Apr 17, 2015

The scores of Eliane Radigue invite you to listen carefully and deeply particularly as the French electronic music composer creates a sonic ambience that seems to move as a continual, nuanced flow around the listener. In her performances at The Kitchen during the 1970s and 80s, however, Radigue employed various unconventional strategies to pull her audience’s minds, ears, and hearts close to her soundscapes sometimes using the written space of a press release as a platform to present her work to the public, and occasionally incorporating sounds appropriated from her personal life. For Radigue, the act of listening carefully to her compositions inevitably pointed back to, and asked for, such sensitivity in everyday experience. Her first show at The Kitchen was in 1973, featuring Phi 84... Read On

Mar 24, 2015

Naked, posed unapologetically on an auction block, Robbie McCauley stood and called on the audience to hear the brutal tale of her great-great-grandmother Sally’s rape. “Bid ‘em in!” bellowed her performance partner Jeannie Hutchins. The audience shifted uneasily in their seats as the uncanny discomfort of history settled over them. Were they being asked to repeat after Hutchins – to implicate themselves in this reenactment of the slave trade? Hutchins urged the spectators to participate. Arms outstretched and fingers pointing, she reached to drag the words from the guts of a shocked audience. Behind her McCauley was still standing, tall and trembling, detailing exactly what Sally’s white master did to her those years back. “Bid ‘em in,” mumbled a smattering of viewers as McCauley’s han... Read On

Mar 19, 2015

Carnival of Sleaze is a title that grabs attention. A simple Google search brings up Guns ‘n Roses, GWAR and some touchy political accusations. The 1988 press release from The Kitchen’s Carnival of Sleaze promises much more than rock music and political satire. It claims “Carnival of Sleaze tests the outer limits of artistic subject matter while offering a response to ‘the new propriety’ in performance.” More specifically, the carnival dealt with what many considered to be “sleazy” art. Though the term has fallen out of favor, it evokes the abject imagery that many late twentieth–century artists were using to make larger political statements about American taboos. The AIDS epidemic was creeping into popular culture, and along with it a renewed paranoia around body fluids and sexual di... Read On

Jan 28, 2015

Over the course of two November nights in 1994, The Kitchen hosted before and after ambient. Curated by Ben Neill, the event was also the inaugural event for the series, Electronic Café. Electronic Café was a program in which many artists stationed at various studios and workshops in Los Angeles (including the Electronic Café’s headquarters in Santa Monica), Paris, London, Denmark, Asia, and South America collaborated via video conferencing, then a revolutionary technology. Before and after ambient filled the theater and gallery spaces (the first and second floors) of The Kitchen with simultaneous live performances by various experimental music artists, including artists performing and video conferencing from Santa Monica and London. This event, through its simultaneous shows, global i... Read On

Dec 18, 2014

1986. The year the United Nations declared as the first International Year of Peace. The year that Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was first observed as a federal holiday. The year President Ronald Reagan instituted sanctions against Libya, South Africa began severe censorship of their press, Oprah premiered her first national broadcast, and Elie Wiesel accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. The year that musical group Zazou-Bikaye premiered in the US at The Kitchen with what UK music magazine Sounds described as mind-bending “textures married to an Afro-electro beat.” While a performance and a UN declaration may not appear immediately connected, a concert from a collective led by two African men (one white and one black) from two separate countries (one north and one sub-Saharan, the latter one s... Read On