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I Don’t Like Fiction, I Like History

at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills (Through September 28, 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

 Realism is best suited to convey the frightening idiosyncrasies of our time. — Duane Hanson

What is reality and how should an artist explore this concept in his or her work? Rejecting art history’s long-standing predilection for idealism, the five hyperrealistic photographers and sculptors on currently on display in I Don’t Like Fiction, I Like History, at Gagosian Beverly Hills present a refreshingly authentic and unvarnished viewing experience. [Read More…]

film

Swaggering Portraits Of American Masculinity In The Sisters Brothers

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

The fantasy of the cowboy is one of liberty and power that is distinctly American. We imagine him riding high on a saddle, the Wild West his to explore and dominate. His hat makes for a striking silhouette as his hips swing with a masculine swagger. His gun outstretched to bend the wilderness and wickedness to his will. He is a folk hero, a good guy with a gun, a legend who refuses to play by the rules of a society he nonetheless defends selflessly. But not every guy with a gun is good. And not every cowboy is a hero. [Read More…]

art

Forgotten Roots: How Los Angeles Shaped Robert Rauschenberg

At LACMA (Through February 10, 2019)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Revealing the divine in the forsaken and the sublime in the mundane, beloved late Neo-Dadaist Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) pens his love letter to Los Angeles in LACMA’s current retrospective Rauschenberg: In And About L.A. Although typically associated with the New York art scene of the 1950s and 60s, this iconic collagist actually derived a great deal of creative inspiration from this sprawling metropolis and its sun-drenched shores. [Read More…]

film

Freaks Is A Sly Sci-Fi Alive With Surprise And Sentiment

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

Her shirt. It snagged my eye as strange, but I couldn’t immediately identify why. It doesn’t suit a seven-year-old somehow. Then I saw the snaps dangling just below her belly, and noticed the details on the shoulder. It’s a onesie, the kind that fastens snuggly around infants. At first, it’s a curious costuming choice. But as writers/directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein peel back the layers of their intimate and intense sci-fi thriller, the secrets spill out, and curious details transform into clues that reveal a world marvelous and monstrous. [Read More…]

art

Forcella Reigns: The Men Who Play Cards

at ZJU Theater, North Hollywood (through 9 September)
Reviewed by Hoyt Hilsman

Neapolitian painter and set designer Francesca Bifulco and her collaborator, musician and sound designer Alex Schetter, have recreated a virtual Naples streetscape that focuses on the timeless ritual of men playing cards. The title of the installation, Forcella Reigns, refers to the rundown neighborhood in Naples that is overrun with violence and organized crime. Yet amidst the poverty and chaos of the Forcella neighborhood, Bifulco has observed patterns of life that are universal in their richness. [Read More…]

The Line –>

David Lynch’s Room To Dream, A Bio-Memoir

Reviewed by John Biscello

Room to Dream
by David Lynch and Kristine McKenna
Random House, 592 pp., $32.00

All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream. 
                   — Edgar Allan Poe

David Lynch, Room To DreamFor the past forty somewhat years, David Lynch has dreamscaped a long day’s journey into night, taking audiences on a hallucinated tour through the underworld of their own splintered psyche. In a world, or perhaps I should say industry, often bereft of visionary spellcasting, Lynch has been the equivalent of a cinematic shaman, a goofball deviant in bi-polar shades, trafficking in symbols, archetypes, glyphs, images and impressions, fished out from a fathomless substratum. His oeuvre, a steam-punk Frankenstein of interchangeable parts, speaks to the savvy and glee of a mad scientist at play, while his blending of the eternal with American pop has given us a surrealistic soap-opera with an eye toward the numinous. Carl Jung eating apple pie in a diner while riffing on anima with a gum-clacking waitress named Flo; the red-jacketed ghost of James Dean partying on top of a toxic mushroom cloud while Marilyn Monroe lip-syncs “Happy Birthday” in Yiddish; a blue jukebox isolated in the desert where it serves as an altar for a congregation of devout rabbits . . . these could be dispatches from a world of Lynch’s making. [Read More…]

Minoru Yamasaki: Humanist Architecture for a Modernist World

Reviewed by Martin Filler

Minoru Yamasaki: Humanist Architecture for a Modernist World
by Dale Allen Gyure
Yale University Press, 283 pp., $65.00
Courtesy of The New York Review of Books

Minoru Yamasaki: Humanist Architecture for a Modernist World

Now that I’m about to turn seventy I finally feel able to reveal a shameful secret: I was a teenage Yamasaki addict. I have no good excuse for why I got hooked, but Minoru Yamasaki was the first contemporary architect who entranced me. I had already begun my architectural self-education with the early writings of Ada Louise Huxtable in The New York Times, where in 1962 she praised the plans for Yamasaki’s Robertson Hall of 1961–1965 (home of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs) for the way in which “Greco-Roman and Far Eastern influences blend in a series of slender classic columns of Oriental lightness, in a top floor suggesting the cornice of a temple, and in a reflecting pool” and for how “the undertones of the past emerge subtly in a quite advanced and experimental construction.” I thought it was wonderful, too. So much so that as editor-in-chief of my high school yearbook, I dragged the baffled members of the National Honor Society fifty miles northeast from our unphotogenic hometown of Camden, New Jersey, to have a group picture taken with us lined up along the white quartzite colonnade of Yamasaki’s newly completed Princeton Parthenon. [Read More…]

The Line

Capturing a Dark Star: Susanna Nicchiarelli on the Making of Nico, 1988

By Alci Rengifo

Many of the great pop culture icons survive through the imagery of their youth, and the photos of their prime. Seldom do we reflect on the final chapters or the later years. That fleeting goddess Fama can favor an individual, but immortality is usually granted through the memories and artworks left after death. Nico, real name Christa Päffgen, was one of the stranger and at the same time most alluring visages to appear in the 1960s. Model, actress, singer, she appeared ever so briefly in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita before transforming into the underworld muse of The Velvet Underground. Andy Warhol, too, adored her and delighted in photographing her Nordic profile. Among her reputed lovers were fellow luminaries like Jim Morrison, who encouraged her to write her own songs. But for Italian writer and director Susanna Nicchiarelli, the more interesting chapter in Nico’s long journey is the end, when the looks have faded, the blonde hair is dyed black and what remains are painful reflections and haunted memories. [Read More…]

Immersive Forays Into Klimt, Schiele and Hundertwasser

at Atelier des Lumières, Paris (through 11 November 2018)
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Friedensreich Hundertwasser

Imagine entering a large raw space plunged in darkness. A few structures barely emerge out of the gloom, adding complexity to the basic box: a cube, a rectangular cuboid, and a cylinder. Images start fading in or flaring up on theblack surfaces. Hugely enlarged photographs of people, buildings, bridges, paintings by super famous artists such as Van Gogh and Picasso and Michelangelo fill sequentially the vertical planes. Decorative or architectural elements from every period — balustrades, cornices, columns, metal arches, clockworks are projected on the smaller structures and on the floor. The photographic or graphic elements or details from the paintings duplicate, triplicate, multiply, creating a rhythmic composition. Blown-up out of all proportions, they are then shrunk back to flash, strobe, fade-out, zoom-by at high speed, making it all the more surprising that warnings for epileptics are not issued at the entrance. The experience is not unlike standing at Times Square at night, but the honks of the city are replaced by a classical music track, and fewer people mull around gaping at the bright spectacle. In fact, there is no need to even move, as the show takes place all around, and people do sit or even lie down. [Read More…]

Rick Bartow: Things You Know But Cannot Explain

at The Autry Museum, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

“For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face…” — I Corinthians
“In today’s world, love, art and magic are greatly needed” — Fritz Scholder

Things You Know But Cannot Explain is the poetic title of the exquisite Rick Bartow retrospective at The Autry Museum. A heady brew of neo-expressionist drawing, painting and sculpture with lashings of Bacon, Basquiat, Kitaj, Scholder and even Nathan Olivera, this is a show not to be missed. Beautifully installed, with small videos strategically placed around with the artist candidly talking of his life in illuminating ways that enhance the viewer’s understanding of his work. No art jargon here. Just plainspoken words by the artist himself, who had struggled with alcoholism, PTSD and, towards the end of his life, two strokes (from which he would recover). It seems, upon further examination, that the title of the exhibit is more specific than poetic. After his strokes, Bartow knew “things” that he could not explain. [Read More…]

Ferocity And Longing In The Chimerical Madeline’s Madeline

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko

There are films that reject your cozy thirst to love them. Films that want not to comfort you, but to crawl under your skin and make it itch. They make you feel a deep, drowning unease. They submerge you in their story through sensation and leave you begging for release, for salvation. They leave your nerves raw and your mind rattled. Josephine Decker’s coming-of-age drama, Madeline’s Madeline, is such a film. [Read More…]

Ian Bonhôte And Peter Ettedgui On Their New Film McQueen

by Cynthia Biret

Raw talent. Sartorial splendor. Passion and rebellious spirit, breaker all the rules: words inevitably fail with Alexander McQueen, the brilliant British designer who revolutionized Fashion and its establishment. His life and complex persona is portrayed in the new documentary, McQueen. Directed by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui, the film is an ode to the prodigal son from a modest family who dared uproot conservative dogmas and whose influence is just starting to be fully understood. [Read More…]