Back in 2006 I was living in LA, working as the director of a contemporary art gallery. Most of my spare time was spent visiting galleries, museums and artists’ studios, trying to get a handle on the local scene. Going to shows and seeing bands was another constant, and I was always on the lookout for places and projects where these two worlds collided. A lot of the visual artists I was meeting played music, like the painter Luke Whitlatch with his band Bipolar Bear, and there were a bunch of art school bands around, like the Mae Shi and LA Riots, who had come out of CalArts. I started to hear about artist-led projects like My Barbarian and Los Super Elegantes, who were pushing the boundaries of the “band” concept, performing their music in gallery spaces and bringing installation-based performances into traditional music venues. The whole scene seemed ripe for the fruition of art/music collaborations coming from all directions. I was excited by the possibilities. It was around this time that I met Eamon Ore-Giron during an open studio event for the UCLA visual arts grad school. His studio was one of the most exciting places I’d been in a long time, filled with stacks of small, delicately rendered gouache drawings of skulls, crosses and anthropomorphic totems, spray painted planks leaning at odd angles, cut-up record cover collages and vividly colored canvasses marrying the weirdo Pop style of John Wesley to imagery of Latin American public murals. His work answered to something I had been seeking for a very long time, a co-mingling of the West Coast skateboard culture I grew up in and the high art references of the world I now found myself engaged with. As we talked, Eamon was working on a home-made contact mic he was building to capture sound from a bunch of random objects he’d attached to a decrepit turntable to create a kind of rudimentary looping device. There was a definite mad scientist vibe about him that I liked immediately. Later Eamon introduced me to his friends Joshua Aster and Justin Cole, two other visual artists at UCLA who were beginning to experiment with sound as a further element in their artistic practices. As I later learned, Eamon, Josh and Justin had already begun collaborating on musical experiments, forming the band OJO as an outlet for their more acoustical tendencies. The fact that they called the group OJO, Spanish for “eye,” and one of the few words that reads as a palindrome in both languages, was a clue that this was a band that was already thinking both musically and visually. What started off as freeform, open ended, everybody-make-some-noise jam sessions, quickly formed into a solid core group of dedicated collaborators pushing the boundaries of music and performance in exciting and unexpected directions. After they were joined by Brenna Youngblood, another visual artist from UCLA, as well as the musician Chris Avitabile (Collapsible Mammals) and cultural historian Moises Medina, OJO began to expand the boundaries of the project, producing elaborately choreographed performance compositions that included visual elements like light projections, sculpture and installation environments. From the outset, OJO was interested in breaking down the barrier between performer and audience, bringing their audiences into the fold as both collaborators and sound makers/instruments. A typical OJO performance will often include directives to the audience, asking them to clap, snap, stomp, howl, chant or scream while moving in circles through the performance space. More than any other point of reference, OJO’s most recent performances evoke the Happenings of the 1960s, and the Cunningham-Cage-Rauschenberg legacy of multi-media performance collaborations, updated to reflect the political and musical climate of now. Their shared interest in creating an egalitarian, all-inclusive performance experience has led them to perform in galleries, museums and artist-run spaces including ESL Projects, Queens Nails Annex, the Hammer Museum and LAX Art. Most recently, OJO completed a three-part performance series at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, part of the museum’s Engagement Party residency program aimed at supporting non-object-based collectives whose practices have historically been overlooked and underfunded by art institutions. The concept of the “art band” can be defined any number of ways, but for OJO I think it’s less about the fact that several members of the group are practicing artists, and more about turning the basic idea of a “band” into its own art project. Recently in LA I met with the members of OJO at Eamon’s house in Angelino Heights, to talk about the genesis of the group and what they’ve been up to lately.
TEXT BY BEN PROVO / IMAGES COURTESY OJO UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED
OJO Interactive Lecture Series, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 2009, image courtesy of MOCA Los Angeles/Patrick Miller (opposite) OJO Interactive Lecture Series, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 2009; OJO Color Chorus, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 2009, image courtesy of OJO/Christine Kesler
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