Tuesday, July 22, 2008

GLOW inspires artist Blanco to launch BLOW Fest!


My dear amigos at Tabloid Bebê:

Words cannot express the gratitude I must convey for the what I feel in my Lisbon heart. No one has been as supportive as you of my efforts both large and small. What was a drunken rage fueled by aguardente de medronho at the beach on Saturday night has now become my raison d'être. Larger than Cane del Garbagio. Westchester is my canvas, hot air my paint. BlowLA is coming. Tell, no, shout, to your readers! Blow!

Joaquin Blanco

GLOW has begat BLOW.

Santa Monica California's all-night weekend festival drew a reported 200,000 people to its pier and beach for a festival of sound and lights that all involved agreed was best appreciated with, and created for, the use of drugs, and has gotten a kneejerkedly positive response from the LA Times and other arbiters of middlebrow culture. But at least one local artist said the attempt to copy Paris, France's tres cool Nuit Blanche was an insult to artists and mass events everywhere.

That would be performance, conceptual and installation artist Joaquin Blanco, who texted this site from the scene in the middle of the light show frenzy that “the overhyped, under-delivered... amazing disappointment... wouldn’t qualify as a neighborhood festival in Lisbon!"

His point of view was seconded by LiquidGeneration's Slippy Jenkins, who wrote "Glow Fest was an abortion... I’m betting that the only people who had a good time were either 1) really drunk or on drugs. 2) Giggly 16-year-olds or people who had the maturity level of a 16-year-old."

The man who caused international controversy and acclaim with his 2004 Garbage Cane installation in nearby Westchester promised to counter the GLOW fest with his own "Blow" festival, "an equally lame but even more over-hyped extravanganza of so-called ‘art'! One hundred electric fans blowing at hanging chimes, creating a symphony of ‘clung clung clung’! ...noisemakers... schoolchildren puffing on Coke bottles! Pan flute players from every open-air mall in the city!"

As you can see from the screengrab above, Senor Blanco has come through. The staff in his bunker-laundry-studio has created a website, is building its mailing list and is ready to unleash upon Los Angeles a mighty wind.

Check out BlowLA's website here.

And join the mailing list here.

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