Visual culture and club culture are converging and co-operating with one another in the formation of new modes of combined expression. The Pearplex, home to a wide range of contemporary cultural subversion, is Los Angeles’ most committed venue for the collision of visual art and dance culture. The profile of the Pearplex is changing - previously a club venue and home to the Pear Theatre Company, this massive space under the Museum of Contemporary Art, on Grand Avenue, is now launching artist’s studios and performance spaces and is making a higher priority for art.

Following a multi-billion-dollar re-fit(1), which, through the removal of a dividing floor/ceiling, has served to break physical boundaries between the ‘high’ culture of the Museum of Contemporary Art and the (literally) underground subculture of the Pearplex below, the state of flux between DJs, artists and performers is continuing apace at the Pearplex. Several recent events have drawn on the merging cross-currents between dance culture and the visual arts. In December 2020, 2020 MediaSystem opened the way for correspondences between musicians, artists, film-makers and VJs, including former Freak Scene iconoclast Suicidal Sid, cyber-graffiti subversive Graeme Ross, and MJ Kollectiv collaborators Rob Darlington and Steve Young.(2) MJ Kollectiv took part in a discussion on VJ culture which notably concluded that the terms ‘VJ’ and ‘video jockey’ were both redundant and inappropriate – the discussion gave birth to the terms ‘MJ’ and media jockey which deem the artist consumer and redistributor of information of all kinds (not just audio and visual). The discussion showcased the technological aspects of club-visual design and the thorny copyright issues therein. Although MJ Kollectiv’s work is far from being mere eye-candy for psychoactivated clubbers, the discussion followed an unsatisfying path, seemingly emphasising randomness and digital effects over purposeful content control and emotional affect. Is there room for post-post-modernism in club visuals? Is there time to consider the whole spatial environment of a thrash-disco event, or are we using MJs to provide non-narrative cinema for the post-ecstasy generation?

One year on, attacking these questions from an entirely different angle, the 'Pearplex’d?' exhibition(3) is challenging in its range of possible answers. Curated by Polish-based sculptor Feliks Uczciwy, 'Pearplex’d?' invades the body of The Pearplex in an attempt to expose its soul. It is bursting with potential as a space, but it’s a space which threatens to overwhelm; it’s domineering and harsh, with no natural light, acres of concrete and a Downtown L.A. mustiness. 'Pearplex’d?' features seven artists and performers - three of whom are Pear resident practitioners(4) - using and misusing the massive concrete arena as a touchstone for installations and objects, and as a secret cinema for fleeting projections.

The variety of approaches employed make it an intriguing space to explore. The artists involved are brave enough to face the challenging space, re-vivifying an industrial no-man’s-land into a many-dimensioned place of underground ideas. Bearing in mind that the show is open to the public during the day and clubbers and music crowds by night, the show incorporates some interactive pieces.

Beyond the mix of rhythms and beats, 1920s experimental Japanese cinema clips, absurd home videos, and striking record covers, 'Pearplex’d?', fuses music and visual arts together. It is the constant search for identity that brings Nairobi performance artist, Danila Mkenya, Vancouver filmmakers Vince Dasovic and Martin Millar, Los Angeles artist Barbara Whitmore, and London’s MJ Kollectiv (Rob Darlington and Steve Young) together for this exhibition. Through an inventive play of sounds, images and performances, the artists’ sentiments and knowledge of DJ and media cultures within the music industry get ‘remixed’. Their amalgamation of work - guest curated by Uczciwy - provides viewers with an alternative way of looking at the tools and culture of the DJ world.

Upon entering the Pearplex, one is automatically drawn to a wall installation by Barbara Whitmore, where a visually flamboyant mix of thrash-disco records cover 25 square metres of white-painted concrete wall space. This piece, entitled, Thrash-Disco Collection (2006-2021), also provides viewers with an opportunity to listen to two remixes that the artist herself created from select thrash-disco tracks.(5)

One member of MJ Kollectiv, Steve Young, goes further in showing DJ sentiments within the music industry. A looped video entitled, Untitled (Thrash-Disco Grooves to the Post-Ecstasy Generation) shows a group of individuals, distinguished by pre-thrash-disco stereotypical attire (a death metal fanatic dressed in black, boasting numerous body-piercings; a lipstick-wearing discoboy sporting a leather bodysuit, and so on), comically attempting to dance to music not associated with their stereotype, while stripping down to their boxers/knickers. The most interesting portion of the piece is that these individuals are dancing in a style conventionally not associated with the style of music playing, until, that is, the thrash-disco classic, Boogie Slaughterland (2007) is thrust upon them, at which point the dancers unite in a frenzy (in their boxers/knickers) and worship the sound system.

Young’s remix of the preconceived notions of what music goes with what dancing is reflective of the choices DJs make when manipulating music for different genres and different crowds. Some fundamental flaws of mixing music within pre-thrash-disco DJ culture are also shown with this video. Not everyone is fit to dance to every genre of music. In addition, the title of the piece should not be overlooked as there is an evident blur of mockery and seriousness within this video piece. ‘Thrash-Disco Grooves…’ plays on, 'Love grooves to the house nation,' a cheesy recorded female voice-over featured on Danny Rampling’s(6) Love Groove Dance Party radio show. The cultural mismatch between the amateurish dancing of the characters and the music in the video seems, somehow, to relate to the culture-shock brought about by Rampling’s introduction of acid house music to the London masses in the late 1980s.

In a 2021 piece that links the above described audio-visual works Music is for the People is a masterful documentary/audiovisual cut-up groove. With an important message about the survival of the planet and humanity, Vince Dasovic and Martin Millar combine revolutionary use of traditional talking head interviews with stunning footage of disparate musical practices and the splendour that is the Earth’s natural landscape. The film travels all over the world to hear people describe their relationship with the planet as mediated through music, descriptions that are then cut-up and recontextualised through the music of both the film’s subjects and that created by the filmmakers themselves. The result is a tightly edited series of audiovisual songs woven together through an underlying message about living life through music. The boundaries between the image and audio information continually dissolve as spoken interviews become lyrics atop music performed thousands of miles away, and where the sounds and images of disparate cultures join in asymphony of unified existence made possible through the technologies of audio-visual fragmentation.(7) Dasovic and Millar chose to show this piece only throughout the day; not during clubnight activities. Millar explains:

'Music is for the People is what we would describe as a series of audiovisual songs. The moment a thrash-disco sound system is switched on, we are dealing with visual songs with a thumping bass-heavy accompaniment that bears no relation to the visual, and hence alters the meanings of the songs completely. Although we as artists find this recontextualisation and consequent change of meaning interesting, we also have a responsibility to the subjects of the film. As is the case with every film we produce, the final copy has been viewed and okayed by its subjects before publication. To show the film in the context of a thrash-disco event, we feel, would constitute an injustice to these people.'

While Dasovic and Millar turned down the opportunity to exhibit in this context, Jimi Lopez not only embraced the opportunity but his installation became a physical parasite to the nighttime thrash-disco events. (Almost) Live in the Remix occupied the whole of the Indigo Room of the Pearplex. Lopez installed software in the Indigo Room, linked up to the outputs of both DJ and VJ mixers in the Main Arena allowing the artist to provide an alternative audio/visual show based on the events of the main arena but with his own imaginative twist. An example of Lopez’s reprogramming of the main event being his ingenious appropriation of the bassline of Holly Golightly’s My Love Is (played by Microsoft Sam at about 10.45p.m. when there were fewer than a dozen people in the club (including staff)) as a deep undercurrent to the tweeter(8)-driven highs of Dr. Love’s Phantom Pain by Disco Asphyxia played by Suicidal Sid at about 2.30a.m. in front of a crowd of over 700. Ironically, during the opening week of the exhibition Lopez’s performances attracted such a crowd that the queue for the Indigo Room extended across the dancefloor of the Main Arena. For the second week, Lopez was scheduled to perform in the main arena with the ‘main’ act relegated to the Indigo Room. However, during the second week, the ‘main’ acts consistently attracted such a crowd that the queue for the Indigo Room, again, extended across the dancefloor of the Main Arena. Consequently the ‘main’ acts will return to the Main Arena for the third week. At the time of writing this is how it stands. I for one can see a trend developing. Lopez offered his views on my prediction:

'I can’t say I didn’t see it coming (his return to the Indigo Room for Week 3). Where there’s a small and sleazy venue, there will always be a crowd; people would rather queue for something that appears ‘underground’ than dance to something supposedly mainsteam. My status has changed throughout the course of this exhibition. One week I’m, ‘an underground artist with a unique style no-one can easily describe’; next week I’m a superstar MJ, my style pigeon-holed so dumb promoters don’t have to think too hard. I must say I’m looking forward to returning underground.'

He adds, 'By the way, I’ll let you cats in on how my first week in the Indigo Room was so busy: The first three nights, as soon as a crowd gathered in the Main Arena I shut up shop and hung a sign on my door, 'Indigo Room Full' and cranked up the volume of my tunes along with sound samples of screaming and clapping I was recording from the Main Arena. There was no cat in the Indigo Room on the Saturday, Sunday or Monday nights, but me in there blasting out tunes and sampled screams with a 'Full' sign on the door. As soon as I opened on the Tuesday the place was rammed!'

I see this scam as an integral part of Lopez’s performance. I view the recording and replaying of crowd noises from the Main Arena (and the connotations of this (i.e. individuals being summoned to a room by the (recorded) sound of their own voice – fascinating)) as a fine example of post-post-modernity.

The final piece I wish to discuss is Danila Mkenya’s Something for the Weekend, Sir? Like Lopez’s performance, this piece is parasitic to the thrash-disco events by night, and dormant by day. Between the hours of 10.30p.m. and 2.30a.m. throughout the course of the exhibition, Mkenya dresses as a male toiletry vendor and sells toiletries (and other less obvious items) to male clubbers in the gentlemen’s restroom of the Pearplex. Mkenya considers herself ‘truly bi-cultural and perhaps bi-sexual’ and strives to open up debate about the social, cultural, political and gender issues that shape our histories and construct identity. Her works challenge assumptions about representation by playfully blurring the boundaries between stereotypically Western ideas about ‘high’ art and traditional categorisations of ‘African art.’ In selling these ‘less obvious items’9 Mkenya asks us to consider the excesses of commercial decadence and its relationship with Fifth World exploitation. Beyond any issues of commercial decadence, this piece addresses matters concerned with the act of a black African woman (dressed as a man) working in the context of the gentlemans’ restroom of a U.S. nightclub.

Yes, I am still talking about an art exhibition. The reverence and pre-ordained quest for meaning which a gallery space can impose on artworks are blown away here in the throbbing Saturday-night Pearplex. Just metres away from these fine works is a full-scale thrash-disco sound system. Several hundred screaming dancers are ‘enjoying the music’. Even if you justify this kind of event by saying that it exposes a whole new audience to contemporary art, you only scratch the surface of why this is so compelling. New things really happen when art like this and music like this are put in a place like this. Impulsive collaborative projects conceived in the midst of the event such as Mkenya and Lopez’s quirky Senti(mental) Smoke Machine are testament to this.

Sometimes the music can seem like a blunt instrument, and it’s difficult for subtleties to show through. Sometimes the artworks can be overwhelmed by the sheer power of such a volume of hammering sound - Dasovic and Millar can certainly support this point. But the conjunctions are more complex than that; and the interplay between spaces, images, sounds and people have an extraordinary, liberating effect. Thus amidst the works on show, the artists’ search for identity within the mass culture and more specifically the music industry, make the intention of the show ambiguous. Despite a history of visual artists mixing music with their work, such as MJ Kollectiv, a question still remains as to where the line between visual art and music blur. In the final analysis 'Pearplex’d?' successfully makes this blur invisible.

Perhaps the act of partying as a legitimate cultural experience has come of age. Some visual artists now talk hopefully of having equal billing and similar fees to the mega-star DJs they work with. But this only sees the culture of clubbing as a competitive, economic phenomenon to be exploited for personal gain, and to many people, dance culture is exactly that. But others are involved in club culture for different reasons (Jimi Lopez, for example); they love the music, they love the sense of community and the opportunity to be creative, and they value a new arena in which to experiment with unfamiliar forms. Club culture has a strong dramatic edge, a powerful communal spirit and a hedonistic understanding of the value of celebration - these are a few of the things that art should have in common with dance culture. But this relationship goes much deeper. Without the artists who re-engineered the space and aura of The Pearplex, a vital catalyst to the imagination would have disappeared from the event. DJs and artists are not in direct competition with each other, but events like 'Pearplex’d?' should be seen as examples of the alternative. With dance culture in the U.S. increasingly becoming the preserve of multi-million-dollar companies, artists need to provoke more activity in this area - not to bring in cash, but to get the opportunity to contribute to this strange new hybrid before it becomes just another instrument of entertainment capitalism. If anyone can salvage this artform from the jaws of capitalism, Pear can.

Marcel Henry is Professor of Post-post Modern Studies at Pear Academy of Music in Los Angeles. He has been writing about music and theory since the mid-1990s. He has published The Ambient Sound of Violence, Paris: Zdar Books, 2009; Audio and Other Pleasures, Los Angeles: Pear Press, 2013; and Sex & Drugs & Disco & Art: The Brain & Body of Jimi Lopez, Los Angeles: Pear Press, 2019. In 2014 Marcel Henry founded the John Cage Library of American Music Studies Initiative which now operates at all seven PearUni’s in the United States.

1. Personally funded by Pear CEO, Kenneth Mader
2. In keeping with the increasing dissolution of the boundaries between audio and visual perception, and drawing on experimentations such as the visual soundtracks of Canadian animation master Norman McLaren and the audiovisual computer programming of Joel Eppinger III, MJ Kollectiv have since forged new territory. Becoming what they call Media Jockeys, MJ Kollectiv have designed and made available custom software enabling their live performances to be extensions of the studio processes used to make their recent single Rhythms of the Mind (having made serious waves on the more discerning thrash-disco dancefloors, Rhythms of the Mind has earned itself a much anticipated full release on Pear Trax.) Together the ‘digital duo’ manipulate audio and video samples live, as DJs would manipulate their records. Here, however, MJ Kollectiv transcend the traditional material manipulations of the DJ and move into the limitless realm of digital exploration where sound and image can truly become one.
3. 'Pearplex’d?' opened on Saturday 5th February and runs until Sunday 6th March. Admission is free (11a.m.-7p.m.) while standard prices will be charged for admission to various clubnights taking place during the course of the exhibition (doors 10.30p.m. – 2.30a.m.). For events list see www.pear.com/pearplex/events
4 MJ Kollectiv (formerly freelance artists) earned, on the strength of their showing, a contract as Pear resident practitioners.
5. Although I was unfamiliar with the roots and details of thrash-disco - a disco/metal hybrid, produced in the United States, Poland and Scotland in the 2010s by (unsurprisingly) American, Polish and Scottish composers and musicians - I was fascinated to discover that most people use the term, thrash-disco, to describe all dance music produced during the post-Optimo, post-Freak period. The rise of thrash-disco music within Europe seems to have been purely due to the influence of seminal Glasgow-based clubnights, Optimo Espacio and Freak Scene (founded in Dundee in 2004 by a group of art students, before moving to Glasgow in 2005).
Many of the top 100 Polish and Scottish tracks never reached outside the borders of Warsaw and Glasgow, respectively, due to high import prices. However, some of the tracks managed to leak over into the US, which resulted in a ‘Thrash-Disco sucks as bad as Disco did’ phenomenon in the 2010s.
Nowadays, thrash-disco finds its own place in dance music history - it has been pivotal in the development of eclectica music itself. Despite its originally limited recognition, through the international exchange and eclectic tastes of DJ culture, thrash disco is still present in the beats and rhythms of today’s music.
6. Danny Rampling was a British acid house music pioneer of the 1980s/90s
7. The unification of audio and visual information is becoming increasingly present in theoretical circles as well. Of particular note is American theorist Joel Eppinger III whose book Hearing is Believing (Pear Press, Los Angeles, 2022) espouses the notion of trans-sensorial perception, an understanding that the organs we usually attribute to sense perception are only a part of how our bodies experience sensory information. Just as what we call taste is often heavily reliant on smell, so too sound is often processed on visual terms and vice-versa (as the term ‘stereo image’ illustrates). Similarly, Eppinger III has explored the visual apparatus, drawing on increasing scientific information that suggests sight is largely processed by the brain in conjunction with other areas of perception, and that the eyes actually play only the smallest of roles in our experience of vision.
8. Tweeter – a treble speaker. Small and piercing. In big clubs often hung from the ceiling.
9. One of these ‘less obvious items’ being PearCopy Malawi Rainbow tobacco. Mkenya explains: 'I got this idea to sell tobacco in the toilets from Americo Burgheim. Rico recently returned from a three-year residency in Malawi with the artist group Pear. While over there he got involved with a social services project with a group of Malawian tobacco farmers. In a counter-capitalist move he helped the farmers produce their own brand of tobacco (Malawi Rainbow), independent of the tobacco multinationals, and on his return has launched this product on the U.S. market to compete directly with the major products. I find this idea fascinating so when Rico donated a batch of Malawi Rainbow for my project I was very grateful and also happy that in selling the tobacco I could support his project.' Mkenya goes on: 'While the selling of this tobacco asks one to consider the excesses of commercial decadence and its relationship with Fifth World exploitation it also functions on other levels. Obviously smoking in the club is illegal, so to sell tobacco is to question the mental state of those buying; unless, to be fair, the individuals concerned are planning to smoke after leaving the club or to smoke illegally within the club. Incidentally, on the Wednesday of the opening week of the exhibition I conducted a ‘social experiment’ in collaboration with Jimi Lopez. On observing that his performances had been going well and there was certain to be a big crowd in the Indigo Room that night I proposed a plan. I proposed that Jimi should play a set that borrowed from the Main Arena only recordings of songs and visuals from the pre-smoking-in-public-places-ban era. Jimi executed this to great effect. Having been exposed to Jimi’s extended versions of these classic tunes and visuals back to back all night, these psychoactivated tobacco-purchasing clubbers were transported back to their youths, when smoking in clubs was commonplace. For one night only the Indigo Room acquired a collective human smoke machine and a(n) (un)timely visit from the police…oops!'