tuner, sampling instrument, and belt sanders
Feb 28 2013, 9pm
Dem Passwords, Los Angeles
organized by John Wiese
7914-B Santa Monica Blvd.
followed by Evidence (Stephan Moore/Scott Smallwood)
Ace Farren Ford & John Wiese
Casey Anderson
W.W.A.R./ Die Dritte Generation at ALAC
Photographs Jennie Warren iPhone photographs by Cindy Bernard and Scott Marvel Cassidy
Scott Benzel: W.W.A.R./ Die Dritte Generation
W.W.A.R. Performance Script, 2016
Review by Sam Bloch PDF
4pm, Saturday Jan. 26 ALAC Ruskin Theatre Santa Monica Airport
Art Los Angeles Contemporary presents the debut of Scott Benzel W.W.A.R. / Die Dritte Generation for belt sanders, amplified newton’s cradles, bass speakers, glass, magnetic tape,viola, violin, and voice.
Taking as starting points Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Die Dritte Generation and Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, Benzel’s ‘performative environment’ features performers installing and then acting upon various musical and visual constructions (some repurposed from previous performances) including a belt sander racetrack, amplified newton’s cradles, a coffee table supported by bass speakers, and a long magnetic tape loop.
A|D with Liz Glynn, The Academy/The Chthonic at Eleusis at Public Fiction
Music orchestrated by Scott Benzel, performed by Scott Benzel, Corey Fogel, and Giles Miller.
As part of Scott Benzel’s current exhibition The Academy / The Chthonic at Eleusis
The Academy/The Chthonic at Eleusis one person show at Public Fiction opens September 21
With a live performance by Ezra Buchla
& a tape-loop by Scott Benzel:
Sines for Michael Asher 2-channel loop 15 ips – 7 ips- performed by Allison Wyper and Jos McKain
This stage of sorts will host a series of performances & events. Including:
A set of dinners by Liz Glynn on October 12th &13th.
Tape Music at the Schindler House
Tape Music at the Schindler House, MAK Center, Los Angeles, featuring William Basinski, John Wiese, Jim Shaw and Mike Kelley, Pauline Oliveros, Cortical Foundation curated by Scott Benzel August 25, presented by SASSAS
(Threnody) a beginner’s guide to Mao Tse Tung at Hammer Museum
Made in L.A. catalog essay by Kurt Mueller pdf
(Threnody) A Beginner’s Guide to Mao Tse-Tung-June 22 7:30 pm @ Hammer
Variations for Commercial Arcade, Gamut I-XXI, 2011
Scott Benzel- Variations for Commercial Arcade, Gamut I-XXI, Cassia Streb, viola at Trespass/Parade, 2011
BLACK BOX, BALL OF ARTISTS, WELCOME INN TIME MACHINE: PST
http://pacificstandardtimefestival.org/events/black-box-by-liz-glynn/
Recombinant Folk History and Non-Genre I for Belt Sanders and Female Black Metal Guitarist, a performance/musical work at Black Box, curated by Liz Glynn Jan. 20, 2012 part of Pacific Standard Time, organized by LA><ART
http://rebeccataylorny.tumblr.com/
http://pacificstandardtimefestival.org/events/ball-of-artists/
After Funhouse in the Style of the penultimate sequence of The Lady from Shanghai (1947) for 3 voices, rock trio, and saxophone
Greystone Manor, Beverly Hills, Sat. Jan. 28th
http://www.sassas.org/welcomeinn/
John Cage Variations IV, realized by Scott Benzel and Dave Muller
January 29, 2012 Welcome Inn. Eagle Rock
Concentric Circles (before and after David Smith) at LACMA
A performance/installation for 3 (infinite) lock groove lacquers and string trio.
Heather Lockie – Viola, Cassia Streb – Viola, Jessica Catron – Cello. Lacquer mastering by Richard Simpson.
Performa: Day is Done Live at Judson Church w Mike Kelley
Click image to play video
Review: NY Times
Mike Kelley EAPR #32 Plus: Live. Performa 09, NY
Music by Mike Kelley and Scott Benzel
Produced for the stage by Mike Kelley and Scott Benzel
Music from the Trip in the style of a Schoenberg-Gershwin tennis match…
Music from the Trip (1967) in the style of a Schoenberg-Gershwin tennis match observed in passing by Dr. Oscar Janiger (commissioned by SASSAS to celebrate West Hollywood’s 25th anniversary) and other works. Sat July 24th at King’s Road Park Pavilion, Los Angeles.
INVERSIONS I-IV FOR STRING QUARTET
INVERSIONS I-IV FOR STRING QUARTET Live at King’s Rd. Park Pavilion, W. Hollywood, CA, July 24, 20
Inversion I (Retrograde) after Dennis Wilson Audio Excerpt
INVERSIONS I-IV FOR STRING QUARTET- AVAILABLE NOW
in select stores on Numero Deux Recordings