HAUNT THE FUTURE

Okey Dokey 2018
Hosting RE/Search Publications, San Francisco

HAUNT THE FUTURE
Organised by Brian Moran & Jamie Stevens
08.09.2018 - 30.09.2018 Opening Friday, 07.09.2018 18:00 21:00

“I want to make photographs that kill,” once proclaimed Charles Gatewood (b. 1942, Elgin, IL; d. 2016, San Francisco, CA), who was a photographer that sought after and documented the areas of American subculture that few felt comfortable in, much less publish, and who revelled in the areas that broke beyond the borders of convention. From the mid-1960s to his death in 2016, Gatewood’s photographs become synonymous with the shifty, the sadistic and sexual, and the outsider punk culture which grew in the darkened areas of a country that was undergoing incredible change and revolution.

Mike Kuchar (b. 1942, New York, NY) has been making films for more than 60 years, but he has always remained an illustrator. Remarking that films “should have sex appeal . . . it helps making it bearable to watch,” the illustrations of Kuchar go right to the pulsing heart of sex; in saturated colours and erotic compositions that would make St. Theresa in Ecstasy blush, Kuchar’s drawings are revelations in homosexual spirituality. As one-half of the Kuchar Brothers, with his twin George, the two pioneered and established a legacy within the underground film world of New York in the 1960s that has since shaped both the city’s, as well as country’s, identity of queerness and dark comedy.

Anne McGuire (b. Minnesota, USA) has been making films that combine equally the intensely private with the intensely revealing. Extolling, demonstrating, and entrancing through performance and the editing of her films, the work by McGuire focuses centrally on one person’s experiences: herself, but through lens both teasing and seductive while also perplexing and misleading. In Joe DiMaggio 1,2,3 (1991), McGuire begins by recording a luck sighting of the baseball legend in the San Francisco marina. As the video progresses in its parts—from following covertly to stalking, singing songs for her affection to the man, to reflection on her experience later while focusing on driving—the film charts a progression of desire and hysteria, initiated by chance and circumstance.

Brian Moran (b. 1978, Los Angeles, CA) is an artist and draftsman-as-researcher. Since 2005, Moran’s ongoing project, Engineering Consent, an iterative series focusing on the points of intersection between marketing and psychoanalyses, has explored the histories of market forces and active public participations through sculpture, works on paper, and primary documents. Thinking to Herman and Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent”—which looked to mass media communications as the arbiter of influence to multiple publics—Moran’s project often takes the form of seemingly disconnected, non-linear material and images that, when looked at macroscopically, demonstrates a psychic symbioses between man and the market he reflects himself into.

A founding member of the rebel underground film collective, No Nothing Cinema, Marian Wallace began making experimental films as a student at SFAI, studying with George Kuchar, Gunvor Nelson, and Lawrence Jordan. After receiving her MFA, she was employed at a film sound studio, going on to work on features (including mixing sound effects for "Bram Stoker's Dracula" by Francis Ford Coppola). For the past decade she's produced a monthly talk show with host, V. Vale, for public access television in San Francisco, while continuing to work on experimental films, printmaking and painting, and also co-publishing RE/Search books and zines.

RE/Search Publications was founded in San Francisco in 1980 by V. Vale, and is the successor to Vale’s punk-rock fanzine, Search & Destroy, notoriously started via a $200 loan provided by Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In the time since its inception, RE/Search has been at the bedrock of San Francisco’s punk and counterculture movement, publishing tabloid issues on a variety of sub-current topics, and on a larger scale publishing issues on such figures as William S. Burroughs & Brion Gysin, J.G. Ballard, and Throbbing Gristle & Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. In 1988 and ’89 it published an issue devoted to “Pranks,” and successively a film on the same topic, that has since been noted as the predecessor to popular American television shows such as MTV’s Jackass and Punk’d, as well as the numerous, highlyviewed Fail Compilations on YouTube.