The voodoo vibe of the enigmatic Anthony Burdin

THE Voodoo Room was what got Anthony Burdin kicked out of the Frieze Art Fair in London. The artist describes his installation as an approximation of the original Voodoo Room he had constructed so many years ago in the garage of his parent’s home in the suburb of Newhall north of Los Angeles. It had served as his private radio station KDOP (pronounced k-dope) and also as a rehearsal space for his constantly mutating hard-rock bands. The art fair Voodoo Room, set amid booths of pristine white walls and meticulously hung art, was a looming, windowless black structure with a locked door and razor wire.

The plan, says Burdin, a Los Angeles drifter and aspiring rock star who has recently emerged as an internationally acclaimed artist, was to sing over old recordings in an echo-infused technique he calls Voodoo Vocals. At the same time, video images of razor wire floating in the sky would phase back and forth across walls adorned with cryptic cave drawings, resulting in an atmospheric display for a truly captive audience.

It was around noon, Burdin says, when he decided to do a sound check. Inside his darkened control room, he cradled a microphone and mini-disc player, both hooked up to an admittedly over-powered 300-watt sound system. Then Burdin pressed play and waited for the first blaring chords of his song “Lollipop Kids.”

“I already knew what was going to happen,” Burdin recalls with a rascally grin, “so I made sure the door was locked so no one could stop me in the middle of what I knew would be my last performance. The song was four minutes, and I’m making sure people will know I’m there. I’m wanting them to come in to give me a record deal, but the place went nuts. People started banging on the door, the security and everybody, and they shut me down.”

The artist and his young New York dealer, Michelle Maccarone of the Maccarone Gallery, promptly informed the Frieze organizers that they were leaving. The organizers, sensing that Burdin was adding some excitement to the otherwise staid proceedings, pleaded with him to stay. Eventually a deal was struck: Burdin would perform at the adjoining Frieze Music Festival. It looked to be an unexpected coup for the long-struggling rock musician, and by the time Burdin walked onto the stage, a sizable crowd had gathered.

And that’s where it really went south. “It was a big disaster,” Burdin says. “The music kept cutting off while I was doing a song, and I would suddenly be singing with no music. So I would just scream ‘Milli Vanilli!’ to try and save myself. It was really chaotic. There were all these cables. I was not in my environment. So I ended up just holding the disc player so it wouldn’t move, and I tried to do as many songs as I could that way. It was just like watching a cripple up there. It was a really big chance to do an amazing show in England, which I wanted to do, and it became one of the most pathetic disasters ever in my career.” He pauses. “Well, I’ve had a lot like that.”

A man of mystery

BURDIN’S art is an undeniable reflection of his history, exploring the world of the outsider, the lone dreamer, evoking both the seduction and unattainability of fame in a place like Los Angeles. So is his persona. After a cagey phone negotiation, he chooses the Sherman Oaks Galleria and its unrelentingly quaint outdoor plaza for a rendezvous. It’s hard to know what he looks like, since he never agrees to be photographed, but it proves surprisingly easy to pick him out, sitting alone beside a fountain, hunched slightly in a tattered green sweater, his longish hair unkempt.

Burdin appears to be in his early 40s. He’s somewhat clandestine with the hard facts, which seems motivated less by vanity than a desire to lend a bit of KISS-like rock-star mystery to the proceedings. An additional bit of self-mythologizing has him living in an old Chevy Nova somewhere out in the California desert, the car also serving as a mobile film and recording studio. How much of that is true is hard to discern, and perhaps it really doesn’t matter. Because what Burdin does eventually reveal, the story of his unending dream of stardom and his unwavering belief in its inevitability, is far more illuminating than any details about his current living situation.

Although he’s recently been able to earn a living from his art, there’s no doubt Burdin was on the fringes for a long time, making music and art, virtually ignored. But then, in 2002, there was a solo show at Maccarone, its centerpiece a series of hallucinatory videos he had shot out the window of the old Nova, driving endlessly through the California landscape while singing over Blue Oyster Cult cassettes. The New York Times heralded Burdin’s work as “extraordinary,” and he was on his way. He followed up with the debacle at the 2004 Frieze Art Fair and another solo show in New York.

But the true acknowledgment of Burdin’s ascendance was his inclusion in last year’s Whitney Biennial, that barometer of the American art zeitgeist. For that installation, Burdin carted a dilapidated wooden shack out of the desert and resurrected it in the Manhattan museum, filling it with razor wire and scribbled-on rock albums from his collection and describing it as a symbolic representation of his radio station.

When asked about the prestigious showcase, Burdin dismisses its significance with a (perhaps protective) sneer. “The Whitney Biennial is like the Grammy Awards,” he says. “And look at how totally pathetic they are.” But if Burdin himself seems unimpressed, the New York Times was not, tagging him “a wandering minstrel of slackerdom, a newfangled art star.”

Scorn for the snubby

BURDIN was born in the San Fernando Valley, growing up on its northern edge and then farther out in Newhall, near Magic Mountain. His dad owned a gas station alongside the I-5. Accordingly, Burdin’s work constantly references that particularly L.A. convergence of the road and rock music. And within minutes of our meeting, he’s climbing into a cluttered black Prius he says is on loan from his gallery. The old Nova, he explains, has been semi-retired to a “top-secret location.”

He begins cruising Ventura Boulevard with his little dog leaning out the back window and a small video camera resting precariously on the dashboard. Contrary to his antisocial public reputation, Burdin proves an eager conversationalist, bordering on forthright, alternating between a self-effacing honesty and grandiose proclamations that he acknowledges with a shrug and “I’m just making this up as we talk”-type of disclaimers. He also uses the word “snub” a lot, primarily to describe those in the art and music worlds who have ignored him over the years. “They’re all the same to me,” he says at one point. “A snubby art crowd or snubby poodle-haired metal heads.”

Burdin drives for several hours, navigating the hypnotic grid of the San Fernando Valley before descending into Hollywood. He talks of his love for the rock band KISS, how his first concert was an enormous show the band staged in the Magic Mountain parking lot for the filming of their 1978 horror movie “Phantom of the Park.”

He spent years on the Sunset Strip hair-metal scene of the ‘80s, fronting a constantly evolving series of hard-rock bands, most composed of friends he’d taught to play. The songs he puts on the car’s stereo seem an ambitious mix of new-wave quirkiness and hard-rock grandeur. Interesting, but it’s difficult to imagine something so defiantly original finding much success among the unapologetically formulaic hairspray-and-spandex crowd.

“My average draw was between two to 20 people,” Burdin says. “Out of the 500 fliers I would pass out for a show, [sometimes] only two people would show up.”

As he talks, Burdin pulls the car to the curb along a residential stretch of Hollywood Boulevard and gestures out the window. There, about 10 feet up on a telephone pole, is a single flier stapled securely to the wood. “Lithium Messiam Superstar” it announces in faded lettering. “That’s one of my bands,” Burdin says. “I put that up there in 1993. I have this whole thing, like I’m still hanging around even though the show’s over. I’ve been hanging around L.A. forever.”

When the Sunset Strip metal scene died out at the beginning of the ‘90s and there was nowhere left for him to play, Burdin embarked on a tour of another sort, driving from parking lot to parking lot, playing tapes of the bands he idolized while singing over them and recording it all on a video camera. “I was doing the Voodoo Vocals, where I would sing and record over other bands,” he says, “but now I sing over my own songs. So they become new renditions. I’m destined to make them classics, but it’s all gonna be very cult status. If you can’t find the comedy there, you’re just not going to get it.”

To demonstrate, he puts on a recording of an old KDOP “show.” It begins with crazed disc jockey Swamp Mix (Burdin) ranting incoherently in a thick Southern accent, his words echoing off into strange audio loops. When the music fades up, it is the haunting ‘70s hit “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult, altered into something approximating a psychedelic dub version. When Buck Dharma begins the original vocals, they are instantaneously matched by Burdin singing with an underwater effect to his voice. It is surprisingly beautiful, and two things are immediately apparent: Burdin knows the song and he can seriously sing. It doesn’t come across as an ironic appropriation or even high-art karaoke, but an entirely new version of the song, with Burdin as uninvited collaborator.

Burdin’s KDOP began “broadcasting” back in 1977 as a way for him to put his favorite songs onto portable cassettes. He had been listening to local free-form FM radio stations such as KMET, featuring the inimitable Jim Ladd, as well as the albums of counterculture sketch comedians Cheech and Chong. Thus inspired, he invented his own eccentric on-air personalities, such as Swamp Mix, who is modeled on an unruly WWII vet who worked at his dad’s gas station. The later Desert Mix, who has made several appearances in Burdin’s video installations, is more of a nomadic desert rat.

“Those tapes were my earliest art,” he says. “But it wasn’t conscious art. It was just something I did because I wanted to, like the Little Rascals, where they would just set up these worlds on their own outside of adult society and just do things.”

When asked if his intention was to ever make KDOP public, Burdin responds, “Not really, but then there’s that public inside your head, that vision of being a star and being on stage. So you’re always thinking that there’s an audience. It’s always in the back of your head that there are a million people there because you have to have that energy.”

As he steers back into the Valley, Burdin plays another recording of a KDOP show. This time the music is not the expected hard rock but lush string arrangements of the James Bond film theme “You Only Live Twice.” As Nancy Sinatra begins to sing, Burdin’s otherworldly vocals match hers:

You only live twice or so it seems

One life for yourself and one for your dreams

Scum at school

THE following afternoon, we meet in the parking lot of Cal Arts in Valencia. Burdin has brought a duplicate video recording of the previous night’s drive, which he insists on trading for my audio recording of the same. Everything, it seems, is fodder for art, or at least meticulous documentation.

Burdin attended Cal Arts from 1990 to 1994 -- “I went to art school because I didn’t want to work” -- and he talks mostly about the school’s once legendary party circuit, though he earned an undergraduate degree in art and it was there at Cal Arts that he says he was first introduced to the concepts of what art could be.

Burdin, something of an expert on parking lots and automobile living, points out a parking space where he says he lived for several months in the Nova after the Northridge earthquake. We head out into the surrounding streets driving past blocks of brand-new suburban homes and mini malls, stopping for coffee at a sprawling shopping center before driving on.

Burdin’s first hint of recognition came from a small group show in an L.A. garage. He was doing his Voodoo Vocals; someone noticed and called a friend who was preparing to open a gallery. The friend was Maccarone, who still represents him.

“I had heard stories about him,” Maccarone says recently by phone. “He was kind of like this mythological figure. When I did a studio visit it was actually in his car with him just telling me stories about his radio station and art hoaxes. And then when I saw his videos, I had never seen work like that. It’s not just about California, and Americana and the landscape, but it’s also about this hermetic age we all live in, and the loneliness.”

Burdin steers past a vast housing development under construction. “When I was growing up it was still rolling hills with oak trees,” he says. “Then they just started scraping it away and putting in these Home Depot-type houses. I’m one of the only people who have been chronically documenting it ever since I got a video camera. I’ve been documenting everywhere I drive, and I do it every day, nonstop, filming the same thing. It’s like I’m subverting my own history and at the same time exposing it to people in the future who will be looking at my work. I’m not really interested in people now because they don’t really pay attention.”

A few nights later Burdin is sitting in the little Prius in a crowded parking lot just off Ventura Boulevard. He has a battered laptop balanced on one knee, angling it away from a streetlight for maximum visibility. By this time we’ve logged more than 10 hours of interviews, and according to Burdin, driven almost 200 miles.

The first video he plays, “Go See Um Black Feather,” was used in his Whitney Biennial installation, broadcast from inside the desert shack. It features KDOP disc jockey Desert Mix and is shot entirely from his point of view. There is even a little tuft of his hair hanging over a corner of the frame. The footage begins in what appears to be a tunnel or a cave. Desert Mix is crawling in semidarkness, muttering and swearing, pushing a dead crow through the sand. The feel is a mix of low-budget horror movie and extreme-sport eco challenge. Eventually Desert Mix emerges into a glaring wash of sunlight and we see that he was in a large, half-buried pipe out in the desert. From there he careens through the barren landscape holding the dead crow, ranting and muttering.

He plays several more videos. One was shot as Burdin drove through San Francisco, his camera capturing the passing cityscape as he does Voodoo Vocals over the Blue Oyster Cult song “Morning Final.” In another video, Burdin holds a large portable tape player on his shoulder, filming and singing over Led Zeppelin’s driving “Immigrant Song” as he staggers through rough desert terrain, barging through bushes and somehow ending up on a tight close-up of a lizard sitting placidly on a rock.

But it is the final video that reveals the most about the artist. It features Burdin sitting in the front seat of his old Nova with the camera situated just behind him. There are spotlights beaming from below, as if he’s on a stage. “Immigrant Song” is blasting at peak volume and Burdin is holding microphone, singing along with Robert Plant. As usual, there is some sort of sound effect on Burdin’s voice that separates the two singers, who are both perfectly in key.

As the song continues, colored smoke begins to rise atmospherically from the car’s floorboards, the swirls catching in the spotlights like at a classic arena-rock show. It’s only when the camera catches a curious pedestrian walking past and peering into the car that one is reminded that Burdin is merely sitting in his car in a parking lot.

As I’m leaving, I ask Burdin how it feels to finally be getting some recognition. “It’s taken a long time, dude,” he says. “Like 30 years in combination with the bands. And still the music has not reached that level yet. But that will all change pretty soon.”