Overview

Over forty interviews and essays with leading cultural icons who have unique ways of critiquing ""the system"" with humor and ingenuity. Dazzling deceptions and provocative put-ons from some of the most outrageous artists and personalities. Spontaneous, improvised craziness from the Underground in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and points in between. This book opens up a whole new territory of fun and pleasure. From artists, Bruce Conner and Mark Pauline to radical organizer/writer, Abbie Hoffman, to performance artists, Karen Finley and Harry Kipper (and the list goes on) -- the interviewees each have a quirky and distinctive way of commenting on life. Here are an exhaustive number of anecdotes and philosophies, heavily illustrated with photographs and clippings from their travails.

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9781889307459

Table of Contents

Reviews

""The definitive treatment of the subject, offering extensive interviews with 36 contemporary tricksters.""--Washington Post ""This book has inspired a new genre of prank phone call recordings, performances and videos based on pranking, and other dubious achievements.""--Comic Revue

Author Information

MARK PAULINE is the founder of San Francisco-based Survival Research Laboratories (since 1979). Along with partners Matt Heckert and Eric Werner, he designs and manufactures machines of legendary destructiveness and horror. Sometimes SRL integrates found animal corpses into their menacing mechanical metaphors. Their city-block long shows have been documented on several videos as well as 16mm, and generaly feature newly-invented mayhem-marauders engaged in incendiary combat of mythic dimension against the backdrop of an amazing apocalyptic set. MARK McCLOUD is a post-psychedelic sculptor whose energetic work, like his conversation, is by turns bright, zany, erotic, eccentric and rich in perverse anecdotal detailing. Currently he is curating a show of ""LSD Art,"" researching art, music and literature of the sixties, working and teaching at Santa Clara University, all the while maintaining his weirdly dazzling gallery/salon through whose portals pass the most interesting visitors to San Francisco. Mark McCloud grew up in boarding schools where pranks functioned not only as initiation rites but also as tests of character and flexibility. Here he recapitulates a brief history of pranks both traditional and contemporary. Gerald V. Casale, DEVO member, a highly articulate conceptualist and media critic in his own right, is a founding member of the band Devo, which produced many albums and videos. He's full of ideas for future film projects, effortlessly spinning off scenarios, mixing in anecdotes and analogies, all the while engaged in a running complex critique of society's deficiencies. In this interview he expounded on the philosophy and principles of pranks. In 1957, Bruce Conner moved from Kansas to San Francisco just in time for the Beat Generation art/poetry scene, where he became a well-known artist and filmmaker in the company of notables such as Dennis Hopper, Michael McClure and others. Subsequently he lived through the Hippie and Punk undergrounds as an active participant, all the while creating a huge body of work ranging from sculptures, collages, photograms, etchings and assemblages to films and photographs. Some of the best documentary photos taken of the early punk rock scene in S.F. are his. He also ran for Mayor of San Francisco--a prank as he saw it. Conner's pioneering 1958 montage film, A Movie, amazed viewers when it was first shown. Using only found footage, he juxtaposed cowboy and Indians with tanks; catastrophes (including a spectacular bridge failure) with feats of daring--some laughs, however, being caused by death or seriously accident. He also made a film on the JFK assassination titled Report, which angered most reviewers. All of his films are eccentric and humorous in some way; that could be said of almost all his art.

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