Category: Art

Hidden off to the side at MOCA’s mammoth Under The Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981 exhibition were some photos from Chauncey Hare. I’d never run across his name before, but his work (mostly post-hippie, pre-yuppie California corporate anonymous) was compelling enough for me to try to dig up some information (and write this blog post). His bio is frustratingly short…

Chauncey Hare does not define himself as a photographer, but instead an engineer, a family therapist and, above all, a protester. Funded by three Guggenheim Fellowships and three National Endowment Fellowships, he spent only a short period of his life making photographs. Frustrated by the photo art world, he photographed only intermittently to 1985, when he stopped making photographs altogether. In 2000, distrusting art museums, Hare donated all of his photographs and negatives to the Bancroft Library of the University of California in Berkeley. He has an engineering degree from Columbia University, an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, a Masters Degree in Organization Development from Pepperdine University, and a Masters Degree in Clinical Psychology from Sierra University. He and his wife Judith Wyatt are co-authors of the denial-breaking clinical handbook Work Abuse: How to Recognize and Survive It (1997). As a licensed family therapist Hare now helps working people – in person, on the phone, and on the internet – minimize the abuse they suffer as workers in their corporate and government jobs.

Amazon lists three books with enough poisonous reviews to bump them up on the “must track down” list.

Quoting from the Pacific Standard Time description…

In this outdoor spectacle, Richard Jackson will fly and crash a remote-controlled, ultra-lightweight, battery powered, model military jet plane with a 15-foot wing span, and filled with paint, into a 20-foot canvas wall that reads “accidents in abstract painting.” On January 22, 2012, at 4:00 p.m. Jackson’s plane will take off and circle the field directly south of the Rose Bowl in Pasadena for approximately 30 minutes. The climax will occur when the plane is aimed toward and flown into the canvas wall; the plane, made of balsa wood, will splinter on impact. Its contents—brightly colored paint—will splash onto, and then drip slowly down the canvas, making an “accidental” painting.

Following Jackson’s spectacle, video footage and photographic documentation will be shown with the wall and the plane debris, along with other work, at the Armory Center for the Arts in an exhibition entitled Richard Jackson: Accidents in Abstract Painting, the Armory, on display from February through May 2012.

Here’s how it went down:

The Pasadena Star News talks with artist Jackson.