The Machine

source: vernissagetv

Los Angeles-based artist and musician Llyn Foulkes exhibits and performs his self-made musical instrument, The Machine, at dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Germany.

The Marchine is a homemade apparatus that Foulkes built from old-fashioned car and bicycle horns and other parts that emit sound. After being a drummer in a rock band from 1965-1971, Foulkes invented The Machine because he got tired of rock music that in his opinion all became about how loud it is.
Llyn Foulkes was born in 1934 in Yakima, Washington. He studied at the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts). Foulkes began exhibiting with the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1959, where many famous Los Angeles-artists such as Wallace Berman, Robert Irwin and Ed Ruscha had their first solo shows.

In 1967, Llyn Foulkes was awarded the first Prize for Painting at the Paris Biennale, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and he participated in the IX São Paulo Art Biennial, in Brazil. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art was the first museum to acquire his work for the collection in 1964. In 1974 he had his first retrospective at the Newport Harbor Art Museum. In 1992 his work was included in the exhibition Helter Skelter at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. After his participation at dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Llyn Foulkes will have a major retrospective in 2013 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
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source: llynfoulkes

Llyn Foulkes has been called the Zelig of contemporary art. Over the past five decades he has been consistently inconsistent, confounding critics and galleries with dramatic changes of direction whenever it seemed he was about to be overtaken by popular acclaim. He’s also been consistently ahead of the curve. He showed a year before Andy Warhol at the legendary Ferus Gallery in the mid-60′s and was heralded as an early master of Pop with his famous ‘Cow’ (a nicely rendered creature in blank space), anticipating Warhol’s bovine prints by three years. Among the artists with whom he emerged were John Baldessari, Wallace Berman, Robert Irwin and Ed Ruscha. Although he would probably scoff at the label, many admirers regard his musical performances as performance art.

His eclectic oeuvre includes intriguing meditations on the nature of photographic images, a light romance with nostalgic Americana, savage portraits reminiscent of Francis Bacon and scathing commentaries on the insidious nature of commercial pop culture — particularly the products of Disney (dead Mickey’s are strewn through recent works). And although he has zigged and zagged through the decades, an echo of Dada and a Duchampian playfulness inform much of his work (though certainly not in a manner that reveals any dreaded consistency).