Art show explores ‘Void California’

When San Francisco underground filmmaker and Other Cinema impresario Craig Baldwin watches Ant Farm’s “Media Burn” (1975) or Jonathan Reiss and Survival Research Laboratories’ “A Bitter Message of Hopeless Grief” (1988), he doesn’t simply see a swooping finned “dream car” crashing into a flaming wall of TVs at the Cow Palace, or mechanized animal skeletons enacting dire dances of torment and dread.

“These films resonate very deeply for me,” says Baldwin, surrounded by the “trillion notes” he relies on while programming, as a matinee plays above him at Artists’ Television Access.

S.F. new-wave outfit Tuxedomoon’s “Hugging the Earth” and Mindy Bagdon’s “Louder, Faster, Shorter,” which documents early San Francisco punk acts like the Dils, the Avengers and Sleepers, will also probably make it onto Baldwin’s video and film program as part of the exhibition of “punk-inflected” zines, photography, collage and sound art.

“A recurring theme of marginalization, of outside status, of poverty and loss,” as Baldwin describes it, marked his California generation’s response to what was viewed as the void between the Vietnam War and Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” between the violence of the Manson family murders and the Jonestown massacre, and the technological advancements in sound and video recording as well as photocopy machines.

Inspired by the “new-wave cultural research” of V. Vale’s Search and Destroy zine, the seven curators from CCA’s graduate program in curatorial practice researched and gathered publications and works by the likes of Raymond Pettibon, Negativland, Melody Sumner Carnahan, Ruby Ray and Greta Snider for “Void California.”

The irony, in a social media landscape awash with online expression, is that the curators have come to treasure the physicality of the oxidizing, yellowing zines and ephemera in their care.

“These objects are so at risk of disappearing because everything can be put online and digitized,” says Goodman.