The Goot Blog

A FRIEND IS GONE
Lynn Learned (10-14-10)

Jefferson Airplane, Headlights, long nights

Janis Lyn Joplin and gin,

She gave a little piece

Of her heart to him.

He gave her Lucy in the Sky

With Diamonds, and screamed

“Now, Come On, Come On”

He got smart with Leary,

Searched for Samadhi with Watts,

Partied with the Dead and Garcia,

Proposed an excess of exotic herbs,

And tripped down to Mexico.

Oh, It makes you feel good.

Glenn McKay's light-projection art gives SFMOMA the acid test.

By Glen Helfand

'IT'S A MAGIC DAY," Glenn McKay says in his funky but well-ordered Sausalito studio. The bearded 62-year-old artist who created the throbbing psychedelic visuals for Jefferson Airplane at their mid-'60s apex and at Ken Kesey's legendary "acid tests" smiles and tinkers with brightly colored slides on a light table as he reveals that he just found out San Francisco's Catharine Clark Gallery will show one of his digital "millennium paintings," a narrow computer monitor that displays images of vibrant abstract brush strokes that slowly morph and dissolve into new images.

But McKay, known to some as the Altered Statesman, is clearly more excited about his retrospective exhibition that opens next week at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. "It's every artist's dream, to have a one-man show at MOMA," he admits.

Fittingly, then, his exhibition, titled "Altered States," includes dreamlike content. With state-of-the-art slide and video projectors, McKay will turn SFMOMA's media arts gallery into a theater of time-traveling trippiness. An hour-long compilation of his light pieces from the '60s, '70s, '80s, and '90s (most re-created from live performances) will screen continuously on a Cineplex-size screen, with blobby, throbbing liquids on overhead projectors, op-art geometrics, and pulsating slide shows blending into what they used to call an experience. Each section is set to a different soundtrack; the '60s portion, for instance, is set to Airplane's "Plastic Fantastic Lover."

It's the kind of visual expression that seems more appropriate for a rock show at Maritime Hall than a pristine cultural institution, but this isn't the first time it's happened for McKay. In 1968 he staged "An Evening with Glenn McKay's Headlights" at the Whitney Museum in New York, after a curator caught his show at the Fillmore East. McKay still seems to enjoy the incongruity of his popular form in highbrow institutions. "There's gonna be people toking out in the parking lot and then going up to see the show. It's called 'Altered States,' and that's exactly what it is."

Considering the show's strong connections to the music world and hippie culture, some museum visitors may contest its status as art. Robert Riley, SFMOMA's media arts curator, views McKay's work in a historical context as it relates to multimedia.

"I remember seeing Glenn's shows with the Airplane, and they were so successful," Riley says. "Sometimes, when the conditions were right, the shows were incredibly composed. They couldn't be that good without being organized." (McKay, fortuitously enough, is one of the few light artists of the period who kept comprehensive archives of his projects.)

"I'm taking this seriously, in terms of relationship to other art," Riley continues. "His work not only comes out of a use of machines of its era, it's related to process art. Nothing is meant to last -- it's all about transparency. His work becomes an animated field of light, color wheels, moving mirrors, and surfaces." At the same time, Riley also seems pleased to announce that a mention of the show is already up on the Grateful Dead Web site.

McKay, an engaging, forthright character, isn't shy about revealing that he isn't a Deadhead. A formalist at heart, he prefers performances that are more structured. "I've done light shows, but I'm basically a painter," he says. He describes his use of hand-painted transparencies, film, inks, and dyes with various art-world references. Some of his more recent pieces, he says, are examples of "21st-century abstract expressionism," while others are live, animated versions of Josef Albers's color theories. "The thing that's really consistent in my life is that I'm studying light -- all the time. The quality, the way it affects colors, the way it affects me."

In his gallery statement, Riley nods to the performative and ephemeral aspects of McKay's work in more academic terms. "Each projection emphasizes light and time as content in art, explores the changing nature over several decades of temporal expression, and expresses inquiry into the philosophical notions of transparency and illusion."

The artist, a practicing Buddhist, might add a reference to the notion of paring things down to a simple essence. "All it is, is light, form, color, and movement," he states. "I had an epiphany in Thailand eight years ago in front of the Buddha. From then on [my art] became part of my spiritual quest. I'm not preaching nothin' except being present and opening the mind to an altered state of consciousness."

These days McKay arrives at his visions naturally, but this wasn't always the case. "In the '60s and '70s, the pieces were totally drug orientated. That's what was happening. I still think psychedelics are one of the best things in the whole wide world," he says. "My first psychedelic experience when I went to the acid test was the thing that really formed me as an artist. I was painting abstractly then, and I thought I knew what abstract was. But a good load of acid made me realize, wait a minute, this is abstract."

His current works, the aforementioned millennium paintings, are as abstract as ever. Their form, however, attest to McKay's newfound interest in digital technology. Having just started working with computers last year -- and complaining that "I find things that are created on the computer have no soul, they're cold" -- he has nonetheless produced work that addresses real aesthetic issues. As with his early work, McKay paints his gestural, liquid, and very analog abstractions on slides and then digitizes them. Then he imports the images into a computer program that allows him to create sequences of fades and dissolves that can be played continuously on a high-resolution monitor. The result resembles a melting stained glass window, an effect true to his past.

McKay seems to be entering the next century in his own style, not that of a younger generation. When asked if he had any connection to rave culture, a scene that McKay's light shows have had a clear influence on, the artist scoffs. "I did a show at a rave over in Oakland about a year ago," he says, slipping on a pair of rose-tinted aviator glasses. "It didn't really work; the kids were more intrigued by the lasers." In that regard, McKay may be of the old school, but where would they be without him? 'Glenn McKay: Altered States -- Light Projections 1966-1999.' Feb. 4-June 1, SFMOMA, 151 Third St., S.F. $4-$8.

Other Glenn McKay links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_light_show

http://www.iotacenter.org/program/publication/other/mckay

http://articles.sfgate.com/1999-01-31/entertainment/17677751_1_mckay-s-work-paintings-mckay-s-head-lights

# posted by goots @ 12:29 PM 2 comments

Most Americans would probably find it hard to believe that Mexico has a problem with illegal immigration. At best, they may think that it stems from Central and South American's overstaying their welcome in the country en route to the United States. But the majority of illegal immigrants in Mexico are actually from the United States.

According to Mexico’s federal bureau of immigration, many undocumented Americans enter Mexico every year and, unsure of how long they are going to stay, end up with incorrect or expired paperwork. As the Global Post reports, many of the Americans in Mexico are elderly citizens who go south to retire.

In direct contrast to the laws, like SB 1070, in the United States—the Mexican government does not deport people who are in the country illegally. According to Mexican immigration agent Beatrice Amparo Perez Alatorre, there is a process for “regularizing” these immigrants and not sent to jail unless they have committed a crime. After five years, undocumented immigrants who have been living in Mexico can apply to become a legal citizen.

Prof. Jorge Durand of the University of Guadalajara confirms, “To be undocumented in Mexico is not a criminal offense.”

# posted by goots @ 9:14 AM 1 comments