Seriously Ecstatic: Joshua White at the Fillmore East, 1968-70 is an account of the Joshua Light Show’slegendary two years at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East. Performing with The Doors, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Blue Cheer, The Band, and many others, the Joshua Light Show created extravagant visual experiences to accompany the music. The book includes exclusive photos and film stills from those performances, along with pleasant detours to the set of Midnight Cowboy and the Woodstock festival. Dan Nadel has interviewed Joshua White and scoured his archives to compile this mini-history.
Soundscreen Design, a "product company inspired by music" and publisher of the Artist Music Journals series hosts a party celebrating the book's release. The evening will include music by "Gary, Devin, and Ross," the musical collaboration between Gary Panter, Devin Flynn, and Ross Goldstein. Joshua White and his team will enliven ISSUE's performance space with a multi-channel video environment, incorporating never-before-seen archival footage.
Josh White is renowned for his light show at the Fillmore East in the late sixties and early seventies. Employing an arsenal of various trailblazing effects, including the now-iconic “liquid light”, the Joshua Light Show catapulted Fillmore crowds into cosmic depths from which many have yet to return. In his post-Fillmore life, White has gone on to a career in television direction and mixed-media art. But he continues to keep a few fingers dipped in the liquid light.
Dan Nadel is the author of Art Out of Time: Unknown Comic Visionaries 1900-1969 and Art in Time: Unknown Comic Book Adventures 1940-1980 (Abrams ComicArts) and has compiled and edited books including We All Die Alone, Where Demented Wented: The Art and Comics of Rory Hayes (Fantagraphics), The Wilco Book and Gary Panter (PictureBox). He also co-founded and edited the now defunct anthology The Ganzfeld. As a curator, he has mounted exhibitions for AMP Gallery and the Athens 2007 Biennale in Greece, the Watarium Museum in Tokyo, and numerous other venues in New York, Los Angeles, and Paris. He most recently curated the only comprehensive Jack Kirby exhibition to date, The House The Jack Built, in Lucerne, Switzerland and Karl Wirsum: Drawings 1967-1970, at Derek Eller Gallery, New York. Dan has published essays and criticism in publications including The Washington Post, Frieze, and Bookforum, and is the co-editor of Comics Comics. He lives and works in Brooklyn.
Long one of his generation’s great visual artists, Gary Panter also has a long history as a musician. He began recording and issuing records on his own back in the ‘70s, but he is probably best known for the “Tornader to the Tater” single, engineered and backed by the Residents, which came out in ‘81, and the Japanese LP, “Pray for Smurph,” which has recently been reissued in deluxe digital format. His sound is always woozy, but he can play a guitar just like stealing a bell. And considering his history – from Jimbo to Pee Wee’s Playhouse to Dal Tokyo to Pink Donkey and onward – well, what would you expect? His most recent book is the massive “Gary Panter” two-volume monograph issued by Picture Box. Amazing.
Devin Flynn is another guy whose visual presence is better known – for now – than his “footprint musicale.” A master of animated insanity, his most revered project may well have been the “Y’all So Stupid” series, which destroyed the line beyween surrealism and Asperger’s Syndrome with all thumbs blazing. What is less known is his deft-ass handling of all-known musical instruments, no matter how obscure. How deft? Deft enough to make Gary sound more like Paul McCartney than a walrus. Which is defter than hell.
Ross Goldstein is a skillful multi instrumentalist who has collaborated with Dearraindrop and done extensive field recording.