V. Vale and Marian Wallace would like to visit your town with a fun and informative art show that surveys San Francisco’s underground culture from the 1970s to today. Often incorporating dark humor, their work explores authorship, spectatorship, movement, and interpretation through mediums such as 16 mm and digital film, live interviews, musical performance, and »art on the walls«, including prints, paintings, and photographs.

Marian Wallace earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute and has produced and shown films with the »NoNothing« group for over 30 years. Her films have a hand-made and surrealist aesthetic, and center on the process of creation, involving paintings by herself and other artists as well as soundscapes that aim to cause psychological shifts in the audience. She has also curated many film shows throughout the years, helping to establish venues that show experimental and underground films. She has also worked as a sound rerecording mixer for feature films, and recently edited a feature film for Christopher Coppola.

V. Vale is a documentarian who champions underground art-world figures. He has worked with subjects such as J.G. Ballard, W.S. Burroughs, and Mark Pauline, as well as early punk rockers, tattoo artists, »Incredibly Strange« musicians and filmmakers, and many other non-commercial, on-the-edge artists. Vale has contributed to countless literary undertakings, films, and events, and has published over 40 books with RE/Search and Search & Destroy, his imprints.  Vale has documented underground culture and the characters that inhabit it for over 40 years.

Internationally, Vale and Marian have shown works at the Rain Dance Film Festival, London; Cosmopolis, Barcelona; Rietveld Academie and Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam; Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp; West Den Haag (gallery); and Lausanne Underground Film Festival (LUFF), Lausanne. Recently in San Francisco, they have been featured at the San Francisco Art Institute, Roxie Cinema, New Nothing Cinema, Black Hole Cinematheque, the Luggage Store, the Emerald Tablet, and the Public Library, to name a few.

Together, they produce a talk show on San Francisco Public Access television called The Counter Culture Hour. Each show is an in-depth conversation between Vale and a featured artist. Guests have included Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson, Jerry Casale, Lyle Tuttle, Penelope Rosemont, Dirk Dirksen, Penny Rimbaud, Jack Hirschman, Diane di Prima, Karen Marcelo, Toby Dammit, Matt Gonzalez, Lydia Lunch, Stelarc, and the list goes on. 

Organization / Institution

ZKM | Center for Art and Media