GEORGE PORCARI
Born: 1952 Lima, Peru
Emigrated to Los Angeles 1962
Moved to New York City 1979
Returned to Los Angeles 1984
Worked as Acquisitions Librarian at the Art Center College 1988-2017
EDUCATION:
Pratt Institute, NY
Art Center College, LA
EXHIBITIONS:
Things: a Story, As-Is Gallery, April 2023, Los Angeles, CA
Los Angeles, 1978, Tif Sigfrids Gallery, June/July 2021, Comer, Georgia
Mise-En-Scéne - Group Exhibition, Curated by Veronica Gonzalez-Peña, Shoot the Lobster Gallery, January/February 2021, New York City
Via Cafe - Group Exhibition, Tif Sigfrids Gallery, Curated by Tif Sigfrids, January/February 2021, Athens, Georgia
Greetings From LA: 24 Frames and 50 Years – Haphazard Gallery, January/February 2016, Los Angeles, California
Interference - Tif’s Desk, May 2014, Los Angeles, California
Just Everyday Matters: an Exhibition of Photographs 1963-2009 - China Art Objects Gallery, March 2010, Los Angeles, California
Untreated Strangeness – Momenta Art, Group Show - Curator: Chris Kraus - with Jorge Pardo and Naomi Fisher October 2009, Brooklyn, NY
10 Year Anniversary Show – Group Exhibition, Curated by Steve Hanson, China Art Objects Gallery April 2009, Los Angeles, California
I (Heart) Oregonia (With Tif Sigfrids) - Automat Gallery November 2008, Los Angeles, California
I See Through You - Mandarin Gallery, June 2006, Los Angeles, California
Greetings From LA 1979! - Mandarin Gallery, June 2006, Los Angeles, California
Shape Shifters - Group Exhibition, Curated by Amy Yao, China Art Objects Gallery, November 2005, Los Angeles, California
Memory Verite - (With Miriam Noske) Mandarin Gallery, January 2005, Los Angeles, California
Sharon Lockhart & George Porcari - (With Sharon Lockhart) China Art Objects Gallery, April 1999, Los Angeles, California
Limeños - Shoshana Wayne Gallery, March 1999, Santa Monica, California
Six Artists - Group Exhibition, Charim Klocker Gallery, May 1998, Vienna, Austria
George Porcari - Shoshana Wayne Gallery, January 1998, Santa Monica, California
New Beginnings - Group Exhibition, Skirball Museum, January 1997, Los Angeles, California
P.L.A.N. (Photography in Los Angeles Now) - Group Exhibition, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, February 1996, Los Angeles, California
Love in the Ruins - Group Exhibition, Curated by Denise Spampinato, Long Beach Museum of Art, November 1994, Long Beach, California
The Bradbury Building Show - Group Exhibition, Bradbury Building, June 1990, Los Angeles, California
George Porcari - Laurie Rubin Gallery December 1988, New York City
PUBLICATIONS ABOUT GEORGE PORCARI:
Gallery Rounds: George Porcari at As Is Gallery, Jody Zellen, Artillery Magazine, May 2023
Greetings From LA: 24 Frames and 50 Years, Catalog, Haphazard Gallery, Los Angeles 2016 (Second ed. 2019)
Introduction to Greetings From LA by Jorge Pardo, Haphazard Gallery, Los Angeles 2016
New Palimpsests From the Zen Arcade by Colin Blodorn, Haphazard Gallery, Los Angeles 2016
The Aesthetic of Reappearance by Sylvére Lotringer, Tif’s Desk, Los Angeles 2012
Untreated Strangeness by Chris Kraus, from Where Art Belongs, Semiotext(e) 2011
Undesirable Alien by Veronica Gonzalez-Peña, Momenta Art, Brooklyn, NY 2009
Untreated Strangeness at Momenta Art by Holland Cotter, New York Times, December 4th, 2009
Shadows, Catastrophe, Happiness: a Conversation between Sylvére Lotringer and Chris Kraus, Momenta Art, Brooklyn, NY 2009
El Laberinto by Mark von Schlegell, Momenta Art, Brooklyn, NY 2009
Pictures by Porcari by Chris Kraus, C: International Magazine, Winter 2006
Now and Then by Veronica Gonzalez-Peña, Mandarin Gallery, Los Angeles 2006
Porcari at Shoshana Wayne by Charlene Roth, New Art Examiner, July/August 1999
Porcari at Shoshana Wayne by David Pagel, Los Angeles Times, January 1998
Love in the Ruins by Denise Spampinato, Long Beach Museum, of Art 1994
Playing With the Truth by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Laurie Rubin Gallery, New York 1988
PUBLISHED BOOKS BY GEORGE PORCARI:
One Second to Live: Photography, Film, and the Corporeal in an Age of Extremes, Delancey Street Press, Los Angeles, CA, 2023
The Antonioni Adventure, Delancey Street Press, 2019
Beige, (with Bruna Mori), UpSet Press, Brooklyn, NY 2019
Greetings From LA: 24 Frames and 50 Years, Delancey Street Press, 2016
PUBLISHED ESSAYS BY GEORGE PORCARI:
Charlie’s Rude Awakening: The Problem With Class Consciousness in Chaplin’s City Lights, CineAction Summer 2023
The Orson Welles Adventure: On The Road to F is for Fake and The Other Side of the Wind, CineAction Spring 2020
Fuck History: Let’s Dance! Richard Avedon in Paris, 1956, CineAction Winter 2018
One Second to Live: Time and Photography, From the catalog: Photography and the Imaginary, Nan Rae Gallery, Woodbury University Fall 2017
The Arc of a Dive: The Photography of Alexander Rodchenko and Leni Riefenstahl, CineAction Spring 2015
Doubting Thomas: Photography and Blow-Up, CineAction Winter 2013
Antonioni’s Orgy: Zabriskie Point, CineAction Summer 2011
The Biggest Film Biographer in the World: The Films of Ken Russell for the BBC, Cine Action Spring 2010
We the Undead: Nadja, CineAction Spring 2009
Fellini Goes to the Beach, Cine Action Summer 2008
Fellini’s Forgotten Masterpiece: Toby Dammit, CineAction Spring 2007
Marriage and Its Discontents: Torpor by Chris Kraus, Rain-Taxi September/October 2006
A Bridge in Blythe and a Vortex in Time: Photography and the Novels of W.G. Sebald, NY Arts March/April 2005
A Brief History of the Photography of Concern, NY Arts May/June 2004
Valerie Jouve: Concrete Poetry, Soma magazine December/January 2002
Interview With Wong Kar-Wai, Soma magazine January 2001
I Was an Artist for the 20th Century, Soma magazine September 2000
Fellini’s Ocean and Mariko’s Dance, Inflatable Magazine Fall 2000
The Photographer of Modern Life: Some Thoughts on Sharon Lockhart’s Untitled, Inflatable Magazine Fall 1998
Western Sighs: The Doom Generation and Lost Highway, Inflatable Magazine Spring 1997
The Photographs of Richard Prince, Arts Magazine May 1987
FILMS:
Greetings From L.A. 1978! – 6 minutes 1978 Super-8. This film was made throughout the year 1978 and a few months before I moved to New York City. In effect it was a goodbye and it was also meant to be a portrait of the city by car. I had lived in LA since I was 10 but still felt like something of an outsider or a tourist and the film sought to find some kind of explanation even if none was forthcoming. As the film progressed from the Summer into the Winter months shots that did not fit those initial requirements (of a drive-by film) intruded and, since I have never cared much for concepts I abandoned the original idea and allowed the film to make its own way. It was edited to The Rolling Stone’s Moonlight Mile over a period of several hectic months before my move. I filmed only those parts of the city that I was familiar with: Gardena, Hawthorne, Westwood, Lawndale, Hermosa Beach, Torrance, Santa Monica, and Point Vicente in Palos Verdes. The emotions in the film befit a 26 year old's look at a city that was by his own admission incomprehensible. It is not meant as an homage, or a critique, or a nostalgic trip - it is simply a portrait of the city that put some of the conflicted ideas and feelings I had about LA into film.
The Night Crew (With Doug Lee) – 30 minutes 1989– Betamax, Hi-8. A film about the immigrants who every weekday evening clean the modernist landmark building by Craig Ellwood, the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Arriving at midnight they work the night shift ending at 8AM - meeting students and staff only when they are working after-hours. The film interviews the "night crew" and asks the participants a basic question: What do they think of the building and the people they have met who occupy it during the day?
The House of Fiction – 30 minutes 1987-2000 – Betamax, High-8, Digital Video. This film was made over a span of years from 1987 to 2000. The House of Fiction was the name of a bookstore in Pasadena California that began sometime in the early 70's. Originally a small bungalow house that showcased only fiction, by the time it closed in 2000 there was a full range of traditional topics in a storefront on Colorado Blv. While the film is primarily about the closing of one of the oldest surviving independent bookstores in Pasadena, it is also a biography of its owner Bill Tunilla. The work also chronicles my failed attempt to make a conventional narrative film with a young woman in the same location (based on Italo Stvevo’s book As a Man Grows Older) in 1987 while holding down a job as Acquisitions Librarian at the Art Center College. As the time frames overlap the failure of the initial film, and the failure of the bookstore 13 years later, act out a visual counterpoint - but the main emphasis remains a love of books, small family shops, and cats, and their magical life force.
David at China – 16 minutes 2001 – Digital Video. David at China was made in 2001 in Chinatown, Los Angeles. This film chronicles the installation and opening of David Von Schlaegel's posthumous exhibition in China Art Objects Gallery that year in LA. Mark Von Schlegell (David's son), Steve Hanson and Giovanni Intra lovingly put together the exhibit of David's abstract sculpture and paintings, and the film shows all of the steps in the process of putting together an exhibition, from the mundane to the sublime. The film tries to give a picture of David Von Schlegell's work in the context of his time, and also provide some serious, and not so serious, documentation of what art openings were like in Los Angeles at the turn of the millennium.
A Wedding in Death Valley – 13 minutes 2003 – Digital Video. This film is about the marriage of two friends who were married there in 2003 in a hotel very close to Zabriskiei Point. It uses the familiar convention of the wedding video - a form that has a lot of possibilities that are not sufficiently appreciated - as a starting point to deal with relationships, sexuality, and of course at the top of the list - the ritual and romance of the family unit.
With Glenn Gould – 30 minutes 2005. A collage film made from appropriated footage from various sources, about the young Glenn Gould's trip to New York in 1957 to record Bach's Italian concerto. The film deals with time as both a fundamental aspect of music and how it might work in the world as such - as opposed to traditional narrative flows that have been, and remain, the backbone of documentary films. The film digresses into various possibilities for different kinds of biographies of Gould - some more appropriate than others - as imagined by the film’s author.
The Beauty and the Beast (Dedicated to Chris Marker) - 30 minutes 2006 - Digital video. This film was made from appropriated footage and is a re-telling of the iconic legend transformed into a narrative about a visitor from a post-apocalyptic future who returns to the past (1962) - the year in which all hell broke loose - in order to set things right. Things do not go as planned.
Magic Gas – (With Tif Sigfrids) - 30 minutes 2007 – Digital Video. A film that documents a folk/rock concert by Tif Sigfrids held in a gas station in Echo Park, Los Angeles aptly named "Magic Gas" - reflecting an older Los Angeles that was more amenable to eccentricity, spontaneous outbursts of irrational behavior, and a good time in a gas station. Tif's friends come and perform duets with her, including one incredible and outlandish performance, by master musician Tom "Guitar" Watson.
Tif and Tom Play the Unknown – (Wth Tif Sigfrids and Tom Watson) - 4 minutes 2008 – Digital Video. Documents a concert performance by Tif Sigfrids and Tom Watson of Neil Young’s Mr. Soul at a club in Hollywood called “The Unknown.”
I (Heart) Oregonia - (With Tif Sigfrids) – 30 minutes 2008 – Digital Video. A film about Tif Sigfrids’s trip from LosAngeles to Oregonia, Ohio - where she grew up - to celebrate her 27th birthday and bid farewell as her parents will shortly be moving to Colorado. In the small town of Oregonia she meets up with family and friends for remembrances, food binges, re-encounters with old boyfriends, sing-a-longs on the porch, and heart to heart talks around the kitchen table - ending in a birthday trip to the Little River Café for a night of drinking and Karaoke. You can - sort of - go home again and I (Heart) Oregonia is living proof captured on digital video.
15 Jokes Told By 15 Artists in 15 Minutes - (With Tif Sigfrids) — 15 minutes 2008 — Digital Video. Documents a conceptual artwork by Tif Sigfrids in which she assigns jokes to 15 artists during an opening of their work at Circus Gallery in Los Angeles one warm summer night.
A Parallel – 30 minutes 2010 – Digital video. This film was made from 2004 to 2010 from appropriated footage. An astronaut’s rudimentary mission in 1963 goes horribly wrong and he crashes back to earth but miraculously survives. As his wife and child greet him on his return, in their comfortable suburban house, they realize that the man who has come back is not the man who left. The astronaut comes to understand that this is not his beautiful wife, or child, or house and that he is in a parallel world.
Eileen Myles at China Art Objects – 20 minutes 2010 – Digital video. This film is a document of Eileen Myles reading from selections from her collection of essays The Importance of being Iceland:Travel Essays in Art.
Dumping Boyfriend - (With Tif Sigfrids) - 18 minutes 2010 - Digital video. This film captures a young woman’s single day as she gets rid of her Toyota, selling it to a junk dealer, and ends a long distance relationship with her boyfriend on the same day - the latter happening in a McDonald's drive-thru on the way to the junk dealer. Drama ensues - of a kind.
The Enchanted Florist - (With Tif Sigfrids) - 20 minutes 2010 - Digital Video. Tif Sigfrids goes to Monument Colorado to visit her parents in their new suburban home, and to participate in the July 4th parade where Tif’s mother has a float celebrating their new shop: The Enchanted Florist. The film evokes the landscape and the people as well as the ritual of American spectacle - on Independence Day - at ground level, with Tif Sigfrids as both explorer and guide.
Waiting For Brainard – (With Tif Sigfrids) - 25 minutes 2011 – Digital video. Waiting for Brainard is an adaptation by Tif Sigfrids and myself of Eric Rohmer's short film Girl at the Monceau Bakery, a work that helped to initiate and set the pace for the French New Wave in the 1960's. We transferred the setting from the young, University areas of Paris in the early sixties to Echo Park and Silverlake in Los Angeles some half a century later. We also switched the roles and now it is the woman who takes the lead and the bakery girl becomes a bakery boy. To make matters more to the point we made the voice over narrator - a central part of the Rohmer film - a French man's voice - essentially turning the inner voice of the American female protagonist to a French male and further adding to the narrative play. The film takes Rohmer's ideas, of moral choices that are made early on before one is really prepared for them, in effect improvising on moral choices that eventually define a life, and relocates them to a contemporary setting where we might see how this scenario plays out in the quickly gentrifying neighborhoods of Echo Park and Silverlake in 2011.
Sunset to Amoeba From Echo Park (A Journey With Daryl Haney) - 38 minutes 2012 - Digital video. A bus ride from Echo Park to Amoeba Records in Hollywood with Daryl Haney as he recounts his experiences as a waiter in NY in the 80’s, as an actor who is brought to LA by Roger Corman to make B-Movies and finally as a screenwriter in "the industry," as the locals refer to Hollywood. Daryl Haney, or Duke, is a novelist, essayist, blogger, and raconteur. The film uses Haney’s memories to trigger a series of digressions in the filmmaker’s own recollections of various trips in different cities from Lima to New York to Berlin at different times in his life. The oral memories of Haney and the visual ones of Porcari engage and disengage playing off in counterpoint, asserting the play of memory and the experiential as the two friends navigate Sunset Boulevard in a trip that takes 38 minutes and 30 years
Sol With Cloud – (With Tif Sigfrids and Gracie De Vito) - 3 minutes 2016 – Digital Video. A baby is left alone for three minutes in an art gallery - a cloud mysteriously wanders in and it starts to rain.
A Drive To Paradise Garden - 3 1/2 minutes 2018 - Digital Video - A Summer drive with Colin and Sol Sigfrids Blodorn to Howard Finster's Paradise Garden becomes an adventure into assemblage sculpture, gardens, art, suburban Georgia, and the meaning of paradise.
Clown Painting (WIth Justine Harari) - 16 Minutes 2019 - Digital Video. A painting clown (Harari) goes to the fabled Venice Beach boardwalk in Los Angeles and sets up a public studio on the beach along with other artists, musicians and people selling a wide variety of objects. Harari proceeds to make a collage painting, using pieces of the LA Weekly, and various friends, acquaintances, and passerby stop by to chat, give advice and talk about the meaning of life.
Athens to Graceland in 16 Songs - 21 minutes 2021 - Digital Video. Documents a two day trip, taken with Tif Sigfrids, from Athens, Georgia to Memphis, Tennessee, via Nashville, in July 2021 to visit Graceland. The 24 hour odyssey is condensed into 20 minutes, with various songs, and the poetry of Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass, first edition) to keep us company and to comment upon, or play off, the contemporary landscape of the American South. The film is also a portrait - via automobile - of Tif Sigfrids as she drives to one of America’s favorite destinations, the home of Elvis Presley.
Coming on to LA (in 12 Songs) - 13 1/2 minutes 2023 Digital Video - A film shot primarily at LAX and a bus ride from the airport to downtown Los Angeles. According to the French sociologist Marc Augé airports are “non-places” but there might be more here than meets the eye. With so many people in transit and so many families suffering under stress, making last minute calls, going or leaving home, there is bound to be a human element that defies any category. The soundtrack is composed of twelve songs by LA based composers/artists/musicians whose names and geographical setting within Los Angeles is listed at the end.