Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Jim Roche

I first heard this on WFMU, it's pretty funny, and clever ( to me anyway) I thought it was a comedian, but I searched around on the WFMU blog and found this info.

In the 1970s, Jim Roche, a performance artist from the deep South, made his way into the New York artworld and began doing pieces in galleries where he'd go into a trance-like state and channel redneck characters from his home turf. The result was this 2 LP set, "Learning to Count," released in 1982 by a museum in Kansas. These are the most intense audio works ever put to vinyl: insane rants, heavily racist, sexist.

This one has some swearing on it, but nothing racist or sexist.
You can download all the tracks on the WFMU site.
This is the only one I have ever listened to. Considering the above info, I really don't need to listen to the others, but this one is funny and odd.


Bubble Blower

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Jim Roche is an Art professor at Florida State. One of the most intense personalities you could ever meet; a postmodern snake oil salesman. Buy his mythos and you'll love him, don't you'll despise him.
The way you hear him on Learning to Count is exactly how he sounds. He rants the same way, about everything.

Anonymous said...

And not only that.......he is alive and well. The China people will eat anything that does not eat them and now they are getting all the turtles from our american rivers. Man kind, and especially the China neese along with a lot of the other people around its borders are the skin cancer of the earth.......over breeding, ultra high polluters. Losers and yet they have bought their way in.

Jim Roche's work always got censored back then.....do you think it would be any different now. Raw, alive, passionate and real! Thanks for having this on your site.

Anonymous said...

Jim Roche is a racist whose particular brand of xenophobia allows him to view people of Chinese ancestry as sub human. He blames China for all the ills of the world but more importantly,is incapable of drawing a distinction between an opressive regime and the average Chinese citizen. This type of moral cancer has no place in higher education and aside from his "talents", he is a small minded bigot and nothing more. Keep him away from your children.

Anonymous said...

I resent the last comment about my work. If came from a person in NJ who has never met me, knows nothing about my work, and only wants to tear it down because of what he and I disagree about concerning BMW and other motorcycles. He is a late middle aged man who lives alone, has now children, and only talks about guns and "his" right to be armed. Please play all of my works and put them in the time context they were done in. Learning To Count is/was 100% accurate as to the feelings in the country at the time the work was performed. An artist responds to the culture, and shows it as accurate as possible. Jim Roche in Tallahassee

Jan van Toorn said...

Jim Roche is one of the best artists still alive.In Holland
many people like him.I play his double album almost daily.Keep up the work and make more records..
especially now when also in Holland religious groups are increasingly trying to get more influence in politics,downgrading daily life to the fifties.
Thank you Jim.